12 
LAND & WATER 
April 27, 1916 
the Universe. He was not in the least afraid of making 
the Universe dull ; he was as perfectly indifferent about 
making himself out uninteresting. His business was in 
both cases to generalise and correlate phenomena. Many 
men have screwed themselves up to confessing publicly 
they were wicked or have done mean things. But 
as in the case of Rousseau, pride usually peeps out in the 
fact that they are obviously conscious that they are own- 
ing up to the things other men conceal. They are proud 
when they comi)are themselves with others. Many have 
written themselves down as rascals, or as* asses of the 
gay and freely kicking kind ; but very few have tried to 
depict themselves at full length as essentially dull. Such 
an achievement is beyond the reacli of humility, and 
can only be accomplished by one free Herbert Spencer 
in whom the passion for truth has no other rival passions. 
Fascinating Result 
The resrdt is fascinating. Perhaps when the Synthetic 
Philosophy, that row of stout volumes bound in the 
philosopher's favourite colour, " an impure purple," is 
forgotten, its author may still be remembered as the most 
perfect specimen of a human type. There is no name 
for this type, but we have a name for his op])osite ; we 
call him a humorist. It was not that Herbert Spencer 
was an antigelast : so far indeed from looking forward to 
the day of the last joke, he was pathetically api)reciativc 
of jokes, seeking them himself with care and hope. But 
his mind was exactly the kind of mind in which humour 
does not live. The jokes he made himself, or appreciated, 
were little tiny jokes ; he never saw a big one in his life. 
He tells us in his autobiography that a sudden access of 
moderately good health enabled him to make one once 
in the Isle of Wight He was on a holiday there with 
G. H. Lewes, and at lunch he records that he remarked that 
it produced very big chops for so small an island. 
Herbert Spencer had a hearty deep laugh ; and 
his own chuckles which followed this remark must have 
been very funny. One can imagine his companion, after 
gazing for a moment in amazement at the delighted 
countenance of the philosopher, bursting into laughter 
himself, laughter which would be echoed by still deeper 
guffaws from the only begetter of the original joke ; in 
their turn provoking redoubled peals from the other, and 
so on till climax was again reached memorable after forty 
years, and the reaction set in, when the philosopher 
suddenly recovering his balance and normal frame of 
mind, remarked on the causal connection between humour 
and health. 
Whisky on Top of Wine 
Describing a walk on Ben Nevis in another passage, he 
says : "I found myself possessed of a quite unusual 
amount of agihty ; being able to leap from rock to rock 
with rapidity, ease and safety ; so that I quite astonished 
myself. There was evidently an exultation of the per- 
ceptive and motor powers. . . . Long continued 
exertion having caused an unusually great action of the 
lungs, the exaltation produced by the stimulation of the 
brain was not cancelled by the diminished oxygenation 
of the blood. The oxygenation had been so much in 
excess, that deduction from it did not appreciably 
diminish the vital activities." What is all this about"? 
He explains. The fact was the philosopher was coming 
down the hill side chariotted by Bacchus and his pards, 
having taken whisky on the top'of wine on the summit. 
There is another story about him which illustrates this 
habitual direction of his attention towards causes 
to the exclusion of all other aspects. Numerous 
complaints about the toughness of the meat having 
occurred at the Atheneum, the matter at last came before 
the kitchen committee, of which he was a member. It 
was agreed that the butcher should be sent for and inter- 
viewed. But Herbert Spencer would not hear of his 
being admitted until it had been decided exactly what 
was the cause of the complaints : it was unfair to the 
man to assert vaguely that the meat was tough. After 
a longish session, in which he took the matter in hand, 
the butcher was at last admitted and told that his joints 
" had too much connective tissue in them." 
Now this habit of mind, though it may be sometimes 
tlic :;ause of humour in Oihers, is u'lfavourable to the 
internal production of it, and in that amusing book Home 
Life with Herbert Spencer, by two of the young ladies 
who kept house fi^r him for eight years, the specimens of 
his own efforts in that direction prove this. For instance, 
there arrived one day a new photograph of him. The 
ladies began to criticise it, no one of them could find any 
points in its favour. " Why it gives neither your serious 
nor 30ur frivolous expression ! We don't like it at all." 
About ten minutes or a quarter of an hour afterwards we 
were astounded to see the philosopher in his sliirt sleeves! 
standing at the dining-room door tying his neck-tic. 
The intensely amused expression on his face shovve d he 
was quite alive to the surprise Yii would occasion. 
Without any apology for his deshabille he laughingly 
remarked : "I liave come down to fire off a joke before 
1 forget it ! Your criticisms of my photograph — which 
you expect to be grave and gay at the same time — remind 
me of the farmers, who are never contented imless 
simultaneously it is raining on the turnips while the sun 
shines on the corn." And with an audible chuckle he 
hurried back to complete his toilet. 
It is a terrible ordeal for any philosopher to be described 
in intimacy by two superficially reverential, but un- 
consciously frivolous young women. Herbert Spencer 
with his foibles, his ear-stoppers, his valetudinism, his 
habit of giving to everything — potatoes, religion, salt- 
cellars, precisely the same quality of attention, was 
peculiarly at the mercy of such observers. (It is a very 
funny book). He was absolutely defenceless ; he had no 
humour, which is but the defence of the thinker against 
those who take things at their face value, and the enor- 
mously wide sweep of his intellectual curiosity was only 
equalled by the humdrumness of his sympathies. 
Study of Trifles 
He was a man who could not attend to anything lie did 
not think of the utmost importance and was tempera- 
mentally driven to attend more than most men to trifles ; 
who thought that complete independence of the bias of 
tradition was as important in deciding how a bed should 
be made, or how thick socks should be (he thought it 
illogical to suppose that the foot should be clad less thinly 
than the rest of the body) as in scjtting out to investigate 
scientific problems ; who made a heroic life-long effort 
to cram every branch of experience into a world-formula 
(succeeding wonderfully well — with the help of a 
big paper basket labelled the Unknowabl-2 for things 
which absolutely would not fit), and yet at meals got 
excited by a minute smut on a potato. What a 
victim for the feminine eye ! 
The authoresses recount how on finding them ignorant 
of some fact, he would exclaim : " Dear me, how innocent 
you are ! " But the reader is much more inclined to 
apply that adjective to him. Indeed, it is precisely that 
quality which after all saves his dignity. When the 
kdies suggested that the next time a rather" over-talkative 
visitor came, they should all wear ear-stoppers, he 
entered into the idea without a notion that it in any 
way reflected on his own favourite method of guarding 
against too much conversation, and he superintended 
enthusiastically the melting off of the rims of old saucepan 
lids for their manufacture. (The ear-stopper was a curved 
spring which passed over the head and pressed a pad 
tightly over each ear.) 
He could not really believe that the application of 
reason to any matter "^ could ever lead to any ridiculous 
result ; that is why he was exactly the opposite tyjic 
to the humorist, for the humorist is always conscious of 
the double aspects of things. The contradiction felt may 
be between feeling and thought or reason and con- 
vention, or the contrast may be between the seriousness 
with which something is felt and its trifling nature, or 
between its importance and the lightness with which 
men take it. If the unreasonableness of convention strikes ■ 
one humorist, another laughs at the absurdity of results 
reached by reason from the point of view of common 
sense ; if one finds jokes in the lightness with which 
tragedies are born, another will find them in the serious- 
ness with which trifles are taken. Humorists take sides on 
all sorts of questions, but they are essentially men who 
feel (whatever they think) that there arc tvvo or more 
sides to them. They are philosophers who cannot make 
ui> their minds. 
