still be the greatest of psychologists. The vast constructions of his 'First Principles' will ever be a monument of his extraordinary powers of generalization. His designed organization of the Social Science opens up the prospect of intellectual acquisitions in the future to which the past may furnish few parallels. But the 'Principles of Psychology' will still remain, in its symmetrical completeness and perfect adequacy to the subject, at once the most remarkable of his achievements and the most scientific treatise on the Mind which has yet seen the light. Its publication in 1855 did not make a sensation. The persistent efforts of Mill had not yet succeeded. in stemming the muddy tide of the prevailing scholasticism. The bastard Kantism of Hamilton did duty for metaphysics, and the Common-Sense philosophy of Reid, with the common-sense left out, usurped the place of Experimental Psychology. Experimental Psychology was, as usual, busy with analysis, and had no eye for the merit of an imposing synthetical effort. Mr. Spencer's work had accordingly a chill reception. Greeted by the aristocratic metaphysicians with a few words of courtly compliment, but treated practically with supercilious disregard, it was received by psychologists of the Association school with hardly more favor than the snarling approval with which a Constitutional Whig views the entry into the Cabinet of a Birmingham Radical. Mr. Spencer was ahead of his generation, and paid the penalty of his prescience in twenty years of neglect. But now the wheel is coming round. The bovine British public, constitutionally disposed indeed to apathy, but drugged into a leaden slumber by its medicine-men, is at last awakening to the fact that the peer of Bacon and Newton is here. Writers of all schools are hastening to define their position with reference to the Synthetic Philosophy." A younger generation has grown up, with minds unhardened by the limitations of obsolete Sensationalism, and inclined rather to a somewhat undisciplined acquiescence in what the Germans call "world-shattering," that are also world-constructing, theories. But "whatever part of his philosophy may be transitory, Mr. Spencer's present influence is indisputable; and, since the lamented death of Mill, no one can now contest his claims to the philosophic supremacy in these islands. That supremacy rests mainly on his Psychology." Cosmological speculation has been so long out of date that we are hardly yet able to incorporate his "first principles" as a vital and vitalizing part of our mental acquisitions. Sociological inquiries are just coming into fashion under the dusky auspices of the "savage races;" but the Social Science, though undoubtedly destined to play a great part in the immediate future, still wants an audience, except for sanitary discussions in autumn among peripatetic philanthropists in provincial towns. But Psychology, at least, the kind of thing found in Reid with an infusion of Hamilton, has long formed part of the higher education in Scotland; and at one of the English universities the hash of cosmology,
