The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.

Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did.

But he was an imperialist of the lowest type.

He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.

Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale?
If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait.