Mill fully sympathised with Comte's demand for social reorganisation as a means towards the moral end. But, with his English and Protestant traditions, he had no faith in the creation of a new spiritual power with an elaborate religious code and ritual as the best machinery for the purpose. In his opinion, the claims of the individual to extended liberty of thought and action, not their restriction, were what first needed attention. Second to this—if second at all—came the necessity for reforming representative government on the lines of an enlarged franchise and a readjusted electoral system with plural suffrage determined by merit, votes for women, and a contrivance for giving minorities a weight proportioned to their numbers. The problem of poverty was to be dealt with by restrictions on the increase of population and on the amount of inheritable property, the maximum of which ought not to exceed a modest competence.
Among the noble characters presented by the history of philosophy we may distinguish between the heroic and the saintly types. To the former in modern
times belong Giordano Bruno, Fichte, and to some extent Comte; to the latter, Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant. To the second class we may surely add John Stuart Mill, whom Gladstone called "the saint of rationalism," and of whom Auguste Laugel said, "He was not sincere—he was sincerity itself."
Herbert Spencer.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was the son of a Nonconformist country schoolmaster, but was educated chiefly by his uncle Thomas, an Evangelical clergyman of the Church of England. A radical reformer of the old school, Thomas Spencer seems to have indoctrinated his youthful charge with the germinal principles afterwards generalised into a whole cosmic philosophy. He had a passion for justice realised under the form of liberty, individual responsibility, and self-help. In his opinion, until it was modified by private misfortunes, everything served everybody right. Beginning as an economical administrator of the new Poor Law, he at last became an advocate of its total abolition; and, alone among fifteen thousand clergymen, he was an active member of the Anti-Corn Law League, besides supporting the separation of Church and State. At twenty-two Herbert Spencer accepted and summed up this policy under the form of a general hostility to State interference with individual liberty, supporting it by a reference to the reign of Natural Law in all orders of existence. In his first great work, Social Statics, the principle of laissez-faire received its full systematic development as the restriction of State action to the defence of liberty against internal and external aggression, the raising of taxes for any other purpose being unjust, as is also private ownership of
land, which is by nature the common heritage of all. Spencer subsequently came to abandon land nationalisation, probably from alarm at its socialistic implications.
The doctrine of natural law and liberty carried with it for Spencer a strong repugnance not only to protectionism in politics, but also to miracles in theology. The profession of journalism brought him into touch
with a freethinking set in London. Whether under their influence, or Shelley's, or by some spontaneous process, his religious convictions evaporated by twenty-eight into the agnosticism which thenceforth remained their permanent expression. There might or not be a First Cause; if there was, we know nothing about it. At this stage Lyell's attempted refutation of Lamarck converted Spencer to the belief in man's derivation from some lower animal by a process of gradual adaptation. Thus the scion of an educationalist family came to interpret the whole history of life on our planet as an educative process.
It seemed, however, as if there was one fatal exception to the scheme of naturalistic optimism. The Rev. Thomas Malthus had originally published his Essay on Population (1798) as a telling answer to the "infidel" Godwin's Political Justice (1793), the bolder precursor of Social Statics. The argument was that the tendency of population to outrun the means of subsistence put human perfectibility out of the question. It had been suggested by the idealists, Mill among the number, that the difficulty might be obviated by habitual self-restraint on the part of married people. But Spencer, with great ingenuity, made the difficulty its own solution. The pressure of population on the means of subsistence is the source of all progress; and of progress not only in discoveries and inventions, but also, through its increased exercise, in the instrument which effects them—that is, the human brain. Now, it is a principle of Aristotle's, revived by modern biology, that individuation is antagonistic to reproduction; and increasing individuation is the very law of developing life, shown above all in the growing power of life's chief instrument, which is thought's organ, the brain. For, as Spencer proceeded