24 MAY 1902, Page 16

HERBERT SPENCER.

ITO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]

SIR,—It is perhaps not curious that Mr. Herbert Spencer did not recognise that the American lady who thought "a country without ruined castles was not worth living in" was repeating one of Ruskin's most familiar sayings. The quota- tion regarding the appalling effect of an attempt to think of space brings to mind the emphasis he long ago laid in "First Principles" on the fact of contradictory inconceivables, and his illustration of it by the alternative conceptions of a limited or limitless universe. The proposition that one of two inconceivables must be true may perhaps be regarded as agnostic, but it involves the corollary that inconceivability is no evidence of untruth, which, in a way, may be called