"and was much amused by the juvenility of the adults. The French never entirely cease to be boys; I saw gray-haired people riding on whirligigs such as we have at our own fairs."[1] He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live it. After seeing Niagara Falls he jotted down in his diary: "Much what I had expected."[2] He describes the most ordinary incidents with the most magnificent pedantry—as when he tells us of the only time he ever swore.[3] He suffered no crises, felt no romance (if his memoirs record him well); he had some intimacies, but he writes of them almost mathematically; he plots the curves of his tepid friendships without any uplifting touch of passion. A friend said of himself that he could not write well when dictating to a young woman stenographer; Spencer said that it did not bother him at all. His secretary says, "The passionless thin lips told of a total lack of sensuality, and the light eyes betrayed a lack of emotional depth."[4] Hence the monotonous levelness of his style: he never soars, and needs no exclamation-points; in a romantic century he stands like a sculptured lesson in dignity and reserve.
He had an exceptionally logical mind; he marshalled his à prioris and his à posterioris with the precision of a chess player. He is the clearest expositor of complex subjects that modern history can show; he wrote of difficult problems in terms so lucid that for a generation all the world was interested in philosophy. "It has been remarked," he says, "that I have an unusual faculty of exposition—set forth my data and reasonings and conclusions with a clearness and coherence not common."[5] He loved spacious generalizations, and made his works interesting rather with his hypotheses than with his proofs. Huxley said that Spencer's idea of a tragedy was
