BEGINNING TO WRITE 23

sense of freedom given by limitless expanse." His
father and he were good companions.

"We read of various activities during this period,—
of investigations, with inadequate mathematics, con-
cerning the strength of girders, of experiments in
electrotyping and the like, of botanical excursions, of
some enthusiastic exercise in part-singing, drawing
and modelling. In the early summer of 1842 Spencer
paid a visit to his old haunts at Hinton. " The
journey left its mark because, in the course of it, I
found that practice in modelling had increased my
perception of beauty in form, A good-looking girl,
"who was one of our fellow-passengers for a short
interval, had remarkably fine eyes; and I had much
c^uiet satisfaction in observing their forms." Our
Hero had not much sense of humour,

Beginning to writt*—Of greater importance is the
fact that Spencer began in 1842 to writ© letters to
jCkt Nonconformist on social problems, in which
prominence was given to such conceptions as the
tmiversality of law and causation, progressive adapta-
tion in organisms and in Man, and the tendency to
equilibrium through self-adjustment, « Every day in
every life there is a budding out of incidents severally
capable of leading to large results \ but the immense
majority of them end as buds, only now and then
does one grow into a branch, and very rarely does such
a branch outgrow and overshadow all others." The
visit to Hinton led to political conversations with
"Xhomas Spencer, to a letter of introduction to the
editor of The Nonconformist, to the letters on " The
3?roper Sphere of Government," to the Social Staticr
sxnd eventually to the Synthetic Philosophy I