June 10, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



875 



less typically English, for the one leading- 

 characteristic of the whole Anglo-Saxon 

 race is the complete mixture of all the 

 numerous races — Saxon, Danish, Norman, 

 British, Welsh, Scotch, etc. — that entered 

 into the composition of the later inhabit- 

 ants of that historic isle. 



Herbert Spencer is commonly repre- 

 sented as being the type of a self-educated 

 man. Nothing could be farther from the 

 truth. The son of a professional teacher 

 belonging to a long line of teachers, he 

 was svirrounded by educational influences 

 from his very birth. So far from strug- 

 gling to educate himself, his main efforts 

 as a boy seem to have been to escape from 

 the perpetual drill of the domestic school. 

 His father finally sent him away to be 

 further drilled by his uncle, but it was the 

 same old story, geometry forever. His 

 youthful escapade from this latter educa- 

 tional treadmill is very amusing. Many 

 boys of some pluck, when they imagine 

 themselves ill-treated at home, 'run away,' 

 but Spencer, thinking himself overtasked 

 by his uncle, ran home, from Hinton to 

 Derby, a distance of nearly 150 miles! 

 He admits that it was largely homesick- 

 ness, and one can compare it to nothing 

 but the way a domestic animal, removed 

 from the spot to which it has become 

 wonted, will seize the first opportunity to 

 go back, regardless of the distance, and 

 guided by that little-known ' sense of direc- 

 tion' that some think to be located in the 

 semicircular canals of the ear. 



But whatever his treatment may have 

 been, and it certainly was never severe, 

 Herbert Spencer as a boy was always being 

 taught. His education was not sporadic 

 and one-sided, biit methodical and all-sided. 

 He is usually represented as wholly ignor- 

 ant of Greek or Latin and of modern lan- 

 guages. In so far as this is true it was due 

 to his distaste for them, for he complains 

 of being taught them. At that day, before 



the natural sciences had come to receive the 

 place they now occupy in education, all 

 pupils belonged to one or the other of two 

 classes, those that loved mathematics and 

 hated languages, and those that loved lan- 

 guages and hated mathematics. Spencer 

 belonged to the first of these classes. But 

 he had to learn languages and dead lan- 

 guages at thatj and any close observer of 

 his style can see that he did learn them 

 sufficiently to affect his style. It is clear 

 that he always had the derivation of a word 

 in mind when using it, and that he knew 

 enough Greek and Latin to apply their 

 principles to his own language. He seems 

 to have known very little German, but he 

 not only read French, but spoke it well 

 enough to act on one occasion as an in- 

 terpreter. 



All that is left, therefore, of the pre- 

 vailing notion about his education is that 

 he was not university trained. He thought 

 that a great advantage, and never tired of 

 citing proofs that university training spoils 

 a man for all usefulness and fills him with 

 a mass of useless rubbish. Whether he 

 would have done any better or worse had 

 he taken a university course may be a diffi- 

 cult question to answer, but his whole 

 reasoning on the subject is unsound be- 

 cause it is based on the exceptional man 

 and takes no accoimt of the average man. 

 Indeed, his entire philosophy of education 

 is permeated by this vice. His book on 

 education may be said to rest on the as- 

 sumption that every child has a father or 

 a mother or both capable of properly edu- 

 cating him or her. One has only to look 

 around to see how absurd this assumption 

 is. 



Herbert Spencer belonged to the middle 

 class ; though not rich, he was by no means 

 poor. He never did manual labor of any 

 kind, and none of his ancestors at all recent 

 belonged to the laboring classes. He ex- 

 plains the smallness of his hands by this 



