OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MCMXIII
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Towards the close of 1870, while I was still in my teens, my youthful enthusiasm was fired by reading Tyndall's Discourse on The Scientific Use of the Imagination. The vision of the conquest of nature by physical science—a vision which had but lately begun to open up to my wondering gaze—was rendered clearer and more extensive. Of the theory of evolution I knew but little; but I none the less felt assured that it had come to stay and to prevail. Was it not accepted by all of us—the enlightened and emancipated men of science whose ranks I had joined as a raw recruit? Believing that I was independently breaking free of all authority, to the authority that appealed to my fancy, and to a new loyalty, I was a willing slave. And here in one glowing sentence the inner core of evolution lay revealed.
'Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular and animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and the lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion, intellect and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud.'[1]
With sparkling eyes I quoted these brave words to a friend of my father's, whose comments were often as caustic as his sympathy in my interests was kindly. With a grave smile he asked whether the notion was not perhaps stripped too naked to preserve the decencies of modest thought; he inquired whether I had not learnt from Sartor Resartus that the philosophy of nature is a Philosophy of Clothes; and he bade me devote a little time to quiet and careful consideration of what Tyndall really meant—meant in terms of the exact science he professed—by the phrase 'latent in a fiery cloud'. I dimly suspected that the old gentleman—old in the sense of being my father's contemporary—was ignorant of those recent developments of modern science with which I had been acquainted for weeks, nay more for months. Perhaps he had never even heard of the nebular hypothesis! But I felt that I had done him an injustice when, next morning, he sent round a volume of the Westminster Review with a slip of paper indicating an article on 'Progress: its Law and Cause'.
Such was my introduction to Herbert Spencer, some of whose works I read with admiration during the next few years.