Herbert Spencer

by J. Arthur Thomson

2. Another inherited capacity was "the synthetic tendency," the power of generalising or of working out unifying formulæ. 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.