With sparkling eyes I quoted these brave words to a friend of my father's, whose comments were often as caustic as his sympathy in my interests was kindly. With a grave smile he asked whether the notion was not perhaps stripped too naked to preserve the decencies of modest thought; he inquired whether I had not learnt from _Sartor Resartus_ that the philosophy of nature is a Philosophy of Clothes; and he bade me devote a little time to quiet and careful consideration of what Tyndall really meant--meant in terms of the exact science he professed--by the phrase 'latent in a fiery cloud'. I dimly suspected that the old gentleman--old in the sense of being my father's contemporary--was ignorant of those recent developments of modern science with which I had been acquainted for weeks, nay more for months. Perhaps he had never even heard of the nebular hypothesis! But I felt that I had done him an injustice when, next morning, he sent round a volume of the _Westminster Review_ with a slip of paper indicating an article on 'Progress: its Law and Cause'. Such was my introduction to Herbert Spencer, some of whose works I read with admiration during the next few years. I have no very distinct recollection of the impression produced on my mind by the germinal essay of 1857, save that it served to quicken that craving, which is, I suppose, characteristic of those who have some natural bent towards philosophy--the imperative craving to seek and, if it may be, to find the one in the many. In any case Tyndall's suggestive sentence was here amplified and the underlying law was disclosed. 'Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufacture, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, the same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.'[2]