Parents.—George Spencer, Herbert's father (b. 1790) was "the flower of the flock." "To faculties which he had in common with the rest (except the humour of Henry and the linguistic faculty of Thomas), he added faculties they gave little sign of. One was inventive ability, and another was artistic perception, joined with skill of hand." He began very early to teach in his father's school, and was for most of his life a teacher. As such, he was noted for his reliance on non-coercive discipline, and at the same time for his firmness; he continually sought to stimulate individuality rather than to inform. His Inventional Geometry and Lucid Shorthand had some vogue for a time.
He was an unconventional person, as shown in little things—by his repugnance to taking off his hat, to donning signs of mourning, or to addressing people as "Esq." or "Revd.," and in big things by his pronounced "Whigism." With "a repugnance to all living authority" he combined so much sympathy and suavity that he was generally beloved. He found Quakerism "congruous with his nature in respect of its complete individualism and absence of ecclesiastical government." He had unusual keenness of the senses, delicacy of manipulation, and noteworthy artistic skill. A somewhat fastidious and finicking habit of trying to make things better was expressed in his annotations on dictionaries and the like, but he had also a larger "passion for reforming the world." As his son notes, the one great drawback was lack of considerateness and good temper in his relations with his wife. For this, however, a nervous disorder was in part to blame. He lived to be over seventy.
Herbert Spencer's mother, née Harriet Holmes (1794-1867), introduced a new strain into the heritage. "So far from showing any ingrained nonconformity, she rather displayed an ingrained conformity." A Wesleyan by tradition rather than by conviction, she was constitutionally averse to change or adventure, non-assertive, self-sacrificing, patient, and gentle. "Briefly characterised, she was of ordinary intelligence and of high moral nature—a moral nature of which the deficiency was the reverse of that commonly to be observed: she was not sufficiently self-asserting: altruism was too little qualified by egoism."
Spencer did not think that he took after his mother except in some physical features. He had something of his father's nervous weakness, but he had not his large chest and well developed heart and lungs. Believing that "the mind is as deep as the viscera," he does not scruple to state that his "visceral constitution was maternal rather than paternal."
"Whatever specialities of character and faculty in me are due to inheritance, are inherited from my father. Between my mother's mind and my own I see scarcely any resemblances, emotional or intellectual. She was very patient; I am very impatient. She was tolerant of pain, bodily or mental; I am intolerant of it. She was little given to finding fault with others; I am greatly given to it. She was submissive; I am the reverse of submissive. So, too, in respect of intellectual faculties, I can perceive no trait common to us, unless it be a certain greater calmness of judgment than was shown by my father; for my father's vivid representative faculty was apt to play him false. Not only, however, in the moral characters just named am I like my father, but such intellectual characters as are peculiar are derived from him" (Autobiography ii., p. 430).
[CHAPTER II]
NURTURE
Boyhood—School—At Hinton—At Home