Concerning the work done by Lewes in philosophy, there will be much difference of opinion.  He did much through his various expositions to make the public familiar with the inductive methods of inquiry and with the conclusions of positive thought.  He made his books readable, and even popular, giving philosophy an exposition suited to the wants of the general reader.  At the same time, he was polemical and dogmatic, and more concerned to be clever than to be exact in his interpretation.  Into the meanings of some of the greatest thinkers he had little clear insight, and he is seldom to be implicitly trusted as an expositor of those whose systems were in any way opposed to his own.  His limitations have been well defined by Ribot, in his Contemporary English Psychology.

“Mr. Lewes lacks the vocation of the scholar, which, indeed, is generally wanting in original minds.  His history resembles rather that of Hegel than that of Ritter.  His review of the labors of philosophers is rather occupied with that which they have thought, than with their comparative importance.  He judges rather than expounds; his history is fastidious and critical.  It is the work of a clear, precise and elegant mind, always that of a writer, often witty, measured, possessing no taste for declamation, avoiding exclusive solutions, and making its interest profitable to the reader whom he forces to think.”  Ribot speaks of the work again as being original but dogmatic and critical.  He says it belongs to that class of books which make history a pretext for conflict.  “The author is less occupied with the exposition of facts than he is with his method of warfare; he thinks less of being exact than of being clever....  He has evidently no taste, or, if we prefer so to put it, he has not the virtue necessary to face these formidable folios, these undigested texts of scholastic learning, which the historian of philosophy ought to penetrate, however repulsive to his positive and lucid mind.”

On the other hand, Mr. Frederic Harrison has described the great success of the Biographical History of Philosophy, and made it apparent what are its chief merits.  “This astonishing work was designed to be popular, to be readable, to be intelligible.  It was all of these in a singular degree.  It has proved to be the most popular account of philosophy of our time; it has been republished, enlarged, and almost re-written, and each re-issue has found new readers.  It did what hardly any previous book on philosophy ever did—­it made philosophy readable, reasonable, lively, almost as exciting as a good novel.  Learners who had been tortured over dismal homilies on the pantheism of Spinoza, and yet more dismal expositions of the pan-nihilism of Hegel, seized with eagerness upon a little book which gave an intense reality to Spinoza and his thoughts, which threw Hegel’s contradictories into epigrams, and made the course of philosophic thought unfold itself naturally with all the life and coherence of a well-considered