Herbert Spencer

by J. Arthur Thomson

Spencer was always clear that "life is not for work and learning, but work and learning are for life." Thus he valued science because it is "fructiferous," to use Bacon's word, making for the amelioration of life; but he valued it still more because it is "luciferous," "for the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe." He spoke with regret of "the ordinary scientific specialist, who, deeply interested in his speciality, and often displaying comparatively little interest in other departments of science, is rarely much interested in the relations between Science at large and the great questions which lie beyond Science." He ranked himself with those who, "while seeking scientific knowledge for its proximate value, have an ever-increasing consciousness of its ultimate value as a transfiguration of things, which, marvellous enough within the limits of the knowable, suggests a profounder marvel than can be known." Thus it is not surprising to find that he had a metaphysical system of his own, and if he had not a religion he had at least "a humility in presence of the inscrutable," and a reverence for Nature deeper than many religious minds exhibit.

Metaphysics.—"Metaphysician" was with Spencer a term of reproach, "employed (as Prof. Sidgwick says) exclusively to designate a class of thinkers who have followed an erroneous method to untenable conclusions," yet he himself had a metaphysical system—which Sidgwick defines as "a systematic view of the nature and relations of finite minds to the material world, and to the Primal Being or ultimate ground of Being." A critical discussion of Spencer's metaphysical and epistemological doctrines will be found in Sidgwick's "Philosophy of Kant and other Lectures," 1905.

In his doctrine of "the Unknowable," in which experts discover the influence of Kant through Hamilton and Mansel, Spencer reached the conclusion that "no tenable hypothesis can be formed as to the origin or nature of the Universe regarded as a whole." He offered for the reconciliation of Religion and Science the "Supreme Verity," that "the reality underlying appearances is totally and for ever inconceivable to us... but we are obliged to regard every phenomenon as the manifestation of an incomprehensible power, called Omnipresent from inability to assign its limits, though Omnipresence is unthinkable." Similarly when we try to understand Time, Space, Matter, Force, Consciousness, we have to confess that the "reality underlying appearances is and must be totally and for ever inconceivable by us." At the same time Spencer was able to attain to some knowledge of his Unknowable, concluding, for instance, in spite of the antithesis between subject and object, never to be transcended while consciousness lasts, that "it is one and the same Ultimate Reality that is manifested to us subjectively and objectively"; that while "the manifestations, as occurring either in ourselves or outside of us, do not persist: that which persists is the Unknown Cause of these manifestations"—"an unconditioned Reality without beginning or end."

Early attitude to Religion.—Spencer came of a religious stock, but the traditional beliefs took no grip of him. Even as a boy he had what may be called a cosmic outlook, but he tells us of no religious tendrils, and if there were any they found no support in the faith of his fathers. Though surrounded in early life by a religious atmosphere, he never seems to have moved or even drawn breath in it. He passed by theological beliefs as if he were immune; he developed into an agnostic without passing through any crisis or perplexity; he had not even what Prof. James has called "the religion of healthy-mindedness."

The explanation of this may be looked for partly in the self-sufficiency of his strong intellect, partly in the limitations of the emotional side of his nature, and partly in his fine heritage of natural goodness. When the religious mood does not arise naturally as an almost spontaneous expression of inherited disposition and nurture-influences, it is usually reached by one of three paths, or by more than one of these at once. These paths to religion, which apply to the racial as well as to the individual history, may be called the practical, the emotional, and the intellectual approaches to faith. When men reach the limits of their practical endeavours and find themselves baffled, when they feel the impotence of their utmost strength, when they are filled with fear of the past, the present, and the future, then they sometimes become religious. When men reach the limits of their emotional strength, and the tension of joy or of sorrow, of delight in nature or love of kin becomes almost an oppression, then they sometimes become religious. When men reach the limit of their intellectual endeavours after clearness and unity and are baffled, they sometimes become religious.

As Spencer was never at his wit's end practically, and was born too good to be troubled by a sense of sin, and as he had a somewhat lukewarm emotional nature, and was singularly devoid of any poetical or mystical sense, he was not likely to approach religion by either the practical or the emotional path. The third path, reached by baffled intelligence, was more or less closed by Spencer's postulate of the Unknowable, though there was even in this some tinge of religious feeling.

He had been brought up among those who held almost as an axiom to the belief that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," but this never seems to have meant anything practically or emotionally to him, while as a cosmological statement it seemed quite unverifiable. Most thinkers have tried by searching to find out God, to find some way of thinking of the ultimate origin, nature, and purpose of things, but at an early age Herbert Spencer foreclosed this quest, and was quite comfortable in so doing, chiefly, it must be suspected, because it never appealed to him save as a purely intellectual puzzle. "Nur was du fühlst, das ist dein Eigenthum."

Thus when he was twenty-six (1848) he wrote to his father, "As regards 'the ultimate nature of things or origin of them,' my position is simply that I know nothing about it, and never can know anything about it, and must be content in my ignorance. I deny nothing, and I affirm nothing, and to any one who says that the current theory is not true, I say just as I say to those who assert its truth—you have no evidence. Either alternative leaves us in inextricable difficulties. An uncaused Deity is just as inconceivable as an uncaused Universe. If the existence of matter from all eternity is incomprehensible, the creation of matter out of nothing is equally incomprehensible. Thus finding that either attempt to conceive the origin of things is futile, I am content to leave the question unsettled as the insoluble mystery"... (Autobiography, i. p. 346).

This was written in 1848, twelve years before First Principles, in which he afterwards sought more fully to justify the position which Huxley called "agnostic."