the civilized world in the ninth century more coherent than it had been in the first century after Christ? Take the rise and development of the Catholic Church, or the history of Christendom from the time of St. Paul to our day. They may be more heterogeneous to-day, but is either more definite, more consistent now? Spencer's laws offer us illuminating flashes of light across that vast waste of troubled waters that we call the history of mankind. But continuous history was to Spencer a sealed book. He so misread such pages as he ever opened that we can hardly wish it had been otherwise.
Over the coffin which held the mortal remains of Herbert Spencer an eloquent friend pronounced a magnificent eulogy. He said, 'All history, all science, all the varying forms of thought and belief, all the institutions of all the stages of man's progress were brought together; and out of this innumerable multitude of data emerged one coherent, luminous, and vitalized conception of the evolution of the world.' It is a noble ideal towards which Spencer toiled with heroic constancy for forty years. It is an ideal which no English philosopher has ever essayed to reach, an ideal towards which Spencer contributed germs of imperishable truth. Would that I could join in the confidence that this mighty Ideal had been achieved! When I reflect on the enormous gaps in the Synthetic System, the absence of any continuous theory of general history, the absence of any systematic treatment, or even of any sketch, of all the Inorganic Sciences—Mechanics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry—I reluctantly am forced to regard the claim, that out of all history, all science, Spencer has evolved 'one coherent conception,' as being far beyond the truth. And when I reflect on the claim, that the
