speculative, romantic, Utopian, or 'ideal,' when couched merely in terms of a program of criticism and reconstruction; only 'science' can give it body. Again, the specializations of science are naturally and properly remote and technical to the interests of the mass of mankind. When we have said they are specialized, we have described them. But to employ the mass of scientific material, the received code of scientific formulations, to give weight and substance to philosophical ideas which are already operative, is an achievement of the very first order. Spencer took two sets of ideas, in themselves abstract and isolated, and by their fusion put them in a shape where their net result became available for the common consciousness. By such a fusion Spencer provided a language, a formulation, an imagery, of a reasonable and familiar kind to the masses of mankind for ideas of the utmost importance, and for ideas which, without such amalgamation, must have remained out of reach.
Even they who—like myself—are so impressed with the work of the philosophers of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century as to believe that they have furnished ideas which in the long run are more luminous, more fruitful, possessed of more organizing power, than those which Spencer has made current, must yet remember that the work of German philosophy is done in an outlandish and alien vocabulary. Now, this is not a mere incident of the use of language,—as if a man happened to choose to speak in Greek rather than in French. The very technicality of the vocabulary means that the ideas used are not as yet naturalized in the common consciousness of man. The 'transcendental' character of such philosophy is not an inherent, eternal characteristic of its subject-matter, but is a sign and exponent that the values dealt in are not yet thoroughly at home in human experience, have not yet found themselves in ordinary social life and popular science, are not yet working terms justifying themselves by daily applications.
Spencer furnished the common consciousness of his day with terms and images so that it could appropriate to its ordinary use in matters of "life, mind, and society," the most fundamental generalizations which had been worked out in the abstract
