712 



SPENCER, HERBERT. 



for the most curiously divergent developments of 

 thought. 



Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, 

 April 27, 1820. He came of a stock in which intel- 

 lectual integrity, fearlessness, and independence 

 were strongly pronounced characteristics. His 

 father was a teacher, whose views of the aims and 

 methods of education were greatly in advance of 

 the average scholastic theories of his time. He had 

 a dread of overtaxing the immature mind by the 

 ordinary forcing system, and accordingly young 

 Spencer was kept at home till he was fourteen years 

 old, thus reaping the advantage of his father's per- 

 sonal training and attention, and breathing an in- 

 tellectual atmosphere unusually clear and stimulat- 

 ing. He was then placed in charge of his uncle, 

 the Rev. Thomas Spencer, at that time perpetual 

 curate of the parish of Hinton Charterhouse, .near 

 Bath. With this relative, who was a vigorous 

 thinker and an energetic social reformer, he spent 

 three years, manifesting extraordinary originality 

 in mathematical and mechanical studies. The de- 

 sign of sending him to Cambridge was gradually 

 relinquished as impracticable, and on leaving Hin- 

 ton the boy returned to his father's house, where he 

 spent apparently an idle and profitless year. Then, 

 after a brief experiment in teaching, he made his 

 real start in life as a civil engineer. This was in 

 the autumn of 1837, in the early days of the rail- 

 road excitement. But presently the tide of activity 

 ebbed away, and after eight or ten years of inter- 

 mittent work Spencer finally abandoned a calling 

 in which he now saw little chance of succe". 



Meanwhile, the expansion of his thought had al- 

 ready begun. At the age of twenty, while engaged 

 on the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, he 

 had read Lyell's " Principles of Geology," and had 

 espoused what was then known as the Development 

 Hypothesis ; accepting the Lamarckian view (com- 

 bated by Lyell) so far as to believe in the evolution 

 of species, but rejecting all the great Frenchman's 

 theories save that of the adaptation of the organism 

 to its environment by the inheritance of acquired 

 characters. In 1842 he had contributed to a paper 

 called " The Nonconformist " a series of letters, 

 subsequently revised and reissued in pamphlet 

 form, on " The Proper Sphere of Government." 

 In this early discussion of a question on which he 

 was to have so much to say by and by, Spencer 

 vigorously insisted on " the limitation of state ac- 

 tion to the maintenance of equitable relations 

 among citizens." 



Spencer presently removed to London, where he 

 secured an appointment on ' The Examiner " news- 

 paper, of which in 1848 he became subeditor. This 

 place he held till 1853. Meantime, in the intervals 

 of comparative leisure afforded by the routine of his 

 office work, he had written his first important book, 

 " Social Statics " (1850). Shortly after this began 

 his connection with the " Westminster Review," to 

 the pages of which, during the next few years, he 

 contributed essays, valuable in themselves, and now 

 particularly interesting as marking the develop- 

 ment and consolidation of many of the fundamen- 

 tal elements of his later thought. In 1855 appeared 

 a large volume on " The Principles of Psychology " 

 (afterward incorporated into his more extended 

 treatise on the same subject in the regular system) ; 

 and in this book (four years before the publication 

 of " The Origin of Species ") the problems of mind 

 were throughout approached and discussed from 

 the evolutionary point of view. 



Almost simultaneously with the publication of 

 this volume, and mainly as the direct result of over- 

 exertion in the writing of it, Mr. Spencer had a 

 serious nervous breakdown, which for eighteen 

 months incapacitated him for work, and left him in 



a condition of semi-invalidism. When, on partial 

 restoration to health, he returned to his dropped 

 undertakings, his first concern was to finish the es- 

 say on " Progress," in which he expounded in detail 

 that conception of evolution as a universal process 

 which he had already reached in the " Psychology." 

 A year later (1858), he published a long defense "of 

 the Nebular Hypothesis ; and during the prepara- 

 tion of this article the scheme of the " Synthetic 

 Philosophy" took shape in his mind. Hitherto, he 

 had dealt with the phenomena of life and society in 

 a fragmentary manner ; now he realized the possi- 

 bility of taking the doctrine of evolution as the 

 basis of a system of thought, and of thus unifying 

 knowledge by the affiliation of its various branches 

 upon the ultimate laws underlying them all. The 

 prospectus of the proposed enterprise was drawn 

 up in 1859, and distributed in the March of the fol- 

 lowing year. 



The history of the man from this time is almost 

 entirely merged in the history of his work ; the 

 dates of importance for the outside world being 

 those marked by the publication of the various por- 

 tions and volumes of the promised series. Of Mr. 

 Spencer himself, through all this long period dur- 

 ing which the rare qualities of his genius have 

 been more fully recognized, and the power of his 

 thought has shown a steady growth, the public at 

 large has known less perhaps than of any of his 

 notable contemporaries. He has lived, rather by 

 necessity than by choice, a very quiet and secluded 

 life, saving all his available strength for the task 

 he had set himself, while he has not only never 

 courted notoriety, but has firmly resisted frequent 

 attempts to thrust notoriety upon him. Himself a 

 delightful conversationalist and capital story-teller, 

 fond of his joke, and with a ready laugh for the 

 good sayings of others, he certainly does not remind 

 those who are privileged to know him well of the 

 dry, abstracted, unemotional philosopher of vulgar 

 tradition, though doubtless a stranger would pro- 

 nounce him cold and reserved. Before his nervous 

 trouble assumed its more serious form a few years 

 since, he took much pleasure in fishing, quoits, and 

 especially billiards, and was a regular habitue of 

 the Athenreum Club. But for a long time past 

 these and similar amusements have been out of the 

 question, and, being a rather impatient reader of 

 general literature, he has derived his greatest solace 

 from music, of which he has always been passion- 

 ately fond. His standard of individual conduct is 

 extremely high, and, unlike many theorists, he ap- 

 plies it to his own life as severely as he does to the 

 lives of other people. 



It is important, in the first place, to make clear 

 the meaning that Mr. Spencer attaches to the word 

 philosophy. By philosophy he does not mean an 

 effort to solve the ultimate problem of the universe. 

 He recognizes two categories the Unknowable and 

 the Knowable : and to the former of these, the 

 proper domain of religion, he relegates all those 

 final questions concerning Absolute Being, and the 

 why and wherefore of the cosmos, which have 

 largely absorbed the attention of the metaphysi- 

 cians questions that are forever beyond the scope 

 of human intelligence. The true subject-matter of 

 philosophy, therefore, is not the problem of abso- 

 lute cause and end, but of secondary causes and 

 ends. What, then, do we demand from philoso- 

 phy? Not an explanation of the universe in terms 

 of Being as distinguished from Appearance : but a 

 complete co-ordination or systematic organization 

 of those cosmical Jaws by which we symbolize the 

 processes of the universe, and the interrelations of 

 the various phenomena of which the universe, as 

 revealed to us, is actually composed. The old an- 

 tithesis between common knowledge and what we 



