1889. The book is interesting, as well in the
light which it throws upon the expansion of the sciences and the
development of the doctrine of evolution in those years, as in the
revelation of the personal traits of the man himself. Concerning these
Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a gift of the book: 'In
autobiographies the most important psychological phenomena are often
revealed quite independently of the author's will.'

Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of
Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education
was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his
reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of
the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his
interest in inventions. He wrote for the newspapers and magazines and
definitely launched upon a literary career. At the age of thirty he
published his first book, on _Social Statics_. He made friends among the
most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the
victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his
recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which
henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating
them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense
increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that
knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the
publication of his _First Principles_ and the conclusion of his more
formal literary labours. There is something captivating about a man's
life, the energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it
better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his
scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the
light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical
limitations he never transcended. He does not so naively offer a
substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was no master in
philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this fact in
his agnosticism.

That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and on the
whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work shows that his
declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is
unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a
relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer'