Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CHARACTER In his Autobiography Spencer has attempted to analyse his own mental characteristics ; but it cannot be said that the attempt was altogether a success. For although that work certainly provides a valuable picture of the man, yet the value is not so much in the conscious analysis as in the unconscious style : the things which he thought worth while setting down and the way in which he said them. Spencer was too much addicted to self-analysis to describe himself in a way that would interest other people. He was too prone to set down what interested himself, and analysis by an outsider will bring out many points which he scarcely perceived himself. Let us follow his own plan and deal with his physical characteristics first. He was 5 feet 10 inches in height ; and though his constitution did not appear to be robust, yet he had none of the appearance of a confirmed invalid. He was particularly proud of his hands, and when he was seventy-eight had a plaster-cast taken of them, which is now in the public museum at Derby. They were of smaller size than usual;and he was fond of using this fact in illustration of the theory of inheritance of acquired characters. His ancestors for some generations back had done no manual labour (a circumstance of which, I think, he was inclined to be vain); their hands, therefore, had not been largely developed, and he had been born with hands congenitally smaller than usual. He was also somewhat vain of his teeth ; and it is indeed remarkable that through all his long life he never had one taken out or stopped. So much we are informed in the official Life by Dr. Duncan ; but Spencer himself has recorded that as he got older many of his teeth were badly decayed ; and it would have been very much better for him if he had fore...