Nevertheless, Spencer was by no means an expounder of foreign thoughts in the ordinary sense of the term; he was the last man for that. “He was at no time a great reader. The influence of other thinkers did not come to him through books, but their ideas were picked up by the wayside, so to speak, or rather imbibed from the air in which they floated, without his being aware of it” (5: p. 210). He was one of the most independent and original thinkers; he was so aloof and isolated from the preceding and current history of thought that his critics account this the weakness of his philosophy in general. Yet if he was independent of the history of thought embodied in books, he was not and could not be so of its living current. We see a new widening of scientific outlook and a great upheaval of the realistic spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century, of which England was again, as three centuries before, the harbinger. This new _Zeitgeist_ of the nineteenth century England was provided with a mouthpiece in this independent, “fully self-governed and habitually self-sufficing,” self-educated philosopher. He it was that in the nineteenth century England wielded the first axe to break down her most obstinate conservatism in the field of education. True, he was not the only one to be called for this work, but his blows were the boldest and the most systematic. Spencer’s first attack was directed against the fortress of the exalted “classics” or “cultural studies.” The positive aspect of this was the claim for a higher, nay, the highest place for science in the school curriculum. This battle had, indeed, been waged since the time of Bacon, but the development of the new sciences had only made the English schools close their gates tighter. “Science was tabooed in most schools and frowned upon in innumerable pulpits.” “The attitude of the universities toward natural science has been that of contemptuous nonrecognition. College authorities have long resisted, either actively or passively, the making of physiology, chemistry, geology, etc., subjects of examination” (9: p. 375). Here came Spencer, the nonconformist of nonconformists, and poured cold water over the long-established dignity of “the education of the gentleman,” saying: