systems somewhat in and through retrospect. Their completeness owes something to the mind of the onlooker gathering together parts which have grown up more or less separately and in response to felt occasions, to particular problems. Our reflection helps bind their parts into one aggregative whole. But Spencer's system was a system from the very start. It was a system in conception, not merely in issue. It was one by the volition of its author, complete, compact, coherent, not in virtue of a single personality which by ways mainly unconscious continually and restlessly reattempts to attain to some worthy and effective embodiment of itself. We are almost inclined to believe in the identification of conscious will with physical force as we follow the steady, unchanging momentum of Spencer's thought.
It is this fore-thought, foreclosed scheme which makes so ominous that phrase of James to the effect that 'the high project announces beforehand its inevitable weakness.' It is this which makes so unavoidable the appropriation of the phrase regarding absence of the individual life. It is this fact which gives jurisdiction to the further remark that "vision and opportunity reside in a personal sense, and in a personal history, and no shortcut to them has ever been discovered." It is this same fact that moves me to transfer to Spencer a further phrase, that the work went on in "the region that I qualify as that of experience by imitation." It may seem harsh to say Spencer occupies himself in any such way as to justify the phrase "experience by imitation." Or, on the other hand, one may say, however the case stands in arts and letters, that in philosophy one must perforce work in and with a region of experience which it is but praise to call "experience by imitation," since it is experience depersonalized, from which the qualities of individual contact and career, with their accidents of circumstance, and corresponding emotional entanglements, have been intentionally shut out. But whether one regard the phrase as harsh, or as defining an indispensable trait of all philosophizing, it remains true that one who announces in advance a system in all its characteristic conceptions and applications has discounted, in a way which is awful in its augustness, all individual contingencies,
