Herbert Spencer

“ For, while to the President of Yale College Spencer is little better than a pretender and a verbal trickster, whose illusive reputation is destined to vanish so speedily that the world will wonder how the delusion lasted so long, the Italian professor, on the other hand, accords to him a regnant place as the commanding mind of the most vigorous and powerful philosophical school of the present age. He says, "Modern psychological inquiry reaches its highest degree of development in Herbert Spencer." ”

“ Indeed I should say that there are few men of great intellect and character who reveal themselves so little to the ordinary observer as Herbert Spencer does. His face is, above all things, commonplace. There is nothing whatever remarkable, nothing attractive, nothing repelling, nothing particularly unattractive, about him. Honest, homespun, prosaic respectability seems to be his principal characteristic. In casual and ordinary conversation he does not impress one in the least. Almost all men of well-earned distinction seem to have, above all things, a strongly-marked individuality. ”

“ Spencer; but of the man he says: "It is a long time since purely English philosophy has produced so able, so comprehensive, and so daring a thinker as Herbert Spencer." In his works "we have some of the clearest and most forcible statements of opinion upon great and abstract topics to be found in the English language. If the truth must have opponents, it is just such opponents we prefer to see and to meet—frank, outspoken, unreserved." This is the general judgment that is passed upon Mr. Spencer by eminent thinkers who have studied him, whether they agree with his views or not. ”

“ In the system of Spencer, as in that of Comte, sociology appears at the top of the scientific series, but with him this pinnacle of knowledge is really and solidly connected with the building itself. In spite of their much greater complexity, social phenomena are essentially identical with those of inferior cosmic life. Sociology for Herbert Spencer is a physical science like others, requiring no peculiar synthetic or subjective methods, and its aim with him can not be any other than the reduction of the specific laws of social life to the universal laws of motion. ”

“ Herbert Spencer had no other titles to fame, he would still be the greatest of psychologists. The vast constructions of his 'First Principles' will ever be a monument of his extraordinary powers of generalization. His designed organization of the Social Science opens up the prospect of intellectual acquisitions in the future to which the past may furnish few parallels. ”

“ THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.
HERBERT SPENCER.
The world loses one of its few great men in the death of Herbert Spencer. Thirty years ago there lived and worked in Great Britain a notable group of leaders—Darwin, Huxley, Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Gladstone and many more. One by one they have died, each time leaving an empty space that remains unfilled. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in his hands.
He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. “It will go! It will go!” was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears. Of course it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at which the magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before him in lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last paragraph in “Overdue” ”

“ The works of Herbert Spencer have attained a prominence and a reputation in America even greater than in England, and he stands the acknowledged leader of a school of philosophy which counts many students and thinkers among his followers. ”

“ No man ever more entirely fulfilled the maxim of the French poet, which another philosopher took for his favourite device: 'What is it that makes a great life? It is the ideal of youth carried out in mature age.' It is thus that, almost alone of modern philosophers, Herbert Spencer achieved all that he purposed, and perhaps all that he was capable of completing. ”

“ Herbert Spencer, having, by diligent, heroic self-desiccation, got his mind into the purely adult, dried-beef condition, well freed from all boy-juices of imagination, has discovered that all Fact in this universe, which cannot be verbally formulated and made a scientific dogma, is without significance to man's spirit, however it may be negatively implied as a vacant somewhat by his logic. ”

“ Herbert Spencer’s system, which is so generally accepted at the present day, consists in the belief that if State power were but sufficiently reduced to narrow it to the circle traced by orthodox economists, the Darwinian law and the survival of the fittest would naturally follow without difficulty. Mr. Spencer has simply borrowed from old-fashioned political economy without submitting to the fire of his inexorable criticism, the superficial and false notion that, if the laissez-faire and free contract régime were proclaimed, the so-called natural laws would govern the social order. ”

“ Herbert Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason that he refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with different tastes. I am an English gentleman with different tastes. He liked philosophy. I like art. He liked writing ten books on the nature of human society. ”

“ I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-begging word “Evolution,” having, so to speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only through the struggling mind of man. ”

“ When Herbert Spencer speaks of the eternal Power in the universe which makes for righteousness and is manifested in every event of the universe as the Unknowable, does he not do what Holy Writ has already done? ”

“ Herbert Spencer, of England, has entered upon the publication of a new philosophical system, so original and comprehensive as to deserve the attention of all earnest inquirers. He proposes nothing less than to unfold such a complete philosophy of Nature, physical, organic, mental and social, as Science has now for the first time made possible, and which, if successfully executed, will constitute a momentous step in the progress of thought. ”

“ Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you—did he ever convince anybody—did he ever for one mad moment convince himself—that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do you believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any more chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined, that an angler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? ”

“ 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." ”

“ Do you propose to suppress nature, extinguish reason, and call it promoting science, vindicating the dignity of man?
Reason can never be made to believe that all reality is confined to what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls the knowable, and we the intelligible. There is nothing of which reason is better or more firmly persuaded than that there is more reality than she herself knows or can know. ”

“ The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards—and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey. ”

“ Herbert Spencer represents the scientific side of a greater number of questions agitating the public mind to-day, than any other one man, and he is still industriously engaged in solving, or endeavoring to solve, a greater number of social problems. And yet the most enthusiastic admirer of this gentleman will be forced to admit, when driven to the wall of actual controversy, that one-half, if not two-thirds, of his more formidable statements, put forth in the name of science, remain undemonstrated as scientific truths. ”

“ Herbert Spencer had a free mind as regards religion, politics, economics and sociology; yet he was a bachelor, lived in the city, belonged to a club, played billiards and smoked cigars. Physical health was out of his reach, and with all his vast knowledge, he never knew why. All through history we find violence and gentleness, ignorance and wisdom, folly and shrewdness side by side in the same person.
The one common thing in humanity is inconsistency. To account for it were vain. We know only that it is. [Pg 368] ”

“ Herbert Spencer, without denying the existence of the unknowable or the absolute, testified to his belief in the unity of all things by the prominence he gives in his writings to the social organism. This organism he admits may be, probably is, under the control of an intelligent power but of which we can, he thinks, have no trustworthy knowledge. In these efforts to find some single expression under which all knowledge may be grouped and estimated at its real value, the tendency of the age toward unity is seen. ”

“ Herbert Spencer is right in endeavoring to purify the conduct of public affairs and discharge it of error by establishing a system of "absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be," I submit that he need not have said so much as he has lately said in your columns. Who doubts that he is right? Who doubts that he is wisely and nobly employed when his business is to discover the bases of true political morality, and to exhort mankind never to lose sight of them, whatever may be the stress of expediency or compulsion in the world as we find it? ”

“ In the words of its greatest philosopher, Herbert Spencer, "It spans the universe and solves the widest range of its problems, which reach outward through boundless space, and back through illimitable time, resolving the deepest problems of life, mind, society, history and civilization." It has woven into one great philosophy the history of the material universe, the entire organic creation, man and all his faculties, the whole course of human history and the origin and progress of all religion. ”

“ Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved as any method adopted by a philosopher could be—and that is saying a good deal.
The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of Webster's Dictionary ”

“ It is but simple justice to Herbert Spencer to say that he writes in strong, manly, and for the most part classical English, and has made himself master of the best philosophical style that we have met with in any English or American writer. ”

“ The former arrayed themselves under the banner of Herbert Spencer, one of the notable men of the Age, who devoted himself to the things of the Intellect with a single-mindedness, and an indifference to the world, the flesh, and the devil, which recall the lives of the early Renaissance scholars. After an unconventional and fragmentary education, he began active life at the age of seventeen in the first year of the Queen's reign as a railway engineer. ”

“ Of Herbert Spencer not much need be said; everybody knows that the Unknowable in his system has become a sort of undetermined and unconscious force, eluding every effort of the mind to grasp it, but remaining, none the less, the cause explaining evolution, and the source profound whence all things flow. ”

“ Taken as a whole, the literature of the latter half of our century is better than the first. I like the essays of Prof. Clifford. They are so clear, so logical that they are poetic. Herbert Spencer is not simply instructive, he is charming. He is full of true imagination. He is not the slave of imagination. Imagination is his servant. Huxley wrote like a trained swordsman. ”

“ Herbert Spencer that it is a duty to be happy; and to be happy not by crushing your instincts but by finding employment for them. Confined to his bed and sentenced to silence, he could still preserve his old boyishness; even his childish amusements. 'We grown people,' he says in an essay, 'can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes till the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed'—whereas a child must have a toy sword or fight with a bit of furniture. ”