On Tuesday was celebrated the centenary of Herbert Spencer, who
was born at Derby on April 27th, 1820. We note that about the same time two small houses, in one of which Herbert Spencer was born, were knocked down at a sale for £280. To our fathers this would have seemed incredible. They would have said that admiration for the stupendous intellect of that great philosopher and individualist would grow even more intense with the generations. The author of the Synthetic Philosophy believed implicitly that both the science and philosophy known to his day—and they were indeed tremendous efforts in research and in theory—represented the culmination of the human intel- lect in principle, though not in detail. That was a vanity which perhaps accounts as much as anything else for the undoing of Herbert Spencer's fame. The dispraise from which Spencer's memory plainly suffers now was perhaps inevitable, but the 'compensating swing is bound to come ; for if his thought was not, as our fathers imagined, the crown of the Victorian era, it is at all events impossible to appreciate that great epoch without understanding Spencer.
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