Herbert Spencer
British philosopher
born April 27, 1820, Derby,
Derbyshire, Eng.
died Dec. 8, 1903, Brighton, Sussex
Main
English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of
evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge,
advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science
over religion. His magnum opus was The Synthetic Philosophy, a
comprehensive work completed in 1896 and containing volumes on the
principles of biology, psychology, morality, and sociology.
Life and works.
Spencer’s father, William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and
his parents’ dissenting religious convictions inspired in him a
nonconformity that continued active even after he had abandoned the
Christian faith. Spencer declined an offer from his uncle, the Rev.
Thomas Spencer, to send him to Cambridge, and in consequence his higher
education was largely the result of his own reading, which was chiefly
in the natural sciences. He was, for a few months, a schoolteacher and
from 1837 to 1841 a railway civil engineer.
In 1842 he contributed some
letters (republished later as a pamphlet, The Proper Sphere of
Government, 1843) to The Nonconformist, in which he argued that it is
the business of governments to uphold natural rights and that they do
more harm than good when they go beyond this. After some association
with progressive journalism through such papers as The Zoist (devoted to
mesmerism and phrenology) and The Pilot (the organ of the Complete
Suffrage Union), Spencer became in 1848 a subeditor of The Economist. In
1851 he published Social Statics (reissued in 1955), which contained in
embryo most of his later views, including his argument in favour of an
extreme form of economic and social laissez-faire. About 1850 Spencer
became acquainted with Marian Evans (the novelist George Eliot), and his
philosophical conversations with her led some of their friends to expect
that they would marry; but in his Autobiography (1904) Spencer denies
any such desire, much as he admired Evans’ intellectual powers. Other
friends were G.H. Lewes, T.H. Huxley, and J.S. Mill. In 1853 Spencer,
having received a legacy from his uncle, resigned his position with The
Economist.
Having published the first part
of The Principles of Psychology in 1855, Spencer in 1860 issued a
prospectus and accepted subscriptions for a comprehensive work, The
Synthetic Philosophy, which was to include, besides the already
published Principles of Psychology, volumes on first principles and on
biology, sociology, and morality. First Principles was published in
1862, and between then and 1896, when the third volume of The Principles
of Sociology appeared, the task was completed. In order to prepare the
ground for The Principles of Sociology, Spencer started in 1873 a series
of works called Descriptive Sociology, in which information was provided
about the social institutions of various societies, both primitive and
civilized. The series was interrupted in 1881 because of lack of public
support. Spencer was a friend and adviser of Beatrice Potter, later
Beatrice Webb, the social reformer, who frequently visited Spencer
during his last illness and left a sympathetic and sad record of his
last years in My Apprenticeship (1926). Spencer died in 1903, at
Brighton, leaving a will by which trustees were set up to complete the
publication of the Descriptive Sociology. The series comprised 19 parts
(1873–1934).
Spencer was one of the most
argumentative and most discussed English thinkers of the Victorian
period. His strongly scientific orientation led him to urge the
importance of examining social phenomena in a scientific way. He
believed that all aspects of his thought formed a coherent and closely
ordered system. Science and philosophy, he held, gave support to and
enhanced individualism and progress. Though it is natural to cite him as
the great exponent of Victorian optimism, it is notable that he was by
no means unaffected by the pessimism that from time to time clouded the
Victorian confidence. Evolution, he taught, would be followed by
dissolution, and individualism would come into its own only after an era
of socialism and war.
The synthetic philosophy in outline.
Spencer saw philosophy as a synthesis of the fundamental principles
of the special sciences, a sort of scientific summa to replace the
theological systems of the Middle Ages. He thought of unification in
terms of development, and his whole scheme was in fact suggested to him
by the evolution of biological species. In First Principles he argued
that there is a fundamental law of matter, which he called the law of
the persistence of force, from which it follows that nothing homogeneous
can remain as such if it is acted upon, because any external force must
affect some part of it differently from other parts and cause difference
and variety to arise. From this, he continued, it would follow that any
force that continues to act on what is homogeneous must bring about an
increasing variety. This “law of the multiplication of effects,” due to
an unknown and unknowable absolute force, is in Spencer’s view the clue
to the understanding of all development, cosmic as well as biological.
It should be noted that Spencer published his idea of the evolution of
biological species before the views of Charles Darwin and the British
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace were known, but Spencer at that time
thought that evolution was caused by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, whereas Darwin and Wallace attributed it to natural
selection. Spencer later accepted the theory that natural selection was
one of the causes of biological evolution, and he himself coined the
phrase “survival of the fittest” (Principles of Biology [1864], vol. 1,
p. 444).
Sociology and social philosophy.
That Spencer first derived his general evolutionary scheme from
reflection on human society is seen in Social Statics, in which social
evolution is held to be a process of increasing “individuation.” He saw
human societies as evolving by means of increasing division of labour
from undifferentiated hordes into complex civilizations. Spencer
believed that the fundamental sociological classification was between
military societies, in which cooperation was secured by force, and
industrial societies, in which cooperation was voluntary and
spontaneous.
Evolution is not the only
biological conception that Spencer applied in his sociological theories.
He made a detailed comparison between animal organisms and human
societies. In both he found a regulative system (the central nervous
system in the one, government in the other), a sustaining system
(alimentation in the one case, industry in the other), and a
distribution system (veins and arteries in the first; roads, telegraphs,
etc., in the second). The great difference between an animal and a
social organism, he said, is that, whereas in the former there is one
consciousness relating to the whole, in the latter consciousness exists
in each member only; society exists for the benefit of its members and
not they for its benefit.
This individualism is the key to
all of Spencer’s work. His contrast between military and industrial
societies is drawn between despotism, which is primitive and bad, and
individualism, which is civilized and good. He believed that in
industrial society the order achieved, though planned by no one, is
delicately adjusted to the needs of all parties. In The Man Versus the
State (1884) he wrote that England’s Tories generally favour a military
and Liberals an industrial social order but that the Liberals of the
latter half of the 19th century, with their legislation on hours of
work, liquor licensing, sanitation, education, etc., were developing a
“New Toryism” and preparing the way for a “coming slavery.” “The
function of liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the
powers of kings. The function of true liberalism in the future will be
that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments.”
Metaphysics.
In his emphasis on variety and differentiation, Spencer was
unwittingly repeating, in a 19th-century idiom, the metaphysics of
liberalism that Spinoza and Leibniz had adumbrated in the 17th century.
Spinoza had maintained that “God or Nature” has an infinity of
attributes in which every possibility is actualized, and Leibniz had
argued that the perfection of God is exhibited in the infinite variety
of the universe. Though neither of them believed that time is an
ultimate feature of reality, Spencer combined a belief in the reality of
time with a belief in the eventual actualization of every possible
variety of being. He thus gave metaphysical support to the liberal
principle of variety, according to which a differentiated and developing
society is preferable to a monotonous and static one.
Evaluation.
Spencer’s attempt to synthesize the sciences showed a sublime
audacity that has not been repeated because the intellectual
specialization he welcomed and predicted increased even beyond his
expectations. His sociology, although it gave an impetus to the study of
society, was superseded as a result of the development of social
anthropology since his day and was much more concerned with providing a
rationale for his social ideals than he himself appreciated. Primitive
men, for example, are not the childlike emotional creatures that he
thought them to be, nor is religion to be explained only in terms of the
souls of ancestors. When T.H. Huxley said that Spencer’s idea of a
tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact,” he called attention to the
system-building feature of Spencer’s work that led him to look for what
confirmed his theories and to ignore or to reinterpret what conflicted
with them.
Harry Burrows Acton
