Herbert Spencer Totally Explained

Everything about Herbert Spencer totally explained

Herbert Spencer (April 27, 1820 – December 8, 1903) was an English philosopher; prominent classical liberal political theorist; and sociological theorist.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. The lifelong bachelor contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, politics, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology.
He is best known for coining the phrase, "survival of the fittest," which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he made use of Lamarckism rather than natural selection.

Life

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820, the son of William George Spencer (generally called George). 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 the 1790s by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles.
   Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Revd Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer’s limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics, physics and the ability to translate some easy texts from Latin. He also imprinted on his nephew his own firmly free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from conversations with his friends and acquaintances.
As both an adolescent and a young man Spencer found it difficult to settle to any intellectual or professional discipline. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics. From 1848 to 1853 he served as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist during which time he published his first book, Social Statics (1851) which predicted that humanity would shortly become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state.
   Its publisher, John Chapman, introduced him to his salon which was attended by many of the leading radical and progressive thinkers of the capital, including John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), with whom he was briefly romantically linked. Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would later win fame as 'Darwin’s Bulldog' and who remained his lifelong friend. However it was the friendship of Evans and Lewes that acquainted him with John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic and with Auguste Comte’s Positivism and which set him on the road to his life’s work.
   The first fruit of his friendship with Evans and Lewes was Spencer's second book the Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, which explored a physiological basis for psychology. The book was founded on the fundamental assumption that the human mind was subject to natural laws and that these could be discovered within the framework of general biology. This permitted the adoption of a developmental perspective not merely in terms of the individual (as in traditional psychology), but also of the species and the race. Through this paradigm, Spencer aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill’s Logic, the notion that human mind was constructed from atomic sensations held together by the laws of the association of ideas, with the apparently more 'scientific' theory of phrenology which located specific mental functions in specific parts of the brain.
   Spencer argued that both these theories were partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas were embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, and these could be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. The Psychology, he modestly believed, would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. However, the book wasn't initially successful and the last of the 251 copies of its first edition wasn't sold until June 1861. Its comparative failure may have contributed to Spencer suffering a nervous breakdown, the symptoms of which were to remain with him for the rest of his life. He suffered from recurrent bouts of insomnia and Beatrice Webb, who befriended him towards the end of his life, alleged that he became a regular morphine user.
   Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern which was to establish the universality of natural law. In common with others of his generation, including the members of Chapman's salon, he was possessed with the idea of demonstrating that it was possible to show that everything in the universe - including human culture, language, and morality - could be explained by laws of universal validity. This was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human soul, were beyond the realm of scientific investigation. Comte's Systeme de Philosophie Positive had been written with the ambition of demonstrating the universality of natural law, and Spencer was to follow Comte in the scale of his ambition. However, Spencer differed from Comte in believing it was possible to discover a single law of universal application which he identified with progressive development and was to call the principle of evolution.
   In 1858 Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applied in biology, psychology, sociology (Spencer appropriated Comte's term for the new discipline) and morality. Spencer envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to complete; in the event it took him twice as long and consumed almost all the rest of his long life.
   Despite Spencer's early struggles to establish himself as a writer, by the 1870s he'd become the most famous philosopher of the age. His works were widely read during his lifetime, and by 1869 he was able to support himself solely on the profit of book sales and on income from his regular contributions to Victorian periodicals which were collected as three volumes of Essays. His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and into many other languages and he was offered honors and awards all over Europe and North America. He also became a member of the Athenaeum, an exclusive Gentleman's Club in London open only to those distinguished in the arts and sciences, and the X Club, a dining club of nine founded by T.H. Huxley that met every month and included some of the most prominent thinkers of the Victorian age (three of whom would become presidents of the Royal Society).
   Members included physicist-philosopher John Tyndall and Darwin's cousin, the banker and biologist Sir John Lubbock. There were also some quite significant satellites such as liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster; and guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time. Through such associations, Spencer had a strong presence in the heart of the scientific community and was able to secure an influential audience for his views. He never married, and despite his growing wealth and fame never owned a house of his own.
   The last decades of Spencer's life were characterized by growing disillusionment and loneliness. By the 1890s his readership had begun to desert him while many of his closest friends died and he'd come to doubt the confident faith in progress that he'd made the center-piece of his philosophical system. His later years were also ones in which his political views became increasingly conservative. Whereas Social Statics had been the work of a radical democrat who believed in votes for women (and even for children) and in the nationalization of the land to break the power of the aristocracy, by the 1880s he'd become a staunch opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the landowners of the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the 'socialism' of the administration of William Ewart Gladstone. Spencer's political views from this period were expressed in what has become his most famous work, The Man versus the State. The exception to Spencer's growing conservativism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing, and it contributed to his declining popularity in Britain.
   In 1902, shortly before his death, Spencer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. 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. At Spencer's funeral the Indian nationalist leader Shyamji Krishnavarma announced a donation of £1,000 to establish a lectureship at Oxford University in tribute to Spencer and his work.

The System of Synthetic Philosophy

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.
   In essence Spencer’s philosophical vision was formed by a combination of Deism and Positivism. On the one hand, he'd imbibed something of eighteenth century Deism from his father and other members of the Derby Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe’s immensely popular The Constitution of Man (1828). This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural laws were thus the statutes of a well governed universe that had been decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness. Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless held fast to this conception at an almost sub-conscious level, particularly given that his education didn't equip him to identify and challenge his own assumptions. At the same time, however, he owed far more than he'd ever acknowledge to Positivism, in particular in its conception of a philosophical system as the unification of the various branches of scientific knowledge. He also followed Positivism in his insistence that it was only possible to have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it was idle to speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality. The tension between Positivism and his residual Deism ran through the entire System of Synthetic Philosophy.
   Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.' Like Comte, he was committed to the universality of natural law, the idea that the laws of nature applied without exception, to the organic realm as much as to the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as to the rest of creation. The first objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was thus to demonstrate that there were no exceptions to being able to discover scientific explanations, in the form of natural laws, of all the phenomena of the universe. Spencer’s volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines. Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover ‘laws’ of morality that had the status of laws of nature while still having normative content, a conception which can be traced to Combe’s Constitution of Man.
   The second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these same laws led inexorably to Progress. In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of scientific method, Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. In this respect, he followed the model laid down by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Chambers’ book was in reality a programme for the unification of science which aimed to exhibit Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis for the origin of the solar system and Lamarck’s theory of species transformation as both instantiations (in Lewes' phrase) of 'one magnificent generalization of progressive development.' Chambers was associated with Chapman’s salon and his work served as the unacknowledged template for the Synthetic Philosophy.

Concept of evolution

The first clear articulation of Spencer’s evolutionary perspective occurred in his essay 'Progress: Its Law and Cause' published in Chapman's Westminster Review in 1857, and which later formed the basis of the First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In it he expounded a theory of evolution which combined insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay 'The Theory of Life' – itself derivative from Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie – with a generalization of von Baer’s law of embryological development. Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organization as much as to the human mind. It differed from other scientific laws only by its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences could be shown to be instantiations of this principle.
This attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different to that to be found in Darwin’s Origin of Species which was published two years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalized Darwin’s work on natural selection. But although after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as his own term for Darwin's concept,. Spencer also influenced the Japanese Westernizer Tokutomi Soho, who believed that Japan was on the verge of transitioning from a "militant society" to an "industrial society," and needed to quickly jettison all things Japanese and take up Western ethics and learning. He also corresponded with Kaneko Kentaro, warning him of the dangers of imperialism.

Literature

Spencer also exerted a great influence on literature and rhetoric. His 1852 essay, “The Philosophy of Style,” explored a growing trend of formalist approaches to writing. Highly focused on the proper placement and ordering of the parts of an English sentence, he created a guide for effective composition. Spencer’s aim was to free prose writing from as much "friction and inertia" as possible, so that the reader wouldn't be slowed by strenuous deliberations concerning the proper context and meaning of a sentence. Spencer argued that it's the writer's ideal "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort" (§3)by the reader.
His logic was that by making the meaning as readily accessible as possible, the writer would achieve the greatest possible communicative efficiency. This was accomplished, according to Spencer, by placing all the subordinate clauses, objects and phrases before the subject of a sentence so that, when readers reached the subject, they'd all the information they needed to completely perceive its significance. While the overall influence that “The Philosophy of Style” had on the field of rhetoric wasn't as far-reaching as his contribution to other fields, Spencer’s voice lent authoritative support to formalist views of rhetoric.
Spencer also had an influence on literature, as many novelists came to address his ideas in their work. George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, Abraham Cahan and D. H. Lawrence all referenced Spencer. Arnold Bennett greatly praised First Principles

, and the influence it had on Bennett may be seen in his many novels. Jack London went so far as to create a character, Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. H.G. Wells used Spencer's ideas as a theme in his novella, The Time Machine, employing them to explain the evolution of man into two species. It is perhaps the best testimony to the influence of Spencer’s beliefs and writings that his reach was so diverse. He influenced not only the administrators who shaped their societies’ inner workings, but also the artists who helped shape those societies' ideals and beliefs.

Primary sources

Papers of Herbert Spencer in Senate House Library, University of London
Most of Spencer's books are available online
"On The Proper Sphere of Government" (1842)
Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851)
- "The Right to Ignore the State", Chapter XIX of the first edition of Social Statics
- Social Statics: Abridged and Revised (1892)
"A Theory of Population" (1852)
Principles of Psychology (1855), first edition, issued in one volume
Education (1861)
System of Synthetic Philosophy',' in ten volumes
First Principles ISBN 0-89875-795-9 (1862)
Principles of Biology (1864, 1867; revised and enlarged: 1898), in two volumes
Volume I — Part I: The Data of Biology; Part II: The Inductions of Biology; Part III: The Evolution of Life; Appendices
Volume II — Part IV: Morphological Development; Part V: Physiological Development; Part VI: Laws of Mutiplication; Appendices
Principles of Psychology (1870, 1880), in two volumes
Volume I — Part I: The Data of Pscyhology; Part II: The Inductions of Pscyhology; Part III: General Synthesis; Part IV: Special Synthesis; Part V: Physical Synthesis; Appendix
Volume II — Part VI: Special Analysis; Part VII: General Analysis; Part VIII: Congruities; Part IX: Corollaries
Principles of Sociology, in three volumes
Volume I (1874-75; enlarged 1876, 1885) — Part I: Data of Sociology; Part II: Inductions of Sociology; Part III: Domestic Institutions
Volume II — Part IV: Ceremonial Institutions (1879); Part V: Political Institutions (1882); Part VI [publishedhere in some editions]: Ecclesiastical Institutions (1885)
Vollume III — Part VI [publishedhere in some editions]: Ecclesiastical Institutions (1885); Part VII: Professional Institutions (1896); Part VIII: Industrial Institutions (1896); References
The Principles of Ethics (1897), in two volumes
Volume I — Part I: The Data of Ethics (1879); Part II: The Inductions of Ethics (1892); Part III: The Ethics of Individual Life (1892); References
Volume II — Part IV: The Ethics of Social Life: Justice (1891); Part V: The Ethics of Social Life: Negative Beneficence (1892); Part VI: The Ethics of Social Life: Positive Beneficence (1892); Appendices
The Study of Sociology (1873, 1896)
An Autobiography (1904), in two volumes

(1908)

v2 Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer by David Duncan

(1908)

Descriptive Sociology; or Groups of Sociological Facts, parts 1-8, classified and arranged by Spencer, compiled and abstracted by David Duncan, Richard Schepping, and James Collier (London, Williams & Norgate, 1873-1881). Essay Collections:

Ilustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions (1864, 1883)

The Man Versus the State (1884)

Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891), in three volumes:

Volume I (includes "The Development Hypothesis," "Progress: Its Law and Cause," "The Factors of Organic Evolution" and others)
Volume II (includes "The Classification of the Sciences," The Philosophy of Style (1852), The Origin and Function of Music," "The Physiology of Laughter," and others)
Volume III (includes "The Ethics of Kant," "State Tamperings With Money and Banks," "Specialized Administration," "From Freedom to Bondage," "The Americans," and others)

Various Fragments (1897, enlarged 1900)

Facts and Comments (1902)

Philosophers' critiques

Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review by Josiah Royce (1904)

Lectures on the Ethics of T.H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau by Henry Sidgwick (1902)

A Few Words with Mr Herbert Spencer by Paul Lafargue (1884)

Further Information

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