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.