ENGLISH MEN OF SCIENCE

EDITED BY

J. REYNOLDS GREEN, D.Sc.

HERBERT SPENCER

HERBERT SPENCER

BY

J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
AUTHOR OF
THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE; THE SCIENCE OF LIFE;
OUTLINES OF ZOOLOGY; PROGRESS OF SCIENCE;
ETC. ETC.

PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY
J. M. DENT & CO. AND IN NEW
YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1906

CONTENTS

PAGE
Introduction [vii]
CHAP.
I. Heredity [1]
II. Nurture [7]
III. Period of Practical Work [17]
IV. Preparation for Life-Work [27]
V. Thinking out the Synthetic Philosophy [37]
VI. Characteristics: Physical and Intellectual [52]
VII. Characteristics: Emotional and Ethical [74]
VIII. Spencer as Biologist: The Data of Biology [93]
IX. Spencer as Biologist: Inductions of Biology [110]
X. Spencer as Champion of the Evolution-Idea [135]
XI. As regards Heredity [154]
XII. Factors of Organic Evolution [180]
XIII. Evolution Universal [209]
XIV. Psychological [232]
XV. Sociological [242]
XVI. The Population Question [259]
XVII. Beyond Science [269]
Conclusion [278]
Index [283]

INTRODUCTION

This volume attempts to give a short account of Herbert Spencer's life, an appreciation of his characteristics, and a statement of some of the services he rendered to science. Prominence has been given to his Autobiography, to his Principles of Biology, and to his position as a cosmic evolutionist; but little has been said of his psychology and sociology, which require another volume, or of his ethics and politics, or of his agnosticism—the whetstone of so many critics. Our appreciation of Spencer's services is therefore partial, but it may not for that reason fail in its chief aim, that of illustrating the working of one of the most scientific minds that ever lived, "whose excess of science was almost unscientific."

The story of Spencer's life is neither eventful nor picturesque, but it commands the interest of all who admire faith, courage, and loyalty to an ideal. It is a story of plain living and high thinking, of one who, though vexed by an extremely nervous temperament, was as resolute as a Hebrew prophet in delivering his message. It is the story of a quiet servant of science, indifferent to conventional honours, careless about "getting on," disliking controversy, sensationalism, and noise, trusting to the power of truth alone, that it must prevail.

Another aspect of interest is that Spencer was an arch-heretic, one of the flowers of Nonconformity, against theology and against metaphysics, against monarchy and against molly-coddling legislation, against classical education and against socialism, against war and against Weismann. So that we can hardly picture the man who has not some crow to pick with Spencer.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that we find extraordinary difference of opinion as to the value of the great Dissenter's deliverances. In 1894, Prof. Henry Sidgwick spoke of Herbert Spencer as "our most eminent living philosopher," and in the same sentence described him as "an impressive survival of the drift of thought in the first half of the nineteenth century." Some have likened him to a second Aristotle, while others assure us that the author of the Synthetic Philosophy was not a philosopher at all. Similarly there are scientists who tell us that Spencer may have been a great philosopher, but that he was too much of an a priori thinker to be of great account in science. Many critics, indeed, devote so much time and ability to demonstrating Spencer's incompetence, in this or that field of thought, that the reader is left with the impression that it must be a tower of strength which requires so many assaults. And there are others, neither philosophers nor scientists, who are content to dismiss Spencer with saying that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he. Yet this much is conceded by most, that Herbert Spencer was an unusually keen intellectual combatant, who took the evolution-formula into his strong hands as a master-key, and tried (teaching others to try better) to open therewith all the locked doors of the universe—all the immediate, though none of the ultimate, riddles, physical and biological, psychological and ethical, social and religious. And this also is conceded, that his life was signalised by absolute consecration to the pursuit of truth, by magnanimous disinterestedness as to rewards, by a resolute struggle against almost overwhelming difficulties, and by an entire fearlessness in delivering the message which he believed the Unknown had given him for the good of the world. In an age of specialism he held up the banner of the Unity of Science, and he actually completed, so far as he could complete, the great task of his life—greater than most men have even dreamed of—that of applying the evolution-formula to everything knowable. He influenced thought so largely, he inspired so many disciples, he left so many enduring works—enduring as seed-plots, if not also as achievements—that his death, writ large, was immortality.

[HERBERT SPENCER]

[CHAPTER I]

HEREDITY

Ancestry—Grandparents—Uncles—Parents

Remarkable parents often have commonplace children, and a genius may be born to a very ordinary couple, yet the importance of pedigree is so patent that our first question in regard to a great man almost invariably concerns his ancestry. In Herbert Spencer's case the question is rewarded.

Ancestry.—From the information afforded by the Autobiography in regard to ancestry remoter than grandparents, we learn that, on both sides of the house, Spencer came of a stock characterised by the spirit of nonconformity, by a correlated respect for something higher than legislative enactments, and by a regard for remote issues rather than immediate results. In these respects Herbert Spencer was true to his stock—an uncompromising nonconformist, with a conscience loyal to "principles having superhuman origins above rules having human origins," and with an eye ever directed to remote issues. Truly it required more than "ingrained nonconformity," loyalty to principles, and far-sighted prudence to make a Herbert Spencer, and hundreds unknown to fame must have shared a similar heritage; but the resemblances between some of Spencer's characteristics and those of his stock are too close to be disregarded. Disown him as many nonconformists did, they could not disinherit him. Nonconformity was in his blood and bone of his bone.

Grandparents.—Spencer's maternal grandfather, John Holmes of Derby, was a business man and an active Wesleyan, with "a little more than the ordinary amount of faculty." The grandmother, née Jane Brettell, is described as "commonplace," but her portrait suggests a more charitable verdict. Spencer's paternal grandfather was a schoolmaster, a "mechanical teacher," somewhat oppressed by life, and "extremely tender-hearted." If, when a newspaper was being read aloud, there came an account of something cruel or very unjust, he would exclaim: "Stop, stop, I can't bear it!" Of this sensitive temperament his illustrious grandson had a large share. The most notable of the four grandparents was Catherine Spencer, née Taylor, "of good type both physically and morally." "Born in 1758 and marrying in 1786, when nearly 28, she had eight children, led a very active life, and lived till 1843: dying at the age of 84 in possession of all her faculties." A personal follower of John Wesley, intensely religious, indefatigably unselfish, combining unswerving integrity with uniform good temper and affection, "she had all the domestic virtues in large measures." Her grandson has said that "nothing was specially manifest in her, intellectually considered, unless, indeed, what would be called sound common sense." Grandparents taken together count on an average for about a quarter of the individual inheritance, but we would note that in Herbert Spencer's case, Catherine Spencer should be regarded as a peculiarly dominant hereditary factor.

Uncles.—Two of her children died in infancy, the only surviving daughter (b. 1788) was an invalid; then came Herbert Spencer's father, William George (b. 1790), and there were four other sons. Henry Spencer, a year and a half younger than Herbert Spencer's father, was "a favourable sample of the type," independent with "a strong dash of chivalry," an energetic, though in the end unsuccessful man of business, an ardent radical and with "a marked sense of humour." The next son, John, had strong individuality; he was a notably self-assertive, obstinate solicitor, successful only in out-living all his brothers. Thomas, the next brother, began active life as a school-teacher near Derby, was a student of St John's, Cambridge, achieved honours (ninth wrangler), and became a clergyman of the Church of England at Hinton. He was "a reformer," "anticipating great movements," a "radical," a "Free-Trader," a "teetotaler," "an intensified Englishman." The youngest son, William, "distinguished less by extent of intellectual acquisitions than by general soundness of sense, joined with a dash of originality," carried on his father's school, and was one of Herbert Spencer's teachers. He was a Whig and a nonconformist, but more moderate than his brothers in either direction.

These facts in regard to Herbert Spencer's uncles corroborate the general thesis that heredity counts for much. The four uncles had individuality, rising sometimes to the verge of eccentricity; in their various paths of life they were independent, critical, self-assertive, and with a characteristic absence of reticence.

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 "Rev^d.," 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

Herbert Spencer was born at Derby on the 27th of April 1820. His father and mother had married early in the preceding year, at the age of about 29 and 25 respectively. Except a little sister, a year his junior, who lived for two years, he was practically the only child, for of the five infants who followed none lived more than a few days. As Spencer pathetically remarks: "It was one of my misfortunes to have no brothers, and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters." But is it not recompense enough of any marriage to produce a genius?

In reference to his father's breakdown soon after marriage, Spencer writes: "I doubt not that had he retained good health, my early education would have been much better than it was; for not only did his state of body and mind prevent him from paying as much attention to my intellectual culture as he doubtless wished, but irritability and depression checked that geniality of behaviour which fosters the affections and brings out in children the higher traits of nature. There are many whose lives would have been happier had their parents been more careful about themselves, and less anxious to provide for others."

Boyhood.—The father's ill-health had this compensation, that Herbert Spencer spent much of his childhood (æt. 4-7) in the country—at New Radford, near Nottingham. In his later years he had still vivid recollections of rambling among the gorse-bushes which towered above his head, of exploring the narrow tracks which led to unexpected places, and of picking the blue-bells "from among the prickly branches, which were here and there flecked with fragments of wool left by passing sheep." He was allowed freedom from ordinary "lessons," and enjoyed a long latent receptive period.

In 1827 the family returned to Derby, but for some time the boy's life was comparatively unrestrained. There was some gardening to do—an educational discipline far too little appreciated—and there was "almost nominal" school-drill; but there was plenty of time for exploring the neighbourhood, for fishing and bird-nesting, for watching the bees and the gnat-larvæ, for gathering mushrooms and blackberries. "Beyond the pleasurable exercise and the gratification of my love of adventure, there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous knowledge of things, and the perceptions were beneficially disciplined." "Most children are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would readily pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones. My father was wise in such matters, and I was not simply allowed but encouraged to enter on natural history."

He had the run of a farm at Ingleby during holidays; he enjoyed fishing in the Trent, in which he was within an ace of being drowned when about ten years old; he was a keen collector of insects, watching their metamorphoses, and often drawing and describing his captures; and he was also encouraged to make models. In short, he had in a simple way not a few of the disciplines which modern pædagogics—helped greatly by Spencer himself—has recognised to be salutary.

In his boyhood Spencer was extremely prone to castle-building or day-dreaming—"a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature life; finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or less practicable." For his tendency to absorption, without which there has seldom been greatness of achievement, he was often reproached by his father in the words: "As usual, Herbert, thinking only of one thing at a time."

He did not read tolerably until he was over seven years old, and Sandford and Merton was the first book that prompted him to read of his own accord. He rapidly advanced to The Castle of Otranto and similar romances, all the more delectable that they were forbidden fruits. While John Stuart Mill was working at the Greek classics, Herbert Spencer was reading novels in bed. But the appetite for reading was soon cloyed, and he became incapable of enjoying anything but novels and travels for more than an hour or two at a time.

School.—As to more definite intellectual culture, the first school period (before ten years) seems to have counted for little, and is interesting only because it revealed the boy's general aversion to rote-learning and dogmatic statements. Shielded from direct punishment, he lived in an atmosphere of reproof, and this "naturally led to a state of chronic antagonism." But when he was ten (1830) he became one of his Uncle William's pupils, and this led to some progress. There was drawing, map-making, experimenting, Greek Testament without grammar, but comparatively little lesson-learning. "As a consequence, I was not in continual disgrace." The boy was quick in all matters appealing to reason, and "had a somewhat remarkable perception of locality and the relations of position generally, which in later life disappeared."

Apart from school he had the advantage of hearing discussions between his father and his friends on all sorts of topics, of preparing for the scientific demonstrations which his father occasionally gave, of sampling scientific periodicals which came to the Derby Philosophical Society of which his father was honorary secretary, and of reading such works as Rollin's Ancient History and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was continually prompted to "intellectual self-help," and was continually stimulated by the question, "Can you tell me the cause of this?"

"Always the tendency in himself, and the tendency strengthened in me, was to regard everything as naturally caused; and I doubt not that while the notion of causation was thus rendered much more definite in me than in most of my age, there was established a habit of seeking for causes, as well as a tacit belief in the universality of causation." "A tacit belief in the universality of causation" seems a big item to be put to the credit of a boy of thirteen, but we have the echo of it in Clerk Maxwell's continual boyish question, "What is the go of this?" That the question of cause was acute in both cases implies that both had hereditarily fine brains, but it also suggests that the question is normal in those who are naturally educated. The sensitive, irritable, invalid father was no ideal parent, but he did not snub his son's inquisitiveness, nor coerce his independence, nor appeal to authority as such as a reason for accepting any belief.

Spencer has given in his Autobiography a picture of himself as a boy of thirteen. His constitution was distinguished "rather by good balance than by great vital activity"; there was "a large margin of latent power"; he was more fleet than any of his school-fellows. He was decidedly peaceful, but when enraged no considerations of pain or danger or anything else restrained him. He was affectionate and tender-hearted, but his most marked moral trait was disregard of authority. His memory was rather below par than above; he was "averse to lesson-learning and the acquisition of knowledge after the ordinary routine methods," but he picked up general information with facility; he could not bear prolonged reading or the receptive attitude. From about ten years of age to thirteen he habitually went on Sunday morning with his father to the Friends' Meeting House, and in the evening with his mother to the Methodist Chapel. "I do not know that any marked effect on me followed; further, perhaps, than that the alternation tended to enlarge my views by presenting me with differences of opinion and usage." While John Mill kept his son away from conventional religious influences, Spencer's father excluded none; and the result seems to have been much the same in the two cases. In this and other connections, Prof. W. H. Hudson points out the contrast between the methods of the two fathers of the two remarkable sons—John Stuart Mill was constrained along carefully chosen paths, Herbert Spencer enjoyed more elbow-room and free-play, what German biologists call "Abänderungsspielraum."

At thirteen, Herbert Spencer had little Latin and less Greek; he was wholly uninstructed in "English"; he had no knowledge of mathematics, English history, ancient literature, or biography. "Concerning things around, however, and their properties, I knew a good deal more than is known by most boys." Through physics and chemistry in certain lines, through entomology and general natural history, through miscellaneous reading in physiology and geography, he had in many ways an intellectual grip of his environment; but on the lines of the "humanities" he was wofully uneducated.

On the other hand, his education had been stimulating and emancipating, and even as a boy of thirteen his intelligence was alert and independent. Much in the open air, he had kept an open mind. He had learned to use his brains and to enjoy nature. After that, everything is possible.

At Hinton.—When Herbert Spencer was thirteen (in the summer of 1833) his parents took him to his Uncle Thomas, at Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath. The journey was a revelation to the boy, and his early days at Hinton were full of delight, especially in regard to the new butterflies. But when he discovered that he had come to stay and to be schooled, he had a feverish Heimweh, and soon followed his parents homewards. "That a boy of thirteen should, without any food but bread and water and two or three glasses of beer, and without sleep for two nights, walk 48 miles one day, 47 the next, and some 20 the third, is surprising enough." It was a rather absurd boyish escapade, mainly due to lack of parental frankness, but not without the compliment implied in all nostalgia, and it gives us an inkling of Spencer's obstinacy and doggedness.

A fortnight after the escapade, the runaway returned peacefully to Hinton—content with his dramatic assertion of himself. For about three years he remained under his uncle's tutorship, and this was a formative period. Hinton stands high in a hilly country, between Bath and Frome, with picturesque places all round. His uncle was "a man of energetic, strongly-marked character," "intellectually above the average," with a good deal of originality of thought. Like his kindly wife, he belonged to the evangelical school.

"The daily routine was not a trying one. In the morning Euclid and Latin, in the afternoon commonly gardening, or sometimes a walk; and in the evening, after a little more study, usually of algebra I think, came reading, with occasionally chess. I became at that time very fond of chess, and acquired some skill." The aversion to linguistic studies continued, but there was an enthusiasm for mathematics and physics. To a modern educationist the regime at Hinton cannot but seem narrow; there was no history, no letters, no concrete science, and no play. There was certainly no over-pressure, but there was some brain-stretching and some salutary moral discipline. Stimulating, doubtless, was the table-talk and Mr Spencer's arguments with his nephew, whom he found "very deficient in the principle of Fear." We must not forget the visits to London (including the then private Zoological Gardens), or the first appearances in print—two letters in the newly started Bath Magazine on curiously shaped floating crystals of common salt, and on the New Poor Law! In June 1836, Herbert Spencer returned to Derby, benefited by the rural life and bracing climate of Hinton, "strong, in good health, and of good stature."

Looking backward after many years, Herbert Spencer felt that he was treated as a youth "with much more consideration and generosity than might have been expected. There was shown great patience in prosecuting what seemed by no means a hopeful undertaking." It is interesting, of course, to speculate what might have been the result if the boy's education had been less of a family affair; and it would be unfair to conclude that the success which attended the easy-going, personal, familiar instruction of this boy of uncommon brains would also attend a similar treatment of those of humbler parts. But would it not be well to make the experiment oftener, since the material abounds, and since the results of the conventional discipline of public schools and the like are not dazzlingly successful?

Spencer felt strongly, as he indulged in retrospect, that his well-meaning educators "had to deal with intractable material—an individuality too stiff to be easily moulded." That we may, in time, come to have not an occasional stiff haulm with a big ear, but a whole crop of them, must be the prayer of all who believe in education and race-progress.

Another of Spencer's retrospective convictions is one that makes all human nature kin—that he was not so black as he was painted. His father and his uncle had been eminently "good" boys, and they gauged boy-nature by their own standard. Had he gone to a public school, Spencer thinks that his "extrinsically-wrong actions would have been many, but the intrinsically-wrong actions would have been few." This distinction will doubtless appeal to the wise.

At Home.—For a year and a half after leaving Hinton, Herbert Spencer remained at home, enjoying another period of freedom. He made in a day, without previous experience, a survey of his father's small property at Kirk Ireton—two fields and three cottages with their gardens; he made designs for a country house; he hit upon a remarkable property of the circle; and he fished. Meanwhile, however, his father who "held, and rightly held, that there are few functions higher than that of the educator," induced him to engage in school-work, and this experiment lasted for three months. It appears to have been directly a success, Spencer's lessons were at once "effective and pleasure-giving," and "complete harmony continued throughout the entire period"; it was not less important eventually, for we cannot doubt that part of the effectiveness of Herbert Spencer's book on Education is traceable to the fact that he had, for a term at least, personal experience of teaching.

Even at this early age (17 years) Spencer had ideals of "intellectual culture, moral discipline, and physical training." But as he disliked mechanical routine, had a great intolerance of monotony, and had ideas of his own, it seems likely enough that if he had embraced the profession of teacher, he would sooner or later have "thrown it up in disgust." The experiment was not to be tried further, however, for in November 1837, his uncle William wrote from London that he had obtained for his nephew a post under Mr Charles Fox as a railway engineer. "The profession of a civil engineer had already been named as one appropriate for me; and this opening at once led to the adoption of it."

We may sum up the first two periods of Spencer's life. The period of childhood was marked by a more than usual freedom from the conventional responsibilities of juvenile tasks, by the large proportion of open-air life, and by much more intercourse with adults than with other children. The table talk between his father and uncles had an important moulding influence, all the more that there was "a comparatively small interest in gossip." "Their conversation ever tended towards the impersonal.... There was no considerable leaning towards literature.... It was rather the scientific interpretations and moral aspects of things which occupied their thoughts." The period of boyhood and of more definite education was marked by freedom and variety, by a relative absence of linguistic discipline, by a preponderance of scientific training, by much family influence, and by an unusual amount of independent thinking.

[CHAPTER III]

PERIOD OF PRACTICAL WORK

Engineering—Many Inventions—Glimpse of Evolution-Idea—A Resting Period—Beginning to Write—Experimenting with Life

Herbert Spencer's life after boyhood may be conveniently divided into four periods:—

1. For about ten years he was engaged in varied practical work—surveying, plan-making, engineering, secretarial business, and superintendence (1837-1846).

2. After an unattached couple of years, during which he continued his self-education, experimented, invented, and meditated, there began a period of miscellaneous literary work, of journalism, and essay-writing, during which he wrote his Principles of Psychology and felt his way to his System (1848-1860).

3. At the age of forty, he settled down to something like unity of occupation—developing and writing The Synthetic Philosophy (1860-1882).

4. Finally, during a prolonged period of pronounced invalidism, he withdrew almost completely from social life, husbanding his meagre supply of mental energy for the completion of his System, the revision of his works, and his Autobiography (1882-1903).

Engineering.—For about ten years (1837-46) Herbert Spencer had a varied experience of practical life. He began as assistant, at £80 a year, to Mr Charles Fox, who had been one of Mr George Spencer's pupils,—a man of mechanical genius, who was at that time resident engineer of the London division of the "London and Birmingham" railway, and afterwards became well known as the designer and constructor of the Exhibition-Building of 1851. Spencer had surveying and measuring, drawing and calculating to do, and he threw off the slackness which marked his school-days. During the first six months in London he never went to any place of amusement and never read a novel, but gave his leisure to mathematical questions and to suggesting little inventions or improved methods.

A transference for the summer months to Wembly, near Harrow, gave him even more time for study, and we read of an appliance by which he proposed to facilitate some kinds of sewing. He seems to have pleased his employer well, for in September 1838 he was advanced to a post of draughtsman in connection with the "Gloucester and Birmingham" railway, at a salary of £120 yearly. Thus the next two years were spent at Worcester, where he had his first experience of working alongside of other young men, to whom he appeared rather an "oddity," though not one to be "quizzed." His "mental excursiveness" grew stronger and stronger, and had occasionally useful results, leading, for instance, to an article in The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal (May 1839) on a new plan of projecting the spiral courses in skew bridges, to a re-invention of Nicholson's Cyclograph, and to an improvement in the apparatus for giving and receiving the mail-bags carried by trains.

Many Inventions.—In 1840, Spencer became engineering secretary to his chief, Captain Moorson, and went to live in the little village of Powick, about three miles out of Worcester. He enjoyed his work, and had the new experience of establishing relations with a number of children, with whom he soon became a favourite. Long afterwards, in his declining years he found much gratification in making friends with children, and referred to it quaintly as "a vicarious phase of the philoprogenitive instinct." It was at Powick that Spencer first began to have a conscience about his very defective spelling (his morals had always been sans reproche) and to take an interest in style. It was at Powick, too, in a physical and social environment that suited him, that Spencer invented his "Velocimeter," a little instrument for showing by inspection the velocity of an engine, and two or three other devices. He had inherited his father's constructive imagination, and his father's discipline had increased it. The father wrote on July 3rd, 1840, "I am glad you find your inventive powers are beginning to develop themselves. Indulge a grateful feeling for it. Recollect, also, the never-ceasing pains taken with you on that point in early life." And the son remarks gratefully that this conveys a lesson to educators; the inherited endowment is much, but the fostering of it is also much. "Culture of the humdrum sort, given by those who ordinarily pass for teachers, would have left the faculty undeveloped." On the whole, however, Spencer attached most importance to the hereditary endowment, for he goes on to say that Edison, "probably the most remarkable inventor who ever lived," was a self-trained man, and that Sir Benjamin Baker, "the designer and constructor of the Forth Bridge, the grandest and most original bridge in the world, received no regular engineering education." It was at Powick, too, that place of many inventions, that Herbert Spencer (aetat. 20) made the intimate acquaintance of an "intelligent, unconventional, amiable, and in various ways attractive" young lady, who "tended to diminish his brusquerie." Luckily or unluckily, the young lady was engaged; and Spencer remarks, "It was pretty clear that had it not been for the pre-engagement our intimacy would have grown into something serious. This would have been a misfortune, for she had little or nothing and my prospects were none of the brightest." Here the ancestral prudence crops out.

Glimpses of Evolution-Idea.—The year 1840-41 was "a nomadic period," of bridge-building at Bromsgroove and Defford, of "castle-building," too, for he dreamt of making a fortune by successful inventions, of testing engines, and other routine duties,—a life involving considerable wear and tear which began to tell on Spencer's eyes. During this period he renewed his youth by collecting fossils, and "making a collection is," as he afterwards said, "the proper commencement of any natural history study; since, in the first place, it conduces to a concrete knowledge which gives definiteness to the general ideas subsequently reached, and, further, it creates an indirect stimulus by giving gratification to that love of acquisition which exists in all." It was then that the purchase of Lyell's Principles of Geology led him, curiously enough, to adopt the supposition that organic forms have arisen, not by special creation, but by progressive modifications, physically caused and inherited. In spite of Lyell's chapter refuting Lamarck's views concerning the origin of species, it was with Lamarck that Spencer, at the age of twenty, sided. The idea of natural genesis was in harmony with the general idea of the order of Nature towards which Spencer had been growing. "My belief in it never afterwards wavered, much as I was, in after years, ridiculed for entertaining it."

"The incident illustrates the general truth that the acceptance of this or that particular belief, is in part a question of the type of mind. There are some minds to which the marvellous and the unaccountable strongly appeal, and which even resent any attempt to bring the genesis of them within comprehension. There are other minds which, partly by nature and partly by culture, have been led to dislike a quiescent acceptance of the unintelligible; and which push their explorations until causation has been carried to its confines. To this last order of minds mine, from the beginning, belonged."

Spencer's engagement with Capt. Moorson came to a natural termination, and an offer of a permanent post on the Birmingham and Gloucester railway was declined, one motive being a desire to prepare for the future by a course of mathematical study, another being to work at an idea his father had arrived at of an electro-magnetic engine. Thus his twenty-first birthday was spent at home in Derby, after an absence of three and a half years,—which had been on the whole "satisfactory, in so far as personal improvement and professional success were concerned."

A Resting Period.—But when he got home he found his study of a work on the Differential Calculus a weariness to the flesh. "To apply day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of increasing ability," was not in him, though he could work hard when the end in view was definite or large enough. Moreover an article in the Philosophical Magazine led to an immediate abandonment of the idea of an electro-magnetic engine. "Thus, within a month of my return to Derby, it became manifest that, in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp, I had left behind a place of vantage from which there might probably have been ascents to higher places."

As a consolation for what was at the time a disappointment, Herbert Spencer made a herbarium, which still retained in 1894 a specimen of Enchanter's Nightshade gathered in the grove skirting the river near Darley. In company with Edward Lott, with whom he formed a life-long friendship, he often spent the early summer morning, in rowing up the Derwent, which in those days was rural and not unpicturesque above Derby. As they rowed they sang popular songs, making the woods echo with their voices, and now and then arresting their "secular matins" for the purpose of gathering a plant. It is refreshing to read of Spencer having in his head a considerable stock of sentimental ballads.

It was during this fallow year that at the age of one-and-twenty he went with his father on a walking tour in the Isle of Wight, and first saw the sea. "The emotion produced in me was, I think, a mixture of joy and awe,—the awe resulting from the manifestation of size and power, and the joy, I suppose, from the sense of freedom given by limitless expanse." His father and he were good companions.

We read of various activities during this period,—of investigations, with inadequate mathematics, concerning the strength of girders, of experiments in electrotyping and the like, of botanical excursions, of some enthusiastic exercise in part-singing, drawing and modelling. In the early summer of 1842 Spencer paid a visit to his old haunts at Hinton. "The journey left its mark because, in the course of it, I found that practice in modelling had increased my perception of beauty in form. A good-looking girl, who was one of our fellow-passengers for a short interval, had remarkably fine eyes: and I had much quiet satisfaction in observing their forms." Our hero had not much sense of humour.

Beginning to write.—Of greater importance is the fact that Spencer began in 1842 to write letters to The Nonconformist on social problems, in which prominence was given to such conceptions as the universality of law and causation, progressive adaptation in organisms and in Man, and the tendency to equilibrium through self-adjustment. "Every day in every life there is a budding out of incidents severally capable of leading to large results; but the immense majority of them end as buds, only now and then does one grow into a branch, and very rarely does such a branch outgrow and overshadow all others." The visit to Hinton led to political conversations with Thomas Spencer, to a letter of introduction to the editor of The Nonconformist, to the letters on "The Proper Sphere of Government," to the Social Statics and eventually to the Synthetic Philosophy!

Spencer's next activity was an inquiry into his father's system of short-hand, which he found to be better than Pitman's. He passed to speculations on the methods to be followed in forming a universal language, and to shrewd criticisms of the decimal system of enumeration. In the autumn of 1842 he interested himself enthusiastically in "The Complete Suffrage Movement." For a youth of twenty-two he took a big plunge into politics. "It produced in me a high tide of mental energy"; the signature on a draft democratic bill "has a sweep and vigour exceeding that of any other signature I ever made, either before or since."

In the spring of 1843 Herbert Spencer went to London and tried very unsuccessfully to get editors to accept his wares. He made a pamphlet of his Nonconformist letters, but perhaps a hundred copies were sold! "The printer's bill was £10 2s. 6d., and the publisher's payment to me on the first year's sales was fourteen shillings and threepence!"

Experimenting with Life.—Spencer's half year in London came to little. As he says, he was too much "in the mood of Mr Micawber,—waiting for something to turn up, and waiting in vain." So he raised the siege and retreated to Derby. There he read Mill's System of Logic, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and some of Emerson's essays. He tried his hand at improving watches, printing-presses, type-making, and what not; he speculated on the rôle of carbon in the earth's history, and on phrenology; and in 1844 he migrated to Birmingham to be sub-editor of a short-lived paper called The Pilot.

It was then that he made a superficial acquaintance with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, only to give it "summary dismissal." He was deterred from pursuing the acquaintance by the "utter incredibility" of the proposition that time and space are "nothing but" subjective forms, and by "want of confidence in the reasonings of any one who could accept a proposition so incredible."

After about a month of sub-editing, he reverted to his former profession of railway engineer, having been commissioned to help with mapping out a projected branch line between Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. The country was dreary enough, but Spencer had abundant open-air work, and it was during this short period that he made a lasting friendship with Mr W. F. Loch which was important in his life.

Then followed an interval, partly in London and partly in the fields of Warwickshire, occupied in various ways connected with railway development, which was then becoming a mania. He seems to have done his work effectively, but it led to no important personal results, and the failure of his chief employer's schemes in 1846 ended Spencer's connection with railway projects and engineering. In afterwards discussing the question whether he should have made a good engineer or not, Spencer notes with his characteristic self-impartiality that he had adequate inventiveness but insufficient patience, enough of intelligence but too little tact. He had an "aversion to mere mechanical humdrum work," "inadequate regard for precedent," no interest in financial details, and a "lack of tact in dealing with men, especially superiors." The frank analysis is interesting, especially in indicating how Spencer was weak where Darwin was strong, in "la patience suivie," in dogged persistence at detailed work. It may seem strange to say this when we think of his indomitable perseverance with his life-work, but this was quite consistent with a "constitutional idleness," with a shirking from everything tedious except his own thinking. As Thomas Hardy says of one of his characters, "he was a thinker by instinct, but he was only a worker by effort." He never learned or tried to learn what it was to put his nose to the grindstone: he would not learn "lessons," he recoiled from languages, he baulked at the differential calculus, he trifled with Kant and Comte, he was always "an impatient reader." He elected to think for himself, and had the defect of this rare quality.

[CHAPTER IV]

PREPARATION FOR LIFE-WORK

More Inventions—Sub-editing—Avowal of Evolutionism—Friendships—Books and Essays—Crystallisation of his Thought—Settling to Life-work

Thrown out of regular employment once more, Spencer was left free for a time to follow his own bent. He lived a "miscellaneous and rather futile kind of life," reading a little and thinking much over a proposed book on Social Statics, holidaying a good deal and trying in vain to make money by inventions.

More Inventions.—In 1845 he had a scheme of quasi-aerial locomotion: not a flying machine but "something uniting terrestrial traction with aerial suspension"; but even on paper it broke down. In 1846 he patented an effective "binding pin" for fastening loose sheets, which might have been a financial success if it had been properly pushed. About the same time he was speculating on a method of multiplying decorative patterns,—a sort of "mental kaleidoscope," and on a systematic nomenclature for colours, analogous to that on which the points of the compass are named. More ambitious was a new planing engine and an improvement in type-making, but neither got much beyond the paper stage. In fact Spencer discovered, as so many have done, that it is one thing to invent and another thing to make inventions boil the pot. For a year and a half, he lamented, time and energy and money had been simply thrown away. The proceeds of the binding pin just about served to pay for his share in the cost of the planing machine patent.

Seven years spent in experimenting towards a livelihood had not brought Spencer much success. In point of fact he was "stranded," and there was talk of emigration to New Zealand, or of "reverting to the ancestral profession" of teaching, but the year of suspense ended with his appointment (1848) as sub-editor in The Economist office, at a salary of one hundred guineas a year. "Thus an end was at last put to the seemingly futile part of my life which filled the space between twenty-one and twenty-eight—futile in respect of material progress, but in other respects perhaps not futile."

He had enjoyed a varied intercourse with men and things during these seven lean years of railway-making, sub-editing, experimenting, inventing; he had had experience of field work and office work, of doing what he was told and of exercising authority; he had had time for drawing, modelling, music, and some natural history; he had come to know something of life's ups and downs. "In short, there had been gained a more than usually heterogeneous, though superficial, acquaintance with the world, animate and inanimate. And along with the gaining of it had gone a running commentary of speculative thought about the various matters presented." Vivendo discimus.

Sub-editing.—Spencer's duties as sub-editor of The Economist were not onerous; he had abundant leisure for reading and reflection, for music and that pleasant conversation which is one of the ends of life. He had great Sunday evening talks with his broad-minded philanthropic uncle Thomas who had come to live in London, and he began to know interesting people, notably, perhaps, Mr G. H. Lewes. His reading was mainly in connection with the journal he had charge of, and Coleridge's Idea of Life, with its doctrine of individuation, was the only serious work which seems to have left any impression during that early period. He tried Ruskin but recoiled disappointed from his "multitudinous absurdities." He also tried vegetarianism but found that it lowered his bodily and mental vigour.

He worked hard at his first book, sitting late over it with an assiduity to which he looked back with astonishment in after years. The subject of the book was "A system of Social and Political Morality" and he had great searchings for a suitable title, his own preference for "Demostatics" yielding finally in favour of "Social Statics." This phrase had been used by Comte as the heading of one of the divisions of his Sociology, but Spencer was quite unaware of this, and at that time "knew nothing more of Auguste Comte, than that he was a French philosopher." There were also great difficulties in securing publication, although to get the work printed and circulated without loss was as much as he hoped for. "At that time I was, and have since remained, one of those classed by Dr Johnson as fools—one whose motive in writing books was not, and never has been, that of making money."

What Spencer calls "an idle year" (1850-1) followed the publication of Social Statics, but it was then that he attended a course of lectures by Prof. Owen on Comparative Osteology, and doubtless got a firmer hold of those principles of organic architecture which make even dry bones live. It was then, too, that he had walks with George Henry Lewes, which were profitable on both sides. Lewes received an impulse which awakened interest in scientific inquiries, and Spencer became interested in philosophy at large. He read Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy, and there was one memorable ramble during which a volume by Milne-Edwards in Lewes's bag was the means of vivifying for Spencer the idea of "the physiological division of labour." "Though the conception was not new to me, as is shown towards the end of Social Statics, yet the mode of formulating it was; and the phrase thereafter played a part in the course of my thought." About the same time, in preparing a review of Carpenter's Physiology, he came across von Baer's formula expressing the course of development through which every living creature passes—"the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity"; and from this very important consequences ensued.

Through Lewes he got to know Carlyle, but the acquaintance was never deepened. While he admired Carlyle's vigour and originality, he was repelled by his passionate incoherence of thought, his prejudices, his dogmatism, his "insensate dislike of science." "Carlyle's nature was one which lacked co-ordination, alike intellectually and morally. Under both aspects, he was, in a great measure, chaotic." To Carlyle, on the other hand, Spencer appeared "an unmeasurable ass."

Avowal of Evolutionism.—In 1852 Spencer definitely began his work as a pioneer of Evolution Doctrine by publishing the famous Leader article on "The Development Hypothesis," in which he avowed his belief that the whole world of life is the result of an age-long process of natural transmutation. In the same year he wrote for The Westminster Review another important essay, "A Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility," in which he sought to show that the degree of fertility is inversely proportionate to the grade of development, or conversely that the attainment of higher degrees of evolution must be accompanied by lower rates of multiplication. Towards the close of the article he came within an ace of recognising that the struggle for existence was a factor in organic evolution. It is profoundly instructive to find that at a time when pressure of population was practically interesting men's minds, not Spencer only, but Darwin and Wallace, were being independently led from this social problem to a biological theory of organic evolution. There could be no better illustration, as Prof. Geddes has pointed out, of the Comtian thesis that science is a "social phenomenon."

Friendships.—About this time a strong friendship arose between Spencer and Miss Evans (George Eliot). To him she was "the most admirable woman, mentally," he ever met, and he speaks enthusiastically of her large intelligence working easily, her remarkable philosophical powers, her habitual calm, her deep and broad sympathies. It is interesting to learn that he strongly advised her to write novels, and that she tried in vain to induce him to read Comte. As they were often together and the best of friends, the gossips had it that he was in love with her and that they were about to be married. "But neither of these reports was true."

Another friendship, formed about the same time, was an important factor in Spencer's life; he got to know Huxley and thus came into close touch with a scientific worker of the first rank, useful alike in suggestion and in criticism. He found another friend in Tyndall, whom he greatly admired for his combination of the poetic with the scientific mood, for "his passion for Nature quite Wordsworthian in its intensity," and for his interest in "the relations between science at large and the great questions which lie beyond science."

In 1853, by the death of his uncle Thomas, who had persistently overworked himself, Spencer received a bequest of £500. On the strength of this and the extended literary connections which the good offices of Mr Lewes and Mr (afterwards Prof.) David Masson had secured for him, he resigned his sub-editorship of The Economist in order to obtain leisure for larger works. He always believed in burning his ships before a struggle.

Looking back on the "Economist" period, Spencer felt that his later career had been "mainly determined by the conceptions which were then initiated and the friendships which were formed."

Books and Essays.—Spencer's life of greater freedom began with a holiday in Switzerland (1853), which "fully equalled his anticipations in respect of its grandeur, but did not do so in respect of its beauty." The tour was greatly enjoyed, for Spencer was a lover of mountains, but some excesses in walking seem to have overtaxed his heart, and immediately after his return "there commenced cardiac disturbances which never afterwards entirely ceased; and which doubtless prepared the way for the more serious derangements of health subsequently established."

For a time he settled down to essay-writing; e.g., on "Method in Education," in which he sought to justify his own experience of his father's non-coercive liberating methods by affiliating these with the Method of Nature; on "Manners and Fashions," in which he protested against unthinking subservience to social conventions, some of which are mere survivals of more primitive times without present-day justification; on "The Genesis of Science," in which he showed how the sciences have grown out of common knowledge; and on "Railway Morals and Railway Policy," in which he made some salutary disclosures with characteristic fearlessness.

Spencer's second book, "The Principles of Psychology," began to be written in 1854 in a summer-house at Tréport, and it was in the same year that the author made his first acquaintance with Paris. Preoccupied with his task, he wandered from Jersey to Brighton, from London to Derby, often writing about five hours a day, and thinking with but little intermission. The result was that he finished the book in about a year and almost finished his own career. The nervous breakdown that followed cost him a year and a half for recuperation, and his pursuit of truth was ever afterwards involved with a pursuit of health.

In search of health Spencer reverted to the best of his ability to a simple life, but he found it difficult not to think. Thought rode behind him when he tried horseback exercise, and novels brought only sleeplessness. He tried yachting and he tried fishing, shower-baths and sea-bathing, playing with children and sleeping in a haunted room, but the cure was slow; music was almost the only thing he could enjoy with impunity. It was when fishing one morning in Loch Doon that he vented his first oath, at the age of thirty-six, because his line was tangled, and became, he tells us, more fully aware of the irritability produced by his nervous disorder!

As entire idleness seemed futile, and as two and a half years had elapsed since he had made any money, Spencer returned to London (1857)—to a home with children—and began in a leisurely way to write more essays. He composed the article on "Progress: its Law and Cause" at the pathetically slow rate of about half a page per day, and the effort proved beneficial. A significant essay entitled, "Transcendental Physiology," dates from the same year, and during an angling holiday in Scotland he wrote another on the "Origin and Function of Music." Starting from the fact that feeling tends to discharge itself in muscular contractions, including those of the vocal organs, he sought to show that music is a development of the natural language of the emotions.

Crystallisation of his Thought.—Spencer settled down in London in a home "with a lively circle," and pursued his calling as a thinker with quiet resolution. He had Sunday afternoon walks and talks with Huxley, and he occasionally dined out to meet interesting people such as Buckle and Grote; but the tenor of his life was uninterrupted by much incident. In this year he published a volume of essays new and old, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative; and this was probably in part responsible for a great unification in Spencer's thought. It was in the beginning of 1858 that he made the first sketch of his System, and on the 9th of January he wrote to his father as follows: "Within the last ten days my ideas on various matters have suddenly crystallised into a complete whole. Many things which were before lying separate have fallen into their places as harmonious parts of a system that admits of logical development from the simplest general principles."

In this annus mirabilis (1858) when Darwin and Wallace read their papers at the Linnæan Society expounding the idea of Natural Selection, Spencer was also thinking keenly along evolutionary lines. He ventured on a defence of the Nebular Hypothesis and a criticism of Owen's Vertebral Theory of the Skull; and he was working at the question of the form and symmetry of animals, which he interpreted as "determined by the relations of the parts to incident forces." Vigorous as he was in his intelligence, he was still unable to work for more than about three hours a day, and his pecuniary prospects were dismal. In view of his determination to go on working out his System, it was a fortunate chance that led him in an emergency to discover that he could greatly increase his productivity by dictating instead of writing.

Spencer made various efforts (1859-60) to secure some Government appointment which would afford him a steady income and yet leave him free for his life-work, but as nothing came of these, he went on quietly with his essay-writing, with many pleasant holidays interspersed, and produced his "Illogical Geology," "The Social Organism," "Prison Ethics," "The Physiology of Laughter," and so on.

Settling to his life-work.—Baffled in other plans, he at length organised a scheme of publishing his projected series of volumes by subscription. His influential friends headed the list and four hundred names were soon secured in Britain; the disinterested energy of an American admirer, Prof. E. S. Youmans, raised the total to six hundred. And thus Spencer, at the age of forty, handicapped by lack of means and health, calmly sat down to a task which was calculated to occupy him for twenty years.... "To think that an amount of mental exertion great enough to tax the energies of one in full health and vigour, and at his ease in respect of means, should be undertaken by one who, having only precarious resources, had become so far a nervous invalid that he could not with any certainty count upon his powers from one twenty-four hours to another! However, as the result proved, the apparently unreasonable hope was entertained, if not wisely, still fortunately. For though the whole of the project has not been executed, yet the larger part of it has." In one form of faith Spencer was in no wise lacking.

[CHAPTER V]

THINKING OUT THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY

Thinking by Stratagem—The System Grows—Difficulties—Italy—Habits of Work—Sociology—Ill-health—Citizenship—Visit to America—Closing Years

Having theoretically secured the requisite number of subscribers to the projected series of volumes, Spencer tried to settle down to "something like unity of occupation." In the Spring of 1860 he began the First Principles—only to break down before he had finished the first chapter; and the same depressing experience was continually repeated. Fortunately for Spencer's peace of mind, his uncle William left him some money; one may well say fortunately, since the number of defaulters in the subscription list was so large that in the absence of other resources even the first volume could not have been published.

Thinking by Stratagem.—Spencer's devices for keeping off the cerebral congestion which work induced were many and various—some almost laughable, if the whole business had not been so tragic. He would ramble into the country, find a sheltered nook or sunny bank, do a little work, and move on like a "Scholar Gipsy"; he would take his amanuensis on the Regent's Park water, row vigorously for five minutes, dictate for fifteen, and so on da capo; he frequented an open racquet-court at Pentonville, and sandwiched games and First Principles; even in the Highlands he would dictate while he rowed. It was altogether like thinking by stratagem, and the tension of working against time became so irksome, that he issued a notice to the subscribers that successive numbers would come out when they were ready. Nevertheless, he completed the First Principles in June 1862.

The System Grows.—Having safely set forth his doctrine, Spencer turned with zest to relaxation, acting as cicerone to his friends at the International Exhibition, climbing in Wales, fishing in Scotland, revisiting Paris, and so forth. The years passed in alternate work and play, and the next great event was the publication of the first volume of the Principles of Biology in 1864. In spite of inadequate preparation Spencer produced by the strength of his intelligence a biological classic. At the time, of course, little notice was taken of it; thus in "The Athenæum" of 5th November 1864, a paragraph concerning the book commenced thus: "This is but one of two volumes, and the two but a part of a larger work: we cannot therefore but announce it." "In 1864," Spencer says, "not one educated person in ten or more knew the meaning of the word Biology; and among those who knew it, whether critics or general readers, few cared to know anything about the subject" (Autobiography, ii. p. 105).

It was in the same year (1864) that Spencer formulated his views on the classification of the sciences and his reasons for dissenting from the philosophy of Comte.

Of considerable interest was the formation of a decemvirate of Spencer's friends, which was first called "The Blastodermic" and afterwards the "X" club. It consisted of Huxley, Tyndall, Hooker, Lubbock, Frankland, Busk, Hirst, Spottiswoode, and Spencer, with one vacancy which was never filled up. The members dined together occasionally and talked at large. "Among its members were three who became Presidents of the Royal Society, and five who became Presidents of the British Association. Of the others one was for a time President of the College of Surgeons; another President of the Chemical Society; and a third of the Mathematical Society...." "Of the nine I was the only one who was fellow of no society, and had presided over nothing." The club lasted for at least twenty-three years (1887), and had considerable influence both on its members and externally.

In 1865 Spencer took considerable interest in a new weekly journal, called "The Reader," in which many prominent workers were implicated, but the enterprise ended in disappointment, unless, indeed, it was a step towards the establishment of Nature. In this and the following year he busied himself with an investigation regarding circulation in plants,—the only concrete piece of biological work he ever indulged in. But the great event of 1866 was the completion of The Principles of Biology.

Difficulties.—In the beginning of 1866 Spencer found that many of the subscribers to his serial publications had withdrawn, and that not a few were much in arrears, and he sorrowfully decided that he must abandon his undertaking. It was at this juncture that he discovered what stuff his friends were made of. Mr John Stuart Mill wrote proposing to help to indemnify Spencer for losses incurred, and offering to guarantee the publisher against any loss on the next treatise. He called this "a simple proposal of co-operation for an important public purpose, for which you give your labour and have given your health." As Spencer felt himself obliged to decline this generous proposal, the next move among his friends was to arrange to take a large number of copies (250) for distribution. To this, with mingled feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, Spencer agreed. Meanwhile, however, his American admirers, organised by Professor Youmans, invested in Spencer's name a sum of 7000 dollars as a fund to ensure the continued publication of his works. This, in combination with an improvement in Spencer's financial position, consequent on his father's death (1866), made publication once more secure without the aid of the subsidising scheme proposed by his English friends.

In September 1866 Herbert Spencer settled himself in London, en pension at 37 Queen's Gardens, Lancaster Gate, which remained his home for over a score of years. Henceforth he was less of a nomad, and he secured himself against all interruptions by taking a secret study a few doors off.

There are two records for the beginning of 1867 which are interesting in their contrast. The first is that Spencer declined without hesitation certain overtures by his friends that he should stand for the professorship of Moral Philosophy at University College, London, and for a similar post in Edinburgh; the second is that he invented a most elaborate invalid-bed, which, like most of his inventions, fell flat.

The invalid-bed had been suggested by his mother's prolonged feebleness, but it was not long to be used. Spencer was left in 1867 with no nearer relatives than cousins. In reference to his mother, we quote with all reverence one of the few strong personal touches in the Autobiography.

"Thus ended a life of monotonous routine, very little relieved by positive pleasures. I look back upon it regretfully: thinking how small were the sacrifices which I made for her in comparison with the great sacrifices which, as a mother, she made for me in my early days. In human life, as we at present know it, one of the saddest traits is the dull sense of filial obligations which exists at the time when it is possible to discharge them with something like fulness, in contrast with the keen sense of them which arises when such discharge is no longer possible."

In the spring of 1867 Spencer finished publishing the second volume of the Biology, and immediately set to work to recast First Principles. And as if that was not enough, he began in the same year, with the help of his secretary, Mr David Duncan, his collection of sociological data, which was intended to afford the foundation for a treatise on the Principles of Sociology. In spite of occasional holidays at Yarrow, at Glenelg, and in other delightful places, the usual nemesis of industry was not avoided. Spencer's nerve-centres, which could never endure prolonged attention, showed the usual symptoms of over-fatigue; and though he tried morphia and skating, hydropathy and rackets, he had to give up work early in 1868. He betook himself to Italy for rest, attracted partly by the fact that Vesuvius was in eruption! About this time he was elected a member of the Athenæum Club, the sedative amenities of which proved a useful prophylactic in after years.

Italy.—Of Spencer's Tour in Italy the Autobiography gives us some interesting reminiscences. He arrived in Naples in a state of extreme exhaustion, wearied with the voyage, wearied with a menu in which tunny was the pièce de résistance, and finding comfort only in the shelter of his Inverness cape. And yet, the day after his arrival, the author of Social Statics might have been seen giving swift chase to an audacious thief who had taken advantage of the philosopher's preoccupation to abstract his opera-glass. "Most likely had the young fellow had a knife about him I should have suffered, perhaps fatally, for my imprudence." A few days later, the same characteristic rashness impelled him to ascend the burning mountain without a guide and at great risk. "How to account for the judicial blindness I displayed, I do not know; unless by regarding it as an extreme instance of the tendency which I perceive in myself to be enslaved by a plan once formed—a tendency to become for a time possessed by one thought to the exclusion of others."

Nothing that Spencer saw in Italy impressed him so much as "the dead town" of Pompeii. The man who "took but little interest in what are called histories" was stirred by this concrete historical fossil. "It aroused sentiments such as no written record had ever done." He enjoyed Rome, but rather for its harmonious colouring than for its historical associations, of which he had no vivid perception. He was more irritated than pleased by the old masters. He got most pleasure from the scenery, but Italy is "a land of beautiful distances and ugly foregrounds." Companionless and impatient, his chief thought was how to get home most comfortably, and so he returned no better than he went.

Habits of Work.—About this time the tide had turned as regarded the sale of his works, and he wrote gratefully "the remainder of my life-voyage was through smooth waters." As the Autobiography shows, it was a quiet and uneventful voyage. Periods of work alternated with holidays, many parts of the country were visited, and angling became more and more his best recreation. "Nothing else served so well to rest my brain and fit it for resumption of work." Another resource was billiards, which he greatly enjoyed. He never could remember whist or similar games.

On fine mornings he used to spend two or three hours on the Serpentine, alternating rowing and dictating. After his morning's work and after lunch he used to walk through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and the Green Park, without more than a quarter of a mile upon pavement, to the Athenæum Club, where he skimmed through periodicals and books, and played his game. Thereafter he sauntered back to dinner at seven, "which was followed by such miscellaneous ways of passing the time without excitement as were available. Thus passed my ordinary days." By this time he had given up novel-reading, only treating himself to one about once a year, and then in a dozen or more instalments. He did not care to multiply social relations, he "avoided acquaintanceships and cultivated only friendships." "There is in me very little of the besoin de parler; and hence I do not care to talk with those in whom I feel no interest." And thus, though far from being a recluse, he lived his life of thought quietly.

In 1871 Spencer was nominated for the office of Lord Rector at the University of St Andrews, but he declined the honour for the sake of his work. He also declined the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the same University, and subsequently, similar honours, chiefly on the ground "that the advance of thought will be most furthered, when the only honours to be acquired by authors are those spontaneously yielded to them by a public which is left to estimate their merits as well as it can."

The first (synthetic) volume of the new edition of the Psychology begun in 1867 was finished in 1870, the second (analytic) volume begun in 1870 was completed in the end of 1872. Having become much interested in the well-known "International Scientific Series," Spencer contributed to it in 1873 the volume known as The Study of Sociology, which has done much in Britain and America to secure the position of Sociology as a workable science. It was unusually successful for a book of its kind, and brought Spencer about £1500.

Sociology.—From 1867 onwards Spencer had been collecting Sociological Data to serve as a basis for generalised interpretation. With the help of Mr David Duncan, Mr James Collier, and Dr Scheppig, this big piece of work made steady progress, and its publication began to be discussed in 1871. It was hoped that the plan of "exhibiting sociological phenomena in such wise that comparisons of them in their co-existences and sequences, as occurring among various peoples in different stages, were made easy, would immensely facilitate the discovery of sociological truths." The first part of this Descriptive Sociology was published in 1873, but the demand for it was very slight; not quite 200 copies were asked for in eight months. "I had," Spencer says, "greatly over-estimated the amount of desire which existed in the public mind for social facts of an instructive kind. They greatly preferred those of an uninstructive kind." In this and similar connections, the reader of the Autobiography cannot but be impressed by two facts,—on the one hand, the chivalrous eagerness on the part of American friends to be allowed to lessen Spencer's pecuniary burden, and, on the other hand, the almost ultra-sensitive resoluteness which Spencer exhibited in declining these offers.

In 1874, with the materials and memoranda of a quarter of a century around him, the thinker, who was blamed for not being inductive, set himself to write the Principles of Sociology, "feeling much as might a general of division who had become commander-in-chief; or rather, as one who had to undertake this highest function in addition to the lower functions of all his subordinates of the first, second, and third grades. Only by deliberate method persistently followed was it possible to avoid confusion."

The period of work on the Sociology was broken by some delightful holidays in the Highlands and elsewhere, by the British Association meeting at Belfast (1874) when Tyndall gave his famous Presidential Address, and by the usual ill-health. The first volume was completed in 1877. Apart from the nemesis of nerves, Spencer's life at this time seems to have been a happy one; he was fairly free from pecuniary cares; he was no longer tied to a serial issue of his publications; he could afford pleasant holidays, and he had a small circle of loyal friends. The philosopher began a series of annual picnics, which he seems to have engineered with great skill; in various ways he acted up to what he says was his habitual maxim, "Be a boy as long as you can." In 1877 he had the excitement of a shipwreck near Loch Carron, and the encouragement of having his Descriptive Sociology translated into Russian.

Ill-Health.—In spite of all his care, the year 1878 opened with a serious illness, and this prompted him to begin dictating The Data of Ethics lest an aggravation of his ill-health should hinder him from raising this coping-stone of his system. Just before Christmas of this year, he went with Prof. Youmans to the Riviera, and for a couple of months was more than usually successful in combining work and play. He finished The Data of Ethics in June 1879, and Ceremonial Institutions later in the year. As a reward of industry, and as a safeguard against too much of it, a holiday up the Nile in pleasant company was then arranged, and Spencer entered upon it in great spirits. But an ill-considered meal at Alexandria brought on dyspepsia and morbid fancies, and he was forced to return at the first cataract. He had seen many of the sights and was inevitably impressed, but he seems to have been glad to get out of the "melancholy country"—"the land of decay and death—dead men, dead races, dead creeds," as it appeared to his jaundiced eyes.

On his return journey he spent three days in Venice, but though he derived much pleasure from the general effects, he was repelled by the obtrusiveness and superficiality of the decorations. He regarded St Mark's as "a fine sample of barbaric architecture"; "it has the trait distinctive of semi-civilised art—excess of decoration"; "it is archæologically, but not æsthetically precious."

The entry in his journal for Feb. 12th, 1880 reads: "Home at 7-10; heartily glad—more pleasure than in anything that occurred during my tour."

Although he did not greatly enjoy his tour in Egypt, and brought back his packet of work unopened, the break seems to have been "decidedly beneficial." "It has apparently worked some kind of constitutional change; for, marvellous to relate, I am now able to drink beer with impunity and, I think, with benefit—a thing I have not been able to do for these fifteen years or more." He thought that it had also perhaps furthered his work to have had contact with people in a lower stage of civilisation.

In 1881 Spencer published the eighth part of his Descriptive Sociology and put a full stop to the undertaking which left him with a deficit of between three and four thousand pounds, and which had half-killed two secretaries.

Spencer's next task was the completion of Political Institutions, another instalment of the Sociology, which he had begun in 1879, and he was at this time also occupied in considering and answering the more formidable of the criticisms which his system had aroused, and in revising new editions of the First Principles and The Study of Sociology. It is interesting to note that the last work was carefully revised sentence by sentence five times.

Citizenship.—In 1881 Spencer felt in a new way the universal call "Il faut être citoyen"; he was drawn into practical action, and although this led to the greatest disaster of his life, the cause was worthy of the sacrifice. It was the cause of peace. While writing Political Institutions he had become more firmly convinced than ever that "the possibility of a higher civilization depends wholly on the cessation of militancy and the growth of industrialism." Conversations with Mr Frederic Harrison and others led to meetings of those who were sympathetic with what might be called a non-aggression policy, and Spencer was so keenly interested that in spite of forebodings he undertook some organising work, and even went the length of moving a resolution and making a speech at a public meeting. There was no direct political result of the "Anti-Aggression League," but there was most mischievous result to Spencer. "There was produced a mischief which, in a gradually increasing degree, undermined life and arrested work." He had now begun to descend the inclined plane which brought him down in the course of subsequent years to "the condition of a confirmed invalid, leading little more than a vegetative life." What Spencer did in connection with the Anti-Aggression movement was probably only the last straw, but he could not look back on his intrinsically right action without regret. "Right though I thought it, my course brought severe penalties and no compensations whatever. I am not thinking only of the weeks, months, years, of wretched nights and vacant days; though these made existence a long-drawn weariness. I refer chiefly to the gradual arrest and final cessation of my work; and the consciousness that there was slipping by that closing part of life during which it should have been completed." He was too honest to profess a pleasure he did not feel in a mens sibi conscia recti. "It is best," he said, "to recognise the facts as they are, and not try to prop up rectitude by fictions."

Visit to America.—In 1882 in the hope of recovering tone, not, as some of the papers said, of recouping his finances, Spencer went on a visit to America, along with Mr Lott his friend of forty years. He was, of course, pressed to lecture, and was offered terms up to 250 dollars per night, but he would have none of it. Lecturing was not his metier, and his health was broken. "As matters stand," he wrote, "the giving a lecture or reading a paper, would be nothing more than making myself a show; and I absolutely decline to make myself a show." The only public appearance he made was at a dinner in his honour at New York, where, with his fatigued brain, he spoke straight to the Americans on the sin of over-devotion to work. With his friend Lott as a buffer, he succeeded in avoiding all interviewers until he had got on board the Germanic on his return voyage, when he was taken unawares at the last moment.

Spencer saw some of the finest sights in America and Canada; he met congenial spirits, and everything possible was done to make his visit a tonic; but he came back in a worse state than he went, "having made another step downwards towards invalid life."

Closing Years.—From 1882 till 1889, when the Autobiography ends, Spencer's life was one of invalidism with occasional gleams of health. There was nothing organically wrong with him, but he had no reserve of nervous energy, and he was not able to work for more than brief intervals at a time. Yet he produced during these years The Man Versus the State, a volume on Ecclesiastical Institutions, and The Factors of Organic Evolution. He also dictated the Autobiography at the average rate of about fifteen lines per day!

As years went on Spencer became more and more of a recluse, more and more a man of nerves, the grasshopper became a burden, and as he watched himself with scientific minuteness, hypochondria naturally grew upon him. He continued, however, to use for work the minute fractions of a day when he felt relatively vigorous, and thus he at length actually finished his Synthetic Philosophy in 1896.

He gives an account of his daily routine when he had attained the age of seventy-three. In the mornings he did a little work, dictating for ten minutes at a time, and repeating the process from two to five times. During the rest of the day he killed time, walking a few hundred yards, driving for an hour or so in a carriage with india-rubber tyres, or "sitting very much in the open air, hearing and observing the birds, watching the drifting clouds, listening to the sighings of the wind through the trees." He could not read or bear being read to, he could not play games or listen to music, he used ear-stoppers to shut out conversation whenever he got tired of it, and without respect of persons, and he took opium to secure a few hours sleep at nights. He might have been more comfortable, physically, if he had abandoned all attempt at work, but the architectonic instinct tyrannised over him. He really lived for the sake of the little oases of work-time which broke the monotony of his daily journey.

It should be remembered, that invalid as he was, Spencer aggravated matters by his scientific hypochondria, and perhaps also by his soporifics. His disturbances of health involved little positive suffering, and, till he was considerably over sixty, he had few deprivations. Even in old age he had no invalid appearance. "Neither in the lines of the face nor in its colour, is there any such sign of constitutional derangement as would be expected. Contrariwise, I am usually supposed to be about ten years younger than I am" (1893).

"Spencer's closing years," Prof. Hudson writes, "were clouded with much sadness and disappointment." His days were vacant and his nights a weariness; he had outlived most of his friends and was lonely; and "the completion of his Synthetic Philosophy in 1896 did not bring him the keen satisfaction he fairly might have expected." He saw his political advice disregarded, and on all sides an exuberant growth of the socialistic organisations which he had spent himself in criticising. "He saw, too, with profound sorrow, unmistakable signs everywhere of reaction in religion, politics, society. The recrudescence of militarism, the development of a sordidly materialistic spirit throughout the modern nations and their abandonment of the principles of sanity and political righteousness—all these things cast a very black shadow over his declining path. I do not wonder that, as he looked back over his magnificent life-work, his mind should have been darkened by the doubt as to whether some of the truths, to which he attached the greatest value, might not after all have been set forth in vain" ("Fortnightly Review," 1904, p. 17).

Spencer's life closed in his eighty-third year, on December 8th, 1903.

[CHAPTER VI]

CHARACTERISTICS:—PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL

The Autobiography—Physical Characteristics—Intellectual Characteristics—Limitations—Development of Spencer's Mind—Methods of Work—Genius?

Spencer was much given to summing up what he called the "traits" of the men he met, and he extended the process to himself in his Autobiography, which is an elaborate piece of self-portraiture.

The Autobiography.—Some one has called autobiography the least credible form of fiction, but that is not the impression which Spencer's gives. His self-analysis is candid and continuous; he is always revealing his feet of clay, and that with a self-complacency which is unintelligible to those who do not understand the impersonal scientific mood which had become habitual to Spencer. He almost achieved the impossible, of looking at himself from the outside.

Huxley wrote an autobiography in a score of pages, and he never wrote anything better; Spencer occupied over a thousand pages with his account of himself, and he never wrote anything worse. Dictated in outline in 1875, it was elaborated piecemeal, in small daily instalments, after the most serious of the many breakdowns in health had precluded more difficult work. Naturally enough, therefore, the Autobiography is often prolix and lacking in proportion, often slack in style and, it must be confessed, tedious. Little details in a picture may be essential to the effective impression, but Spencer often wearies us with trifling incidents whose narration has no excuse except as happening in a great life. Yet, if we lay the volumes aside, bored by their monumental egotism, we return to them with sympathy, and are won again by their unaffected frankness and candid sincerity.

With the Autobiography before us, but exercising the right of private judgment, we propose in this and the next chapter to sum up Spencer's characteristics—physical, intellectual, and emotional, and to refer to his methods of work and conduct of life.

Physical Characteristics.—Spencer at his best was an impressive figure, "tall, erect, a little gaunt, with a magnificent broad brow and high domed head." "His face," Prof. W. H. Hudson writes, "was a strikingly expressive one, with its strong frontal ridge, deep-set eyes, prominent nose, and firmly-cut mouth and jaw—the face of a man marked out for intellectual leadership."[1] It was not wrinkled with thought, as one might have expected, but was smooth as a child's or as a bishop's, the explanation being, as Spencer said, that he never worried over things, but allowed his brain to do its own thinking without pressure. He looked anything but an invalid, for his cheeks were ruddy even in later years. He had a fine voice and "a rather rare laugh of deep-chested musical qualities."

[1] Herbert Spencer: A Character Study, "Fortnightly Review," 1904.

He lamented that he had not inherited his father's finely developed chest organs, and that in consequence his cerebral circulation was under par. More positively, he seems to have inherited a readily fatigued nervous system, which limited his powers of protracted attention and made him not infrequently irritable and difficult to get on with. As we have seen he suffered periodically from over-taxing his brain, which induced terrible insomnia. Like Carlyle, he suffered from dyspepsia.

Intellectual Characteristics.—1. Among his intellectual characteristics, Spencer gave the foremost place to his "unusual capacity for the intuition of cause." The capacity was inherited and it was carefully nurtured. His restlessness to discover causes—"natural causes"—was illustrated when, as a boy of thirteen, he called in question the dictum of Dr Arnott respecting inertia, and it was characteristic of his whole intellectual life. He cultivated this inquisitiveness for causes till the mood became habitual, and resulted in what we may almost call an interpretative instinct. That this never led him astray, not even his most enthusiastic disciples would venture to maintain.

While the scientific method is always fundamentally the same, there is happily some legitimate elasticity in the order of procedure. Some minds start with a clue perceived by a flash of insight and then proceed to test and verify; others collect their data laboriously and never get a glimpse of their conclusion until the induction is complete. Some seem to have a selective instinct for getting hold of the most significant facts, or for making the crucial experiment; others have to plod on patiently from fact to fact and must make many "fools' experiments." Some find a nugget while their neighbours get their gold in dust particles after washing much ore.

Now Spencer had that passion for facts which is fundamental to all solid scientific work, but he had the greater gift of getting rapidly beneath facts to the question of their significance. He had not the love of details which is essential to the descriptive naturalist for instance, which sometimes becomes intellectual avarice for copper coinage, but he was instinctively an ætiologist, an interpreter.

In his account of the working of his mind, he says:—

"There was commonly shown a faculty of seizing cardinal truths rather than of accumulating detailed information. The implications of phenomena were then, as always, more interesting to me than the phenomena themselves. What did they prove? was the question instinctively put. The consciousness of causation, to which there was a natural proclivity, and which had been fostered by my father, continually prompted analyses, which of course led me below the surface and made fundamental principles objects of greater attention than the various concrete illustrations of them. So that while my acquaintance with things might have been called superficial, if measured by the number of facts known, it might have been called the reverse of superficial, if measured by the quality of the facts. And there was possibly a relation between these traits. A friend who possessed extensive botanical knowledge, once remarked to me that, had I known as much about the details of plant-structure as botanists do, I never should have reached those generalisations concerning plant-morphology which I had reached." (Autobiography I.)

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.

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.

His output of work was so large even for a long life that one naturally thinks of him as a hard worker. But the reverse would be nearer the truth. Partly as a self-justification of his "constitutional idleness," and partly as a precaution against his hereditary tendency to nervous breakdown, he was a strong advocate of the proposition that "Life is not for work, but work is for life." "The progress of mankind is, under one aspect, a means of liberating more and more life from mere toil and leaving more and more life available for relaxation—for pleasurable culture, for æsthetic gratification, for travels, for games." Industry is not a virtue in itself; over-work is blameworthy.

In the second place, Spencer made it a rule never to force his thinking. If a problem was not clear to him, he let it simmer. "On one occasion George Eliot expressed her surprise that the author of Social Statics had no lines on his forehead, to which he answered, 'I suppose it is because I am never puzzled.' This called forth the exclamation: 'O! that's the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered.' To which I rejoined: 'Not at all, when you know what I mean.' And I then proceeded to explain that my mode of thinking did not involve that concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows" (Autobiography, i. p. 399).

Spencer did not set himself a problem and try to puzzle out an answer. "The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived at unawares—each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts which slowly grew from a germ."

He had "an instinctive interest in those facts which have general meanings"; he let these accumulate and simmer, thinking them over and over again at intervals. "When accumulation of instances had given body to a generalisation, reflexion would reduce the vague conception at first framed to a more definite conception; and perhaps difficulties or anomalies at first passed over for a while, but eventually forcing themselves on attention, might cause a needful qualification and a truer shaping of the thought. Eventually the growing generalisation, thus far inductive, might take deductive form: being all at once recognised as a necessary consequence of some physical principle—some established law. And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organised theory" (Autobiography, i. 400, 401). In short, Spencer gave his thinking machine time to do its work, or in other words he let his thoughts grow. He distrusted strain and all forcing. Like a good golfer, he would not "press." "The determined effort causes perversion of thought."

A third feature in his work has been already alluded to—his practical indifference to the literature of the subject at which he was working. For this characteristic there were doubtless several reasons, though none of them justified it. He was not fond of hard reading, and conserved his energy for his own production; he had abundant thought-material of his own, and no lack of confidence in its value. Furthermore, he explains, "It has always been out of the question for me to go on reading a book the fundamental principles of which I entirely dissent from. Tacitly giving an author credit for consistency, I, without thinking much about the matter, take it for granted that if the fundamental principles are wrong, the rest cannot be right, and thereupon cease reading—being, I suspect, rather glad of an excuse for doing so" (i. p. 253). "All through my life," he says, "Locke's 'Essay' had been before me on my father's shelves, but I had never taken it down; or at any rate I have no recollection of having read a page of it." More than once he tackled Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but was baulked at the start by the doctrine that time and space are merely subjective forms. Nor did Mill's Logic interest him.

At the same time it is not to be supposed that Spencer wove his system out of himself as a spider its web. He had a wonderful aptitude for collecting data by a strange sort of skimming reading.

"Though by some I am characterised as an a priori thinker, it will be manifest to any one who does not set out with an a priori conception of me, that my beliefs, when not suggested a posteriori, are habitually verified a posteriori. My first book, Social Statics, shows this in common with my later books. I have sometimes been half-amused, half-irritated, by one who speaks of me as typically deductive, and whose own conclusions, nevertheless, are not supported by facts anything like so numerous as those brought in support of mine. But we meet with men who are such fanatical adherents of the inductive method, that immediately an induction, otherwise well established, is shown to admit of deductive establishment, they lose faith in it" (Autobiography, i. pp. 304-5).

No one who studies Spencer's works can fail to be impressed with the logical orderliness and lucidity of his method. Thus, in beginning The Principles of Biology, for instance, we are first asked to consider what truths the biologist takes for granted; e.g., the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter; then we are asked to notice the inductions in regard to the phenomena of life which biologists agree in accepting as well-established; and only then do we pass to Spencer's particular interpretation of the facts in the light of his evolutionist ideas. The same logical method is illustrated in his treatment of psychology, sociology and ethics.

Like most men who get through much work, Spencer was very methodical and orderly. In reference to his Sociology, he tells us how he classified and reclassified his materials in fasciculi, placing them in a semi-circle on the floor round his chair, inserting new "covers" where there seemed need for them, and gradually filling these. As the plan became clear, the materials for a chapter were raised to his large desk, and then began a grouping into sections, and a grouping within each section.

He did not begin to compose until he had thought out his subject to the best of his ability. He then wrote or dictated a little at a time, criticising every sentence with especial reference to clearness and force. Except for his first book, which he revised, copied out, and revised afresh, the original copy was always sent to press "sprinkled with erasures and interlineations." He was more interested in vigour and lucidity of style than in its beauty, and it was characteristic of him to try to correlate effectiveness of style with the doctrine of the conservation of energy. The main thesis in the essay on "The Philosophy of Style" may be briefly stated. The reader has only a limited amount of nervous energy, and it is important that this should not be dissipated before he comes to the ideas of which the style is the vehicle. "In proportion as there is less energy absorbed in interpreting the symbols, there is more left for representing the idea, and, consequently, greater vividness of the idea." "Every resistance met with in the progress from the antecedent idea to the consequent idea, entails a deduction from the force with which the consequent idea arises in consciousness."

It is common to speak of Spencer's works as "hard reading," but those who say so must have a strange scale of hardness. He may be difficult to agree with, but he is rarely difficult to understand; he deals with difficult themes, but he is singularly clear in his expression of his convictions. When he discusses less abstract questions, as in his Study of Sociology or Education, his style has almost every good quality except beauty. And when he occasionally "lets himself go" a little, as in the famous passage in the First Principles at the end of the discussion of the Unknowable, there is a ring of nobility in his sentences.

Sometimes he sums up with epigrammatic terseness, and we submit a few of his utterances which we have noted down as illustrating various qualities:—

"Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life."

"It is best to recognise the facts as they are, and not try to prop up rectitude by fictions."

"Beliefs, like creatures, must have fit environments before they can live and grow."

"Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep as the viscera."

"Melody is an idealised form of the natural cadences of emotion."

"Logic is a science of objective phenomena."

"In proportion as intellect is active, emotion is rendered inactive."

"Inherited constitution must ever be the chief factor in determining character."

"Each nature is a bundle of potentialities of which only some are allowed by the conditions to become actualities."

"Considering that the ordinary citizen has no excess of individuality to boast of, it seems strange that he should be so anxious to hide what little he has."

"Englishmen are averse to conclusions of wide generality."

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."

"A nation which fosters its good-for-nothings will end by becoming a good-for-nothing nation."

"I don't mean to get on. I don't think getting on is worth the bother."

Genius.—It doubtless requires genius to define genius, and until that is done, the question of awarding or refusing this supreme title to our hero need not be very seriously discussed. All will agree that genius is more than unusually great talent; that it is neither "une patience suivie" nor "an infinite capacity for taking pains"; that it is not to be judged by its effectiveness; and that it may never receive the unwithering laurels of immortality. Spencer poured contempt on Carlyle's assertion that genius "means transcendent capacity of taking trouble first of all"; the truth being, he said, that genius may be rightly defined quite oppositely, as an ability to do with little trouble that which cannot be done by the ordinary man with any amount of trouble.

Another of Spencer's remarks about genius is worth citing. Speaking of Huxley's wonderful versatility as a thinker, he said that it lent "some colour to the dictum—quite untenable, however—that genius is a unit, and, where it exists, can manifest itself equally in all directions." As it seems to us, there is much truth in the dictum which Spencer dismissed as "quite untenable." The genius is a new variation of high potential and is as such a unity, capable of expressing itself in many diverse ways, and always with originality. The expression of genius may be intellectual, emotional, or practical, according to the mood which is constitutionally dominant and according to the opportunities afforded by education and circumstances; but there seems much to be said, both on general grounds and from a study of historical examples, for the view that genius means something distinctive in the whole mental pattern or personality, and is potentially at least many-sided.

Biologically regarded, a genius is a transilient variation on the up-grade of psychical evolution, of such magnitude that it stands apart as a new mental pattern, as a peculiar combination of moods at a high potential, as a secret amalgam. Whether it be intellectual, emotional, or practical, it sees or feels or does things in a new way. It makes what it touches new; it affords a new outlook. "God said: Let Newton be! and there was light"—that is genius.

In this sense we venture to think that Spencer was not far from the kingdom of genius. He saw all things in the light of the evolution-idea; he had a fresh vision of the unity of nature and the unity of science, and the light that was in him was so clear that it radiated into other minds. Had his emotional nature been stronger, had he been more than luminiferous, he might have set the world aflame.

[CHAPTER VII]

CHARACTERISTICS: EMOTIONAL AND ETHICAL

Emotional—The Genius Loci—Poetry—Science and Poetry—Art—Humour—Callousness—Nature—Human Relations—Fundamental Motives

Emotional.—Spencer found great delight in scenery and sunsets; he enjoyed music within certain limits; he was very fond of children, but he was essentially a man of thought, not of feeling or of action. The scientific mood dominated him, the artistic and practical moods were in abeyance. Although he delighted in imaginative construction, he does not seem to have had much imaginative life. Although he pondered over the great mysteries of the universe, there was no mystical element in his composition. Of course no Englishman wears his heart on his sleeve, but Spencer was more than usually callous, and our sketch would be far from true if it ignored his emotional limitations.

The Genius Loci.—To begin with, let us refer to his indifference to places which are rich in human associations. On his many holidays he visited not a few of these, and yet he seems to have been rarely touched or impressed by their significance. He frankly confessed that he took but little interest in what are called histories, but was interested only in sociology, and therefore his appreciation of the genius loci was always limited. He could not people the palaces, the cathedrals, the castles, the ancient cities that he visited. "When I go to see a ruined abbey or the remains of a castle, I do not care to learn when it was built, who lived or died there, or what catastrophes it witnessed. I never yet went to a battle-field, although often near to one—not having the slightest curiosity to see a place where many men were killed and a victory achieved." He had few historical associations even in Rome, and when at Florence he did not go three miles to Fiesole. The forms and colours of time-worn walls and arches excited pleasant sentiments, he said, but that seems to have been all. It was a sort of conchological interest that he had.

One is unfortunately familiar with the cosmic preoccupation which the dominant scientific mood is apt to engender, as also with historical erudition which loses the wood in the trees or leaves Nature out altogether. These are the defects of our limited mental capacities and our ill-organised education; but that a man of Spencer's powers could be so complacent with his limitations is extraordinary. And that he could write, "It is always the poetry rather than the history of a place that appeals to me," is more extraordinary still; as if the history were not half the poetry.

Poetry.—Spencer's attitude to poetry was characteristic; he took it all too intellectually and was usually bored. He did not find enough thought in it, and it may be doubted if he ever surrendered himself to the artistic mood. At one time he regarded Shelley as "by far the finest poet of his era," and of "Prometheus Unbound" he said, "It is the only poem over which I have ever become enthusiastic." It satisfied one of his organic needs—variety; "I say organic, because I perceive that it runs throughout my constitution, beginning with likings for food." Another requirement of poetry for Spencer was intensity. "The matter embodied is idealised emotion, the vehicle is the idealised language of emotion." For this reason he was in but small measure attracted to Wordsworth. "Admitting, though I do, that throughout his works there are sprinkled many poems of great beauty, my feeling is that most of his writing is not wine but beer" (i. p. 263). Similarly, he found the "Iliad" "tedious" and Dante "too continuously rich"... "a gorgeous dress ill made up."

"About others' requirements I cannot of course speak; but my own requirement is—little poetry and of the best. Even the true poets are far too productive." More will agree with him when he says: "The poetry commonly produced does not bubble up as a spring, but is simply pumped up; and pumped-up poetry is not worth reading. No one should write verse if he can help it. Let him suppress it if possible; but if it bursts forth in spite of him, it may be of value."

In reference to the supposed antagonism between Science and Poetry, Spencer refers to the story that Keats once proposed after dinner, some such sentiment as "Confusion to Newton," for having by his analysis destroyed the wonder of the rainbow. "In so doing," Spencer says, "Keats did but give more than usually definite expression to the current belief that science and poetry are antagonistic. Doubtless it is true that while consciousness is occupied in the scientific interpretation of a thing, which is now and again "a thing of beauty," it is not occupied in the æsthetic appreciation of it. But it is no less true that the same consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the æsthetic appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation. The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take both. Those who allege this antagonism forget that Goethe, predominantly a poet, was also a scientific inquirer" (Autobiography, i. p. 419). This is sound sense, and is the excuse for Spencer's own limitations in regard to poetry; he usually found it too difficult to lay aside the intellectual preoccupation that gave part of the point to Huxley's jest in the course of a talk on tragedy: "Oh! you know, Spencer's idea of a tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact."

The same sort of desperately serious intellectual attitude is seen in Spencer's remarks on the Opera. His "intolerance of gross breaches of probability" spoilt his enjoyment of the music. "That serving-men and waiting-maids should be made poetical and prompted to speak in recitative, because their masters and mistresses happened to be in love, was too conspicuous an absurdity; and the consciousness of this absurdity went far towards destroying what pleasure I might otherwise have derived from the work. It is with music as with painting—a great divergence from the naturalness in any part so distracts my attention from the meaning or intention of the whole, as almost to cancel gratification."

In connection with Spencer's relative lack of interest in poetry and the drama, or in the works of men like Carlyle and Ruskin, we have simply to deplore the fact and remember that his mind was preoccupied with big problems and was dominated by the scientific mood. From his boyhood he was "thinking about only one thing at a time," and he had to husband his energies. This is well illustrated by his note on Carlyle's Cromwell: "If, after a thorough examination of the subject, Carlyle tells us that Cromwell was a sincere man, I reply that I am heartily glad to hear it, and that I am content to take his word for it; not thinking it worth while to investigate all the evidence which has led him to that conclusion." This might seem to betray a somewhat Philistinish contempt for historical study and complacence therewith, but the real state of the case is revealed in the sentence that follows the above: "I find so many things to think about in this world of ours, that I cannot afford to spend a week in estimating the character of a man who lived two centuries ago." What he somewhat strangely calls "interests of an entirely unlike kind" were at that time strongly attracting him to Humboldt's Kosmos. His outlook was characteristically cosmic, not human.

Art.—One of Spencer's heresies concerned the old masters of painting, whose works he regarded as highly over-rated. On the one hand, he detected insincerity in the conventional veneration in which the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, to name no smaller names, are held. Subject is not dissociated from execution, and "the judicial faculty has been mesmerised by the confused halo of piety which surrounds them." There is an æsthetic orthodoxy from which few are bold enough to dissent. On the other hand, Spencer detected in the works themselves "fundamental vices," "the grossest absurdities," "gratuitous contradictions of Nature," impossible light and shade, and no end of technical defects in what he was pleased to call "physioscopy."

Art-criticism is probably now more emancipated from authority than it was when Spencer promulgated his heresies and Ruskin wrote his Modern Painters, and doubtless many experts will admit that some of the philosopher's strictures are justified. More will probably maintain that in his intellectual criticism Spencer was blind to artistic genius. In his criticism, for instance, of Guido's "Phœbus and Aurora," to which he allowed beauty in composition and grace in drawing, he applied commonplace physical criteria to show that "absurdity was piled upon absurdity." "The entire group—the chariot and horses, the hours and their draperies, and even Phœbus himself—are represented as illuminated from without: are made visible by some unknown source of light—some other sun! Stranger still is the next thing to be noted. The only source of light indicated in the composition—the torch carried by the flying boy—radiates no light whatever. Not even the face of its bearer immediately behind it is illumined by it! Nay, this is not all. The crowning absurdity is that the non-luminous flames of this torch are themselves illuminated from elsewhere!" And so on.

All this is dismally intellectual, and reminds us of the medical man's discovery that Botticelli's "Venus," in the Uffizi at Florence, is suffering from consumption, and should not be riding across the sea in an open shell, clad so scantily.

Humour.—Prof. Hudson speaks of Spencer's capital sense of humour, but it is difficult for a reader of the Autobiography to believe this. The ponderous way in which he analyses his own little jokes, for instance, is too quaint to be consistent with much sense of humour. Thus he tells us that it was only the sudden access of moderately good health that enabled him to remark to G. H. Lewes, on a little tour they had, that the Isle of Wight produced very large chops for so small an island. The fact is that he always took himself and other people very seriously in little things as well as great. With what physiological seriousness does he discuss the experience he had coming down Ben Nevis after some wine on the top of whisky: "I found myself possessed of a quite unusual amount of agility; being able to leap from rock to rock with rapidity, ease, and safety; so that I quite astonished myself. There was evidently an exaltation of the perceptive and motor powers."... "Long-continued exertion having caused unusually great action of the lungs, the exaltation produced by stimulation of the brain was not cancelled by the diminished oxygenation of the blood. The oxygenation had been so much in excess, that deduction from it did not appreciably diminish the vital activities."

Callousness.—In his extreme sang-froid, Spencer sometimes did violence to the unity of the human spirit. We venture to give one example. In referring to a ramble in France (Autobiography, ii. p. 236), he wrote as follows: "We passed a wayside shrine, at the foot of which were numerous offerings, each formed of two bits of lath nailed one across the other. The sight suggested to me the behaviour of an intelligent and amiable retriever, a great pet at Ardtornish. On coming up to salute one after a few hours' or a day's absence, wagging her tail and drawing back her lips so as to simulate a grinning smile, she would seek around to find a stick, or a bit of paper, or a dead leaf, and bring it in her mouth; so expressing her desire to propitiate. The dead leaf or bit of paper was symbolic, in much the same way as was the valueless cross. Probably, in respect of sincerity of feeling, the advantage was on the side of the retriever." The animal psychology here expressed seems pretty bad, and the human psychology much worse.

Turning, however, to pleasanter subjects and correcting any unduly harsh judgment, we would remind the reader that Spencer was genuinely fond of music and of scenery, two loves which cover a multitude of sins.

"The often-quoted remark of Kant that two things excited his awe—the starry heavens and the conscience of man—is not one which I should make of myself. In me the sentiment has been more especially produced by three things—the sea, a great mountain, and fine music in a cathedral. Of these the first has, from familiarity I suppose, lost much of the effect it originally had, but not the others."

Nature.—One of the lasting pleasures of Spencer's life was a simple delight in the beauty of Nature, especially in varied scenery. Thus he writes (in 1844) to his friend Lott, regarding a journey into South Wales: "I wish you had been with me. Your poetical feelings would have had great gratification. A day's journey through a constantly changing scene of cloud-capped hills with here and there a sparkling and romantic river winding perhaps round the base of some ruined castle is a treat not often equalled. I enjoyed it much. When I reached the seaside, however, and found myself once again within sound of the breakers, I almost danced with pleasure. To me there is no place so delightful as the beach. It is the place where, more than anywhere else, philosophy and poetry meet—where in fact you are presented by Nature with a never-ending feast of knowledge and beauty. There is no place where I can so palpably realise Emerson's remark that 'Nature is the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.'"

One evening in August 1861 Spencer stood looking over the Sound of Mull from Ardtornish house. "The gorgeous colours of clouds and sky, splendid enough even by themselves to be long remembered, were reflected from the surface of the sound, at the same time that both of its sides, along with the mountains of Mull, were lighted up by the setting sun; and, while I was leaning out of the window gazing at this scene, music from the piano behind me served as a commentary. The exaltation of feeling produced was unparalleled in my experience; and never since has pleasurable emotion risen in me to the same intensity" (Autobiography, ii. p. 69).

Spencer's feeling for Nature was for the most part limited to scenic effects. Occasionally, when he was at leisure, he felt some "admiration of the beauties and graces" of flowers, but this was so unusual that it surprised him, "for, certainly," he says, "intellectual analysis is at variance with æsthetic appreciation." This does not of course mean that there is any opposition between scientific interpretation and artistic enjoyment; it simply means that the scientific mood is quite different from the artistic mood, and that for most people only one can be dominant at a time. There are many naturalists of undoubted analytic skill who have a "love exceeding a simple love of the things that glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck"; the modern botanist may still see the Dryad in the tree; and if the scientific mood is not allowed by over-specialisation to over-ride all others, increase in knowledge may mean not increase of sorrow, but a deepening of the joy of life.

Human Relations.—That Spencer lacked emotional warmth and expansiveness not only in regard to nature and art, literature and history, but in his human relations, will be admitted by all, but when a great man has an obvious limitation there is often a tendency to make too much of it. We think that Mr Gribble has done this in his interesting comparison of Spencer and Carlyle,[2] whom he contrasts as philosopher and sage. We condense his comparison. Both were big men, both were egotists, both were dyspeptics. Neither suffered fools gladly, and each tended to be an outspoken judge of all the earth. But while Carlyle loved and hated intensely, Spencer judged callously. Carlyle was more like a human being, Spencer "made his heart wait on his judgment—indefinitely." "What is almost uncanny about Herbert Spencer is his triumphant superiority to natural instincts." "It is difficult for the average man to believe that Spencer was a human being of like passions with himself." In reference to love he said, "Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me"; "in every walk of life," Mr Gribble says, "it seems, some sine qua non stood like an angel with a flaming sword between Herbert Spencer and his emotions." "In the main, he suggests abstract intellect performing in a morality play, exhibiting no emotion but intellectual pride." But this tends to suggest that Spencer was a sort of synthetic ogre, which he certainly was not.

[2] Francis Gribble: "Fortnightly Review," 1904, p. 984.

Emotion is distinctively impulsive, and it was Spencer's nature and deliberate purpose not to yield to the strain of impulse. Yet we must not misunderstand his reserve and restraint for cold-bloodedness. Some have referred to the cold impersonal way in which he refers to his father in the Autobiography, but when we consider facts not words we find that the relations of sympathy, companionship, and mutual understanding between father and son were very perfect. The human male is slow to learn that it is not only necessary to love, but to say that one loves.

In his human relations, Spencer was loyal, if somewhat too candid, as a friend; he was by no means non-social, but enjoyed conversation with those who interested him, and was himself a good talker and raconteur; he was fond of, and was a favourite with children, which is saying a great deal. One of his friends has called him a thoroughly "clubbable" man, which is probably going too far, but it was only in later years that he became an almost monastic recluse and used ear-stoppers. Many who met him for a short time thought him cold and difficult of access, with reserved chilly talk "like a book," rather restrained, scrupulous and severe; but those who knew him well speak of his large, simple, and eminently sympathetic nature. George Eliot said, "He is a good, delightful creature, and I always feel better for being with him." Prof. Hudson writes: "The better one knew him the more one grew to understand and admire his quiet strength, steadiness of ethical purpose, and unflinching courage, the purity of his motives, his rigid adherence to righteousness and truth, and his exquisite sense of justice in all things." He was often terribly provoked by unjust criticisms and stupid or wilful misunderstandings of his positions, but "in controversy he was scrupulously fair, aiming at truth, and not at the barren victories of dialectics."[3]

[3] Gribble, op. cit.

Besides his love of truth and justice, besides his courage and self-sacrificing altruism, Spencer reveals a strength of purpose which has rarely been surpassed. In fact it is difficult to over-estimate the resolution with which he effected his life-work. Apart from the inherent difficulty of his task, apart from the long delay of public appreciation, and apart from ill-health, the pecuniary obstacles were very serious. Had it not been for the £80 which came to him in 1850 under the Railway Winding-up Act, he would have been unable to publish Social Statics; a bequest from his uncle Thomas made the publication of the Principles of Psychology possible; he would have been forced to desist before the completion of First Principles had it not been for a bequest from his uncle William; at a later stage an American testimonial and his father's death just saved the situation. Well might he say:—

"It was almost a miracle that I did not sink before success was reached." When we read the detailed story of his preparation, his endeavour, his struggle, his achievement, we cannot but feel that his resolute strenuousness was not far from heroism.

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."

Fundamental Motives.—There seems something approaching self-vivisection in Spencer's analysis of the motives prompting his career, and the reader who is not moved by it must be callous indeed. We shall not do more than refer to the general results arrived at.

"So deep down is the gratification which results from the consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is impossible for any one to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case, the desire for such recognition has not been absent. Yet, so far as I can remember, ambition was not the primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive of my larger and later efforts."... "Still, as I have said, the desire for achievement and the honour which achievement brings, have doubtless been large factors."... "Though from the outset I have had in view the effects to be wrought on men's beliefs and courses of action—especially in respect of social affairs and governmental functions; yet the sentiment of ambition has all along been operative."

The other prompters were the pleasure of intellectual hunting and "the architectonic instinct." On the one hand, "It has been with me a source of continual pleasure, distinct from other pleasures, to evolve new thoughts, and to be in some sort a spectator of the way in which, under persistent contemplation, they gradually unfolded into completeness." On the other hand, "during thirty years it has been a source of frequent elation to see each division, and each part of a division, working out into congruity with the rest—to see each component fitting into its place, and helping to make a harmonious whole." "Once having become possessed by the conception of Evolution in its comprehensive form, the desire to elaborate and set it forth was so strong that to have passed life in doing something else would, I think, have been almost intolerable." Like an architect he was restless till his edifice was completed, and on working towards this there was æsthetic as well as intellectual gratification. "There appears to be in me a dash of the artist, which has all along made the achievement of beauty a stimulus; not, of course, beauty as commonly conceived, but such beauty as may exist in a philosophical structure."

Spencer had a high sense of his responsibility to deliver the truth that was in him, and he had a strong faith in human progress. It is in the light of these two sentiments, perhaps, that we best understand the heroism of his strenuous life. "Not only is it rational to infer that changes like those which have been going on during civilisation will continue to go on, but it is irrational to do otherwise. Not he who believes that adaptation will increase is absurd, but he who doubts that it will increase is absurd. Lack of faith in such further evolution of humanity as shall harmonise with its conditions adds but another to the countless illustrations of inadequate consciousness of causation. One who, leaving behind both primitive dogmas and primitive ways of looking at them, has, while accepting scientific conclusions, acquired those habits of thought which science generates, will regard the conclusion above drawn as inevitable" (Data of Ethics, chap. x.).

"Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realise the fact that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself—that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency—is a unit of forces, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of his time. He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief" (First Principles, p. 123).

[CHAPTER VIII]

SPENCER AS BIOLOGIST—THE DATA OF BIOLOGY

The Principles of Biology—Organic Matter—Metabolism—Definition of Life—The Dynamic Element in Life—Life and Mechanism

The Principles of Biology.—If there is any book that will save a naturalist from being easy-going it is Spencer's Principles of Biology. It is a biological classic, which, in its range and intensity, finds no parallel except in Haeckel's greatest and least known work, the Generelle Morphologie, which was published in 1866 about the same time as the Principles. As one of our foremost biologists, Prof. Lloyd Morgan has said[5]: "What strikes one most forcibly is the extraordinary range and grasp of its author, the piercing keenness of his eye for essentials, his fertility in invention, and the bold sweep of his logical method. In these days of increasingly straitened specialism, it is well that we should feel the influence of a thinker whose powers of generalisation have seldom been equalled and perhaps never surpassed."

[5] Mr Herbert Spencer's Biology, "Natural Science," xiii. (1898) pp. 377-383.

Much that is in The Principles of Biology has now become common biological property; much has been absorbed or independently reached by others; consciously or unconsciously we are now, as it were, standing on Spencer's shoulders, but this should not blind us to the magnitude of Spencer's achievement. The book was more than a careful balance-sheet of the facts of life at a time when that was much needed; it meant orientation and systematisation; it was the introduction of order, clearness, and breadth of view. It gave biology a fresh start by displaying the facts of life and the inductions from these for the first time clearly in the light of evolution. For if the evolution idea is an adequate modal formula of the great process of Becoming, then we need to think of growth, development, differentiation, integration, reproduction, heredity, death—all the big facts—in the light of this. And this is what the Principles of Biology helps us to do. It is of course saturated with the theory of the transmissibility of acquired characters—an idea integral to much of Spencer's thinking—which had hardly begun to be questioned when the work was published, which is now, however, a very moot point indeed. For this and other reasons, we doubt whether Spencer was wise in making a re-edition of what might well have remained as a historical document, especially as the re-edition is not so satisfactory for 1898 as the original was for 1864.

The chief purpose of The Principles of Biology was to interpret the general facts of organic life as results of evolution. Manifestly, as a preliminary step, "it was needful to specify and illustrate these general facts; and needful also to set forth those physical and chemical properties of organic matter which are implied in the interpretation." "What are the antecedent truths taken for granted in Biology, and what are the biological truths, which, apart from theory, may be regarded as established by observation?" Thus Part I. deals with organic matter and its activity or metabolism, the action and reaction between organisms and their environment, the correspondence between organisms and their circumstances, and similar general data. Part II. states the big inductions regarding growth, development, adaptation, heredity, variation, and so on. Part III. deals with the arguments suggestive of organic evolution and with the factors in the process. Part IV. is a detailed interpretation of the evolution of organic structure, and Part V. an analogous interpretation of the evolution of functions. Part VI. deals with the laws of multiplication.

Before illustrating Spencer's workmanship in dealing with these great themes, we cannot but ask what preparation he had for a task so ambitious. He had an inborn interest in Natural History; he had dabbled in Entomology and done a little microscopic work; he had attended lectures by Owen and had enjoyed many a talk with Huxley; he had been influenced by Lamarck, Milne-Edwards, and von Baer; he had read hither and thither in medical and biological literature; but it is manifest that his own admission was true that he was "inadequately equipped for the task." That he succeeded in producing a biological classic is a signal proof of his intellectual strength. He was kept right by his power of laying hold of cardinal facts and by his grip of the Evolution-clue. Not to be forgotten, moreover, was the generous help rendered by Professor Huxley and Sir Joseph Hooker, who checked his proofs. Spencer made but one biological investigation (1865-6), and that of little moment—on the circulation in plants—but his contact with the facts of organic life was by no means superficial. His intelligence was such that he got further into them than most concrete workers have ever done. And in some measure it was an advantage to him in his task that he was no specialist, that he did not know too much. It enabled him to approach the facts with a fresh mind, and to see more clearly the general facts of Biology which lie behind the details of Botany and Natural History. He was in no danger of not seeing the wood for the trees.

Organic Matter.—"In the substances of which organisms are composed, the conditions necessary to that redistribution of Matter and Motion which constitutes Evolution, are fulfilled in a far higher degree than at first appears." Thus the most complex compounds into which Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen enter, together with small proportions of two other elements (Sulphur and Phosphorus) which very readily oxidise, "have an instability so great that decomposition ensues under ordinary atmospheric conditions"; the component elements have an unusual tendency to unite in different modes of aggregation though in the same proportions, thus forming analogous substances with different properties; the colloid character of the most complex compounds that are instrumental to vital actions gives them great molecular mobility—a plastic quality fitting them for organisation; "while the relatively great inertia of the large and complex organic molecules renders them comparatively incapable of being set in motion by the ethereal undulations, and so reduced to less coherent forms of aggregation, this same inertia facilitates changes of arrangement among their constituent molecules or atoms, since, in proportion as an incident force impresses but little motion on a mass, it is the better able to impress motion on the parts of the mass in relation to one another"; "lastly, the great difference in diffusibility between colloids and crystalloids makes possible in the tissues of organisms a specially rapid redistribution of matter and motion; both because colloids, being easily permeable by crystalloids, can be chemically acted on throughout their whole masses, instead of only on their surfaces; and because the products of decomposition, being also crystalloids, can escape as fast as they are produced, leaving room for further transformations." In short, organic matter is chemically and physically well-suited to be the physical basis of life.

The colloid character of organic matter facilitates modification by arrested momentum or by continuous strain. There is often strong capillary affinity and rapid osmosis. Heat is an important agent of redistribution in the animal organism, and light is an all-important agent of molecular changes in organic substances. But the extreme modifiability of organic matter by chemical agencies is the chief cause of that active molecular rearrangement which organisms, and especially animal organisms, display. In short, the substances of which organisms are built up are specially sensitive to the varied environing influences; "in consequence of its extreme instability organic matter undergoes extensive molecular rearrangements on very slight changes of conditions."

The correlative general fact is that during these extensive molecular rearrangements, there are evolved large amounts of energy, in the form of motion, heat, and even light and electricity. On the one hand the components of organic matter are regarded as falling from positions of unstable equilibrium to positions of stable equilibrium; on the other hand, "they give out in their falls certain momenta—momenta that may be manifested as heat, light, electricity, nerve-force, or mechanical motion, according as the conditions determine." It follows from the law of the Conservation of Energy that "whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape, is the correlate and equivalent of a power which was taken into it from without."

Metabolism.—"The materials forming the tissues of plants as well as the materials contained in them, are progressively elaborated from the inorganic substances; and the resulting compounds, eaten, and some of them assimilated by animals, pass through successive changes which are, on the average, of an opposite character: the two sets being constructive and destructive. To express changes of both these natures the term 'metabolism' is used; and such of the metabolic changes as result in building up from simple to compound are distinguished as 'anabolic,' while those which result in the falling down from compound to simple are distinguished as 'katabolic.'"

"Regarded as a whole, metabolism includes, in the first place, those anabolic or building-up processes specially characterising plants, during which the impacts of ethereal undulations are stored up in compound molecules of unstable kinds; and it includes, in the second place, those katabolic or tumbling-down changes specially characterising animals, during which this accumulated molecular motion (contained in the food directly or indirectly supplied by plants) is in large measure changed into those molar motions constituting animal activities. There are multitudinous metabolic changes of minor kinds which are ancillary to these—many katabolic changes in plants and many anabolic changes in animals—but these are the essential ones."

Definition of Life.—Spencer's first definition of life (Theory of Population, 1852) was simply "the co-ordination of actions." But he soon saw that this was too wide. "It may be said of the Solar System, with its regularly-recurring movements and its self-balancing perturbations, that it, also, exhibits co-ordination of actions." "A true idea of Life must be an idea of some kind of change or changes." Therefore he carefully considered assimilation on the one hand, as an example of bodily life, and reasoning on the other hand, as an example of that life known as intelligence, and inquired into the common features of these two processes of change. Thus there emerged the formula that life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive. But this formula also fails, as he said, by omitting the most distinctive peculiarity. It is universally recognised that living creatures continually exhibit effective response to external stimuli. To be able to do this is the very essence of life, distinguishing its responses from non-vital responses. Thus a clause must be added to the proximate conception, and the formula reads: "Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences." There are internal relations, namely, "definite combinations of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive," and there are external relations, "external co-existences and sequences," and life is the connexion of correspondence between them. Thus under its most abstract form, Spencer's conception of Life is:—"The continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations."

In an appendix to the revised edition of the Principles of Biology, Spencer admits that he had not sufficiently emphasised the fact of co-ordination. "The idea of co-ordination is so cardinal a one that it should be expressed not by implication but overtly." The formula defining the phenomenon of life thus reads: "The definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, co-ordinated into correspondence with external co-existences and sequences." It may be needful to remark that this was not intended to define Life in its essence, but Life as manifested to us. "The ultimate mystery is as great as ever: seeing that there remains unsolved the question: What determines the co-ordination of actions?"

If life be correspondence between internal and external relations, then "allowing a margin for perturbations, the life will continue only while the correspondence continues; the completeness of the life will be proportionate to the completeness of the correspondence; and the life will be perfect only when the correspondence is perfect." As organisms become more differentiated they enter into more complex relations with their environment, and as the environment becomes more complex organisms become more differentiated. The internal and external relations increase in number and intricacy pari passu, and the correspondences between them become more complex, numerous, and persistent. "The highest life is that which, like our own, shows great complexity in the correspondences, great rapidity in the succession of them, and great length in the series of them." "The highest Life is reached when there is some inner relation of actions fitted to meet every outer relation of actions by which the organism can be affected." "This continuous correspondence between inner and outer relations which constitutes Life, and the perfection of which is the perfection of Life, answers completely to that state of organic moving equilibrium which arises in the course of Evolution and tends ever to become more complete."

The Dynamic Element in Life.—But Spencer was not satisfied with his formula of Life. He recognised that there were vital phenomena which were not covered by it. The growth of a gall on a plant, due to irritant substances produced by an insect, shows no internal relations adjusted to external relations; the heart of a frog will live and beat for a long time after excision; the segmentation of an egg shows no correspondence with co-existences and sequences in its environment; when rudimentary organs are partly formed and then absorbed, no adjustment can be alleged between the inner relations which these present and any outer relations: the outer relations they refer to ceased millions of years ago; no correspondence, or part of a correspondence, by which inner actions are made to balance outer actions, can be seen in the dairymaid's laugh or the workman's whistle; the struggles of a boy in an epileptic fit show no correspondence with the co-existences and sequences around him, but they betray vitality as much as do the changing movements of a hawk pursuing a pigeon; "both exhibit that principle of activity which constitutes the essential element in our conception of life."

"When it is said that Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences, there arises the question—Changes of what?... Still more clearly do we see this insufficiency when we take the more abstract definition—"the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." Relations between what things? is the question to be asked. A relation of which the terms are unspecified does not connote a thought but merely the blank form of a thought. Its value is comparable to that of a cheque on which no amount is written."

This self-criticism led Spencer to the conclusion that "that which gives substance to our idea of Life is a certain unspecified principle of activity. The dynamic element in life is its essential element."

But how are we to conceive of this dynamic element? "Is this principle of activity inherent in organic matter, or is it something superadded?" Spencer at once rejected the second alternative, because the hypothesis of an independent vital principle has a bad pedigree, carrying us back to the ghost-theory of the savage, and because it is an unrepresentable 'pseud-idea,' which cannot even be imagined.

But the alternative of regarding Life as inherent in the substances of the organisms displaying it is also full of difficulties. "The processes which go on in living things are incomprehensible as results of any physical actions known to us." "We are obliged to confess that Life in its essence cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms. The required principle of activity, which we found cannot be represented as an independent vital principle, we now find cannot be represented as a principle inherent in living matter. If, by assuming its inherence, we think the facts are accounted for, we do but cheat ourselves with pseud-ideas."

"What then are we to say—what are we to think? Simply that in this direction, as in all other directions, our explanations finally bring us face to face with the inexplicable. The Ultimate Reality behind this manifestation, as behind all other manifestations, transcends conception."

"Life as a principle of activity is unknown and unknowable—while its phenomena are accessible in thought the implied noumenon is inaccessible—only the manifestations come within the range of our intelligence, while that which is manifested lies beyond it."

But "our surface knowledge continues to be a knowledge valid of its kind, after recognising the truth that it is only surface knowledge."

The chapter on "The Dynamic Element in Life," which concludes the section of the book called The Data of Biology, was interpolated in the revised edition (1898). It indicates, as it seems to us, that Spencer's point of view had changed considerably since he stereotyped his First Principles. We must pause to consider what this change was.

In his First Principles Spencer wrote: "The task before us is that of exhibiting the phenomena of Evolution in synthetic order. Setting out from an established ultimate principle [the Persistence of Force] it has to be shown that the course of transformation among all kinds of existences cannot but be that which we have seen it to be." [This refers to the formula: Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.] "It has to be shown that the redistribution of matter and motion must everywhere take place in those ways and produce those traits, which celestial bodies, organisms, societies alike display. And it has to be shown that this universality of process results from the same necessity which determines each simplest movement around us, down to the accelerated fall of a stone or the recurrent beat of a harp string. In other words, the phenomena of Evolution have to be deduced from the Persistence of Force. As before said, 'to this an ultimate analysis brings us down; and on this a rational synthesis must build up.'" And again he wrote: "The interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force, is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of thought to the simplest symbols."

These were brave words, and if we understand them aright it is, to say the least, surprising to be told when we come to the life of organisms that "the processes which go on in living things are incomprehensible as results of any physical actions known to us."

On the first page of the Principles of Biology we read: "The properties of substances, though destroyed to sense by combination, are not destroyed in reality. It follows from the persistence of force, that the properties of a compound are resultants of the properties of its components—resultants in which the properties of the components are severally in full action, though mutually obscured." But on p. 122 it is written: "We find it impossible to conceive Life as emerging from the co-operation of the components."

In the frankest possible way Spencer admitted that his definition of Life did not cover the facts, that it did not recognise the essential or dynamic element, that "Life in its essence cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms." But if so, it can only be by great faith or great credulity that we can believe that an Evolution-formula in terms of "Matter, Motion, and Force" is adequate to describe its genesis.

At an earlier part of the Data of Biology Spencer assumed the origin of active protoplasm from a combination of inert proteids during the time of the earth's slow cooling, and did not suggest that there was any particular difficulty in the assumption; yet in the end we are told that it is "impossible even to imagine those processes going on in organic matter out of which emerges the dynamic element in Life."

"One can picture," Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan writes,[6] "how certain folk will gloat and 'chortle in their joy' over this confession, for such it will almost inevitably be regarded. But it is not likely that Mr Spencer is here, in so vital a matter, false to the evolution he has done so much to elucidate. The two seemingly contradictory statements are not really contradictory; they are made in different connections; the one in reference to phenomenal causation, the other to noumenal causation—to an underlying 'principle of activity.' The simple statement of fact is that the phenomena of life are data sui generis, and must as such be accepted by science. Just as when oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water, new data for science emerge; so, when protoplasm was evolved, new data emerged which it is the business of science to study. In both cases we believe that the results are due to the operation of natural laws, that is to say, can, with adequate knowledge, be described in terms of antecedence and sequence. But in both cases the results, which we endeavour thus to formulate, are the outcome of principles of activity, the mode of operation of which is inexplicable. We formulate the laws of evolution in terms of antecedence and sequence; we also refer these laws to an underlying cause, the noumenal mode of action of which is inexplicable. This, if I interpret him rightly, is Mr Spencer's meaning."

[6] "Natural Science," xiii., December 1898, p. 380.

Our own impression is that Spencer was guilty of "wobbling" between two modes of interpretation, between scientific description and philosophical explanation, a confusion incident on the fact that his Principles of Biology was also part of his Synthetic Philosophy. Biology as such has of course nothing to do with "the Ultimate Reality behind manifestations" or with the "implied noumenon." And when Spencer says "it is impossible even to imagine those processes going on in organic matter out of which emerges the dynamic element in Life," or when he illustrates his difficulty by pointing out how impossible it is to give a physico-chemical interpretation of the way a plant cell makes its wall, or a coccolith its imbricated covering, or a sponge its spicules, or a hen eats broken egg-shells, we do not believe he was thinking of anything but "phenomenal causation." When he says "The processes which go on in living things are incomprehensible as results of any physical actions known to us," we see no reason to take the edge off this truth by saying that Spencer simply meant that the Ultimate Reality is inaccessible.

In any case, whether Spencer meant that we cannot give any scientific analysis in physico-chemical terms of the unified behaviour of even the simplest organism, or whether he simply meant that the raison d'être, the ultimate reality of life, was an inaccessible noumenon, he confesses that we have "only a surface knowledge"; "only the manifestations come within the range of our intelligence while that which is manifested lies beyond it"; "the order existing among the actions which living things exhibit remains the same whether we know or do not know the nature of that from which the actions originate." This seems to us to sound a more modest note than is heard in the sentence: "The interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion and Force, is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of thought to the simplest symbols."