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.