INTRLLECTXTAL CHARACTERISTICS 55

while their neighbours get their gold in dust particles
after washing much ore.

Now Spencer had that passion for facts which is
fundamental to all solid .scientific work, but he had
the greater gift of getting rapidly beneath facts to the
question of their significance. He had not the love
of details which is essential to the descriptive
naturalist for instance, which sometimes becomes
intellectual avarice for copper coinage, but he was
instinctively an ivtiologist, an interpreter,

In his account of the working of his mind, he

"There wiť comnunly shown a faculty of seizing cardinal
truths rather than of accumulating detailed information,
The implication! of phenomena were then, at alwaya,
more interesting to me than the phenomena themselves.
What did they prove ? wai the queition inttinetively pat*
The consciousness of causation, to which there was a
natural proclivity, and which hid been foitered by my father,
continually prompted analywi, which of eourie led me below
the surface and made fundamental principles object! of greater
attention than the various concrete illustrations of them, So
that while my acquaintance with things might have been
called superficml, if measured by the number of facts known, it
might have been called the reverse of superficial! if measured
by the quality of the facts. And there wai poisibiy a
relation between these traits, A friend who pollened
exteniive botanical knowledge, once .remarked to me that,
had I known an much about the details of planoitracture a*
botanists do, I never should have retched thoie generalisations
concerning plant-morphology which I had reached," (Auto*
I. pp. 335-6.)

2, Another inherited capacity was ** the synthetic
tendency," the power of generalising or of working
out unifying formula* His first book Sotta/ Statin
set out with a general principle | his first esŤay was