characteristic tenets of English political and social liberalism, with their individualistic connotations. It is significant that Spencer's earliest literary contribution,—written at the age of twenty-two,—was upon the proper sphere of government, and was intended (I speak only from second-hand information, never having seen the pamphlet) to show the restrictions upon governmental action required in the interests of the individual. I know no more striking tribute to the thoroughness and success with which earlier English philosophic thought did its work than the fact that Spencer was completely saturated with, and possessed by, the characteristic traditions of this individualistic philosophy, simply, so to speak, by absorption, by respiration of the intellectual atmosphere, with a minimum of study and reflective acquaintance with the classic texts of Hobbes, Hume, and (above all) John Locke. So far as we can tell, Spencer's ignorance of the previous history of philosophy extended in considerable measure even to his own philosophic ancestry; and I am inclined to believe that even such reading as he did of his predecessors left him still with a delightful unconsciousness that in them were the origin and kin of his own thought. The solid body and substantiality of Spencer's individualism is made not less but more comprehensible on the supposition that it came to him not through conscious reading and personal study, but through daily drafts upon his intellectual environment; the results being so unconsciously and involuntarily wrought into the fibre of his being that they became with him an instinct rather than a reflection or theory.
It is this complete incorporation of the results of prior individualistic philosophy, accompanied by total unconsciousness that anything was involved in the way of philosophic preliminaries or presuppositions, which freed Spencer from the lurking scepticism regarding systems and deductive syntheses which permeate the work of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and John Stuart Mill. It was this thoroughgoing unconscious absorption that gave him a confident, aggressive, dogmatic individualism,—which enabled him to employ individualism as a deductive instrument, instead of as a point of view useful in the main for
