From the Parthenon.
By these books he has wedged his way into fame in a manner distinctly original, and curiously marked.... There is a peculiar charm in this author's style, in that it sacrifices to no common taste, while at the same time it makes the most abstruse questions intelligible.... The book, if it is to be noticed with the slightest degree of fairness, requires to be read and re-read, to be studied apart from itself and with itself. For whatever may be its ultimate fate—although as the ages go on it shall become but as the lispings of a little child, a little more educated than other lisping children of the same time—this is certain, that, as a book addressed to the present, it lifts the mind far above the ordinary range of thought, suggests new associations, arranges chaotic pictures, strikes often a broad harmony, and even moves the heart by an intellectual struggle as passionless as fate, but as irresistible as time.
From the Critic.
Mr. Spencer is the foremost mind of the only philosophical school in England which has arrived at a consistent scheme... Beyond this school we encounter an indolent chaotic eclecticism. Mr. Spencer claims the respect due to distinct and daring individuality; others are echoes or slaves. Mr. Spencer may be a usurper, but he has the voice and gesture of a king.
From the Medico-Chirurgical Review.
Mr. Spencer is equally remarkable for his search after first principles; for his acute attempts to decompose mental phenomena into their primary elements; and for his broad generalizations of mental activity, viewed in connection with nature, instinct, and all the analogies presented by life in its universal aspects.
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
The essays contained in the present volume were first published in the English periodicals—chiefly the Quarterly Reviews. They contain ideas of permanent interest, and display an amount of thought and labor evidently much greater than is usually bestowed on review articles. They were written with a view to ultimate republication in an enduring form, and were issued in London with several other papers, under the title of "Essays; Scientific, Political, and Speculative," first and second series;—the former appearing in 1857, and the latter in 1863.
The interest created in Mr. Spencer's writings by the publication in this country of his valuable work on "Education," and by criticisms of his other works, has created a demand for these discussions which can only be supplied by their republication. They are now, however, issued in a new form, and are more suited to develop the author's purpose in their preparation; for while each of these essays has its intrinsic and independent claims upon the reader's attention, they are all at the same time but parts of a connected and comprehensive argument. Nearly all of Mr. Spencer's essays have relations more or less direct to the general doctrine of Evolution—a doctrine which he has probably done more to unfold and illustrate than any other thinker. The papers comprised in the present volume are those which deal with the subject in its most obvious and prominent aspects.