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 Athenæum, 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).
[4] Gribble, op. cit.
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 Athenæum 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 quâ 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 quâ 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."