THE SPENCERIAN WAY

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 28 October 1915, Page 5

THE SPENCERIAN WAY

Herbert Spencer, perhaps the most continuous thinker within memory, did not believe in "sitting down to a problem." George Eliot, then Miss Evans, one day remarked to him that considering how much thinking he had done she was surprised to see no lines on his forehead. He replied: "I suppose it is because I am never puzzled," to which Miss Evans retorted: "Oh! that's the most arrogant tiling I have ever heard uttered." But Spencer denied this, and proceeded to explain that he was never puzzled because lie never put his mind at the mercy of n subject. Instead of sitting down to puzzle it out he was satisfied to take an idea into his mind and return to it from time to time until, "little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without' conscious intention or appreciable effort there would grow ,np a coherent and organised theory,"