HERBERT SPENCER was born at Derby, England, April 27th, 1820. To his father, a schoolmaster at Derby, and to his father’s brother, Rev. Thomas Spencer, rector at Hinton, he owed his early education and the first impulse towards the profound studies which made him the founder of “Synthetic Philosophy.” He began life as an assistant in the office of a civil engineer, but in 1845 turned from engineering to the career of a writer, to which he devoted himself with remarkable industry and astonishing fertility during the remainder of the century. He worked with Darwin in elucidating the theories of evolution, but as against those who call him “a pupil of Darwin,” his admirers cite the fact that in his “Principles of Psychology,” published in 1855, he stated the principles of evolution four years before the appearance of “The Origin of Species.” There is scarcely room for controversy on such a point, however, as only the “terminology” of the evolutionists of the nineteenth century was new. Their philosophy was itself an evolution. Spencer was really more remarkable, however, as a political essayist than in the science of which he was so fond. His determined and aggressive individualism did much to hold in check the “Collectionism” of Fourier, Marx, and Lassalle. To Spencer, society and all its institutions exist for man, not man for society. He reasoned that the only right society has to legislate for and to coerce the individual is that individuality may be the more fully developed through the establishment of a more nearly perfect justice. The only vitiating flaw in his severe logic was its consistency carried to its extreme. It made “the law of the survival of the fittest” apply against state aid, even to the helpless; and charity to the undeserving is by his theories almost criminal. It was on such consistencies as these that his opponents seized as they might have seized on the inconsistencies of a weaker intellect. They did not break his influence, however, and he became an inspiration for all who endeavor to check the tendency to restrictive legislation. The list of his works is so long and all are in one sense or another so important that it is hard to select from among them, but he himself no doubt intended to make the various volumes of his “Synthetic Philosophy” the great masterpiece of his life. His essay on “Education,” his “Social Statics,” “Data of Ethics,” “The Man versus the State,” and the essay on “The Philosophy of Style” are works which have had extensive circulation among general readers.