Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Background
Spencer was born on April 27, 1820 in Derby, England, the son of William George Spencer. Spencer's father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. He ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and also served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society which had been founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Education
Spencer was educated at home by his father and later by an uncle who wanted him to attend Cambridge. Spencer declined, however, feeling himself unfit for a university career. From an early age Spencer demonstrated a marked inclination toward science, and especially toward scientific generalization.
Career
For a few years, until 1841, he practiced the profession of civil engineer as an employee of the London and Birmingham Railway. His interest in evolution is said to have arisen from the examination of fossils that came from the rail-road cuts. Spencer left the railroad to take up a literary career and to follow up some of his scientific interests. He began by contributing to The Non-Conformist, writing a series of letters called The Proper Sphere of Government. This was his first major work and contained his basic concepts of individualism and laissez-faire, which were to be later developed more fully in his Social Statics (1850) and other works. Especially stressed were the right of the individual and the ideal of noninterference on the part of the state. He also foreshadowed some of his later ideas on evolution and spoke of society as an individual organism.
The concept of organic evolution was elaborated fully for the first time in his famous essay "The Developmental Hypothesis, " published in the Leader in 1852. Spencer enthusiastically elaborated on Darwin's process of natural selection, applying it to human society, and made his own contribution in the notion of "survival of the fittest. " Spencer systematically tried to establish the basis of a scientific study of education, psychology, sociology, and ethics from an evolutionary point of view.
Social philosophy in the latter part of the 19th century in the United States was dominated by Spencer. His ideas of laissez-faire and the survival of the fittest by natural selection fitted very well into an age of rapid expansion and ruthless business competition. Spencer provided businessmen with the reassuring notion that what they were doing was not just ruthless self-interest but was a natural law operating in nature and human society. Not only was competition in harmony with nature, but it was also in the interest of the general welfare and progress. Social Darwinism, or Spencerism, became a total view of life which justified opposition to social reform on the basis that reform interfered with the operation of the natural law of survival of the fittest. Spencer visited the United States in 1882 and was much impressed by what he observed on a triumphal tour. He prophetically saw in the industrial might of the United States the seeds of world power. He admired the American industrialists and became a close friend of the great industrialist and steel baron Andrew Carnegie. By the 1880s and 1890s Spencer had become a universally recognized philosopher and scientist. His books were published widely, and his ideas commanded a great deal of respect and attention. His Principles of Biology was a standard text at Oxford. At Harvard, William James used his Principles of Psychology as a textbook. Although some of Spencer's more extreme formulations of laissez-faire were abandoned fairly rapidly, even in the United States, he will continue to exert an influence as long as competition, the profit motive, and individualism are held up as positive social values.
Spencer spent his last years continuing his work and avoiding the honors and positions that were offered to him by a long list of colleges and universities. He continued writing all his life, in later years often by dictation, until he succumbed to poor health at the age of 83. His ashes are interred in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery facing Karl Marx's grave.
The basis for Spencer's appeal to many of his generation was that he appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science. Spencer's philosophical system seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to believe in the ultimate perfection of humanity on the basis of advanced scientific conceptions such as the first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution.
Spencer's reputation among the Victorians owed a great deal to his agnosticism. He rejected theology as representing the 'impiety of the pious.' He was to gain much notoriety from his repudiation of traditional religion, and was frequently condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and materialism. Nonetheless, unlike Thomas Henry Huxley, whose agnosticism was a militant creed directed at 'the unpardonable sin of faith' (in Adrian Desmond's phrase), Spencer insisted that he was not concerned to undermine religion in the name of science, but to bring about a reconciliation of the two. The following argument is a summary of Part 1 of his First Principles.
Starting either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued, we are ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator or the substratum which underlies our experience of phenomena, we can frame no conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, religion and science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable of 'relative' knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge of phenomena, not of the reality ('the absolute') underlying phenomena. Hence both science and religion must come to recognise as the 'most certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable' and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges.
Politics
Spencerian views in 21st century circulation derive from his political theories and memorable attacks on the reform movements of the late 19th century. He has been claimed as a precursor by libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Politics in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Spencer disliked, and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and individualists in Europe and America that they are still in use in the 21st century.
Views
In 1851 Spencer was asked to review W. B. Carpenter’s Principles of Physiology. He perceived that evolution involves not only an increase in heterogeneity but also an increase in definiteness and in integration. The term “evolution” itself, which Spencer made current, he used for the first time in “On Manners and Fashion” (1854). Years later, in discussing his first use of the term, he wrote, “I did not introduce it in the place of ’epigénesis,’ or any word of specially biological application, but as a word fit for expressing the process of evolution throughout its entire range, inorganic and organic”. In explaining why he had replaced the term “progress, ” which he had used as late as April 1857 in his article “Progress: Its Law and Cause, ” Spencer noted that “progress” has an anthropocentric meaning, and that there is needed a word free from that”. In some of his later writings Spencer defined the general process of evolution in the following terms: Evolution is a change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent, heterogeneity. While he had discussed the evolution of various things in earlier articles, it was in “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) that Spencer first applied the concept of evolution systematically to the universe at large, and especially to human society.
The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back, and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth; it is seen in the unfolding of every single organism on its surface, and in the multiplication of kinds of organisms; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilized individual, or in the aggregate of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organization; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity (1857). While becoming increasingly interested in general evolution, Spencer continued to be concerned with organic evolution.
In 1855, in the first edition of Principles of Psychology, he wrote that “Life under all its forms has arisen by a progressive, unbroken evolution; and through the immediate instrumentality of what we call natural causes.” When Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Spencer received it warmly and in fact over the years defended it against attack. What Darwin supplied that Spencer had not was a satisfactory mechanism - natural selection - to account for organic evolution.
In 1858 Spencer conceived the idea of surveying the fields of biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics from an evolutionary point of view. Thus, Spencer argued, Comte’s ideas could not have entered into his thinking on comparative sociology. The first volume of the Synthetic Philosophy was First Principles (1862), in which Spencer dealt with the principle of evolution at great length, exhibiting and discussing many examples of it.
A thoroughgoing determinist, Spencer maintained that causation operates in human behavior just as it does in other spheres of nature and regarded free will as an illusion. Spencer’s disdain for conventional historians extended to their published works. Spencer further charged historians with failing to present the essential facts of human history.
Quotations:
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
"The law is the survival of the fittest... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival."
"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."
"The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future."
"Society exists for the benefit of its members - not the members for the benefit of society."
"This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."
"The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control."
"No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy."
"The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts."
"Mother, when your children are irritable, do not make them more so by scolding and fault-finding, but correct their irritability by good nature and mirthfulness. Irritability comes from errors in food, bad air, too little sleep, a necessity for change of scene and surroundings; from confinement in close rooms, and lack of sunshine."
"What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man - to protect person and property - to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak - in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more."
"If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state-to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support."