THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORK OF HERBERT SPENCER.
I DO not know whether it may have occurred to any one else to associate the work of Émile Zola in fiction and of Herbert Spencer in philosophy. I find myself, however, mentally running together the careers of these two men, different as they were in surroundings, interests, aims, and personalities. The two somehow associate themselves in my mind, at least to such an extent that I find no words of my own so apt to characterize the larger features of the work of Herbert Spencer as these borrowed from the remarkable critical appreciation by Henry James of Émile Zola, published in the August, 1903, number of the Atlantic Monthly. Mr. James begins by referring to "the circumstance that, thirty years ago, a young man of extraordinary brain and indomitable purpose, wishing to give the measure of these endowments in a piece of work supremely solid, conceived and sat down to Les Rougon-Macquart, rather than to an equal task in physics, mathematics, politics, economics. He saw his undertaking, thanks to his patience and courage, practically to a close. ... No finer act of courage and confidence, I think, is recorded in the history of letters. The critic in sympathy with him returns again and again to the great wonder of it, in which something so strange is mixed with something so august. Entertained and carried out almost from the threshold of manhood, the high project, the work of a lifetime, announces beforehand its inevitable weakness, and yet speaks in the same voice for its admirable, its almost unimaginable, strength."
With few verbal changes, this surely sets forth the case of Mr. Spencer; and in saying the word of criticism which must inevitably shadow all mortal attempts, I again find nothing more appropriate than some further sentences of Mr. James. "It was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of Les Rougon-Macquart to deal with things almost always in gregarious form, to be a picture of numbers, of classes, crowds, confusions, move-
