NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
In the announcement this little book is described as "a final review of Herbert Spencer's character, and of his contribution to the thought of nations; written after the publication of his autobiography and constituting a last and enlightening word on the subject."
Professor Royce has given us a rather dreary picture of the Englishman. He is represented as a confirmed hypochondriac, passively benevolent but narrow-minded and unaggressively stubborn. Mr. Collier, Spencer's assistant and amanuensis, gives a more sympathetic account in his personal reminiscences in the latter part of the book.
The characterization of Spencer's attempts at epistemology in the first part of his First Principles, in which he sets forth his doctrince of the 'Unknowable,' as "conscientious but uninstructed," is a harsh but probably a sound criticism. The same is true of the stricture upon his educational theory, summed up in the author's words that, after all, it is little more than "a sort of generalized autobiography" of Herbert Spencer himself. But whatever we may think of Professor Royce' s estimate of the man as a man, as a metaphysician, and as an educational theorist, probably all will recognize the justice of the criticisms which he passes upon this philosophy of evolution; for Herbert Spencer did not make evolution as fundamental a principle in his 'Synthetic Philosophy' as he supposed he did.
Professor Royce points out two main limitations in Spencer's thought: first, the almost complete lack of any sense of historical perspective in his own system; and, second, the vagueness and lack of unifying principle in the doctrine of evolution itself, as he sets it forth.
As has been remarked before by other writers, philosophical systems from the beginning have tended to divide into two schools according to whether the emphasis has been placed upon essence or upon genesis, upon nature or upon origin. This distinction Professor Royce employs in a very instructive way in giving the true setting and background of Spencer's philosophy of evolution. The "conception of the eternity of the forms of things," he says, "is, historically considered, by far the most significant opponent that the philosophical doctrine of evolution has had or ever can have" (p. 29). "The great historical enemy of the evolutionary interest in philosophy has been, not 'supernaturalism,' nor yet the doctrine of 'special creation,' but the tendency to conceive the universe as an eternal, and so, temporally viewed, as an essentially permanent order" (P- 35-36). The 'Synthetic Philosophy/ though ostensibly generalizing
