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Herbert Spencer

by J. Arthur Thomson · English · Gutenberg #39002 · 505,944 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Herbert Spencer

Author: J. Arthur Thomson


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERBERT SPENCER ***




Produced by Adam Buchbinder, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
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ENGLISH MEN OF SCIENCE

EDITED BY

J. REYNOLDS GREEN, D.Sc.


HERBERT SPENCER

[Illustration]




HERBERT SPENCER

BY

J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
AUTHOR OF
THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE; THE SCIENCE OF LIFE;
OUTLINES OF ZOOLOGY; PROGRESS OF SCIENCE;
ETC. ETC.

[Illustration]

PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY
J. M. DENT & CO. AND IN NEW
YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.

1906




CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE
INTRODUCTION                                             vii

CHAP.

I. HEREDITY                                                1

II. NURTURE                                                7

III. PERIOD OF PRACTICAL WORK                             17

IV. PREPARATION FOR LIFE-WORK                             27

V. THINKING OUT THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY                  37

VI. CHARACTERISTICS: PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL            52

VII. CHARACTERISTICS: EMOTIONAL AND ETHICAL               74

VIII. SPENCER AS BIOLOGIST: THE DATA OF BIOLOGY           93

IX. SPENCER AS BIOLOGIST: INDUCTIONS OF BIOLOGY          110

X. SPENCER AS CHAMPION OF THE EVOLUTION-IDEA             135

XI. AS REGARDS HEREDITY                                  154

XII. FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION                        180

XIII. EVOLUTION UNIVERSAL                                209

XIV. PSYCHOLOGICAL                                       232

XV. SOCIOLOGICAL                                         242

XVI. THE POPULATION QUESTION                             259

XVII. BEYOND SCIENCE                                     269

CONCLUSION                                               278

INDEX                                                    283




INTRODUCTION


This volume attempts to give a short account of Herbert Spencer's life,
an appreciation of his characteristics, and a statement of some of the
services he rendered to science. Prominence has been given to his
_Autobiography_, to his _Principles of Biology_, and to his position as
a cosmic evolutionist; but little has been said of his psychology and
sociology, which require another volume, or of his ethics and politics,
or of his agnosticism--the whetstone of so many critics. Our
appreciation of Spencer's services is therefore partial, but it may not
for that reason fail in its chief aim, that of illustrating the working
of one of the most scientific minds that ever lived, "whose excess of
science was almost unscientific."

The story of Spencer's life is neither eventful nor picturesque, but it
commands the interest of all who admire faith, courage, and loyalty to
an ideal. It is a story of plain living and high thinking, of one who,
though vexed by an extremely nervous temperament, was as resolute as a
Hebrew prophet in delivering his message. It is the story of a quiet
servant of science, indifferent to conventional honours, careless about
"getting on," disliking controversy, sensationalism, and noise, trusting
to the power of truth alone, that it must prevail.

Another aspect of interest is that Spencer was an arch-heretic, one of
the flowers of Nonconformity, against theology and against metaphysics,
against monarchy and against molly-coddling legislation, against
classical education and against socialism, against war and against
Weismann. So that we can hardly picture the man who has not some crow to
pick with Spencer.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that we find extraordinary difference
of opinion as to the value of the great Dissenter's deliverances. In
1894, Prof. Henry Sidgwick spoke of Herbert Spencer as "our most eminent
living philosopher," and in the same sentence described him as "an
impressive survival of the drift of thought in the first half of the
nineteenth century." Some have likened him to a second Aristotle, while
others assure us that the author of the Synthetic Philosophy was not a
philosopher at all. Similarly there are scientists who tell us that
Spencer may have been a great philosopher, but that he was too much of
an _a priori_ thinker to be of great account in science. Many critics,
indeed, devote so much time and ability to demonstrating Spencer's
incompetence, in this or that field of thought, that the reader is left
with the impression that it must be a tower of strength which requires
so many assaults. And there are others, neither philosophers nor
scientists, who are content to dismiss Spencer with saying that the
least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he. Yet this much is
conceded by most, that Herbert Spencer was an unusually keen
intellectual combatant, who took the evolution-formula into his strong
hands as a master-key, and tried (teaching others to try better) to open
therewith all the locked doors of the universe--all the immediate,
though none of the ultimate, riddles, physical and biological,
psychological and ethical, social and religious. And this also is
conceded, that his life was signalised by absolute consecration to the
pursuit of truth, by magnanimous disinterestedness as to rewards, by a
resolute struggle against almost overwhelming difficulties, and by an
entire fearlessness in delivering the message which he believed the
Unknown had given him for the good of the world. In an age of specialism
he held up the banner of the Unity of Science, and he actually
completed, so far as he could complete, the great task of his
life--greater than most men have even dreamed of--that of applying the
evolution-formula to everything knowable. He influenced thought so
largely, he inspired so many disciples, he left so many enduring
works--enduring as seed-plots, if not also as achievements--that his
death, writ large, was immortality.




HERBERT SPENCER




CHAPTER I

HEREDITY

     _Ancestry--Grandparents--Uncles--Parents_


Remarkable parents often have commonplace children, and a genius may be
born to a very ordinary couple, yet the importance of pedigree is so
patent that our first question in regard to a great man almost
invariably concerns his ancestry. In Herbert Spencer's case the question
is rewarded.

_Ancestry._--From the information afforded by the _Autobiography_ in
regard to ancestry remoter than grandparents, we learn that, on both
sides of the house, Spencer came of a stock characterised by the spirit
of nonconformity, by a correlated respect for something higher than
legislative enactments, and by a regard for remote issues rather than
immediate results. In these respects Herbert Spencer was true to his
stock--an uncompromising nonconformist, with a conscience loyal to
"principles having superhuman origins above rules having human origins,"
and with an eye ever directed to remote issues. Truly it required more
than "ingrained nonconformity," loyalty to principles, and far-sighted
prudence to make a Herbert Spencer, and hundreds unknown to fame must
have shared a similar heritage; but the resemblances between some of
Spencer's characteristics and those of his stock are too close to be
disregarded. Disown him as many nonconformists did, they could not
disinherit him. Nonconformity was in his blood and bone of his bone.

_Grandparents._--Spencer's maternal grandfather, John Holmes of Derby,
was a business man and an active Wesleyan, with "a little more than the
ordinary amount of faculty." The grandmother, nee Jane Brettell, is
described as "commonplace," but her portrait suggests a more charitable
verdict. Spencer's paternal grandfather was a schoolmaster, a
"mechanical teacher," somewhat oppressed by life, and "extremely
tender-hearted." If, when a newspaper was being read aloud, there came
an account of something cruel or very unjust, he would exclaim: "Stop,
stop, I can't bear it!" Of this sensitive temperament his illustrious
grandson had a large share. The most notable of the four grandparents
was Catherine Spencer, nee Taylor, "of good type both physically and
morally." "Born in 1758 and marrying in 1786, when nearly 28, she had
eight children, led a very active life, and lived till 1843: dying at
the age of 84 in possession of all her faculties." A personal follower
of John Wesley, intensely religious, indefatigably unselfish, combining
unswerving integrity with uniform good temper and affection, "she had
all the domestic virtues in large measures." Her grandson has said that
"nothing was specially manifest in her, intellectually considered,
unless, indeed, what would be called sound common sense." Grandparents
taken together count on an _average_ for about a quarter of the
individual inheritance, but we would note that in Herbert Spencer's
case, Catherine Spencer should be regarded as a peculiarly dominant
hereditary factor.

_Uncles._--Two of her children died in infancy, the only surviving
daughter (_b._ 1788) was an invalid; then came Herbert Spencer's father,
William George (_b._ 1790), and there were four other sons. Henry
Spencer, a year and a half younger than Herbert Spencer's father, was "a
favourable sample of the type," independent with "a strong dash of
chivalry," an energetic, though in the end unsuccessful man of business,
an ardent radical and with "a marked sense of humour." The next son,
John, had strong individuality; he was a notably self-assertive,
obstinate solicitor, successful only in out-living all his brothers.
Thomas, the next brother, began active life as a school-teacher near
Derby, was a student of St John's, Cambridge, achieved honours (ninth
wrangler), and became a clergyman of the Church of England at Hinton. He
was "a reformer," "anticipating great movements," a "radical," a
"Free-Trader," a "teetotaler," "an intensified Englishman." The youngest
son, William, "distinguished less by extent of intellectual acquisitions
than by general soundness of sense, joined with a dash of originality,"
carried on his father's school, and was one of Herbert Spencer's
teachers. He was a Whig and a nonconformist, but more moderate than his
brothers in either direction.

These facts in regard to Herbert Spencer's uncles corroborate the
general thesis that heredity counts for much. The four uncles had
individuality, rising sometimes to the verge of eccentricity; in their
various paths of life they were independent, critical, self-assertive,
and with a characteristic absence of reticence.

_Parents._--George Spencer, Herbert's father (_b._ 1790) was "the flower
of the flock." "To faculties which he had in common with the rest
(except the humour of Henry and the linguistic faculty of Thomas), he
added faculties they gave little sign of. One was inventive ability, and
another was artistic perception, joined with skill of hand." He began
very early to teach in his father's school, and was for most of his life
a teacher. As such, he was noted for his reliance on non-coercive
discipline, and at the same time for his firmness; he continually sought
to stimulate individuality rather than to inform. His _Inventional
Geometry_ and _Lucid Shorthand_ had some vogue for a time.

He was an unconventional person, as shown in little things--by his
repugnance to taking off his hat, to donning signs of mourning, or to
addressing people as "Esq." or "Rev'd.," and in big things by his
pronounced "Whigism." With "a repugnance to all living authority" he
combined so much sympathy and suavity that he was generally beloved. He
found Quakerism "congruous with his nature in respect of its complete
individualism and absence of ecclesiastical government." He had unusual
keenness of the senses, delicacy of manipulation, and noteworthy
artistic skill. A somewhat fastidious and finicking habit of trying to
make things better was expressed in his annotations on dictionaries and
the like, but he had also a larger "passion for reforming the world."
As his son notes, the one great drawback was lack of considerateness and
good temper in his relations with his wife. For this, however, a nervous
disorder was in part to blame. He lived to be over seventy.

Herbert Spencer's mother, nee Harriet Holmes (1794-1867), introduced a
new strain into the heritage. "So far from showing any ingrained
nonconformity, she rather displayed an ingrained conformity." A Wesleyan
by tradition rather than by conviction, she was constitutionally averse
to change or adventure, non-assertive, self-sacrificing, patient, and
gentle. "Briefly characterised, she was of ordinary intelligence and of
high moral nature--a moral nature of which the deficiency was the
reverse of that commonly to be observed: she was not sufficiently
self-asserting: altruism was too little qualified by egoism."

Spencer did not think that he took after his mother except in some
physical features. He had something of his father's nervous weakness,
but he had not his large chest and well developed heart and lungs.
Believing that "the mind is as deep as the viscera," he does not scruple
to state that his "visceral constitution was maternal rather than
paternal."

     "Whatever specialities of character and faculty in me are due to
     inheritance, are inherited from my father. Between my mother's mind
     and my own I see scarcely any resemblances, emotional or
     intellectual. She was very patient; I am very impatient. She was
     tolerant of pain, bodily or mental; I am intolerant of it. She was
     little given to finding fault with others; I am greatly given to
     it. She was submissive; I am the reverse of submissive. So, too,
     in respect of intellectual faculties, I can perceive no trait
     common to us, unless it be a certain greater calmness of judgment
     than was shown by my father; for my father's vivid representative
     faculty was apt to play him false. Not only, however, in the moral
     characters just named am I like my father, but such intellectual
     characters as are peculiar are derived from him" (_Autobiography_
     ii., p. 430).




CHAPTER II

NURTURE

     _Boyhood--School--At Hinton--At Home_


Herbert Spencer was born at Derby on the 27th of April 1820. His father
and mother had married early in the preceding year, at the age of about
29 and 25 respectively. Except a little sister, a year his junior, who
lived for two years, he was practically the only child, for of the five
infants who followed none lived more than a few days. As Spencer
pathetically remarks: "It was one of my misfortunes to have no brothers,
and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters." But is it not
recompense enough of any marriage to produce a genius?

In reference to his father's breakdown soon after marriage, Spencer
writes: "I doubt not that had he retained good health, my early
education would have been much better than it was; for not only did his
state of body and mind prevent him from paying as much attention to my
intellectual culture as he doubtless wished, but irritability and
depression checked that geniality of behaviour which fosters the
affections and brings out in children the higher traits of nature. There
are many whose lives would have been happier had their parents been more
careful about themselves, and less anxious to provide for others."

_Boyhood._--The father's ill-health had this compensation, that Herbert
Spencer spent much of his childhood (aet. 4-7) in the country--at New
Radford, near Nottingham. In his later years he had still vivid
recollections of rambling among the gorse-bushes which towered above his
head, of exploring the narrow tracks which led to unexpected places, and
of picking the blue-bells "from among the prickly branches, which were
here and there flecked with fragments of wool left by passing sheep." He
was allowed freedom from ordinary "lessons," and enjoyed a long latent
receptive period.

In 1827 the family returned to Derby, but for some time the boy's life
was comparatively unrestrained. There was some gardening to do--an
educational discipline far too little appreciated--and there was "almost
nominal" school-drill; but there was plenty of time for exploring the
neighbourhood, for fishing and bird-nesting, for watching the bees and
the gnat-larvae, for gathering mushrooms and blackberries. "Beyond the
pleasurable exercise and the gratification of my love of adventure,
there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous knowledge of
things, and the perceptions were beneficially disciplined." "Most
children are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would
readily pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones.
My father was wise in such matters, and I was not simply allowed but
encouraged to enter on natural history."

He had the run of a farm at Ingleby during holidays; he enjoyed fishing
in the Trent, in which he was within an ace of being drowned when about
ten years old; he was a keen collector of insects, watching their
metamorphoses, and often drawing and describing his captures; and he was
also encouraged to make models. In short, he had in a simple way not a
few of the disciplines which modern paedagogics--helped greatly by
Spencer himself--has recognised to be salutary.

In his boyhood Spencer was extremely prone to castle-building or
day-dreaming--"a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature
life; finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or
less practicable." For his tendency to absorption, without which there
has seldom been greatness of achievement, he was often reproached by his
father in the words: "As usual, Herbert, thinking only of one thing at a
time."

He did not read tolerably until he was over seven years old, and
_Sandford and Merton_ was the first book that prompted him to read of
his own accord. He rapidly advanced to _The Castle of Otranto_ and
similar romances, all the more delectable that they were forbidden
fruits. While John Stuart Mill was working at the Greek classics,
Herbert Spencer was reading novels in bed. But the appetite for reading
was soon cloyed, and he became incapable of enjoying anything but novels
and travels for more than an hour or two at a time.

_School._--As to more definite intellectual culture, the first school
period (before ten years) seems to have counted for little, and is
interesting only because it revealed the boy's general aversion to
rote-learning and dogmatic statements. Shielded from direct punishment,
he lived in an atmosphere of reproof, and this "naturally led to a
state of chronic antagonism." But when he was ten (1830) he became one
of his Uncle William's pupils, and this led to some progress. There was
drawing, map-making, experimenting, Greek Testament without grammar, but
comparatively little lesson-learning. "As a consequence, I was not in
continual disgrace." The boy was quick in all matters appealing to
reason, and "had a somewhat remarkable perception of locality and the
relations of position generally, which in later life disappeared."

Apart from school he had the advantage of hearing discussions between
his father and his friends on all sorts of topics, of preparing for the
scientific demonstrations which his father occasionally gave, of
sampling scientific periodicals which came to the Derby Philosophical
Society of which his father was honorary secretary, and of reading such
works as Rollin's _Ancient History_ and Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_. He was continually prompted to "intellectual
self-help," and was continually stimulated by the question, "Can you
tell me the cause of this?"

"Always the tendency in himself, and the tendency strengthened in me,
was to regard everything as naturally caused; and I doubt not that while
the notion of causation was thus rendered much more definite in me than
in most of my age, there was established a habit of seeking for causes,
as well as a tacit belief in the universality of causation." "A tacit
belief in the universality of causation" seems a big item to be put to
the credit of a boy of thirteen, but we have the echo of it in Clerk
Maxwell's continual boyish question, "What is the go of this?" That the
question of cause was acute in both cases implies that both had
hereditarily fine brains, but it also suggests that the question is
normal in those who are naturally educated. The sensitive, irritable,
invalid father was no ideal parent, but he did not snub his son's
inquisitiveness, nor coerce his independence, nor appeal to authority as
such as a reason for accepting any belief.

Spencer has given in his _Autobiography_ a picture of himself as a boy
of thirteen. His constitution was distinguished "rather by good balance
than by great vital activity"; there was "a large margin of latent
power"; he was more fleet than any of his school-fellows. He was
decidedly peaceful, but when enraged no considerations of pain or danger
or anything else restrained him. He was affectionate and tender-hearted,
but his most marked moral trait was disregard of authority. His memory
was rather below par than above; he was "averse to lesson-learning and
the acquisition of knowledge after the ordinary routine methods," but he
picked up general information with facility; he could not bear prolonged
reading or the receptive attitude. From about ten years of age to
thirteen he habitually went on Sunday morning with his father to the
Friends' Meeting House, and in the evening with his mother to the
Methodist Chapel. "I do not know that any marked effect on me followed;
further, perhaps, than that the alternation tended to enlarge my views
by presenting me with differences of opinion and usage." While John Mill
kept his son away from conventional religious influences, Spencer's
father excluded none; and the result seems to have been much the same
in the two cases. In this and other connections, Prof. W. H. Hudson
points out the contrast between the methods of the two fathers of the
two remarkable sons--John Stuart Mill was constrained along carefully
chosen paths, Herbert Spencer enjoyed more elbow-room and free-play,
what German biologists call "Abaenderungsspielraum."

At thirteen, Herbert Spencer had little Latin and less Greek; he was
wholly uninstructed in "English"; he had no knowledge of mathematics,
English history, ancient literature, or biography. "Concerning things
around, however, and their properties, I knew a good deal more than is
known by most boys." Through physics and chemistry in certain lines,
through entomology and general natural history, through miscellaneous
reading in physiology and geography, he had in many ways an intellectual
grip of his environment; but on the lines of the "humanities" he was
wofully uneducated.

On the other hand, his education had been stimulating and emancipating,
and even as a boy of thirteen his intelligence was alert and
independent. Much in the open air, he had kept an open mind. He had
learned to use his brains and to enjoy nature. After that, everything is
possible.

_At Hinton._--When Herbert Spencer was thirteen (in the summer of 1833)
his parents took him to his Uncle Thomas, at Hinton Charterhouse, near
Bath. The journey was a revelation to the boy, and his early days at
Hinton were full of delight, especially in regard to the new
butterflies. But when he discovered that he had come to stay and to be
schooled, he had a feverish _Heimweh_, and soon followed his parents
homewards. "That a boy of thirteen should, without any food but bread
and water and two or three glasses of beer, and without sleep for two
nights, walk 48 miles one day, 47 the next, and some 20 the third, is
surprising enough." It was a rather absurd boyish escapade, mainly due
to lack of parental frankness, but not without the compliment implied in
all nostalgia, and it gives us an inkling of Spencer's obstinacy and
doggedness.

A fortnight after the escapade, the runaway returned peacefully to
Hinton--content with his dramatic assertion of himself. For about three
years he remained under his uncle's tutorship, and this was a formative
period. Hinton stands high in a hilly country, between Bath and Frome,
with picturesque places all round. His uncle was "a man of energetic,
strongly-marked character," "intellectually above the average," with a
good deal of originality of thought. Like his kindly wife, he belonged
to the evangelical school.

"The daily routine was not a trying one. In the morning Euclid and
Latin, in the afternoon commonly gardening, or sometimes a walk; and in
the evening, after a little more study, usually of algebra I think, came
reading, with occasionally chess. I became at that time very fond of
chess, and acquired some skill." The aversion to linguistic studies
continued, but there was an enthusiasm for mathematics and physics. To a
modern educationist the regime at Hinton cannot but seem narrow; there
was no history, no letters, no concrete science, and no play. There was
certainly no over-pressure, but there was some brain-stretching and
some salutary moral discipline. Stimulating, doubtless, was the
table-talk and Mr Spencer's arguments with his nephew, whom he found
"very deficient in the principle of _Fear_." We must not forget the
visits to London (including the then private Zoological Gardens), or the
first appearances in print--two letters in the newly started _Bath
Magazine_ on curiously shaped floating crystals of common salt, and on
the New Poor Law! In June 1836, Herbert Spencer returned to Derby,
benefited by the rural life and bracing climate of Hinton, "strong, in
good health, and of good stature."

Looking backward after many years, Herbert Spencer felt that he was
treated as a youth "with much more consideration and generosity than
might have been expected. There was shown great patience in prosecuting
what seemed by no means a hopeful undertaking." It is interesting, of
course, to speculate what might have been the result if the boy's
education had been less of a family affair; and it would be unfair to
conclude that the success which attended the easy-going, personal,
familiar instruction of this boy of uncommon brains would also attend a
similar treatment of those of humbler parts. But would it not be well to
make the experiment oftener, since the material abounds, and since the
results of the conventional discipline of public schools and the like
are not dazzlingly successful?

Spencer felt strongly, as he indulged in retrospect, that his
well-meaning educators "had to deal with intractable material--an
individuality too stiff to be easily moulded." That we may, in time,
come to have not an occasional stiff haulm with a big ear, but a whole
crop of them, must be the prayer of all who believe in education and
race-progress.

Another of Spencer's retrospective convictions is one that makes all
human nature kin--that he was not so black as he was painted. His father
and his uncle had been eminently "good" boys, and they gauged boy-nature
by their own standard. Had he gone to a public school, Spencer thinks
that his "_extrinsically_-wrong actions would have been many, but the
_intrinsically_-wrong actions would have been few." This distinction
will doubtless appeal to the wise.

_At Home._--For a year and a half after leaving Hinton, Herbert Spencer
remained at home, enjoying another period of freedom. He made in a day,
without previous experience, a survey of his father's small property at
Kirk Ireton--two fields and three cottages with their gardens; he made
designs for a country house; he hit upon a remarkable property of the
circle; and he fished. Meanwhile, however, his father who "held, and
rightly held, that there are few functions higher than that of the
educator," induced him to engage in school-work, and this experiment
lasted for three months. It appears to have been directly a success,
Spencer's lessons were at once "effective and pleasure-giving," and
"complete harmony continued throughout the entire period"; it was not
less important eventually, for we cannot doubt that part of the
effectiveness of Herbert Spencer's book on _Education_ is traceable to
the fact that he had, for a term at least, personal experience of
teaching.

Even at this early age (17 years) Spencer had ideals of "intellectual
culture, moral discipline, and physical training." But as he disliked
mechanical routine, had a great intolerance of monotony, and had ideas
of his own, it seems likely enough that if he had embraced the
profession of teacher, he would sooner or later have "thrown it up in
disgust." The experiment was not to be tried further, however, for in
November 1837, his uncle William wrote from London that he had obtained
for his nephew a post under Mr Charles Fox as a railway engineer. "The
profession of a civil engineer had already been named as one appropriate
for me; and this opening at once led to the adoption of it."

We may sum up the first two periods of Spencer's life. The period of
childhood was marked by a more than usual freedom from the conventional
responsibilities of juvenile tasks, by the large proportion of open-air
life, and by much more intercourse with adults than with other children.
The table talk between his father and uncles had an important moulding
influence, all the more that there was "a comparatively small interest
in gossip." "Their conversation ever tended towards the impersonal....
There was no considerable leaning towards literature.... It was rather
the scientific interpretations and moral aspects of things which
occupied their thoughts." The period of boyhood and of more definite
education was marked by freedom and variety, by a relative absence of
linguistic discipline, by a preponderance of scientific training, by
much family influence, and by an unusual amount of independent
thinking.




CHAPTER III

PERIOD OF PRACTICAL WORK

     _Engineering--Many Inventions--Glimpse of Evolution-Idea--A Resting
     Period--Beginning to Write--Experimenting with Life_


Herbert Spencer's life after boyhood may be conveniently divided into
four periods:--

1. For about ten years he was engaged in varied practical
work--surveying, plan-making, engineering, secretarial business, and
superintendence (1837-1846).

2. After an unattached couple of years, during which he continued his
self-education, experimented, invented, and meditated, there began a
period of miscellaneous literary work, of journalism, and essay-writing,
during which he wrote his _Principles of Psychology_ and felt his way to
his System (1848-1860).

3. At the age of forty, he settled down to something like unity of
occupation--developing and writing _The Synthetic Philosophy_
(1860-1882).

4. Finally, during a prolonged period of pronounced invalidism, he
withdrew almost completely from social life, husbanding his meagre
supply of mental energy for the completion of his System, the revision
of his works, and his _Autobiography_ (1882-1903).

_Engineering._--For about ten years (1837-46) Herbert Spencer had a
varied experience of practical life. He began as assistant, at L80 a
year, to Mr Charles Fox, who had been one of Mr George Spencer's
pupils,--a man of mechanical genius, who was at that time resident
engineer of the London division of the "London and Birmingham" railway,
and afterwards became well known as the designer and constructor of the
Exhibition-Building of 1851. Spencer had surveying and measuring,
drawing and calculating to do, and he threw off the slackness which
marked his school-days. During the first six months in London he never
went to any place of amusement and never read a novel, but gave his
leisure to mathematical questions and to suggesting little inventions or
improved methods.

A transference for the summer months to Wembly, near Harrow, gave him
even more time for study, and we read of an appliance by which he
proposed to facilitate some kinds of sewing. He seems to have pleased
his employer well, for in September 1838 he was advanced to a post of
draughtsman in connection with the "Gloucester and Birmingham" railway,
at a salary of L120 yearly. Thus the next two years were spent at
Worcester, where he had his first experience of working alongside of
other young men, to whom he appeared rather an "oddity," though not one
to be "quizzed." His "mental excursiveness" grew stronger and stronger,
and had occasionally useful results, leading, for instance, to an
article in _The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal_ (May 1839) on a
new plan of projecting the spiral courses in skew bridges, to a
re-invention of Nicholson's Cyclograph, and to an improvement in the
apparatus for giving and receiving the mail-bags carried by trains.

_Many Inventions._--In 1840, Spencer became engineering secretary to
his chief, Captain Moorson, and went to live in the little village of
Powick, about three miles out of Worcester. He enjoyed his work, and had
the new experience of establishing relations with a number of children,
with whom he soon became a favourite. Long afterwards, in his declining
years he found much gratification in making friends with children, and
referred to it quaintly as "a vicarious phase of the philoprogenitive
instinct." It was at Powick that Spencer first began to have a
conscience about his very defective spelling (his _morals_ had always
been _sans reproche_) and to take an interest in style. It was at
Powick, too, in a physical and social environment that suited him, that
Spencer invented his "Velocimeter," a little instrument for showing by
inspection the velocity of an engine, and two or three other devices. He
had inherited his father's constructive imagination, and his father's
discipline had increased it. The father wrote on July 3rd, 1840, "I am
glad you find your inventive powers are beginning to develop themselves.
Indulge a grateful feeling for it. Recollect, also, the never-ceasing
pains taken with you on that point in early life." And the son remarks
gratefully that this conveys a lesson to educators; the inherited
endowment is much, but the fostering of it is also much. "Culture of the
humdrum sort, given by those who ordinarily pass for teachers, would
have left the faculty undeveloped." On the whole, however, Spencer
attached most importance to the hereditary endowment, for he goes on to
say that Edison, "probably the most remarkable inventor who ever lived,"
was a self-trained man, and that Sir Benjamin Baker, "the designer and
constructor of the Forth Bridge, the grandest and most original bridge
in the world, received no regular engineering education." It was at
Powick, too, that place of many inventions, that Herbert Spencer (aetat.
20) made the intimate acquaintance of an "intelligent, unconventional,
amiable, and in various ways attractive" young lady, who "tended to
diminish his _brusquerie_." Luckily or unluckily, the young lady was
engaged; and Spencer remarks, "It was pretty clear that had it not been
for the pre-engagement our intimacy would have grown into something
serious. This would have been a misfortune, for she had little or
nothing and my prospects were none of the brightest." Here the ancestral
prudence crops out.

_Glimpses of Evolution-Idea._--The year 1840-41 was "a nomadic period,"
of bridge-building at Bromsgroove and Defford, of "castle-building,"
too, for he dreamt of making a fortune by successful inventions, of
testing engines, and other routine duties,--a life involving
considerable wear and tear which began to tell on Spencer's eyes. During
this period he renewed his youth by collecting fossils, and "making a
collection is," as he afterwards said, "the proper commencement of any
natural history study; since, in the first place, it conduces to a
concrete knowledge which gives definiteness to the general ideas
subsequently reached, and, further, it creates an indirect stimulus by
giving gratification to that love of acquisition which exists in all."
It was then that the purchase of Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ led
him, curiously enough, to adopt the supposition that organic forms have
arisen, not by special creation, but by progressive modifications,
physically caused and inherited. In spite of Lyell's chapter refuting
Lamarck's views concerning the origin of species, it was with Lamarck
that Spencer, at the age of twenty, sided. The idea of natural genesis
was in harmony with the general idea of the order of Nature towards
which Spencer had been growing. "My belief in it never afterwards
wavered, much as I was, in after years, ridiculed for entertaining it."

"The incident illustrates the general truth that the acceptance of this
or that particular belief, is in part a question of the type of mind.
There are some minds to which the marvellous and the unaccountable
strongly appeal, and which even resent any attempt to bring the genesis
of them within comprehension. There are other minds which, partly by
nature and partly by culture, have been led to dislike a quiescent
acceptance of the unintelligible; and which push their explorations
until causation has been carried to its confines. To this last order of
minds mine, from the beginning, belonged."

Spencer's engagement with Capt. Moorson came to a natural termination,
and an offer of a permanent post on the Birmingham and Gloucester
railway was declined, one motive being a desire to prepare for the
future by a course of mathematical study, another being to work at an
idea his father had arrived at of an electro-magnetic engine. Thus his
twenty-first birthday was spent at home in Derby, after an absence of
three and a half years,--which had been on the whole "satisfactory, in
so far as personal improvement and professional success were
concerned."

_A Resting Period._--But when he got home he found his study of a work
on the Differential Calculus a weariness to the flesh. "To apply day
after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of
increasing ability," was not in him, though he could work hard when the
end in view was definite or large enough. Moreover an article in the
_Philosophical Magazine_ led to an immediate abandonment of the idea of
an electro-magnetic engine. "Thus, within a month of my return to Derby,
it became manifest that, in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp, I had left
behind a place of vantage from which there might probably have been
ascents to higher places."

As a consolation for what was at the time a disappointment, Herbert
Spencer made a herbarium, which still retained in 1894 a specimen of
Enchanter's Nightshade gathered in the grove skirting the river near
Darley. In company with Edward Lott, with whom he formed a life-long
friendship, he often spent the early summer morning, in rowing up the
Derwent, which in those days was rural and not unpicturesque above
Derby. As they rowed they sang popular songs, making the woods echo with
their voices, and now and then arresting their "secular matins" for the
purpose of gathering a plant. It is refreshing to read of Spencer having
in his head a considerable stock of sentimental ballads.

It was during this fallow year that at the age of one-and-twenty he went
with his father on a walking tour in the Isle of Wight, and first saw
the sea. "The emotion produced in me was, I think, a mixture of joy and
awe,--the awe resulting from the manifestation of size and power, and
the joy, I suppose, from the sense of freedom given by limitless
expanse." His father and he were good companions.

We read of various activities during this period,--of investigations,
with inadequate mathematics, concerning the strength of girders, of
experiments in electrotyping and the like, of botanical excursions, of
some enthusiastic exercise in part-singing, drawing and modelling. In
the early summer of 1842 Spencer paid a visit to his old haunts at
Hinton. "The journey left its mark because, in the course of it, I found
that practice in modelling had increased my perception of beauty in
form. A good-looking girl, who was one of our fellow-passengers for a
short interval, had remarkably fine eyes: and I had much quiet
satisfaction in observing their forms." Our hero had not much sense of
humour.

_Beginning to write._--Of greater importance is the fact that Spencer
began in 1842 to write letters to _The Nonconformist_ on social
problems, in which prominence was given to such conceptions as the
universality of law and causation, progressive adaptation in organisms
and in Man, and the tendency to equilibrium through self-adjustment.
"Every day in every life there is a budding out of incidents severally
capable of leading to large results; but the immense majority of them
end as buds, only now and then does one grow into a branch, and very
rarely does such a branch outgrow and overshadow all others." The visit
to Hinton led to political conversations with Thomas Spencer, to a
letter of introduction to the editor of _The Nonconformist_, to the
letters on "The Proper Sphere of Government," to the _Social Statics_
and eventually to the _Synthetic Philosophy_!

Spencer's next activity was an inquiry into his father's system of
short-hand, which he found to be better than Pitman's. He passed to
speculations on the methods to be followed in forming a universal
language, and to shrewd criticisms of the decimal system of enumeration.
In the autumn of 1842 he interested himself enthusiastically in "The
Complete Suffrage Movement." For a youth of twenty-two he took a big
plunge into politics. "It produced in me a high tide of mental energy";
the signature on a draft democratic bill "has a sweep and vigour
exceeding that of any other signature I ever made, either before or
since."

In the spring of 1843 Herbert Spencer went to London and tried very
unsuccessfully to get editors to accept his wares. He made a pamphlet of
his _Nonconformist_ letters, but perhaps a hundred copies were sold!
"The printer's bill was L10 2s. 6d., and the publisher's payment to me
on the first year's sales was fourteen shillings and threepence!"

_Experimenting with Life._--Spencer's half year in London came
to little. As he says, he was too much "in the mood of Mr
Micawber,--waiting for something to turn up, and waiting in vain." So he
raised the siege and retreated to Derby. There he read Mill's _System of
Logic_, Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_ and some of Emerson's essays. He
tried his hand at improving watches, printing-presses, type-making, and
what not; he speculated on the role of carbon in the earth's history,
and on phrenology; and in 1844 he migrated to Birmingham to be
sub-editor of a short-lived paper called _The Pilot_.

It was then that he made a superficial acquaintance with Kant's
_Critique of Pure Reason_, only to give it "summary dismissal." He was
deterred from pursuing the acquaintance by the "utter incredibility" of
the proposition that time and space are "nothing but" subjective forms,
and by "want of confidence in the reasonings of any one who could accept
a proposition so incredible."

After about a month of sub-editing, he reverted to his former profession
of railway engineer, having been commissioned to help with mapping out a
projected branch line between Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. The country
was dreary enough, but Spencer had abundant open-air work, and it was
during this short period that he made a lasting friendship with Mr W. F.
Loch which was important in his life.

Then followed an interval, partly in London and partly in the fields of
Warwickshire, occupied in various ways connected with railway
development, which was then becoming a mania. He seems to have done his
work effectively, but it led to no important personal results, and the
failure of his chief employer's schemes in 1846 ended Spencer's
connection with railway projects and engineering. In afterwards
discussing the question whether he should have made a good engineer or
not, Spencer notes with his characteristic self-impartiality that he had
adequate inventiveness but insufficient patience, enough of intelligence
but too little tact. He had an "aversion to mere mechanical humdrum
work," "inadequate regard for precedent," no interest in financial
details, and a "lack of tact in dealing with men, especially superiors."
The frank analysis is interesting, especially in indicating how Spencer
was weak where Darwin was strong, in "la patience suivie," in dogged
persistence at detailed work. It may seem strange to say this when we
think of his indomitable perseverance with his life-work, but this was
quite consistent with a "constitutional idleness," with a shirking from
everything tedious except his own thinking. As Thomas Hardy says of one
of his characters, "he was a thinker by instinct, but he was only a
worker by effort." He never learned or tried to learn what it was to put
his nose to the grindstone: he would not learn "lessons," he recoiled
from languages, he baulked at the differential calculus, he trifled with
Kant and Comte, he was always "an impatient reader." He elected to think
for himself, and had the defect of this rare quality.




CHAPTER IV

PREPARATION FOR LIFE-WORK

     _More Inventions--Sub-editing--Avowal of
     Evolutionism--Friendships--Books and Essays--Crystallisation
      of his Thought--Settling to Life-work_


Thrown out of regular employment once more, Spencer was left free for a
time to follow his own bent. He lived a "miscellaneous and rather futile
kind of life," reading a little and thinking much over a proposed book
on Social Statics, holidaying a good deal and trying in vain to make
money by inventions.

_More Inventions._--In 1845 he had a scheme of quasi-aerial locomotion:
not a flying machine but "something uniting terrestrial traction with
aerial suspension"; but even on paper it broke down. In 1846 he patented
an effective "binding pin" for fastening loose sheets, which might have
been a financial success if it had been properly pushed. About the same
time he was speculating on a method of multiplying decorative
patterns,--a sort of "mental kaleidoscope," and on a systematic
nomenclature for colours, analogous to that on which the points of the
compass are named. More ambitious was a new planing engine and an
improvement in type-making, but neither got much beyond the paper stage.
In fact Spencer discovered, as so many have done, that it is one thing
to invent and another thing to make inventions boil the pot. For a year
and a half, he lamented, time and energy and money had been simply
thrown away. The proceeds of the binding pin just about served to pay
for his share in the cost of the planing machine patent.

Seven years spent in experimenting towards a livelihood had not brought
Spencer much success. In point of fact he was "stranded," and there was
talk of emigration to New Zealand, or of "reverting to the ancestral
profession" of teaching, but the year of suspense ended with his
appointment (1848) as sub-editor in _The Economist_ office, at a salary
of one hundred guineas a year. "Thus an end was at last put to the
seemingly futile part of my life which filled the space between
twenty-one and twenty-eight--futile in respect of material progress, but
in other respects perhaps not futile."

He had enjoyed a varied intercourse with men and things during these
seven lean years of railway-making, sub-editing, experimenting,
inventing; he had had experience of field work and office work, of doing
what he was told and of exercising authority; he had had time for
drawing, modelling, music, and some natural history; he had come to know
something of life's ups and downs. "In short, there had been gained a
more than usually heterogeneous, though superficial, acquaintance with
the world, animate and inanimate. And along with the gaining of it had
gone a running commentary of speculative thought about the various
matters presented." _Vivendo discimus._

_Sub-editing._--Spencer's duties as sub-editor of _The Economist_ were
not onerous; he had abundant leisure for reading and reflection, for
music and that pleasant conversation which is one of the ends of life.
He had great Sunday evening talks with his broad-minded philanthropic
uncle Thomas who had come to live in London, and he began to know
interesting people, notably, perhaps, Mr G. H. Lewes. His reading was
mainly in connection with the journal he had charge of, and Coleridge's
_Idea of Life_, with its doctrine of individuation, was the only serious
work which seems to have left any impression during that early period.
He tried Ruskin but recoiled disappointed from his "multitudinous
absurdities." He also tried vegetarianism but found that it lowered his
bodily and mental vigour.

He worked hard at his first book, sitting late over it with an assiduity
to which he looked back with astonishment in after years. The subject of
the book was "A system of Social and Political Morality" and he had
great searchings for a suitable title, his own preference for
"Demostatics" yielding finally in favour of "Social Statics." This
phrase had been used by Comte as the heading of one of the divisions of
his Sociology, but Spencer was quite unaware of this, and at that time
"knew nothing more of Auguste Comte, than that he was a French
philosopher." There were also great difficulties in securing
publication, although to get the work printed and circulated without
loss was as much as he hoped for. "At that time I was, and have since
remained, one of those classed by Dr Johnson as fools--one whose motive
in writing books was not, and never has been, that of making money."

What Spencer calls "an idle year" (1850-1) followed the publication of
_Social Statics_, but it was then that he attended a course of lectures
by Prof. Owen on Comparative Osteology, and doubtless got a firmer hold
of those principles of organic architecture which make even dry bones
live. It was then, too, that he had walks with George Henry Lewes, which
were profitable on both sides. Lewes received an impulse which awakened
interest in scientific inquiries, and Spencer became interested in
philosophy at large. He read Lewes's _Biographical History of
Philosophy_, and there was one memorable ramble during which a volume by
Milne-Edwards in Lewes's bag was the means of vivifying for Spencer the
idea of "the physiological division of labour." "Though the conception
was not new to me, as is shown towards the end of _Social Statics_, yet
the mode of formulating it was; and the phrase thereafter played a part
in the course of my thought." About the same time, in preparing a review
of Carpenter's _Physiology_, he came across von Baer's formula
expressing the course of development through which every living creature
passes--"the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity"; and from this
very important consequences ensued.

Through Lewes he got to know Carlyle, but the acquaintance was never
deepened. While he admired Carlyle's vigour and originality, he was
repelled by his passionate incoherence of thought, his prejudices, his
dogmatism, his "insensate dislike of science." "Carlyle's nature was one
which lacked co-ordination, alike intellectually and morally. Under both
aspects, he was, in a great measure, chaotic." To Carlyle, on the other
hand, Spencer appeared "an unmeasurable ass."

_Avowal of Evolutionism._--In 1852 Spencer definitely began his work as
a pioneer of Evolution Doctrine by publishing the famous _Leader_
article on "The Development Hypothesis," in which he avowed his belief
that the whole world of life is the result of an age-long process of
natural transmutation. In the same year he wrote for _The Westminster
Review_ another important essay, "A Theory of Population deduced from
the General Law of Animal Fertility," in which he sought to show that
the degree of fertility is inversely proportionate to the grade of
development, or conversely that the attainment of higher degrees of
evolution must be accompanied by lower rates of multiplication. Towards
the close of the article he came within an ace of recognising that the
struggle for existence was a factor in organic evolution. It is
profoundly instructive to find that at a time when pressure of
population was practically interesting men's minds, not Spencer only,
but Darwin and Wallace, were being independently led from this social
problem to a biological theory of organic evolution. There could be no
better illustration, as Prof. Geddes has pointed out, of the Comtian
thesis that science is a "social phenomenon."

_Friendships._--About this time a strong friendship arose between
Spencer and Miss Evans (George Eliot). To him she was "the most
admirable woman, mentally," he ever met, and he speaks enthusiastically
of her large intelligence working easily, her remarkable philosophical
powers, her habitual calm, her deep and broad sympathies. It is
interesting to learn that he strongly advised her to write novels, and
that she tried in vain to induce him to read Comte. As they were often
together and the best of friends, the gossips had it that he was in love
with her and that they were about to be married. "But neither of these
reports was true."

Another friendship, formed about the same time, was an important factor
in Spencer's life; he got to know Huxley and thus came into close touch
with a scientific worker of the first rank, useful alike in suggestion
and in criticism. He found another friend in Tyndall, whom he greatly
admired for his combination of the poetic with the scientific mood, for
"his passion for Nature quite Wordsworthian in its intensity," and for
his interest in "the relations between science at large and the great
questions which lie beyond science."

In 1853, by the death of his uncle Thomas, who had persistently
overworked himself, Spencer received a bequest of L500. On the strength
of this and the extended literary connections which the good offices of
Mr Lewes and Mr (afterwards Prof.) David Masson had secured for him, he
resigned his sub-editorship of _The Economist_ in order to obtain
leisure for larger works. He always believed in burning his ships before
a struggle.

Looking back on the "_Economist_" period, Spencer felt that his later
career had been "mainly determined by the conceptions which were then
initiated and the friendships which were formed."

_Books and Essays._--Spencer's life of greater freedom began with a
holiday in Switzerland (1853), which "fully equalled his anticipations
in respect of its grandeur, but did not do so in respect of its beauty."
The tour was greatly enjoyed, for Spencer was a lover of mountains, but
some excesses in walking seem to have overtaxed his heart, and
immediately after his return "there commenced cardiac disturbances which
never afterwards entirely ceased; and which doubtless prepared the way
for the more serious derangements of health subsequently established."

For a time he settled down to essay-writing; _e.g._, on "Method in
Education," in which he sought to justify his own experience of his
father's non-coercive liberating methods by affiliating these with the
Method of Nature; on "Manners and Fashions," in which he protested
against unthinking subservience to social conventions, some of which are
mere survivals of more primitive times without present-day
justification; on "The Genesis of Science," in which he showed how the
sciences have grown out of common knowledge; and on "Railway Morals and
Railway Policy," in which he made some salutary disclosures with
characteristic fearlessness.

Spencer's second book, "The Principles of Psychology," began to be
written in 1854 in a summer-house at Treport, and it was in the same
year that the author made his first acquaintance with Paris. Preoccupied
with his task, he wandered from Jersey to Brighton, from London to
Derby, often writing about five hours a day, and thinking with but
little intermission. The result was that he finished the book in about a
year and almost finished his own career. The nervous breakdown that
followed cost him a year and a half for recuperation, and his pursuit of
truth was ever afterwards involved with a pursuit of health.

In search of health Spencer reverted to the best of his ability to a
simple life, but he found it difficult not to think. Thought rode
behind him when he tried horseback exercise, and novels brought only
sleeplessness. He tried yachting and he tried fishing, shower-baths and
sea-bathing, playing with children and sleeping in a haunted room, but
the cure was slow; music was almost the only thing he could enjoy with
impunity. It was when fishing one morning in Loch Doon that he vented
his first oath, at the age of thirty-six, because his line was tangled,
and became, he tells us, more fully aware of the irritability produced
by his nervous disorder!

As entire idleness seemed futile, and as two and a half years had
elapsed since he had made any money, Spencer returned to London
(1857)--to a home with children--and began in a leisurely way to write
more essays. He composed the article on "Progress: its Law and Cause" at
the pathetically slow rate of about half a page per day, and the effort
proved beneficial. A significant essay entitled, "Transcendental
Physiology," dates from the same year, and during an angling holiday in
Scotland he wrote another on the "Origin and Function of Music."
Starting from the fact that feeling tends to discharge itself in
muscular contractions, including those of the vocal organs, he sought to
show that music is a development of the natural language of the
emotions.

_Crystallisation of his Thought._--Spencer settled down in London in a
home "with a lively circle," and pursued his calling as a thinker with
quiet resolution. He had Sunday afternoon walks and talks with Huxley,
and he occasionally dined out to meet interesting people such as Buckle
and Grote; but the tenor of his life was uninterrupted by much
incident. In this year he published a volume of essays new and old,
_Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative_; and this was probably
in part responsible for a great unification in Spencer's thought. It was
in the beginning of 1858 that he made the first sketch of his System,
and on the 9th of January he wrote to his father as follows: "Within the
last ten days my ideas on various matters have suddenly crystallised
into a complete whole. Many things which were before lying separate have
fallen into their places as harmonious parts of a system that admits of
logical development from the simplest general principles."

In this _annus mirabilis_ (1858) when Darwin and Wallace read their
papers at the Linnaean Society expounding the idea of Natural Selection,
Spencer was also thinking keenly along evolutionary lines. He ventured
on a defence of the Nebular Hypothesis and a criticism of Owen's
Vertebral Theory of the Skull; and he was working at the question of the
form and symmetry of animals, which he interpreted as "determined by the
relations of the parts to incident forces." Vigorous as he was in his
intelligence, he was still unable to work for more than about three
hours a day, and his pecuniary prospects were dismal. In view of his
determination to go on working out his System, it was a fortunate chance
that led him in an emergency to discover that he could greatly increase
his productivity by dictating instead of writing.

Spencer made various efforts (1859-60) to secure some Government
appointment which would afford him a steady income and yet leave him
free for his life-work, but as nothing came of these, he went on quietly
with his essay-writing, with many pleasant holidays interspersed, and
produced his "Illogical Geology," "The Social Organism," "Prison
Ethics," "The Physiology of Laughter," and so on.

_Settling to his life-work._--Baffled in other plans, he at length
organised a scheme of publishing his projected series of volumes by
subscription. His influential friends headed the list and four hundred
names were soon secured in Britain; the disinterested energy of an
American admirer, Prof. E. S. Youmans, raised the total to six hundred.
And thus Spencer, at the age of forty, handicapped by lack of means and
health, calmly sat down to a task which was calculated to occupy him for
twenty years.... "To think that an amount of mental exertion great
enough to tax the energies of one in full health and vigour, and at his
ease in respect of means, should be undertaken by one who, having only
precarious resources, had become so far a nervous invalid that he could
not with any certainty count upon his powers from one twenty-four hours
to another! However, as the result proved, the apparently unreasonable
hope was entertained, if not wisely, still fortunately. For though the
whole of the project has not been executed, yet the larger part of it
has." In one form of faith Spencer was in no wise lacking.




CHAPTER V

THINKING OUT THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY

     _Thinking by Stratagem--The System
     Grows--Difficulties--Italy--Habits of
     Work--Sociology--Ill-health--Citizenship--Visit
      to America--Closing Years_


Having theoretically secured the requisite number of subscribers to the
projected series of volumes, Spencer tried to settle down to "something
like unity of occupation." In the Spring of 1860 he began the _First
Principles_--only to break down before he had finished the first
chapter; and the same depressing experience was continually repeated.
Fortunately for Spencer's peace of mind, his uncle William left him some
money; one may well say fortunately, since the number of defaulters in
the subscription list was so large that in the absence of other
resources even the first volume could not have been published.

_Thinking by Stratagem._--Spencer's devices for keeping off the cerebral
congestion which work induced were many and various--some almost
laughable, if the whole business had not been so tragic. He would ramble
into the country, find a sheltered nook or sunny bank, do a little work,
and move on like a "Scholar Gipsy"; he would take his amanuensis on the
Regent's Park water, row vigorously for five minutes, dictate for
fifteen, and so on _da capo_; he frequented an open racquet-court at
Pentonville, and sandwiched games and _First Principles_; even in the
Highlands he would dictate while he rowed. It was altogether like
thinking by stratagem, and the tension of working against time became so
irksome, that he issued a notice to the subscribers that successive
numbers would come out when they were ready. Nevertheless, he completed
the _First Principles_ in June 1862.

_The System Grows._--Having safely set forth his doctrine, Spencer
turned with zest to relaxation, acting as cicerone to his friends at the
International Exhibition, climbing in Wales, fishing in Scotland,
revisiting Paris, and so forth. The years passed in alternate work and
play, and the next great event was the publication of the first volume
of the _Principles of Biology_ in 1864. In spite of inadequate
preparation Spencer produced by the strength of his intelligence a
biological classic. At the time, of course, little notice was taken of
it; thus in "The Athenaeum" of 5th November 1864, a paragraph concerning
the book commenced thus: "This is but one of two volumes, and the two
but a part of a larger work: we cannot therefore but announce it." "In
1864," Spencer says, "not one educated person in ten or more knew the
meaning of the word Biology; and among those who knew it, whether
critics or general readers, few cared to know anything about the
subject" (_Autobiography_, ii. p. 105).

It was in the same year (1864) that Spencer formulated his views on the
classification of the sciences and his reasons for dissenting from the
philosophy of Comte.

Of considerable interest was the formation of a decemvirate of
Spencer's friends, which was first called "The Blastodermic" and
afterwards the "X" club. It consisted of Huxley, Tyndall, Hooker,
Lubbock, Frankland, Busk, Hirst, Spottiswoode, and Spencer, with one
vacancy which was never filled up. The members dined together
occasionally and talked at large. "Among its members were three who
became Presidents of the Royal Society, and five who became Presidents
of the British Association. Of the others one was for a time President
of the College of Surgeons; another President of the Chemical Society;
and a third of the Mathematical Society...." "Of the nine I was the only
one who was fellow of no society, and had presided over nothing." The
club lasted for at least twenty-three years (1887), and had considerable
influence both on its members and externally.

In 1865 Spencer took considerable interest in a new weekly journal,
called "The Reader," in which many prominent workers were implicated,
but the enterprise ended in disappointment, unless, indeed, it was a
step towards the establishment of _Nature_. In this and the following
year he busied himself with an investigation regarding circulation in
plants,--the only concrete piece of biological work he ever indulged in.
But the great event of 1866 was the completion of _The Principles of
Biology_.

_Difficulties._--In the beginning of 1866 Spencer found that many of the
subscribers to his serial publications had withdrawn, and that not a few
were much in arrears, and he sorrowfully decided that he must abandon
his undertaking. It was at this juncture that he discovered what stuff
his friends were made of. Mr John Stuart Mill wrote proposing to help
to indemnify Spencer for losses incurred, and offering to guarantee the
publisher against any loss on the next treatise. He called this "a
simple proposal of co-operation for an important public purpose, for
which you give your labour and have given your health." As Spencer felt
himself obliged to decline this generous proposal, the next move among
his friends was to arrange to take a large number of copies (250) for
distribution. To this, with mingled feelings of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, Spencer agreed. Meanwhile, however, his American
admirers, organised by Professor Youmans, invested in Spencer's name a
sum of 7000 dollars as a fund to ensure the continued publication of his
works. This, in combination with an improvement in Spencer's financial
position, consequent on his father's death (1866), made publication once
more secure without the aid of the subsidising scheme proposed by his
English friends.

In September 1866 Herbert Spencer settled himself in London, _en
pension_ at 37 Queen's Gardens, Lancaster Gate, which remained his home
for over a score of years. Henceforth he was less of a nomad, and he
secured himself against all interruptions by taking a secret study a few
doors off.

There are two records for the beginning of 1867 which are interesting in
their contrast. The first is that Spencer declined without hesitation
certain overtures by his friends that he should stand for the
professorship of Moral Philosophy at University College, London, and for
a similar post in Edinburgh; the second is that he invented a most
elaborate invalid-bed, which, like most of his inventions, fell flat.

The invalid-bed had been suggested by his mother's prolonged feebleness,
but it was not long to be used. Spencer was left in 1867 with no nearer
relatives than cousins. In reference to his mother, we quote with all
reverence one of the few strong personal touches in the _Autobiography_.

     "Thus ended a life of monotonous routine, very little relieved by
     positive pleasures. I look back upon it regretfully: thinking how
     small were the sacrifices which I made for her in comparison with
     the great sacrifices which, as a mother, she made for me in my
     early days. In human life, as we at present know it, one of the
     saddest traits is the dull sense of filial obligations which exists
     at the time when it is possible to discharge them with something
     like fulness, in contrast with the keen sense of them which arises
     when such discharge is no longer possible."

In the spring of 1867 Spencer finished publishing the second volume of
the _Biology_, and immediately set to work to recast _First Principles_.
And as if that was not enough, he began in the same year, with the help
of his secretary, Mr David Duncan, his collection of sociological data,
which was intended to afford the foundation for a treatise on the
_Principles of Sociology_. In spite of occasional holidays at Yarrow, at
Glenelg, and in other delightful places, the usual nemesis of industry
was not avoided. Spencer's nerve-centres, which could never endure
prolonged attention, showed the usual symptoms of over-fatigue; and
though he tried morphia and skating, hydropathy and rackets, he had to
give up work early in 1868. He betook himself to Italy for rest,
attracted partly by the fact that Vesuvius was in eruption! About this
time he was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, the sedative
amenities of which proved a useful prophylactic in after years.

_Italy._--Of Spencer's Tour in Italy the _Autobiography_ gives us some
interesting reminiscences. He arrived in Naples in a state of extreme
exhaustion, wearied with the voyage, wearied with a menu in which tunny
was the _piece de resistance_, and finding comfort only in the shelter
of his Inverness cape. And yet, the day after his arrival, the author of
_Social Statics_ might have been seen giving swift chase to an audacious
thief who had taken advantage of the philosopher's preoccupation to
abstract his opera-glass. "Most likely had the young fellow had a knife
about him I should have suffered, perhaps fatally, for my imprudence." A
few days later, the same characteristic rashness impelled him to ascend
the burning mountain without a guide and at great risk. "How to account
for the judicial blindness I displayed, I do not know; unless by
regarding it as an extreme instance of the tendency which I perceive in
myself to be enslaved by a plan once formed--a tendency to become for a
time possessed by one thought to the exclusion of others."

Nothing that Spencer saw in Italy impressed him so much as "the dead
town" of Pompeii. The man who "took but little interest in what are
called histories" was stirred by this concrete historical fossil. "It
aroused sentiments such as no written record had ever done." He enjoyed
Rome, but rather for its harmonious colouring than for its historical
associations, of which he had no vivid perception. He was more irritated
than pleased by the old masters. He got most pleasure from the scenery,
but Italy is "a land of beautiful distances and ugly foregrounds."
Companionless and impatient, his chief thought was how to get home most
comfortably, and so he returned no better than he went.

_Habits of Work._--About this time the tide had turned as regarded the
sale of his works, and he wrote gratefully "the remainder of my
life-voyage was through smooth waters." As the _Autobiography_ shows, it
was a quiet and uneventful voyage. Periods of work alternated with
holidays, many parts of the country were visited, and angling became
more and more his best recreation. "Nothing else served so well to rest
my brain and fit it for resumption of work." Another resource was
billiards, which he greatly enjoyed. He never could remember whist or
similar games.

On fine mornings he used to spend two or three hours on the Serpentine,
alternating rowing and dictating. After his morning's work and after
lunch he used to walk through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and the
Green Park, without more than a quarter of a mile upon pavement, to the
Athenaeum Club, where he skimmed through periodicals and books, and
played his game. Thereafter he sauntered back to dinner at seven, "which
was followed by such miscellaneous ways of passing the time without
excitement as were available. Thus passed my ordinary days." By this
time he had given up novel-reading, only treating himself to one about
once a year, and then in a dozen or more instalments. He did not care to
multiply social relations, he "avoided acquaintanceships and cultivated
only friendships." "There is in me very little of the _besoin de
parler_; and hence I do not care to talk with those in whom I feel no
interest." And thus, though far from being a recluse, he lived his life
of thought quietly.

In 1871 Spencer was nominated for the office of Lord Rector at the
University of St Andrews, but he declined the honour for the sake of his
work. He also declined the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the
same University, and subsequently, similar honours, chiefly on the
ground "that the advance of thought will be most furthered, when the
only honours to be acquired by authors are those spontaneously yielded
to them by a public which is left to estimate their merits as well as it
can."

The first (synthetic) volume of the new edition of the _Psychology_
begun in 1867 was finished in 1870, the second (analytic) volume begun
in 1870 was completed in the end of 1872. Having become much interested
in the well-known "International Scientific Series," Spencer contributed
to it in 1873 the volume known as _The Study of Sociology_, which has
done much in Britain and America to secure the position of Sociology as
a workable science. It was unusually successful for a book of its kind,
and brought Spencer about L1500.

_Sociology._--From 1867 onwards Spencer had been collecting Sociological
Data to serve as a basis for generalised interpretation. With the help
of Mr David Duncan, Mr James Collier, and Dr Scheppig, this big piece of
work made steady progress, and its publication began to be discussed in
1871. It was hoped that the plan of "exhibiting sociological phenomena
in such wise that comparisons of them in their co-existences and
sequences, as occurring among various peoples in different stages, were
made easy, would immensely facilitate the discovery of sociological
truths." The first part of this _Descriptive Sociology_ was published in
1873, but the demand for it was very slight; not quite 200 copies were
asked for in eight months. "I had," Spencer says, "greatly
over-estimated the amount of desire which existed in the public mind for
social facts of an instructive kind. They greatly preferred those of an
uninstructive kind." In this and similar connections, the reader of the
_Autobiography_ cannot but be impressed by two facts,--on the one hand,
the chivalrous eagerness on the part of American friends to be allowed
to lessen Spencer's pecuniary burden, and, on the other hand, the almost
ultra-sensitive resoluteness which Spencer exhibited in declining these
offers.

In 1874, with the materials and memoranda of a quarter of a century
around him, the thinker, who was blamed for not being inductive, set
himself to write the _Principles of Sociology_, "feeling much as might a
general of division who had become commander-in-chief; or rather, as one
who had to undertake this highest function in addition to the lower
functions of all his subordinates of the first, second, and third
grades. Only by deliberate method persistently followed was it possible
to avoid confusion."

The period of work on the _Sociology_ was broken by some delightful
holidays in the Highlands and elsewhere, by the British Association
meeting at Belfast (1874) when Tyndall gave his famous Presidential
Address, and by the usual ill-health. The first volume was completed in
1877. Apart from the nemesis of nerves, Spencer's life at this time
seems to have been a happy one; he was fairly free from pecuniary cares;
he was no longer tied to a serial issue of his publications; he could
afford pleasant holidays, and he had a small circle of loyal friends.
The philosopher began a series of annual picnics, which he seems to have
engineered with great skill; in various ways he acted up to what he says
was his habitual maxim, "Be a boy as long as you can." In 1877 he had
the excitement of a shipwreck near Loch Carron, and the encouragement of
having his _Descriptive Sociology_ translated into Russian.

_Ill-Health._--In spite of all his care, the year 1878 opened with a
serious illness, and this prompted him to begin dictating _The Data of
Ethics_ lest an aggravation of his ill-health should hinder him from
raising this coping-stone of his system. Just before Christmas of this
year, he went with Prof. Youmans to the Riviera, and for a couple of
months was more than usually successful in combining work and play. He
finished _The Data of Ethics_ in June 1879, and _Ceremonial
Institutions_ later in the year. As a reward of industry, and as a
safeguard against too much of it, a holiday up the Nile in pleasant
company was then arranged, and Spencer entered upon it in great spirits.
But an ill-considered meal at Alexandria brought on dyspepsia and morbid
fancies, and he was forced to return at the first cataract. He had seen
many of the sights and was inevitably impressed, but he seems to have
been glad to get out of the "melancholy country"--"the land of decay and
death--dead men, dead races, dead creeds," as it appeared to his
jaundiced eyes.

On his return journey he spent three days in Venice, but though he
derived much pleasure from the general effects, he was repelled by the
obtrusiveness and superficiality of the decorations. He regarded St
Mark's as "a fine sample of barbaric architecture"; "it has the trait
distinctive of semi-civilised art--excess of decoration"; "it is
archaeologically, but not aesthetically precious."

The entry in his journal for Feb. 12th, 1880 reads: "Home at 7-10;
heartily glad--more pleasure than in anything that occurred during my
tour."

Although he did not greatly enjoy his tour in Egypt, and brought back
his packet of work unopened, the break seems to have been "decidedly
beneficial." "It has apparently worked some kind of constitutional
change; for, marvellous to relate, I am now able to drink beer with
impunity and, I think, with benefit--a thing I have not been able to do
for these fifteen years or more." He thought that it had also perhaps
furthered his work to have had contact with people in a lower stage of
civilisation.

In 1881 Spencer published the eighth part of his _Descriptive Sociology_
and put a full stop to the undertaking which left him with a deficit of
between three and four thousand pounds, and which had half-killed two
secretaries.

Spencer's next task was the completion of _Political Institutions_,
another instalment of the _Sociology_, which he had begun in 1879, and
he was at this time also occupied in considering and answering the more
formidable of the criticisms which his system had aroused, and in
revising new editions of the _First Principles_ and _The Study of
Sociology_. It is interesting to note that the last work was carefully
revised sentence by sentence five times.

_Citizenship._--In 1881 Spencer felt in a new way the universal call
"_Il faut etre citoyen_"; he was drawn into practical action, and
although this led to the greatest disaster of his life, the cause was
worthy of the sacrifice. It was the cause of peace. While writing
_Political Institutions_ he had become more firmly convinced than ever
that "the possibility of a higher civilization depends wholly on the
cessation of militancy and the growth of industrialism." Conversations
with Mr Frederic Harrison and others led to meetings of those who were
sympathetic with what might be called a non-aggression policy, and
Spencer was so keenly interested that in spite of forebodings he
undertook some organising work, and even went the length of moving a
resolution and making a speech at a public meeting. There was no direct
political result of the "Anti-Aggression League," but there was most
mischievous result to Spencer. "There was produced a mischief which, in
a gradually increasing degree, undermined life and arrested work." He
had now begun to descend the inclined plane which brought him down in
the course of subsequent years to "the condition of a confirmed invalid,
leading little more than a vegetative life." What Spencer did in
connection with the Anti-Aggression movement was probably only the last
straw, but he could not look back on his intrinsically right action
without regret. "Right though I thought it, my course brought severe
penalties and no compensations whatever. I am not thinking only of the
weeks, months, years, of wretched nights and vacant days; though these
made existence a long-drawn weariness. I refer chiefly to the gradual
arrest and final cessation of my work; and the consciousness that there
was slipping by that closing part of life during which it should have
been completed." He was too honest to profess a pleasure he did not feel
in a _mens sibi conscia recti_. "It is best," he said, "to recognise the
facts as they are, and not try to prop up rectitude by fictions."

_Visit to America._--In 1882 in the hope of recovering tone, not, as
some of the papers said, of recouping his finances, Spencer went on a
visit to America, along with Mr Lott his friend of forty years. He was,
of course, pressed to lecture, and was offered terms up to 250 dollars
per night, but he would have none of it. Lecturing was not his metier,
and his health was broken. "As matters stand," he wrote, "the giving a
lecture or reading a paper, would be nothing more than making myself a
show; and I absolutely decline to make myself a show." The only public
appearance he made was at a dinner in his honour at New York, where,
with his fatigued brain, he spoke straight to the Americans on the sin
of over-devotion to work. With his friend Lott as a buffer, he succeeded
in avoiding all interviewers until he had got on board the _Germanic_ on
his return voyage, when he was taken unawares at the last moment.

Spencer saw some of the finest sights in America and Canada; he met
congenial spirits, and everything possible was done to make his visit a
tonic; but he came back in a worse state than he went, "having made
another step downwards towards invalid life."

_Closing Years._--From 1882 till 1889, when the _Autobiography_ ends,
Spencer's life was one of invalidism with occasional gleams of health.
There was nothing organically wrong with him, but he had no reserve of
nervous energy, and he was not able to work for more than brief
intervals at a time. Yet he produced during these years _The Man Versus
the State_, a volume on _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, and _The Factors
of Organic Evolution_. He also dictated the _Autobiography_ at the
average rate of about fifteen lines per day!

As years went on Spencer became more and more of a recluse, more and
more a man of nerves, the grasshopper became a burden, and as he watched
himself with scientific minuteness, hypochondria naturally grew upon
him. He continued, however, to use for work the minute fractions of a
day when he felt relatively vigorous, and thus he at length actually
finished his _Synthetic Philosophy_ in 1896.

He gives an account of his daily routine when he had attained the age of
seventy-three. In the mornings he did a little work, dictating for ten
minutes at a time, and repeating the process from two to five times.
During the rest of the day he killed time, walking a few hundred yards,
driving for an hour or so in a carriage with india-rubber tyres, or
"sitting very much in the open air, hearing and observing the birds,
watching the drifting clouds, listening to the sighings of the wind
through the trees." He could not read or bear being read to, he could
not play games or listen to music, he used ear-stoppers to shut out
conversation whenever he got tired of it, and without respect of
persons, and he took opium to secure a few hours sleep at nights. He
might have been more comfortable, physically, if he had abandoned all
attempt at work, but the architectonic instinct tyrannised over him. He
really lived for the sake of the little oases of work-time which broke
the monotony of his daily journey.

It should be remembered, that invalid as he was, Spencer aggravated
matters by his scientific hypochondria, and perhaps also by his
soporifics. His disturbances of health involved little positive
suffering, and, till he was considerably over sixty, he had few
deprivations. Even in old age he had no invalid appearance. "Neither in
the lines of the face nor in its colour, is there any such sign of
constitutional derangement as would be expected. Contrariwise, I am
usually supposed to be about ten years younger than I am" (1893).

     "Spencer's closing years," Prof. Hudson writes, "were clouded with
     much sadness and disappointment." His days were vacant and his
     nights a weariness; he had outlived most of his friends and was
     lonely; and "the completion of his _Synthetic Philosophy_ in 1896
     did not bring him the keen satisfaction he fairly might have
     expected." He saw his political advice disregarded, and on all
     sides an exuberant growth of the socialistic organisations which he
     had spent himself in criticising. "He saw, too, with profound
     sorrow, unmistakable signs everywhere of reaction in religion,
     politics, society. The recrudescence of militarism, the development
     of a sordidly materialistic spirit throughout the modern nations
     and their abandonment of the principles of sanity and political
     righteousness--all these things cast a very black shadow over his
     declining path. I do not wonder that, as he looked back over his
     magnificent life-work, his mind should have been darkened by the
     doubt as to whether some of the truths, to which he attached the
     greatest value, might not after all have been set forth in vain"
     ("Fortnightly Review," 1904, p. 17).

Spencer's life closed in his eighty-third year, on December 8th, 1903.




CHAPTER VI

CHARACTERISTICS:--PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL

     _The Autobiography--Physical Characteristics--Intellectual
     Characteristics--Limitations--Development of Spencer's
     Mind--Methods of Work--Genius?_


Spencer was much given to summing up what he called the "traits" of the
men he met, and he extended the process to himself in his
_Autobiography_, which is an elaborate piece of self-portraiture.

_The Autobiography._--Some one has called autobiography the least
credible form of fiction, but that is not the impression which Spencer's
gives. His self-analysis is candid and continuous; he is always
revealing his feet of clay, and that with a self-complacency which is
unintelligible to those who do not understand the impersonal scientific
mood which had become habitual to Spencer. He almost achieved the
impossible, of looking at himself from the outside.

Huxley wrote an autobiography in a score of pages, and he never wrote
anything better; Spencer occupied over a thousand pages with his account
of himself, and he never wrote anything worse. Dictated in outline in
1875, it was elaborated piecemeal, in small daily instalments, after the
most serious of the many breakdowns in health had precluded more
difficult work. Naturally enough, therefore, the _Autobiography_ is
often prolix and lacking in proportion, often slack in style and, it
must be confessed, tedious. Little details in a picture may be essential
to the effective impression, but Spencer often wearies us with trifling
incidents whose narration has no excuse except as happening in a great
life. Yet, if we lay the volumes aside, bored by their monumental
egotism, we return to them with sympathy, and are won again by their
unaffected frankness and candid sincerity.

With the _Autobiography_ before us, but exercising the right of private
judgment, we propose in this and the next chapter to sum up Spencer's
characteristics--physical, intellectual, and emotional, and to refer to
his methods of work and conduct of life.

_Physical Characteristics._--Spencer at his best was an impressive
figure, "tall, erect, a little gaunt, with a magnificent broad brow and
high domed head." "His face," Prof. W. H. Hudson writes, "was a
strikingly expressive one, with its strong frontal ridge, deep-set eyes,
prominent nose, and firmly-cut mouth and jaw--the face of a man marked
out for intellectual leadership."[1] It was not wrinkled with thought,
as one might have expected, but was smooth as a child's or as a
bishop's, the explanation being, as Spencer said, that he never worried
over things, but allowed his brain to do its own thinking without
pressure. He looked anything but an invalid, for his cheeks were ruddy
even in later years. He had a fine voice and "a rather rare laugh of
deep-chested musical qualities."

He lamented that he had not inherited his father's finely developed
chest organs, and that in consequence his cerebral circulation was
under par. More positively, he seems to have inherited a readily
fatigued nervous system, which limited his powers of protracted
attention and made him not infrequently irritable and difficult to get
on with. As we have seen he suffered periodically from over-taxing his
brain, which induced terrible insomnia. Like Carlyle, he suffered from
dyspepsia.

_Intellectual Characteristics._--1. Among his intellectual
characteristics, Spencer gave the foremost place to his "unusual
capacity for the intuition of cause." The capacity was inherited and it
was carefully nurtured. His restlessness to discover causes--"natural
causes"--was illustrated when, as a boy of thirteen, he called in
question the dictum of Dr Arnott respecting inertia, and it was
characteristic of his whole intellectual life. He cultivated this
inquisitiveness for causes till the mood became habitual, and resulted
in what we may almost call an interpretative instinct. That this never
led him astray, not even his most enthusiastic disciples would venture
to maintain.

While the scientific method is always fundamentally the same, there is
happily some legitimate elasticity in the order of procedure. Some minds
start with a clue perceived by a flash of insight and then proceed to
test and verify; others collect their data laboriously and never get a
glimpse of their conclusion until the induction is complete. Some seem
to have a selective instinct for getting hold of the most significant
facts, or for making the crucial experiment; others have to plod on
patiently from fact to fact and must make many "fools' experiments."
Some find a nugget while their neighbours get their gold in dust
particles after washing much ore.

Now Spencer had that passion for facts which is fundamental to all solid
scientific work, but he had the greater gift of getting rapidly beneath
facts to the question of their significance. He had not the love of
details which is essential to the descriptive naturalist for instance,
which sometimes becomes intellectual avarice for copper coinage, but he
was instinctively an aetiologist, an interpreter.

In his account of the working of his mind, he says:--

     "There was commonly shown a faculty of seizing cardinal truths
     rather than of accumulating detailed information. The implications
     of phenomena were then, as always, more interesting to me than the
     phenomena themselves. What did they prove? was the question
     instinctively put. The consciousness of causation, to which there
     was a natural proclivity, and which had been fostered by my father,
     continually prompted analyses, which of course led me below the
     surface and made fundamental principles objects of greater
     attention than the various concrete illustrations of them. So that
     while my acquaintance with things might have been called
     superficial, if measured by the _number_ of facts known, it might
     have been called the reverse of superficial, if measured by the
     _quality_ of the facts. And there was possibly a relation between
     these traits. A friend who possessed extensive botanical knowledge,
     once remarked to me that, had I known as much about the details of
     plant-structure as botanists do, I never should have reached those
     generalisations concerning plant-morphology which I had reached."
     (_Autobiography_ I.)

2. Another inherited capacity was "the synthetic tendency," the power of
generalising or of working out unifying formulae. His first book _Social
Statics_ set out with a general principle; his first essay was
entitled, "A theory of population, _deduced from the general law_ of
animal fertility"; his life-work was the _Synthetic Philosophy_. One of
George Eliot's witticisms made game of Spencer's aptitude for
generalisation. He had been explaining his disbelief in the critical
powers of salmon, and his aim in making flies "the best average
representation of an insect buzzing on the surface of the water." "Yes,"
she said, "you have such a passion for generalising, you even fish with
a generalisation." And this exactly describes what he spent much of his
life in doing.

Mr Francis Galton has graphically stated his impression, that Spencer's
composite mental photographs, in forming a generalisation, or in using a
general formula-term, were many times multiple of those of ordinary
mortals. A composite mental photograph from a small number of
intellectual negatives yields a blurred outline--a woolly idea, with
ragged edges and loose ends--but a composite mental photograph from a
very large number of impressions, yielded, in Spencer's case, a
generalisation which was crisp and well-defined. Some one has said that
Ruskin had the most analytic mind in modern Christendom: that Spencer
had one of the most synthetic minds can hardly be questioned.

3. It was one of the open secrets of Spencer's power that his analytic
tendency was almost equal to his synthetic tendency. "Both subjectively
and objectively, the desire to build up was accompanied by an almost
equal desire to delve down to the deepest accessible truth, which should
serve as an unshakable foundation." "It appears that in the treatment
of every topic, however seemingly remote from philosophy, I found
occasion for falling back on some ultimate principle in the natural
order."

The first volume of the Psychology is synthetic, the second volume is
analytic, "taking to pieces our intellectual fabric and the products of
its actions, until the ultimate components are reached"; and we find the
same two methods pursued in his other books.

     "While, on the one hand, they betray a great liking for drawing
     deductions and building them up into a coherent whole; on the other
     hand, they betray a great liking for examining the premises on
     which a set of deductions is raised, for the purpose of seeing what
     assumptions are involved in them, and what are the deeper truths
     into which such assumptions are resolvable. There is shown an
     evident dissatisfaction with proximate principles, and a
     restlessness until ultimate principles have been reached; at the
     same time there is shown a desire to see how the most complex
     phenomena are to be interpreted as workings of these ultimate
     principles. It is, I think, to the balance of these two tendencies
     that the character of the work done is mainly ascribable."

But while Spencer had beyond doubt analytic powers of a very high order,
it is to be feared that there is some justice in the criticism that he
sometimes confused abstraction with analysis, and reached an apparently
simple result by abstracting away some essential components.

4. "One further cardinal trait, which is in a sense a result of the
preceding traits, has to be named--the ability to discern inconspicuous
analogies." It was in part this ability that gave Spencer his power of
handling so many different orders of facts. "The habit of ignoring the
variable outer components and relations, and looking for the invariable
inner components and relations, facilitates the perception of likeness
between things which externally are quite unlike--perhaps so utterly
unlike that, by an unanalytical intelligence, they cannot be conceived
to have any resemblance whatever." It is this kind of insight which
enables the morphologist to unify a whole series of organic types by
detecting the similarities of architecture underlying the exceedingly
diverse external expression. It was this kind of insight which led
Spencer to his analogy between a social organism and an individual
organism, and to many others which have been found fruitful. But it is
to be feared that some of his analogies, notably that between inanimate
mechanisms and living creatures led him far astray.

5. Another power strongly developed was constructive imagination. The
boy who was so fond of building castles in the air, who grudged the
sleep which put an end to his fanciful adventures, grew up a man whose
mind was his kingdom. All sorts of things and thoughts pulled the
trigger of his imagination, with which he was often so preoccupied that
he would pass those living in the same house with him and look them in
the face without knowing that he had seen them.

     Spencer found in the delight of constructive imagination part of
     the explanation of his versatility. The products of his mental
     action ranged "from a doctrine of State functions to a
     levelling-staff; from the genesis of religious ideas to a watch
     escapement; from the circulation in plants to an invalid bed; from
     the law of organic symmetry to planing machinery; from principles
     of ethics to a velocimeter; from a metaphysical doctrine to a
     binding-pin; from a classification of the sciences to an improved
     fishing-rod joint; from the general Law of Evolution to a better
     mode of dressing artificial flies." "But for every interest in
     either the theoretical or the practical, a requisite condition has
     been--the opportunity offered for something new. And here may be
     perceived the trait which unites the extremely unlike products of
     mental action exemplified above. They have one and all afforded
     scope for constructive imagination."

Clearness in exposition was another of Spencer's gifts, and he connected
this with the fact that his grandfather and father had been teachers.
But lucidity of exposition usually accompanies clear thinking, and
increases if there is opportunity for practice. His fearlessness and his
self-confidence, he also connected with the fact that in school the
master must be the absolute authority, but it seems much more plausible
to regard this characteristic independence of judgment as an outcrop of
the Nonconformist mood of his ancestors.

_Limitations._--Spencer was too scrupulous a self-analyst not to be
aware of many of his own limitations, and he has exposed the defects of
his qualities with the utmost frankness. Thus his disregard of
authority, which helped him to independent positions in science and
philosophy, seemed to become a habit of mind which prompted him to react
from current beliefs and opinions without always doing them justice. His
anti-classical bias led him "to underestimate the past as compared with
the present". "Lack of reverence for what others have said and done has
tended to make me neglect the evidence of early achievements."

     One concrete instance may be selected,--his failure to appreciate
     Plato's dialogues, which the wise are at one in regarding as
     masterpieces of philosophical discussion, and as affording
     invaluable discipline for the most modern of thinkers. Spencer
     approached them with a strong bias, with a predisposition to
     depreciate, and what was the result? "Time after time I have
     attempted to read, now this dialogue and now that, and have put it
     down in a state of impatience with the indefiniteness of the
     thinking and the mistaking of words for things: being repelled also
     by the rambling form of the argument. Once when I was talking on
     the matter to a classical scholar, he said--'Yes, but as works of
     art they are well worth reading.' So, when I again took up the
     dialogues, I contemplated them as works of art, and put them aside
     in greater exasperation than before. To call that a 'dialogue'
     which is an interchange of speeches between the thinker and his
     dummy, who says just what it is convenient to have said, is absurd.
     There is more dramatic propriety in the conversations of our
     third-rate novelists; and such a production as that of Diderot,
     _Rameau's nephew_, has more strokes of dramatic truth than all the
     Platonic dialogues put together, if the rest are like those I have
     looked into. Still, quotations from time to time met with, lead me
     to think that there are in Plato detached thoughts from which I
     might benefit had I the patience to seek them out. The like is
     probably true of other ancient writings." (!)

Disregard of authority is a great gift, if it go hand in hand with a
careful examination of the reasons which lead to a conclusion becoming
authoritative, but Spencer does not seem to have felt this
responsibility. He began every subject by cleaning the slate. Thus one
of the most conspicuous, and in some ways least agreeable
characteristics of his intellectual work was his indifference as to what
previous investigators had said. This was in part an expression of his
own strength and independence, but it also savoured of arrogance. The
virtue of it was that he approached a subject with the vigour of a fresh
mind, but its vice was repeatedly disclosed in his failure to realise
all the difficulties and subtleties of a problem--a failure which
sometimes involved nothing short of amateurishness. A skilful naturalist
has said that in tackling an unsolved problem there are only two
commendable methods,--one to read everything bearing on the question,
the other to read nothing. It was the second method that Spencer
habitually practised. He gathered facts, but took little stock in
opinions or previous deliverances.

Thus in beginning to plan out his _Social Statics_ he "paid little
attention to what had been written either upon ethics or politics. The
books I did read were those which promised to furnish illustrative
material." He wrote his _First Principles_ with a minimal knowledge of
the philosophical classics, and his _Psychology_ as if he had been
living before the invention of printing. Some one thought certain parts
of his _Education_ savoured of Rousseau, but he had not heard of _Emile_
when he wrote. He was greatly indebted to von Baer for a formula, but
there is no evidence that he ever read any part of the great
embryologist's works. The suggestion that he was indebted to Comte for
some sociological ideas might have been dismissed at once on _a priori_
grounds as absurd. And in point of fact when Spencer wrote his _Social
Statics_ he knew no more of Comte than that he was a French
philosophical writer, and it was not till 1853 that he began to nibble
at Comte's works, to which Lewes and George Eliot had repeatedly
directed his attention. He adopted two of Comte's words--"altruism" and
"sociology"--but beyond that his indebtedness was little. We may take
his own word for it: "The only indebtedness I recognise is the
indebtedness of antagonism. My pronounced opposition to his views led me
to develop some of my own views." That they both tried to organise a
system of so-called philosophy out of the sciences indicates a community
of aim, but there the resemblance ceases.

Spencer's intellectual development seems to have been peculiarly
detached and independent. He was of course influenced by his father and
by two of his uncles during his formative period, and he was also
doubtless influenced by George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, Huxley and
Hooker in later years--as who could help being--but in the main he was a
strong, self-sufficient, self-made Ishmaelite. Similarly as regards
authors, he was influenced by Lamarck's transformist theory, by
Laplace's nebular hypothesis, by Malthus's theory of population, by
Milne-Edwards' idea of the physiological division of labour, by von
Baer's formula, by Hamilton and Mansel, by Grove's correlation of the
physical forces, by Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and so on, but his own
thought was always far more to him than anything he ever read.

Just as independence may become a vice, so with criticism, and Spencer
had certainly the defect of this quality. Like his grandfather and his
father before him, he was perpetually criticising, and he developed a
hypersensitiveness to mistakes and shortcomings. For while sound
criticism is an intellectual saving grace, it defeats its own end when
the critic is constantly looking for reasons for disagreement, rather
than for supplementary construction. Comte was assuredly right in saying
that one only destroys when one replaces. Morever, Spencer's dominant
tendency greatly interfered with his power of admiration. He was so
keenly alive to "the many mistakes in _chiaroscuro_ which characterise
various paintings of the old masters" that he found little pleasure in
them. When looking at Greek sculpture he constantly discovered unnatural
drapery. When he went to the opera with George Eliot he remarked "how
much analysis of the effects produced deducts from enjoyment of the
effects." He could not even look at a beautiful woman without his
"phrenological diagnosis" discovering something which took the edge off
his admiration. "It seems probable," he quaintly remarks, "that this
abnormal tendency to criticise has been a chief factor in the
continuance of my celibate life."

_Development of Spencer's Mind._--Spencer has himself given us an
account of his mental development.

     As a boy his mind was always set upon discovering natural causes,
     and under his father's influence there grew up in him "a tacit
     belief that whatever occurred had its assignable cause of a
     comprehensible kind." Insensibly he relinquished the current creed
     of supernaturalism and its associated story of creation.

     The doctrine of the universality of natural causation has for its
     inevitable corollary the doctrine that the Universe and all things
     in it have reached their present forms through successive stages
     physically necessitated. But no such corollary suggested itself
     definitely until Spencer was twenty when he read Lyell's
     _Principles of Geology_, and was led by Lyell's arguments against
     Lamarck to a partial acceptance of Lamarck's evolutionist point of
     view.

     Two years afterwards, in _The proper Sphere of Government_, "there
     was shown an unhesitating belief that the phenomena of both
     individual life and social life conform to law"; and eight years
     later in _Social Statics_, the social organism was discussed in the
     same sort of way as the individual organism; a physiological view
     of social actions was taken, and the same mode of progress was
     shown to be common to all changing phenomena.

     In 1852 the essay on the "Development Hypothesis" was an open
     avowal of evolutionism; and other essays on population and
     over-legislation "assumed that social arrangements and institutions
     are products of natural causes, and that they have a normal order
     of growth."

     An acquaintance with von Baer's description of individual
     development gave definiteness to Spencer's conception of progress,
     and the idea of change from homogeneity to heterogeneity became his
     formula of evolution, applicable to style, to manners and fashions,
     to science itself, and to the growing mind of the child, as was
     shown in a succession of essays on these themes.

     The next great step was in the _Principles of Psychology_ which
     sought to trace out the genesis of mind in all its forms, sub-human
     and human, as produced by the organised and inherited effects of
     mental actions. Increase of faculty by exercise, hereditary
     entailment of gains, and consequent progressive adaptation, were
     prominent ideas in this treatise. "Progressive adaptation became
     increasing adjustment of inner subjective relations to outer
     objective relations--increasing correspondence between the two."

     So far, then, Spencer had recognised throughout a vast field of
     phenomena the increase of heterogeneity, of speciality, of
     integration--as traits of progress of all kinds; and thus arose the
     question: Why is this increasing heterogeneity universal? "A
     transition from the inductive stage to the deductive stage was
     shown in the answer--the transformation results from the unceasing
     multiplication of effects. When, shortly after, there came the
     perception that the condition of homogeneity is an unstable
     condition, yet another step towards the completely deductive stage
     was made." "The theorem passed into the region of physical
     science."

     "The advance towards a complete conception of evolution was itself
     a process of evolution. At first there was simply an unshaped
     belief in the development of living things; including, in a vague
     way, social development. The extension of von Baer's formula
     expressing the development of each organism, first to one and then
     to another group of phenomena, until all were taken in as parts of
     a whole, exemplified the process of integration. With advancing
     integration there went that advancing heterogeneity implied by
     inclusion of the several classes of inorganic phenomena and the
     several classes of super-organic phenomena in the same category
     with organic phenomena. And then the indefinite idea of progress
     passed into the definite idea of evolution, when there was
     recognised the essential nature of the change, as a physically
     determined transformation conforming to ultimate laws of force."

     It is difficult to state with any certainty what led Spencer in
     1857 to a coherent body of beliefs--to the first sketch of his
     system. In the main the unification was probably a natural
     maturation and integration of his thoughts, but it was perhaps
     helped by the immediate task of revising and publishing a
     collection of essays, and also by the fact that "the time was one
     at which certain all-embracing scientific truths of a simple order
     were being revealed." Notably the doctrine of the conservation and
     transformability of energy was beginning to possess scientific
     minds, and the doctrine of evolution was beginning to make its grip
     felt.

     Furthermore, in trying to understand Spencer, we must recognise
     that he was the flower of a nonconformist dissenting stock, that
     his mind matured in contact with engines and other mechanisms, and
     that he was almost forced to exclude new influences after he
     settled down with his system at the age of forty.

_Methods of Work._--While there was nothing remarkable in Spencer's
methods of work, it may be of interest to indicate certain general
features which the _Autobiography_ discloses.

In the first place, after a few disastrous experiments, he abandoned any
attempt at what is usually called working hard. Like many an artist who
will only paint when he feels in the mood and in good form, Spencer
would never write or dictate under pressure, or when he felt that his
brain was not working smoothly. When he was writing the _Principles of
Psychology_ (1854-5), he began between nine and ten and continued till
one; he then paused for a few minutes to take some slight refreshment,
usually a little fruit, and resumed till three, altogether about five
hours at a stretch. He then went for a walk, returned in time for dinner
between five and six, and did considerable proof-correcting thereafter.
But, as we have seen, the result of this strenuousness--which would be
quite normal to many students--was his first serious breakdown,
involving a loss of eighteen months. Thereafter, it was his custom to
work for short spells at a time, to sandwich work and exercise, and to
take a holiday whenever he began to feel tired.

His output of work was so large even for a long life that one naturally
thinks of him as a hard worker. But the reverse would be nearer the
truth. Partly as a self-justification of his "constitutional idleness,"
and partly as a precaution against his hereditary tendency to nervous
breakdown, he was a strong advocate of the proposition that "Life is not
for work, but work is for life." "The progress of mankind is, under one
aspect, a means of liberating more and more life from mere toil and
leaving more and more life available for relaxation--for pleasurable
culture, for aesthetic gratification, for travels, for games." Industry
is not a virtue in itself; over-work is blameworthy.

In the second place, Spencer made it a rule never to force his thinking.
If a problem was not clear to him, he let it simmer. "On one occasion
George Eliot expressed her surprise that the author of _Social Statics_
had no lines on his forehead, to which he answered, 'I suppose it is
because I am never puzzled.' This called forth the exclamation: 'O!
that's the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered.' To which I
rejoined: 'Not at all, when you know what I mean.' And I then proceeded
to explain that my mode of thinking did not involve that concentrated
effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows"
(_Autobiography_, i. p. 399).

Spencer did not set himself a problem and try to puzzle out an answer.
"The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not
been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived
at unawares--each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts which
slowly grew from a germ."

He had "an instinctive interest in those facts which have general
meanings"; he let these accumulate and simmer, thinking them over and
over again at intervals. "When accumulation of instances had given body
to a generalisation, reflexion would reduce the vague conception at
first framed to a more definite conception; and perhaps difficulties or
anomalies at first passed over for a while, but eventually forcing
themselves on attention, might cause a needful qualification and a truer
shaping of the thought. Eventually the growing generalisation, thus far
inductive, might take deductive form: being all at once recognised as a
necessary consequence of some physical principle--some established law.
And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious
intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and
organised theory" (_Autobiography_, i. 400, 401). In short, Spencer
gave his thinking machine time to do its work, or in other words he let
his thoughts grow. He distrusted strain and all forcing. Like a good
golfer, he would not "press." "The determined effort causes perversion
of thought."

A third feature in his work has been already alluded to--his practical
indifference to the literature of the subject at which he was working.
For this characteristic there were doubtless several reasons, though
none of them justified it. He was not fond of hard reading, and
conserved his energy for his own production; he had abundant
thought-material of his own, and no lack of confidence in its value.
Furthermore, he explains, "It has always been out of the question for me
to go on reading a book the fundamental principles of which I entirely
dissent from. Tacitly giving an author credit for consistency, I,
without thinking much about the matter, take it for granted that if the
fundamental principles are wrong, the rest cannot be right, and
thereupon cease reading--being, I suspect, rather glad of an excuse for
doing so" (i. p. 253). "All through my life," he says, "Locke's 'Essay'
had been before me on my father's shelves, but I had never taken it
down; or at any rate I have no recollection of having read a page of
it." More than once he tackled Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, but was
baulked at the start by the doctrine that time and space are merely
subjective forms. Nor did Mill's _Logic_ interest him.

At the same time it is not to be supposed that Spencer wove his system
out of himself as a spider its web. He had a wonderful aptitude for
collecting data by a strange sort of skimming reading.

     "Though by some I am characterised as an _a priori_ thinker, it
     will be manifest to any one who does not set out with an _a priori_
     conception of me, that my beliefs, when not suggested _a
     posteriori_, are habitually verified _a posteriori_. My first book,
     _Social Statics_, shows this in common with my later books. I have
     sometimes been half-amused, half-irritated, by one who speaks of me
     as typically deductive, and whose own conclusions, nevertheless,
     are not supported by facts anything like so numerous as those
     brought in support of mine. But we meet with men who are such
     fanatical adherents of the inductive method, that immediately an
     induction, otherwise well established, is shown to admit of
     deductive establishment, they lose faith in it" (_Autobiography_,
     i. pp. 304-5).

No one who studies Spencer's works can fail to be impressed with the
logical orderliness and lucidity of his method. Thus, in beginning _The
Principles of Biology_, for instance, we are first asked to consider
what truths the biologist takes for granted; _e.g._, the conservation of
energy and the indestructibility of matter; then we are asked to notice
the inductions in regard to the phenomena of life which biologists agree
in accepting as well-established; and only then do we pass to Spencer's
particular interpretation of the facts in the light of his evolutionist
ideas. The same logical method is illustrated in his treatment of
psychology, sociology and ethics.

Like most men who get through much work, Spencer was very methodical and
orderly. In reference to his _Sociology_, he tells us how he classified
and reclassified his materials in fasciculi, placing them in a
semi-circle on the floor round his chair, inserting new "covers" where
there seemed need for them, and gradually filling these. As the plan
became clear, the materials for a chapter were raised to his large desk,
and then began a grouping into sections, and a grouping within each
section.

He did not begin to compose until he had thought out his subject to the
best of his ability. He then wrote or dictated a little at a time,
criticising every sentence with especial reference to clearness and
force. Except for his first book, which he revised, copied out, and
revised afresh, the original copy was always sent to press "sprinkled
with erasures and interlineations." He was more interested in vigour and
lucidity of style than in its beauty, and it was characteristic of him
to try to correlate effectiveness of style with the doctrine of the
conservation of energy. The main thesis in the essay on "The Philosophy
of Style" may be briefly stated. The reader has only a limited amount of
nervous energy, and it is important that this should not be dissipated
before he comes to the ideas of which the style is the vehicle. "In
proportion as there is less energy absorbed in interpreting the symbols,
there is more left for representing the idea, and, consequently, greater
vividness of the idea." "Every resistance met with in the progress from
the antecedent idea to the consequent idea, entails a deduction from the
force with which the consequent idea arises in consciousness."

It is common to speak of Spencer's works as "hard reading," but those
who say so must have a strange scale of hardness. He may be difficult to
agree with, but he is rarely difficult to understand; he deals with
difficult themes, but he is singularly clear in his expression of his
convictions. When he discusses less abstract questions, as in his
_Study of Sociology_ or _Education_, his style has almost every good
quality except beauty. And when he occasionally "lets himself go" a
little, as in the famous passage in the _First Principles_ at the end of
the discussion of the Unknowable, there is a ring of nobility in his
sentences.

Sometimes he sums up with epigrammatic terseness, and we submit a few of
his utterances which we have noted down as illustrating various
qualities:--

     "Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and
     working are for life."

     "It is best to recognise the facts as they are, and not try to prop
     up rectitude by fictions."

     "Beliefs, like creatures, must have fit environments before they
     can live and grow."

     "Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep
     as the viscera."

     "Melody is an idealised form of the natural cadences of emotion."

     "Logic is a science of objective phenomena."

     "In proportion as intellect is active, emotion is rendered
     inactive."

     "Inherited constitution must ever be the chief factor in
     determining character."

     "Each nature is a bundle of potentialities of which only some are
     allowed by the conditions to become actualities."

     "Considering that the ordinary citizen has no excess of
     individuality to boast of, it seems strange that he should be so
     anxious to hide what little he has."

     "Englishmen are averse to conclusions of wide generality."

     "The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
     to fill the world with fools."

     "A nation which fosters its good-for-nothings will end by becoming
     a good-for-nothing nation."

     "I don't mean to get on. I don't think getting on is worth the
     bother."

_Genius._--It doubtless requires genius to define genius, and until
that is done, the question of awarding or refusing this supreme title to
our hero need not be very seriously discussed. All will agree that
genius is more than unusually great talent; that it is neither "une
patience suivie" nor "an infinite capacity for taking pains"; that it is
not to be judged by its effectiveness; and that it may never receive the
unwithering laurels of immortality. Spencer poured contempt on Carlyle's
assertion that genius "means transcendent capacity of taking trouble
first of all"; the truth being, he said, that genius may be rightly
defined quite oppositely, as an ability to do with little trouble that
which cannot be done by the ordinary man with any amount of trouble.

Another of Spencer's remarks about genius is worth citing. Speaking of
Huxley's wonderful versatility as a thinker, he said that it lent "some
colour to the dictum--quite untenable, however--that genius is a unit,
and, where it exists, can manifest itself equally in all directions." As
it seems to us, there is much truth in the dictum which Spencer
dismissed as "quite untenable." The genius is a new variation of high
potential and is as such a unity, capable of expressing itself in many
diverse ways, and always with originality. The expression of genius may
be intellectual, emotional, or practical, according to the mood which is
constitutionally dominant and according to the opportunities afforded by
education and circumstances; but there seems much to be said, both on
general grounds and from a study of historical examples, for the view
that genius means something distinctive in the whole mental pattern or
personality, and is potentially at least many-sided.

Biologically regarded, a genius is a transilient variation on the
up-grade of psychical evolution, of such magnitude that it stands apart
as a new mental pattern, as a peculiar combination of moods at a high
potential, as a secret amalgam. Whether it be intellectual, emotional,
or practical, it sees or feels or does things in a new way. It makes
what it touches new; it affords a new outlook. "God said: Let Newton be!
and there was light"--that is genius.

In this sense we venture to think that Spencer was not far from the
kingdom of genius. He saw all things in the light of the evolution-idea;
he had a fresh vision of the unity of nature and the unity of science,
and the light that was in him was so clear that it radiated into other
minds. Had his emotional nature been stronger, had he been more than
luminiferous, he might have set the world aflame.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herbert Spencer: A Character Study, "Fortnightly Review," 1904.




CHAPTER VII

CHARACTERISTICS: EMOTIONAL AND ETHICAL

     _Emotional--The Genius Loci--Poetry--Science and
     Poetry--Art--Humour--Callousness--Nature--Human
     Relations--Fundamental Motives_


_Emotional._--Spencer found great delight in scenery and sunsets; he
enjoyed music within certain limits; he was very fond of children, but
he was essentially a man of thought, not of feeling or of action. The
scientific mood dominated him, the artistic and practical moods were in
abeyance. Although he delighted in imaginative construction, he does not
seem to have had much imaginative life. Although he pondered over the
great mysteries of the universe, there was no mystical element in his
composition. Of course no Englishman wears his heart on his sleeve, but
Spencer was more than usually callous, and our sketch would be far from
true if it ignored his emotional limitations.

_The Genius Loci._--To begin with, let us refer to his indifference to
places which are rich in human associations. On his many holidays he
visited not a few of these, and yet he seems to have been rarely touched
or impressed by their significance. He frankly confessed that he took
but little interest in what are called histories, but was interested
only in sociology, and therefore his appreciation of the genius loci
was always limited. He could not people the palaces, the cathedrals, the
castles, the ancient cities that he visited. "When I go to see a ruined
abbey or the remains of a castle, I do not care to learn when it was
built, who lived or died there, or what catastrophes it witnessed. I
never yet went to a battle-field, although often near to one--not having
the slightest curiosity to see a place where many men were killed and a
victory achieved." He had few historical associations even in Rome, and
when at Florence he did not go three miles to Fiesole. The forms and
colours of time-worn walls and arches excited pleasant sentiments, he
said, but that seems to have been all. It was a sort of conchological
interest that he had.

One is unfortunately familiar with the cosmic preoccupation which the
dominant scientific mood is apt to engender, as also with historical
erudition which loses the wood in the trees or leaves Nature out
altogether. These are the defects of our limited mental capacities and
our ill-organised education; but that a man of Spencer's powers could be
so complacent with his limitations is extraordinary. And that he could
write, "It is always the poetry rather than the history of a place that
appeals to me," is more extraordinary still; as if the history were not
half the poetry.

_Poetry._--Spencer's attitude to poetry was characteristic; he took it
all too intellectually and was usually bored. He did not find enough
thought in it, and it may be doubted if he ever surrendered himself to
the artistic mood. At one time he regarded Shelley as "by far the
finest poet of his era," and of "Prometheus Unbound" he said, "It is the
only poem over which I have ever become enthusiastic." It satisfied one
of his organic needs--variety; "I say organic, because I perceive that
it runs throughout my constitution, beginning with likings for food."
Another requirement of poetry for Spencer was intensity. "The matter
embodied is idealised emotion, the vehicle is the idealised language of
emotion." For this reason he was in but small measure attracted to
Wordsworth. "Admitting, though I do, that throughout his works there are
sprinkled many poems of great beauty, my feeling is that most of his
writing is not wine but beer" (i. p. 263). Similarly, he found the
"Iliad" "tedious" and Dante "too continuously rich"... "a gorgeous dress
ill made up."

"About others' requirements I cannot of course speak; but my own
requirement is--little poetry and of the best. Even the true poets are
far too productive." More will agree with him when he says: "The poetry
commonly produced does not bubble up as a spring, but is simply pumped
up; and pumped-up poetry is not worth reading. No one should write verse
if he can help it. Let him suppress it if possible; but if it bursts
forth in spite of him, it may be of value."

In reference to the supposed antagonism between Science and Poetry,
Spencer refers to the story that Keats once proposed after dinner, some
such sentiment as "Confusion to Newton," for having by his analysis
destroyed the wonder of the rainbow. "In so doing," Spencer says, "Keats
did but give more than usually definite expression to the current
belief that science and poetry are antagonistic. Doubtless it is true
that while consciousness is occupied in the scientific interpretation of
a thing, which is now and again "a thing of beauty," it is not occupied
in the aesthetic appreciation of it. But it is no less true that the same
consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the aesthetic
appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation.
The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows
his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by
his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take
both. Those who allege this antagonism forget that Goethe, predominantly
a poet, was also a scientific inquirer" (_Autobiography_, i. p. 419).
This is sound sense, and is the excuse for Spencer's own limitations in
regard to poetry; he usually found it too difficult to lay aside the
intellectual preoccupation that gave part of the point to Huxley's jest
in the course of a talk on tragedy: "Oh! you know, Spencer's idea of a
tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact."

The same sort of desperately serious intellectual attitude is seen in
Spencer's remarks on the Opera. His "intolerance of gross breaches of
probability" spoilt his enjoyment of the music. "That serving-men and
waiting-maids should be made poetical and prompted to speak in
_recitative_, because their masters and mistresses happened to be in
love, was too conspicuous an absurdity; and the consciousness of this
absurdity went far towards destroying what pleasure I might otherwise
have derived from the work. It is with music as with painting--a great
divergence from the naturalness in any part so distracts my attention
from the meaning or intention of the whole, as almost to cancel
gratification."

     In connection with Spencer's relative lack of interest in poetry
     and the drama, or in the works of men like Carlyle and Ruskin, we
     have simply to deplore the fact and remember that his mind was
     preoccupied with big problems and was dominated by the scientific
     mood. From his boyhood he was "thinking about only one thing at a
     time," and he had to husband his energies. This is well illustrated
     by his note on Carlyle's _Cromwell_: "If, after a thorough
     examination of the subject, Carlyle tells us that Cromwell was a
     sincere man, I reply that I am heartily glad to hear it, and that I
     am content to take his word for it; not thinking it worth while to
     investigate all the evidence which has led him to that conclusion."
     This might seem to betray a somewhat Philistinish contempt for
     historical study and complacence therewith, but the real state of
     the case is revealed in the sentence that follows the above: "I
     find so many things to think about in this world of ours, that I
     cannot afford to spend a week in estimating the character of a man
     who lived two centuries ago." What he somewhat strangely calls
     "interests of an entirely unlike kind" were at that time strongly
     attracting him to Humboldt's _Kosmos_. His outlook was
     characteristically cosmic, not human.

_Art._--One of Spencer's heresies concerned the old masters of painting,
whose works he regarded as highly over-rated. On the one hand, he
detected insincerity in the conventional veneration in which the works
of Raphael and Michael Angelo, to name no smaller names, are held.
Subject is not dissociated from execution, and "the judicial faculty has
been mesmerised by the confused halo of piety which surrounds them."
There is an aesthetic orthodoxy from which few are bold enough to
dissent. On the other hand, Spencer detected in the works themselves
"fundamental vices," "the grossest absurdities," "gratuitous
contradictions of Nature," impossible light and shade, and no end of
technical defects in what he was pleased to call "physioscopy."

Art-criticism is probably now more emancipated from authority than it
was when Spencer promulgated his heresies and Ruskin wrote his _Modern
Painters_, and doubtless many experts will admit that some of the
philosopher's strictures are justified. More will probably maintain that
in his intellectual criticism Spencer was blind to artistic genius. In
his criticism, for instance, of Guido's "Phoebus and Aurora," to which
he allowed beauty in composition and grace in drawing, he applied
commonplace physical criteria to show that "absurdity was piled upon
absurdity." "The entire group--the chariot and horses, the hours and
their draperies, and even Phoebus himself--are represented as
illuminated from without: are made visible by some unknown source of
light--some other sun! Stranger still is the next thing to be noted. The
only source of light indicated in the composition--the torch carried by
the flying boy--radiates no light whatever. Not even the face of its
bearer immediately behind it is illumined by it! Nay, this is not all.
The crowning absurdity is that the non-luminous flames of this torch are
themselves illuminated from elsewhere!" And so on.

All this is dismally intellectual, and reminds us of the medical man's
discovery that Botticelli's "Venus," in the Uffizi at Florence, is
suffering from consumption, and should not be riding across the sea in
an open shell, clad so scantily.

_Humour._--Prof. Hudson speaks of Spencer's capital sense of humour, but
it is difficult for a reader of the _Autobiography_ to believe this. The
ponderous way in which he analyses his own little jokes, for instance,
is too quaint to be consistent with much sense of humour. Thus he tells
us that it was only the sudden access of moderately good health that
enabled him to remark to G. H. Lewes, on a little tour they had, that
the Isle of Wight produced very large chops for so small an island. The
fact is that he always took himself and other people very seriously in
little things as well as great. With what physiological seriousness does
he discuss the experience he had coming down Ben Nevis after some wine
on the top of whisky: "I found myself possessed of a quite unusual
amount of agility; being able to leap from rock to rock with rapidity,
ease, and safety; so that I quite astonished myself. There was evidently
an exaltation of the perceptive and motor powers."... "Long-continued
exertion having caused unusually great action of the lungs, the
exaltation produced by 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."

_Callousness._--In his extreme sang-froid, Spencer sometimes did
violence to the unity of the human spirit. We venture to give one
example. In referring to a ramble in France (_Autobiography_, ii. p.
236), he wrote as follows: "We passed a wayside shrine, at the foot of
which were numerous offerings, each formed of two bits of lath nailed
one across the other. The sight suggested to me the behaviour of an
intelligent and amiable retriever, a great pet at Ardtornish. On coming
up to salute one after a few hours' or a day's absence, wagging her tail
and drawing back her lips so as to simulate a grinning smile, she would
seek around to find a stick, or a bit of paper, or a dead leaf, and
bring it in her mouth; so expressing her desire to propitiate. The dead
leaf or bit of paper was symbolic, in much the same way as was the
valueless cross. Probably, in respect of sincerity of feeling, the
advantage was on the side of the retriever." The animal psychology here
expressed seems pretty bad, and the human psychology much worse.

Turning, however, to pleasanter subjects and correcting any unduly harsh
judgment, we would remind the reader that Spencer was genuinely fond of
music and of scenery, two loves which cover a multitude of sins.

     "The often-quoted remark of Kant that two things excited his
     awe--the starry heavens and the conscience of man--is not one which
     I should make of myself. In me the sentiment has been more
     especially produced by three things--the sea, a great mountain, and
     fine music in a cathedral. Of these the first has, from familiarity
     I suppose, lost much of the effect it originally had, but not the
     others."

_Nature._--One of the lasting pleasures of Spencer's life was a simple
delight in the beauty of Nature, especially in varied scenery. Thus he
writes (in 1844) to his friend Lott, regarding a journey into South
Wales: "I wish you had been with me. Your poetical feelings would have
had great gratification. A day's journey through a constantly changing
scene of cloud-capped hills with here and there a sparkling and
romantic river winding perhaps round the base of some ruined castle is a
treat not often equalled. I enjoyed it much. When I reached the seaside,
however, and found myself once again within sound of the breakers, I
almost danced with pleasure. To me there is no place so delightful as
the beach. It is the place where, more than anywhere else, philosophy
and poetry meet--where in fact you are presented by Nature with a
never-ending feast of knowledge and beauty. There is no place where I
can so palpably realise Emerson's remark that 'Nature is the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.'"

     One evening in August 1861 Spencer stood looking over the Sound of
     Mull from Ardtornish house. "The gorgeous colours of clouds and
     sky, splendid enough even by themselves to be long remembered, were
     reflected from the surface of the sound, at the same time that both
     of its sides, along with the mountains of Mull, were lighted up by
     the setting sun; and, while I was leaning out of the window gazing
     at this scene, music from the piano behind me served as a
     commentary. The exaltation of feeling produced was unparalleled in
     my experience; and never since has pleasurable emotion risen in me
     to the same intensity" (_Autobiography_, ii. p. 69).

Spencer's feeling for Nature was for the most part limited to scenic
effects. Occasionally, when he was at leisure, he felt some "admiration
of the beauties and graces" of flowers, but this was so unusual that it
surprised him, "for, certainly," he says, "intellectual analysis is at
variance with aesthetic appreciation." This does not of course mean that
there is any opposition between scientific interpretation and artistic
enjoyment; it simply means that the scientific mood is quite different
from the artistic mood, and that for most people only one can be
dominant at a time. There are many naturalists of undoubted analytic
skill who have a "love exceeding a simple love of the things that glide
in grasses and rubble of woody wreck"; the modern botanist may still see
the Dryad in the tree; and if the scientific mood is not allowed by
over-specialisation to over-ride all others, increase in knowledge may
mean not increase of sorrow, but a deepening of the joy of life.

_Human Relations._--That Spencer lacked emotional warmth and
expansiveness not only in regard to nature and art, literature and
history, but in his human relations, will be admitted by all, but when a
great man has an obvious limitation there is often a tendency to make
too much of it. We think that Mr Gribble has done this in his
interesting comparison of Spencer and Carlyle,[2] whom he contrasts as
philosopher and sage. We condense his comparison. Both were big men,
both were egotists, both were dyspeptics. Neither suffered fools gladly,
and each tended to be an outspoken judge of all the earth. But while
Carlyle loved and hated intensely, Spencer judged callously. Carlyle was
more like a human being, Spencer "made his heart wait on his
judgment--indefinitely." "What is almost uncanny about Herbert Spencer
is his triumphant superiority to natural instincts." "It is difficult
for the average man to believe that Spencer was a human being of like
passions with himself." In reference to love he said, "Physical beauty
is a _sine qua non_ with me"; "in every walk of life," Mr Gribble says,
"it seems, some _sine qua non_ stood like an angel with a flaming sword
between Herbert Spencer and his emotions." "In the main, he suggests
abstract intellect performing in a morality play, exhibiting no emotion
but intellectual pride." But this tends to suggest that Spencer was a
sort of synthetic ogre, which he certainly was not.

Emotion is distinctively impulsive, and it was Spencer's nature and
deliberate purpose not to yield to the strain of impulse. Yet we must
not misunderstand his reserve and restraint for cold-bloodedness. Some
have referred to the cold impersonal way in which he refers to his
father in the _Autobiography_, but when we consider facts not words we
find that the relations of sympathy, companionship, and mutual
understanding between father and son were very perfect. The human male
is slow to learn that it is not only necessary to love, but to say that
one loves.

In his human relations, Spencer was loyal, if somewhat too candid, as a
friend; he was by no means non-social, but enjoyed conversation with
those who interested him, and was himself a good talker and raconteur;
he was fond of, and was a favourite with children, which is saying a
great deal. One of his friends has called him a thoroughly "clubbable"
man, which is probably going too far, but it was only in later years
that he became an almost monastic recluse and used ear-stoppers. Many
who met him for a short time thought him cold and difficult of access,
with reserved chilly talk "like a book," rather restrained, scrupulous
and severe; but those who knew him well speak of his large, simple, and
eminently sympathetic nature. George Eliot said, "He is a good,
delightful creature, and I always feel better for being with him." Prof.
Hudson writes: "The better one knew him the more one grew to understand
and admire his quiet strength, steadiness of ethical purpose, and
unflinching courage, the purity of his motives, his rigid adherence to
righteousness and truth, and his exquisite sense of justice in all
things." He was often terribly provoked by unjust criticisms and stupid
or wilful misunderstandings of his positions, but "in controversy he was
scrupulously fair, aiming at truth, and not at the barren victories of
dialectics."[3]

Besides his love of truth and justice, besides his courage and
self-sacrificing altruism, Spencer reveals a strength of purpose which
has rarely been surpassed. In fact it is difficult to over-estimate the
resolution with which he effected his life-work. Apart from the inherent
difficulty of his task, apart from the long delay of public
appreciation, and apart from ill-health, the pecuniary obstacles were
very serious. Had it not been for the L80 which came to him in 1850
under the Railway Winding-up Act, he would have been unable to publish
_Social Statics_; a bequest from his uncle Thomas made the publication
of the _Principles of Psychology_ possible; he would have been forced to
desist before the completion of _First Principles_ had it not been for a
bequest from his uncle William; at a later stage an American testimonial
and his father's death just saved the situation. Well might he say:--

     "It was almost a miracle that I did not sink before success was
     reached." When we read the detailed story of his preparation, his
     endeavour, his struggle, his achievement, we cannot but feel that
     his resolute strenuousness was not far from heroism.

As a nervous subject, Spencer was naturally at times irritable, as
others can be without his excuse, and even petulant, severe in his
utterances, and a little intolerant. But normally he was habitually just
and tried to understand people, if not as persons, at least as
phenomena. What he said of Carlyle was much more just than what Carlyle
said of him, though it may have been what we call less "human." In his
own way Spencer felt that "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," but
it has been truly said that "the natural man would rather be
passionately denounced than treated as a phenomenon to be
co-ordinated."[4] But this was just Spencer's way, and he applied it
equally to himself.

     In speaking of his seven years' experience as a committee-man in
     connection with the Athenaeum, he notes certain traits of nature
     which were manifest to himself at least. "The most conspicuous is
     want of tact. This is an inherited deficiency. The Spencers of the
     preceding generation were all characterised by lack of
     reticence.... I tended habitually to undisguised utterance of ideas
     and feelings; the result being that while I often excited
     opposition from not remembering what others were likely to feel, I,
     at the same time, disclosed my own intentions in cases where
     concealment of them was needful as a means to success"
     (_Autobiography_, ii. p. 280).

It must be admitted that there was little out of the common in Herbert
Spencer's daily walk and conversation; in fact, there was a fair share
of common-placeness. Spencer himself was rather amused at those who
came expecting extraordinary intellectual manifestations or traits of
character greatly transcending ordinary ones. There was the pretty
poetess and heiress, whom two of his friends (Chapman and Miss Evans)
selected as a suitable wife for the philosopher, and who seems to have
been as little favourably impressed with him as he was with her.
"Probably she came with high anticipations and was disappointed." There
was the Frenchman who found Spencer playing billiards at the Athenaeum
Club, and "lifted up his hands with an exclamation to the effect that
had he not seen it he could not have believed it." And there was the
American millionaire, Mr Andrew Carnegie, who was so greatly astonished
to hear Spencer say at the dinner-table on the _Servia_, "Waiter, I did
not ask for Cheshire; I asked for Cheddar." To think that a philosopher
should be so fastidious about his cheese!

Spencer seems never to have fallen in love, and his early utterances on
marriage savour somewhat of the non-mammalian type of bachelor. "If as
somebody said (Socrates, was it not?)--marrying is a thing which whether
you do it or do it not you will repent, it is pretty clear that you may
as well decide by a toss up. It's a choice of evils, and the two sides
are pretty nearly balanced." He was too wise to marry out of a sense of
duty, and too preoccupied to marry by inclination. "As for marrying
under existing circumstances, that is out of the question; and as for
twisting circumstances into better shape, I think it is too much
trouble."... "On the whole I am quite decided not to be a drudge; and as
I see no probability of being able to marry without being a drudge,
why, I have pretty well given up the idea." As a matter of fact,
however, he was not altogether so callous as his words suggest. Indeed
when balancing the alternatives of emigrating to New Zealand or staying
in England, he gave 110 marks to the latter and 301 to the former,
allowing no less than 100 for the marriage which emigration would render
feasible!

In short Spencer could not marry when he would, and would not when he
could. He had a great admiration for women, especially beautiful women;
he had a natural fondness for children and got on well with them; but in
his struggling years he could not have supported a wife and family, and
besides he was very hard to please. On the one hand there was the
economic difficulty, for he felt assured that his friend was right in
saying "Had you married there would have been no system of philosophy."
It does not seem to have occurred to him that there might have been a
better one! On the other hand, there was his eternally critical
attitude. "Physical beauty is a _sine qua non_ with me; as was once
unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits
were of the highest." From the point of view of the race it seems a pity
that his _sine qua non_ was so stringent; an emotional graft on the
Spencerian stock might have given us for instance a new religious
genius. But Spencer's own conclusion was:--

     "I am not by nature adapted to a relation in which perpetual
     compromise and great forbearance are needful. That extreme critical
     tendency which I have above described, joined with a lack of
     reticence no less pronounced, would, I fear, have caused perpetual
     domestic differences. After all my celibate life has probably been
     the best for me, as well as the best for some unknown other."

A critical yet appreciative estimate of Spencer has been given by Prof.
A. S. Pringle-Pattison, which we venture to quote to correct our own
partiality.

"Paradoxical as the statement may seem in view of Spencer's achievement,
the mind here pourtrayed, save for the command of scientific facts and
the wonderful faculty of generalisation, is commonplace in the range of
its ideas; neither intellectually nor morally is the nature sensitive to
the finest issues. Almost uneducated except for a fair acquaintance with
mathematics and the scientific knowledge which his own tastes led him to
acquire, with the prejudices and limitations of middle-class English
Nonconformity, but untouched by its religion, Spencer appears in the
early part of his life as a somewhat ordinary young man. His ideals and
habits did not differ perceptibly from those of hundreds of intelligent
and straight-living Englishmen of his class. And to the end, in spite of
his cosmic outlook, there remains this strong admixture of the British
Philistine, giving a touch almost of banality to some of his sayings and
doings. But, just because the picture is so faithfully drawn, giving us
the man in his habit as he lived, with all his limitations and
prejudices (and his own consciousness of these limitations, expressed
sometimes with a passing regret, but oftener with a childish pride),
with all his irritating pedantries and the shallowness of his emotional
nature, we can balance against these defects his high integrity and
unflinching moral courage, his boundless faith in knowledge and his
power of conceiving a great ideal and carrying it through countless
difficulties to ultimate realisation, and a certain boyish simplicity of
character as well as other gentler human traits, such as his fondness
for children, his dependence upon the society of his kind, and his
capacity to form and maintain some life-long friendships. A kindly
feeling for the narrator grows as we proceed; and most unprejudiced
readers will close the book with a genuine respect and esteem for the
philosopher in his human aspect."

_Fundamental Motives._--There seems something approaching
self-vivisection in Spencer's analysis of the motives prompting his
career, and the reader who is not moved by it must be callous indeed. We
shall not do more than refer to the general results arrived at.

     "So deep down is the gratification which results from the
     consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of the
     applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is impossible
     for any one to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case, the desire
     for such recognition has not been absent. Yet, so far as I can
     remember, ambition was not the primary motive of my first efforts,
     nor has it been the primary motive of my larger and later
     efforts."... "Still, as I have said, the desire for achievement and
     the honour which achievement brings, have doubtless been large
     factors."... "Though from the outset I have had in view the effects
     to be wrought on men's beliefs and courses of action--especially in
     respect of social affairs and governmental functions; yet the
     sentiment of ambition has all along been operative."

The other prompters were the pleasure of intellectual hunting and "the
architectonic instinct." On the one hand, "It has been with me a source
of continual pleasure, distinct from other pleasures, to evolve new
thoughts, and to be in some sort a spectator of the way in which, under
persistent contemplation, they gradually unfolded into completeness." On
the other hand, "during thirty years it has been a source of frequent
elation to see each division, and each part of a division, working out
into congruity with the rest--to see each component fitting into its
place, and helping to make a harmonious whole." "Once having become
possessed by the conception of Evolution in its comprehensive form, the
desire to elaborate and set it forth was so strong that to have passed
life in doing something else would, I think, have been almost
intolerable." Like an architect he was restless till his edifice was
completed, and on working towards this there was aesthetic as well as
intellectual gratification. "There appears to be in me a dash of the
artist, which has all along made the achievement of beauty a stimulus;
not, of course, beauty as commonly conceived, but such beauty as may
exist in a philosophical structure."

     Spencer had a high sense of his responsibility to deliver the truth
     that was in him, and he had a strong faith in human progress. It is
     in the light of these two sentiments, perhaps, that we best
     understand the heroism of his strenuous life. "Not only is it
     rational to infer that changes like those which have been going on
     during civilisation will continue to go on, but it is irrational to
     do otherwise. Not he who believes that adaptation will increase is
     absurd, but he who doubts that it will increase is absurd. Lack of
     faith in such further evolution of humanity as shall harmonise with
     its conditions adds but another to the countless illustrations of
     inadequate consciousness of causation. One who, leaving behind both
     primitive dogmas and primitive ways of looking at them, has, while
     accepting scientific conclusions, acquired those habits of thought
     which science generates, will regard the conclusion above drawn as
     inevitable" (_Data of Ethics_, chap. x.).

     "Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth,
     lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure
     himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view.
     Let him duly realise the fact that opinion is the agency through
     which character adapts external arrangements to itself--that his
     opinion rightly forms part of this agency--is a unit of forces,
     constituting, with other such units, the general power which works
     out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give
     full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce
     what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these
     sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He with
     all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an
     accident, but a product of his time. He must remember that while he
     is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that
     his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not
     carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider
     himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the
     Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown produces in him a certain
     belief, he is thereby authorised to profess and act out that
     belief" (_First Principles_, p. 123).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Francis Gribble: "Fortnightly Review," 1904, p. 984.

[3] Gribble, _op. cit._

[4] Gribble, _op. cit._




CHAPTER VIII

SPENCER AS BIOLOGIST--THE DATA OF BIOLOGY

     _The Principles of Biology--Organic Matter--Metabolism--Definition
     of Life--The Dynamic Element in Life--Life and Mechanism_


_The Principles of Biology._--If there is any book that will save a
naturalist from being easy-going it is Spencer's _Principles of
Biology_. It is a biological classic, which, in its range and intensity,
finds no parallel except in Haeckel's greatest and least known work, the
_Generelle Morphologie_, which was published in 1866 about the same time
as the _Principles_. As one of our foremost biologists, Prof. Lloyd
Morgan has said[5]: "What strikes one most forcibly is the extraordinary
range and grasp of its author, the piercing keenness of his eye for
essentials, his fertility in invention, and the bold sweep of his
logical method. In these days of increasingly straitened specialism, it
is well that we should feel the influence of a thinker whose powers of
generalisation have seldom been equalled and perhaps never surpassed."

Much that is in _The Principles of Biology_ has now become common
biological property; much has been absorbed or independently reached by
others; consciously or unconsciously we are now, as it were, standing
on Spencer's shoulders, but this should not blind us to the magnitude of
Spencer's achievement. The book was more than a careful balance-sheet of
the facts of life at a time when that was much needed; it meant
orientation and systematisation; it was the introduction of order,
clearness, and breadth of view. It gave biology a fresh start by
displaying the facts of life and the inductions from these for the first
time clearly in the light of evolution. For if the evolution idea is an
adequate modal formula of the great process of Becoming, then we need to
think of growth, development, differentiation, integration,
reproduction, heredity, death--all the big facts--in the light of this.
And this is what the _Principles of Biology_ helps us to do. It is of
course saturated with the theory of the transmissibility of acquired
characters--an idea integral to much of Spencer's thinking--which had
hardly begun to be questioned when the work was published, which is now,
however, a very moot point indeed. For this and other reasons, we doubt
whether Spencer was wise in making a re-edition of what might well have
remained as a historical document, especially as the re-edition is not
so satisfactory for 1898 as the original was for 1864.

The chief purpose of _The Principles of Biology_ was to interpret the
general facts of organic life as results of evolution. Manifestly, as a
preliminary step, "it was needful to specify and illustrate these
general facts; and needful also to set forth those physical and chemical
properties of organic matter which are implied in the interpretation."
"What are the antecedent truths taken for granted in Biology, and what
are the biological truths, which, apart from theory, may be regarded as
established by observation?" Thus Part I. deals with organic matter and
its activity or metabolism, the action and reaction between organisms
and their environment, the correspondence between organisms and their
circumstances, and similar general data. Part II. states the big
inductions regarding growth, development, adaptation, heredity,
variation, and so on. Part III. deals with the arguments suggestive of
organic evolution and with the factors in the process. Part IV. is a
detailed interpretation of the evolution of organic structure, and Part
V. an analogous interpretation of the evolution of functions. Part VI.
deals with the laws of multiplication.

Before illustrating Spencer's workmanship in dealing with these great
themes, we cannot but ask what preparation he had for a task so
ambitious. He had an inborn interest in Natural History; he had dabbled
in Entomology and done a little microscopic work; he had attended
lectures by Owen and had enjoyed many a talk with Huxley; he had been
influenced by Lamarck, Milne-Edwards, and von Baer; he had read hither
and thither in medical and biological literature; but it is manifest
that his own admission was true that he was "inadequately equipped for
the task." That he succeeded in producing a biological classic is a
signal proof of his intellectual strength. He was kept right by his
power of laying hold of cardinal facts and by his grip of the
Evolution-clue. Not to be forgotten, moreover, was the generous help
rendered by Professor Huxley and Sir Joseph Hooker, who checked his
proofs. Spencer made but one biological investigation (1865-6), and
that of little moment--on the circulation in plants--but his contact
with the facts of organic life was by no means superficial. His
intelligence was such that he got further into them than most concrete
workers have ever done. And in some measure it was an advantage to him
in his task that he was no specialist, that he did not know too much. It
enabled him to approach the facts with a fresh mind, and to see more
clearly the general facts of Biology which lie behind the details of
Botany and Natural History. He was in no danger of not seeing the wood
for the trees.

_Organic Matter._--"In the substances of which organisms are composed,
the conditions necessary to that redistribution of Matter and Motion
which constitutes Evolution, are fulfilled in a far higher degree than
at first appears." Thus the most complex compounds into which Carbon,
Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen enter, together with small proportions of
two other elements (Sulphur and Phosphorus) which very readily oxidise,
"have an instability so great that decomposition ensues under ordinary
atmospheric conditions"; the component elements have an unusual tendency
to unite in different modes of aggregation though in the same
proportions, thus forming analogous substances with different
properties; the colloid character of the most complex compounds that are
instrumental to vital actions gives them great molecular mobility--a
plastic quality fitting them for organisation; "while the relatively
great inertia of the large and complex organic molecules renders them
comparatively incapable of being set in motion by the ethereal
undulations, and so reduced to less coherent forms of aggregation, this
same inertia facilitates changes of arrangement among their constituent
molecules or atoms, since, in proportion as an incident force impresses
but little motion on a mass, it is the better able to impress motion on
the parts of the mass in relation to one another"; "lastly, the great
difference in diffusibility between colloids and crystalloids makes
possible in the tissues of organisms a specially rapid redistribution of
matter and motion; both because colloids, being easily permeable by
crystalloids, can be chemically acted on throughout their whole masses,
instead of only on their surfaces; and because the products of
decomposition, being also crystalloids, can escape as fast as they are
produced, leaving room for further transformations." In short, organic
matter is chemically and physically well-suited to be the physical basis
of life.

     The colloid character of organic matter facilitates modification by
     arrested momentum or by continuous strain. There is often strong
     capillary affinity and rapid osmosis. Heat is an important agent of
     redistribution in the animal organism, and light is an
     all-important agent of molecular changes in organic substances. But
     the extreme modifiability of organic matter by chemical agencies is
     the chief cause of that active molecular rearrangement which
     organisms, and especially animal organisms, display. In short, the
     substances of which organisms are built up are specially sensitive
     to the varied environing influences; "in consequence of its extreme
     instability organic matter undergoes extensive molecular
     rearrangements on very slight changes of conditions."

     The correlative general fact is that during these extensive
     molecular rearrangements, there are evolved large amounts of
     energy, in the form of motion, heat, and even light and
     electricity. On the one hand the components of organic matter are
     regarded as falling from positions of unstable equilibrium to
     positions of stable equilibrium; on the other hand, "they give out
     in their falls certain momenta--momenta that may be manifested as
     heat, light, electricity, nerve-force, or mechanical motion,
     according as the conditions determine." It follows from the law of
     the Conservation of Energy that "whatever amount of power an
     organism expends in any shape, is the correlate and equivalent of a
     power which was taken into it from without."

_Metabolism._--"The materials forming the tissues of plants as well as
the materials contained in them, are progressively elaborated from the
inorganic substances; and the resulting compounds, eaten, and some of
them assimilated by animals, pass through successive changes which are,
on the average, of an opposite character: the two sets being
constructive and destructive. To express changes of both these natures
the term 'metabolism' is used; and such of the metabolic changes as
result in building up from simple to compound are distinguished as
'anabolic,' while those which result in the falling down from compound
to simple are distinguished as 'katabolic.'"

     "Regarded as a whole, metabolism includes, in the first place,
     those anabolic or building-up processes specially characterising
     plants, during which the impacts of ethereal undulations are stored
     up in compound molecules of unstable kinds; and it includes, in the
     second place, those katabolic or tumbling-down changes specially
     characterising animals, during which this accumulated molecular
     motion (contained in the food directly or indirectly supplied by
     plants) is in large measure changed into those molar motions
     constituting animal activities. There are multitudinous metabolic
     changes of minor kinds which are ancillary to these--many katabolic
     changes in plants and many anabolic changes in animals--but these
     are the essential ones."

_Definition of Life._--Spencer's first definition of life (_Theory of
Population_, 1852) was simply "the co-ordination of actions." But he
soon saw that this was too wide. "It may be said of the Solar System,
with its regularly-recurring movements and its self-balancing
perturbations, that it, also, exhibits co-ordination of actions." "A
true idea of Life must be an idea of some kind of change or changes."
Therefore he carefully considered assimilation on the one hand, as an
example of bodily life, and reasoning on the other hand, as an example
of that life known as intelligence, and inquired into the common
features of these two processes of change. Thus there emerged the
formula that life is _the definite combination of heterogeneous changes,
both simultaneous and successive_. But this formula also fails, as he
said, by omitting the most distinctive peculiarity. It is universally
recognised that living creatures continually exhibit _effective_
response to external stimuli. To be able to do this is the very essence
of life, distinguishing its responses from non-vital responses. Thus a
clause must be added to the proximate conception, and the formula reads:
"Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both
simultaneous and successive, _in correspondence with external
co-existences and sequences_." There are internal relations, namely,
"definite combinations of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and
successive," and there are external relations, "external co-existences
and sequences," and life is the connexion of correspondence between
them. Thus under its most abstract form, Spencer's conception of Life
is:--"_The continuous adjustment of internal relations to external
relations._"

In an appendix to the revised edition of the _Principles of Biology_,
Spencer admits that he had not sufficiently emphasised the fact of
_co-ordination_. "The idea of co-ordination is so cardinal a one that it
should be expressed not by implication but overtly." The formula
defining the phenomenon of life thus reads: "_The definite combination
of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, co-ordinated
into correspondence with external co-existences and sequences._" It may
be needful to remark that this was not intended to define Life in its
essence, but Life as manifested to us. "The ultimate mystery is as great
as ever: seeing that there remains unsolved the question: What
_determines_ the co-ordination of actions?"

If life be correspondence between internal and external relations, then
"allowing a margin for perturbations, the life will continue only while
the correspondence continues; the completeness of the life will be
proportionate to the completeness of the correspondence; and the life
will be perfect only when the correspondence is perfect." As organisms
become more differentiated they enter into more complex relations with
their environment, and as the environment becomes more complex organisms
become more differentiated. The internal and external relations increase
in number and intricacy _pari passu_, and the correspondences between
them become more complex, numerous, and persistent. "The highest life is
that which, like our own, shows great complexity in the correspondences,
great rapidity in the succession of them, and great length in the series
of them." "The highest Life is reached when there is some inner relation
of actions fitted to meet every outer relation of actions by which the
organism can be affected." "This continuous correspondence between
inner and outer relations which constitutes Life, and the perfection of
which is the perfection of Life, answers completely to that state of
organic moving equilibrium which arises in the course of Evolution and
tends ever to become more complete."

_The Dynamic Element in Life._--But Spencer was not satisfied with his
formula of Life. He recognised that there were vital phenomena which
were not covered by it. The growth of a gall on a plant, due to irritant
substances produced by an insect, shows no internal relations adjusted
to external relations; the heart of a frog will live and beat for a long
time after excision; the segmentation of an egg shows no correspondence
with co-existences and sequences in its environment; when rudimentary
organs are partly formed and then absorbed, no adjustment can be alleged
between the inner relations which these present and any outer relations:
the outer relations they refer to ceased millions of years ago; no
correspondence, or part of a correspondence, by which inner actions are
made to balance outer actions, can be seen in the dairymaid's laugh or
the workman's whistle; the struggles of a boy in an epileptic fit show
no correspondence with the co-existences and sequences around him, but
they betray vitality as much as do the changing movements of a hawk
pursuing a pigeon; "both exhibit that principle of activity which
constitutes the essential element in our conception of life."

     "When it is said that Life is the definite combination of
     heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in
     correspondence with external co-existences and sequences, there
     arises the question--Changes of what?... Still more clearly do we
     see this insufficiency when we take the more abstract
     definition--"the continuous adjustment of internal relations to
     external relations." Relations between what things? is the question
     to be asked. A relation of which the terms are unspecified does not
     connote a thought but merely the blank form of a thought. Its value
     is comparable to that of a cheque on which no amount is written."

This self-criticism led Spencer to the conclusion that "that which gives
substance to our idea of Life is a certain unspecified principle of
activity. The dynamic element in life is its essential element."

But how are we to conceive of this dynamic element? "Is this principle
of activity inherent in organic matter, or is it something superadded?"
Spencer at once rejected the second alternative, because the hypothesis
of an independent vital principle has a bad pedigree, carrying us back
to the ghost-theory of the savage, and because it is an unrepresentable
'pseud-idea,' which cannot even be imagined.

But the alternative of regarding Life as inherent in the substances of
the organisms displaying it is also full of difficulties. "The processes
which go on in living things are incomprehensible as results of any
physical actions known to us." "We are obliged to confess that Life in
its essence cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms. The required
principle of activity, which we found cannot be represented as an
independent vital principle, we now find cannot be represented as a
principle inherent in living matter. If, by assuming its inherence, we
think the facts are accounted for, we do but cheat ourselves with
pseud-ideas."

"What then are we to say--what are we to think? Simply that in this
direction, as in all other directions, our explanations finally bring us
face to face with the inexplicable. The Ultimate Reality behind this
manifestation, as behind all other manifestations, transcends
conception."

"Life as a principle of activity is unknown and unknowable--while its
phenomena are accessible in thought the implied noumenon is
inaccessible--only the manifestations come within the range of our
intelligence, while that which is manifested lies beyond it."

But "our surface knowledge continues to be a knowledge valid of its
kind, after recognising the truth that it is only surface knowledge."

The chapter on "The Dynamic Element in Life," which concludes the
section of the book called _The Data of Biology_, was interpolated in
the revised edition (1898). It indicates, as it seems to us, that
Spencer's point of view had changed considerably since he stereotyped
his _First Principles_. We must pause to consider what this change was.

In his _First Principles_ Spencer wrote: "The task before us is that of
exhibiting the phenomena of Evolution in synthetic order. Setting out
from an established ultimate principle [the Persistence of Force] it has
to be shown that the course of transformation among all kinds of
existences cannot but be that which we have seen it to be." [This refers
to the formula: Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant
dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite,
incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during
which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.] "It has
to be shown that the redistribution of matter and motion must everywhere
take place in those ways and produce those traits, which celestial
bodies, organisms, societies alike display. And it has to be shown that
this universality of process results from the same necessity which
determines each simplest movement around us, down to the accelerated
fall of a stone or the recurrent beat of a harp string. In other words,
the phenomena of Evolution have to be deduced from the Persistence of
Force. As before said, 'to this an ultimate analysis brings us down; and
on this a rational synthesis must build up.'" And again he wrote: "The
interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force,
is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of thought to
the simplest symbols."

These were brave words, and if we understand them aright it is, to say
the least, surprising to be told when we come to the life of organisms
that "the processes which go on in living things are incomprehensible as
results of any physical actions known to us."

On the first page of the _Principles of Biology_ we read: "The
properties of substances, though destroyed to sense by combination, are
not destroyed in reality. It follows from the persistence of force, that
the properties of a compound are _resultants_ of the properties of its
components--_resultants_ in which the properties of the components are
severally in full action, though mutually obscured." But on p. 122 it is
written: "We find it impossible to conceive Life as emerging from the
co-operation of the components."

In the frankest possible way Spencer admitted that his definition of
Life did not cover the facts, that it did not recognise the essential or
dynamic element, that "Life in its essence cannot be conceived in
physico-chemical terms." But if so, it can only be by great faith or
great credulity that we can believe that an Evolution-formula in terms
of "Matter, Motion, and Force" is adequate to describe its genesis.

At an earlier part of the _Data of Biology_ Spencer assumed the origin
of active protoplasm from a combination of inert proteids during the
time of the earth's slow cooling, and did not suggest that there was any
particular difficulty in the assumption; yet in the end we are told that
it is "impossible even to imagine those processes going on in organic
matter out of which emerges the dynamic element in Life."

     "One can picture," Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan writes,[6] "how certain
     folk will gloat and 'chortle in their joy' over this confession,
     for such it will almost inevitably be regarded. But it is not
     likely that Mr Spencer is here, in so vital a matter, false to the
     evolution he has done so much to elucidate. The two seemingly
     contradictory statements are not really contradictory; they are
     made in different connections; the one in reference to phenomenal
     causation, the other to noumenal causation--to an underlying
     'principle of activity.' The simple statement of fact is that the
     phenomena of life are data _sui generis_, and must as such be
     accepted by science. Just as when oxygen and hydrogen combine to
     form water, new data for science emerge; so, when protoplasm was
     evolved, new data emerged which it is the business of science to
     study. In both cases we believe that the results are due to the
     operation of natural laws, that is to say, can, with adequate
     knowledge, be described in terms of antecedence and sequence. But
     in both cases the results, which we endeavour thus to formulate,
     are the outcome of principles of activity, the mode of operation of
     which is inexplicable. We formulate the laws of evolution in terms
     of antecedence and sequence; we also refer these laws to an
     underlying cause, the noumenal mode of action of which is
     inexplicable. This, if I interpret him rightly, is Mr Spencer's
     meaning."

Our own impression is that Spencer was guilty of "wobbling" between two
modes of interpretation, between scientific description and
philosophical explanation, a confusion incident on the fact that his
_Principles of Biology_ was also part of his _Synthetic Philosophy_.
Biology as such has of course nothing to do with "the Ultimate Reality
behind manifestations" or with the "implied noumenon." And when Spencer
says "it is impossible even to imagine those processes going on in
organic matter out of which emerges the dynamic element in Life," or
when he illustrates his difficulty by pointing out how impossible it is
to give a physico-chemical interpretation of the way a plant cell makes
its wall, or a coccolith its imbricated covering, or a sponge its
spicules, or a hen eats broken egg-shells, we do not believe he was
thinking of anything but "phenomenal causation." When he says "The
processes which go on in living things are incomprehensible as results
of any physical actions known to us," we see no reason to take the edge
off this truth by saying that Spencer simply meant that the Ultimate
Reality is inaccessible.

In any case, whether Spencer meant that we cannot give any scientific
analysis in physico-chemical terms of the unified behaviour of even the
simplest organism, or whether he simply meant that the _raison d'etre_,
the ultimate reality of life, was an inaccessible noumenon, he
confesses that we have "only a surface knowledge"; "only the
manifestations come within the range of our intelligence while that
which is manifested lies beyond it"; "the order existing among the
actions which living things exhibit remains the same whether we know or
do not know the nature of that from which the actions originate." This
seems to us to sound a more modest note than is heard in the sentence:
"The interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion and
Force, is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of
thought to the simplest symbols."

_Life and Mechanism._--But are not all biologists confronted with the
difficulty that gave Herbert Spencer pause? Physiological analysis has
done much in revealing chains of sequence within the organism, but no
vital phenomenon has as yet been redescribed in terms of chemistry and
physics. Again and again some success in discovering physico-chemical
chains of sequence has awakened the expectation that the dawn of a
mechanical theory of life was drawing nigh, but the dawn seems further
off than ever. The residual phenomena left uninterpreted by mechanical
categories loom out more persistently than they did a century ago. As
Bunge once said "the more thoroughly and conscientiously we endeavour to
study biological problems, the more are we convinced that even those
processes which we have already regarded as explicable by chemical and
physical laws, are in reality infinitely more complex, and at present
defy any attempt at a mechanical explanation." As Dr J. S. Haldane puts
it: "If we look at the phenomena which are capable of being stated, or
explained in physico-chemical terms, we see at once that there is
nothing in them characteristic of life.... The action of each bodily
mechanism, the composition and structure of each organ, are all mutually
determined and connected with one another in such a way as at once to
distinguish a living organism from anything else. As this mutual
determination is the characteristic mark of what is living, it cannot be
ignored in the framing of fundamental working hypotheses."

The fact is that we have to regard the living organism as a new
synthesis which we cannot at present analyse, and life as an activity
which cannot at present be redescribed in terms of the present physical
conceptions of matter and energy. And even if a living organism were
artificially made, the problem would not be altered; though our
conception of what we at present call inanimate might be.

Prof. Karl Pearson states the position from another point of view.

For the biologist as a scientific inquirer "the problem of whether life
is or is not a mechanism is not a question of whether the same things,
'matter' and 'force,' are or are not at the back of organic and
inorganic phenomena--of what is at the back of either class of
sense-impressions we know absolutely nothing--but of whether the
conceptual shorthand of the physicist, his ideal world of ether, atom,
and molecule, will or will not also suffice to describe the biologist's
perceptions." That it does not at present seems the conviction of the
majority of physiologists; if it ever should it would be "purely an
economy of thought; it would provide the great advantages which flow
from the use of one instead of two conceptual shorthands, but it would
not 'explain' life any more than the law of gravitation explains the
elliptic path of a planet."

"Atom" and "molecule" and the rest are scientific concepts, not
phenomenal existences, therefore even if the physicist's formulae should
fit vital phenomena--which they seem very far from doing--there would be
no explanation forthcoming, for "mechanism does not explain anything."

Thus, like Spencer, we find the secret of the organism irresoluble in
terms of lower categories. But we differ from him inasmuch as we believe
that this admission is fatal to his formula of evolution, to his
definition of life, and to the coherence of his _Synthetic Philosophy_.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Mr Herbert Spencer's Biology, "Natural Science," xiii. (1898) pp.
377-383.

[6] "Natural Science," xiii., December 1898, p. 380.




CHAPTER IX

SPENCER AS BIOLOGIST: INDUCTIONS OF BIOLOGY

     _Growth--Development--Structure and Function--Waste and
     Repair--Adaptation--Cell-Life--Genesis--Nutrition and
     Reproduction--The Germ-Cells_


_Growth._--Perhaps the widest and most familiar induction of Biology, is
that organisms grow. But there is growth in crystals, in terrestrial
deposits, in celestial bodies; in fact, growth, as being an integration
of matter, is the primary trait of evolution; it is universal, in the
sense that all aggregates display it in some way at some period. "The
essential community of nature between organic growth and inorganic
growth is, however, most clearly seen on observing that they both result
in the same way. The segregation of different kinds of detritus from
each other, as well as from the water carrying them, and their
aggregation into distinct strata, is but an instance of a universal
tendency towards the union of like units and the parting of unlike units
(_First Principles_, Sec. 163). The deposit of a crystal from a solution is
a differentiation of the previously mixed molecules; and an integration
of one class of molecules into a solid body, and the other class into a
liquid solvent. Is not the growth of an organism an essentially similar
process? Around a plant there exist certain elements like the elements
which form its substance; and its increase in size is effected by
continually integrating these surrounding like elements with itself."
And so on.

Passing over the far-fetched statement that the deposit of sediment in
distinct strata illustrates the universal tendency towards the union of
like units and the parting of unlike units, we must point out that
Spencer begins his discussion of organic growth by describing it in such
general terms that its essential characteristic is lost sight of. A
minute crystal of alum is dropped into a saturated solution of alum, and
it grows rapidly under our eyes out of material the same as its own, but
the living creature grows larger at the expense of material _different_
from its own. The grass grows at the expense of air, water, and salts,
and the lamb grows at the expense of the grass. Though the living
creature cannot, of course, transform one element into another, and must
have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc., in its food, it utilises
materials chemically very different from its own complex compounds.

Spencer's inductions as to growth were the following:--

     (1) The growth of an organism is dependent on the available supply
     of such environing materials as are of like natures with the
     matters composing the organism.

     (2) Other things being equal, the degree of growth varies according
     to the surplus of nutrition over expenditure.

     (3) In the same organism the surplus of nutrition over expenditure
     differs at different stages, and growth is unlimited or has a
     definite limit, according as the surplus does or does not rapidly
     decrease. There is almost unceasing growth in organisms that expend
     relatively little energy and definitely limited growth in
     organisms that expend much energy. [There are many difficulties
     here, _e.g._, the apparent absence of a limit of growth in many
     very energetic fishes.]

     (4) Among organisms which are large expenders of force, the size
     ultimately attained is, other things equal, determined by the
     initial size. [By initial size Spencer means the bulk of the
     organism when it begins to feed for itself.] A calf and a lamb
     commence their physiological transactions on widely different
     scales; their first increments of growth are similarly contrasted
     in their amounts; and the two diminishing series of such increments
     end at similarly-contrasted limits.

     [But the further we penetrate into details, the more inevitable
     seems the conclusion that adult size is _an adaptive phenomenon_;
     in other words that growth has been punctuated by natural
     selection.]

     (5) Where the likeness of other circumstances permits a comparison,
     the possible extent of growth depends on the degree of
     organization; an inference testified to by the larger forms among
     the various divisions and sub-divisions of organisms.

In connection with growth and its limit Spencer made a simple but shrewd
observation, which seems also to have occurred to Prof. Leuckart and to
Dr Alexander James. He pointed out, that in the growth of similarly
shaped bodies the increase of volume continually tends to outrun the
increase of surface. The volume of living matter must grow more than the
surface through which it is kept alive, if the surface remain regular in
contour. In spherical and all other regular units the volume increases
as the cube of the radius, the surface only as the square of the radius.
Thus a cell, for instance, as it grows, must get into physiological
difficulties, for the nutritive necessities of the increasing volume are
ever less adequately supplied by the less rapidly increasing absorbent
surface. There is less and less opportunity for nutrition, respiration,
and excretion. A nemesis of growth sets in, for waste gains upon,
overtakes, balances, and threatens to exceed repair. Growth may cease at
this limit, and a balance be struck; or the form of the unit may be
altered and surface gained by flattening out, or very frequently by
ramifying processes; or--and this the most frequent solution--the cell
may divide, halving its volume, gaining new surface, and restoring the
balance. In more general terms, growth expresses the preponderance of
constructive processes or anabolism; increase of volume with less rapid
increase of nutritive, respiratory, and excretory surface involves a
relative predominance of katabolism; the limit of growth occurs when
further increase of volume would prejudicially increase the ratio of
katabolism to anabolism; at that point the cell restores the balance by
dividing. And what is true of the unit applies also in a general way to
organs, such as leaves which increase their surface by becoming much
divided, and even to organisms which exhibit many adaptations for
increasing their nutritive, respiratory, and excretory surfaces.

_Development._--Growth is increase in bulk, development is increase in
structure, and Spencer's chief induction in regard to development is
that we see a change from an incoherent, indefinite homogeneity to a
coherent, definite heterogeneity. "The originally like units called
cells become unlike in various ways, and in ways more numerous and
marked as the development goes on. The several tissues which these
several classes of cells form by aggregation, grow little by little
distinct from each other; and little by little put on those structural
complexities that arise from differentiations among their component
units. In the shoot, as in the limb, the external form, originally very
simple, and having much in common with simple forms in general,
gradually acquires an increasing complexity and an increasing unlikeness
to other forms. Meanwhile, the remaining parts of the organism to which
the shoot or limb belongs, having been severally assuming structures
divergent from one another and from that of this particular shoot or
limb, there has arisen a greater heterogeneity in the organism as a
whole." Moreover, "whereas the germs of organisms are extremely similar,
they gradually diverge widely in modes now regular and now irregular,
until in place of a multitude of forms practically alike we finally have
a multitude of forms most of which are extremely unlike." In other
words, there is in individual development (ontogeny) some condensed
recapitulation of the steps in racial evolution (phylogeny).
Furthermore, in the progressing differentiation of each organism there
is a progressing differentiation of it from its environment; it becomes
freer from the environmental grip and more master of its fate. Here
again there is an individual progress parallel to that seen in the
course of historic evolution.

A general criticism must be made, that Spencer thought of the germ-cell
much too simply. It is a microcosm full of intricacy; the nucleus is
often exceedingly definite and coherent; the early cells are often from
the first defined, with prospective values which do not change. The
fertilised ovum has only apparent simplicity; it has a complex
individualised organisation--often visible. No one can doubt that
development is progressive differentiation, but it is rather a
realisation of a complex inheritance of materialised potentialities than
a change from an incoherent, indefinite homogeneity to a coherent,
definite heterogeneity.

_Structure and Function._--To the question, does Life produce
Organisation, or does Organisation produce Life? Spencer answered that
"structure and function must have advanced _pari passu_: some difference
of function, primarily determined by some difference of relation to the
environment, initiating a slight difference of structure, and this again
leading to a more pronounced difference of function; and so on through
continuous actions and reactions." As structure progresses from the
homogeneous, indefinite, and incoherent, so does function, illustrating
progressive division of labour. From an evolutionist point of view,
Spencer argued that life necessarily comes before organisation; "organic
matter in a state of homogeneous aggregation must precede organic matter
in a stage of heterogeneous aggregation. But since the passing from a
structureless state to a structured state is itself a vital process, it
follows that vital activity must have existed while there was yet no
structure: structure could not else arise. That function takes
precedence of structure, seems also implied in the definition of Life.
If Life is shown by inner actions so adjusted as to balance outer
actions--if the implied energy is the _substance_ of Life while the
adjustment of the actions constitutes its _form_; then may we not say
that the actions to be formed must come before that which forms
them--that the continuous change which is the basis of function, must
come before the structure which brings function into shape?"

But all such discussions of "structure" and "function" in the abstract
tend to verbal quibbling. We cannot have activity without something to
act, we cannot have metabolism without stuff. No one can tell what the
first thing that lived on the earth was like, what organisation it had,
or what it was able to do, but we may be sure that vital organisation
and vital activity are only static and kinetic aspects of the same
thing. It is quite probable, however, that there is no one thing that
can be called protoplasm, for vital function may depend upon the
inter-relations or inter-actions of several complex substances, none of
which could by itself be called alive; which are, however, held together
in that unity which makes an organism what it is. Just as the secret of
a firm's success may depend upon a particularly fortunate association of
partners, so it may be with vitality.[7]

_Waste and Repair._--Organisms are systems for transforming matter and
energy and the law of conservation holds good. "Each portion of
mechanical or other energy which an organism exerts implies the
transformation of as much organic matter as contained this energy in a
latent state," and the waste must be made good by repair. We thus see
why plants with an enormous income of energy and little expenditure of
energy have no difficulty in sustaining the balance between waste and
repair; we understand the relation between small waste, small activity,
and low temperature in many of the lower animals; we understand
conversely the rapid waste of energetic, hot-blooded animals. The
deductive interpretation of waste is easy, but it is different with
repair, for here the analogy between the organism and an inanimate
engine breaks down. The living creature is a self-stoking,
self-repairing, and also--it may be noted in passing--a self-reproducing
engine. Spencer did not do more than restate the difficulty when he said
that the component units of organisms have the power of moulding fit
materials into other units of the same order.

In passing to consider the ability which an organism often has of
recompleting itself when one of its parts has been cut off, just as an
injured crystal recompletes itself, Spencer was led to the hypothesis
that "the form of each species of organism is determined by a
peculiarity in the constitution of its units--that these have a special
structure in which they tend to arrange themselves; just as have the
simpler units of inorganic matter." "This organic polarity (as we might
figuratively call this proclivity towards a specific structural
arrangement) can be possessed neither by the chemical units nor the
morphological units, we must conceive it as possessed by certain
intermediate units, which we may term _physiological_." But if in each
organism the physiological units which result from the compounding of
highly compound molecules have a more or less distinctive character, the
germ-cell is not so very _indefinite_ after all.

Many of the facts of regeneration are very striking. A crab may regrow
its complex claw, a starfish arm may regrow an entire body. A snail has
been known to regenerate an amputated eye-bearing horn twenty times in
succession, a newt can replace a lost lens, a lizard can regrow its tail
and part of its leg, a stork can regrow the greater part of its bill. In
many cases, the surrender of parts which are afterwards regrown is
exceedingly common, as in some worms and Echinoderms, and is a
life-saving adaptation. Organically, though not consciously, the
brainless starfish has learned that it is better that one member should
perish than that the whole life should be lost. This regenerative
capacity no doubt implies certain properties in the living matter and in
the organism, but we are far from being

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