sy over use-inheritance with
Weismann, entered into after he was sixty, seems to me in point of
quality better than any other part of his work. It is genuine labor
over a puzzle, genuine research.
Spencer's "Ethics" is a most vital and original piece of
attitude-taking in the world of ideals. His politico-ethical activity
in general breathes the purest English spirit liberty, and his attacks
on over-administration and criticisms on the inferiority of great
centralized systems are worthy to be the textbooks of individualists
the world over. I confess that it is with this part of his work, in
spite of its hardness and inflexibility of tone, that I personally
sympathize most.
Looking back on Mr. Spencer as a whole, as this admirably truth-telling
"Autobiography" reveals him, he is a figure unique for quaint
consistency. He never varied from that inimitable blend of small and
vast mindedness, of liberality and crabbedness, which was his personal
note, and which defies our formulating power. If an abstract logical
concept could come to life, its life would be like Spencer's,--the same
definiteness of exclusion and inclusion, the same bloodlessness of
temperament, the same narrowness of intent and vastness of extent, the
same power of applying itself to numberless instances. But he was no
abstract idea; he was a man vigorously devoted to truth and justice as
he saw them, who had deep insights, and who finished, under terrible
frustrations from bad health, a piece of work that taken for all in
all, is extraordinary. A human life is greater than all its possible
appraisers, assessors, and critics. In comparison with the fact of
Spencer's actual living, such critical characterization of it as I have
been at all these pains to produce seems a rather unimportant as well
as a decidedly graceless thing.
[1] Written upon the publication of Herbert Spencer's "Autobiography."
Published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904.
VII
FREDERIC MYERS' SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY[1]
On this memorial occasion it is from English hearts and tongues
belonging, as I never had the privilege of belonging, to the immediate
environment of our lamented President, that discourse of him as a man and
as a friend must come. It is for those who participated in the endless
drudgery of his labors for our Society to tell of the high powers he
showed there; and it is for those who have something of his burning
interest in the proble
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