Frederic Harrison, well known in his own time for his vital part in the leading controversies of the Victorian Age in England, has become in the twentieth century little more than a name encountered here and there in the records of the lives of his outstanding contemporaries. Few Englishmen in the nineteenth century had a more important role in furthering the cause of the working man and in the legitimization of trade unions--possibly his most solid achievement. But as the leading English Positivist, he championed various political, religious, scientific, and literary ideas that were bursting on the English intellectual scene during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the forefront of innumerable and varied controversies, there was Frederic Harrison, holding his own with, and highly respected by, the leading figures of the age. In the wake of the cataclysm of the French Revolution and during the rapid...