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Updated: May 2, 2025
What do we mean when we speak of 'division' of interests, 'division' of families, when we say that 'union' is strength, or how good it is to dwell together in 'unity, or speak of lives 'made one'? Are we not unwittingly expressing the unconscious yearning of the fractions to merge once more in the sweet kinship of the unit, of the ninths and the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninths of humanity to merge their differences in the mighty generalisation Man, of man to merge his finite existence in the mysterious infinite, the undivided, indivisible One, to 'be made one, as theology phrases it, 'with God'? How the complex life of our time longs to return to its first happy state of simplicity, we feel on every hand.
It is an intellectual feat on a par with the framing of a great generalisation. And would woman that being of such short sight, whose mind is always so taken up with whatever instances lie nearest to her be capable of framing anything that could pass muster as a great generalisation?
It strikes me as a capital generalisation, and appears to me even more original than it did at first. I have had an excellent and cautious letter from Mr. Geach of Singapore with some valuable answers on expression, which I owe to you. I heartily congratulate you on the birth of "Herbert Spencer," and may he deserve his name, but I hope he will copy his father's style and not his namesake's.
If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden.
It is true, this was but a simple empirical generalisation; but so was the generalisation respecting the recurrence of eclipses; so are the first generalisations of every science.
But it also included all that here we speak of as Literature, as Art, as Craft everything, in fact, which the human brain can study and the human fingers can accomplish the whole of that, in one grand generalisation, was called "Divine Wisdom," but it was the lower divine Wisdom, the inferior knowledge of God.
A Commander may also be successful at the head of standing Armies, like Eugene and Marlborough, without enjoying the benefit of its assistance; we must not, therefore, say that a successful War without it cannot be imagined; and we draw especial attention to that point, in order the more to individualise the conception which is here brought forward, that the idea may not dissolve into a generalisation and that it may not be thought that military virtue is in the end everything.
Indeed it cannot be denied that a theory which establishes a connection between the absence of all relics of vertebrata in the oldest fossiliferous rocks, and the presence of man's remains in the newest, which affords a more than plausible explanation of the successive appearance in strata of intermediate age of the fish, reptile, bird, and mammal, has no ordinary claims to our favour as comprehending the largest number of positive and negative facts gathered from all parts of the globe, and extending over countless ages, that science has perhaps ever attempted to embrace in one grand generalisation.
As a fact it is simply a false generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general. This does not apply to the Negative Barbarian: it does not apply to the Russian or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him: he is likely to beat less rather than more as the past fades away.
In regard to plants, although the generalisation above cited of M. Adolphe Brongniart is probably true, there has been a tendency in the advocates of progression to push the inferences deducible from known facts, in support of their favourite dogma, somewhat beyond the limits which the evidence justifies. Dr.
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