Yesterday, I spoke of James's discussion of the theory of mind-stuff, or mental chemistry, as a proposed basis for psychology. James famously responded that you cannot understand a sentence as a self-compounding of a number of words. The theory is a bygone. Why bother with it now, except as a curiosity that was on the way out even when James critiqued it in 1890? Because the theory has one proponent whose name is still very much with us: Herbert Spencer. We tend to think of Spencer as a social theorist. We associate him with the notion that 'survival of the fittest' should be allowed to work its way through the social sphere as it did in the primordial jungle. Those of us who have been to law school associate this in turn with a famous taunt that Oliver Wendell Holmes directed at his laissez-faire colleagues, that the constitution does not enshrine Spencer's philosophy. But, think of Spencer in this way, we may forget to think of Spencer as his own contemporaries tho...