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HUMAN RELATIONS 89

A critical yet appreciative estimate of Spencer has
been given by Prof. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, which we
venture to quote to correct our own partiality.

"Paradoxical as the statement may seem in view
of Spencer's achievement, the mind here pourtrayed,
save for the command of scientific facts and the
wonderful faculty of generalisation, is commonplace
in the range of its ideas; neither intellectually nor
morally is the nature sensitive to the finest issues.
Almost uneducated except for a fair acquaintance
with mathematics and the scientific knowledge which
his own tastes led him to acquire, with the prejudices
and limitations of middle-class English Nonconformity,
but untouched by its religion, Spencer appears in the
early part of his life as a somewhat ordinary young
man. His ideals and habits did not differ perceptibly
from those of hundreds of intelligent and straight-
living Englishmen of his class. And to the end, in
spite of his cosmic outlook, there remains this strong
admixture of the British Philistine, giving a touch
almost of banality to some of his sayings and doings.
But, just because the picture is so faithfully drawn,
giving us the man in his habit as he lived, with all his
limitations and prejudices (and his own consciousness
of these limitations, expressed sometimes with a
passing regret, but oftener with a childish pride),
with all his irritating pedantries and the shallowness
of his emotional nature, we can balance against these
defects his high integrity and unflinching moral
courage, his boundless faith in knowledge and his
power of conceiving a great ideal and carrying it
through countless difficulties to ultimate realisation,
and a certain boyish simplicity of character as well as



	HUMAN RELATIONS 89 A critical yet appreciative estimate of Spencer has been given by Prof. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, which we venture to quote to correct our own partiality. "Paradoxical as the statement may seem in view of Spencer's achievement, the mind here pourtrayed, save for the command of scientific facts and the wonderful faculty of generalisation, is commonplace in the range of its ideas; neither intellectually nor morally is the nature sensitive to the finest issues. Almost uneducated except for a fair acquaintance with mathematics and the scientific knowledge which his own tastes led him to acquire, with the prejudices and limitations of middle-class English Nonconformity, but untouched by its religion, Spencer appears in the early part of his life as a somewhat ordinary young man. His ideals and habits did not differ perceptibly from those of hundreds of intelligent and straight- living Englishmen of his class. And to the end, in spite of his cosmic outlook, there remains this strong admixture of the British Philistine, giving a touch almost of banality to some of his sayings and doings. But, just because the picture is so faithfully drawn, giving us the man in his habit as he lived, with all his limitations and prejudices (and his own consciousness of these limitations, expressed sometimes with a passing regret, but oftener with a childish pride), with all his irritating pedantries and the shallowness of his emotional nature, we can balance against these defects his high integrity and unflinching moral courage, his boundless faith in knowledge and his power of conceiving a great ideal and carrying it through countless difficulties to ultimate realisation, and a certain boyish simplicity of character as well as