one supreme conception of Evolution, with its monotonous, rigid, mechanical dogmas, sufficed to illustrate and even to co-ordinate all phenomena, both cosmical and human, I even begin to doubt if the very basis of the Evolution system were on sound philosophical lines.
Even if this were so, Spencer happily was far too great a philosopher, far too acute and observant of facts, too much saturated with scientific learning of all kinds, to suffer himself to be overweighted and confined by the materialistic dogmas with which he set forth. Though he gave the world no continuous view of general history, he endowed historical research with a series of brilliant elucidations. Though he leapt across the vast chasm of the Inorganic Sciences in his eagerness to come to Life, to Mankind, to Right and Wrong in human conduct, he turned his powerful searchlight upon one science after another, as it swept round the horizon with its rapidly revolving flash. He, who hotly rejected any serial order in the sciences, in practice evolved his own synthesis in regular series; nay, he built up his whole system in the very serial order for which he had condemned a rival philosophy. And, though he sought to base the Philosophy of Evolution on a set of dogmas as purely physical as if they applied to nothing but celestial mechanics, in the end Spencer devoted the whole strength of his great brain and his spiritual sense of justice, honour, and benevolence in the brotherhood of Man, to the supreme science of society and of morality. Never did Philosophy open with aspect more physical. Never did it insist more imperatively on the law of Justice from man to man, on the supreme duty of Altruism.
Over the portal of the Evolution Philosophy I see
