SPENCER, HERBERT

(b. Derby, England, 27 April 1820; d. Brighton, England, 8 December 1903)

philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology

Spencer was the only surviving child of William George and Catherine Spencer; his father, a private school teacher of very modest means, was inclined to a deist rationalism and frequented Quaker meetings. Spencer was educated privately, first by his father (author of an original system of teaching geometry, by “discovery” methods) and then by his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, a radical and scientifically inclined parson. He also participated in the Derby Philosophical Society, a coterie of amateur “natural philosophers” founded by Erasmus Darwin in 1783 along the lines of the Birmingham Lunar Society, and thus became an heir to that provincial tradition of political radicalism, religious free thought, and scientific endeavor of which the key figure had been Joseph Priestley. Above fairly elementary levels he was a virtual autodidact, learning his science from casual reading, attending lectures, and, later, associating with working scientists.

In 1837 Spencer took up railway engineering, during the boom period of railway construction in England, and was active in radical, middle-class, dissenting politics. Dissatisfied with engineering, he hovered long over other choices, finally taking a job in London in 1848 as subeditor of the Economist. There he moved among leaders of literary and scientific opinion and gradually shaped his career as an independent writer and reviewer. Spencer never married (despite his celebrated affair with Marian Evans [George Eliot]) and from 1855 suffered, despite good physical health, from a neurotic condition that intermittently prevented him from sleeping, working, or being in company. Despite his friendships (notably with T. H. Huxley and with the other scientists who composed the X-Club) and his membership in the Athenaeum, Spencer was socially an isolate and took pride in declining all the many honors that were offered him. His considerable reputation as a proponent of extreme laissez-faire liberalism, of the claims of science against traditional religion, and of evolutionary philosophy was at its height in the late 1870’s (most especially in the United States) but had diminished dramatically by the time of his death.

Spencer is important less for specific discoveries or for his contribution to particular sciences (except sociology and psychology) than for his synthesis of so much of the accepted science of his day in the integrating framework of evolution. In an age when natural science was becoming institutionalized and differentiated, both internally and externally, Spencer was the last of the Naturphilosophen. This accounts for the vagaries of his reputation among his scientific contemporaries: low among specialist working scientists and high among many of the most original boundary-crossing innovators (Darwin, Gallon, A. R. Wallace). Spencer’s unified vision of science, expressed in methodological writings as well as in the synthesis itself, contributed greatly to the acceptance of science as a major component in the intellectual culture of industrial society. If the evolutionary totality had many of the attributes of a theology, it was not merely because of its place in the last decisive battle between science and religion, but because its original and enduring motive had been to establish “the secularization of ethics,” now that the unanimous hold of religion had been weakened.It was necessary to integrate physical science with social science and ethics in order to invest the latter with the authority that only science could truly claim. The unity of the whole, and the fertile but misleading cross references between the parts,were essential to both Spencer’s scientific and his socialethical interests.

The precise origin of Spencer’s evolutionary views is impossible to date, but it is likely that they were imbibed in some form during his youth from the “Darwinians” of Derby. He had become a Lamarckian through his reading of Lyell in 1840, and although critical of the Vestiges of Creation (1843). he accepted its basic tenet, “the development hypothesis,” Social Statics (1850), his first book, is evolutionary; and his long essay “A Theory of Population” (1852), in attempting to show that progress is necessitated by population pressure, comes within an ace of anticipating the main elements of Darwinian natural selection. In the later Spencer applied Malthusian principles to animal populations, deduced a struggle for survival and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” but the perspective remained Lamarckian. It is clear from his subsequent essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause”(1857) that the goal of his theory was quite distinct from Darwin’s: to show how progress or development in all areas of the universe—the solar system, the totality of organic species, the maturation of each organism, the psychic development and socialization of the individual, the evolution of society and culture—consists of one fundamental determinate motion from an incoherent homogeneity to a complex and interdependent heterogeneity.

The path to this vision had been cleared by Spencer’s reading of K. E, von Baer’s work on embryology and H. Milne-Edwards‘ theme of “the physiological division of labor” —a notion that, introduced into biology from political economy, was now to be reapplied by Spencer to the social world, in an extensive use of the organic analogy First Principles (1862), with its doctrine of an ultimate unknowable force, sought to reconcile science and religion, and to lay the metaphysical underpinnings of all evolution. The necessity of differentiation was derived from “the Persistence of Force,” the instability of all homogeneous physical conditions, and the tendency of all changes to produce multiple effects, leading to ever more heterogeneous and complex results. He resisted Clerk Maxwell’s suggestion that the second law of thermodynamics modynamics implied increasing entropy, not increasing heterogeneity, as the cosmic trend.

Starting from a definition of life as “a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive... in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences,” Spencer saw higher forms emerging from a gradual process of adaptation to the environment. The Principles of Biology (1864- 1867) analyzes the principal mechanisms by which this occurs and relates them to the specialized structures and functions of plants and animals. Although Darwinian natural selection was easily incorporated into Spencer’s system (as “indirect equilibration”), Spencer was always concerned to insist on the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a major mechanism of evolution. Long after most professional biologists had abandoned it, Spencer, in The Factors of Organic Evolution (1886), his last important scientific essay, argued that “use-inheritance” was necessary to explain most organized systems of behavior or physiological structure. The fatal weakness in his case was his inability to explain how modifications of organs derived from use and the direct effects of the environment could become embodied in the genetic stock. There was one powerful reason—quite apart from the unresolved difficulties that the neo-Darwinism of Weismann and others had left—why Spencer was unwilling to abandon his Lamarckism. It would have undermined what he most wanted to maintain: the fundamental identity of biological evolution and of psychic and social evolution. This tenet of the unity of evolution also led him to blur differences between processes in which the outcome is in some sense “programmed” at the outset (such as the maturation of the embryo) and those in which it is not (such as the evolution of species or the socialization of children).

The Principles of Psychology (1855) was an important and original work, a real milestone in the history of the subject, marking its transition from a heavily epistemological phase to one in which it was closely dependent on physiology. In it Spencer paved the way for Wundt, William James, and Pavlov. Spencer had in his youth accepted phrenology, which, although abandoned, provided him with a critique of the associationist psychology of Hartley, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill, on the grounds of its not embracing the fact of species or racial character. Spencer presented this character not as an innate essence, but as the “organized” residue of the past experience of the species, a factor that interacted with present experience. But he could give no firm account of just how fixed or fluid this “character” was; and he never distinguished properly between the (in our terms) racial and cultural components of “character” in man. The end of psychological evolution was the emergence of ever more complex powers of “representation” in response to environmental stimuli. The same basic processes operated at all levels, so that abstract thought and developed moral sympathy differed only in degree from the automatic contractions of microorganisms.

Spencer’s social theory rested on his psychology, just as his psychology presupposed his biology, because of his basic principle that the character of any aggregate, whether society or physical substance, is fixed by that of its constituent units. The mental development of man, Spencer argued, lay from egotism to altruism: thus society developed from a “militant” phase, in which rigid coercion was needed to hold men together, to an “industrial” phase, in which altruism and a marked individualism permitted the decline of external control and the complex interdependence of an advanced division of labor. The “social state,” or end product of evolution, was the ideal of Spencer’s youth: a society with the minimum of state control over its members’ activities and associations, in which altruism permitted the harmonious free play of each person’s individual interest. His lifework was to try to show that this ideal was uniquely in accord with natural principles.

Spencer failed, yet it was a grand failure. Apart from his major contributions to the nascent fields of sociology and psychology, he performed a major function for the science of his day by drawing out and integrating its principal themes with the general culture of his age. It is a function that no one has performed since.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. There is a complete bibliography of Spencer’s writings in J. Rumney, Herbert Spencer’s Sociology (London, 1937), 311 -323. His principal works, all published in London, are Social Statics: Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1850); The Principles of Psychology (1855; 2nd ed. , enl. and rev. , 2 vols. , 1870- 1872); Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1861); First Principles (1862); The Principles of Biology, 2 vols. (1864- 1867); The Study of Sociology (1873); The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (1876-1897); The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. (1879- 1893); The Man Versus the State (1884); and An Autobiography (1904).

Many of his essays were reprinted in his Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols. (various eds., rev. London, 1890). The principal essays of scientific interest are “A Theory of Population, Deduced From the General Law of Animal Fertility,” in Westminster Review (1852); “The Development Hypothesis,” in Leader (1852); “The Genesis of Science,” in British Quarterly Review (1854); “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” in Westminster Review (1857); “The Social Organism,” ibid. (1860); “The Factors of Organic Evolution,” in Nineteenth Century (1886); and “The Inadequacy of Natural Selection” and further rejoinders, in Contemporary Review ( 1893- 1894).

Several selections from Spencer’s writings, mostly on sociology, have recently been published: The Man Versus the State, With Four Essays on Politics and Society, D. G. MacRae, ed. (Harmondsworth, 1969); Herbert Spencer: Structure, Function and Evolution, S. L. Andreski, ed. (London, 1971); and Herbert Spencer on Social Evolution, J. D. Y. Peel, ed. (Chicago. 1972).

Original MSS of most of Spencer’s books are at the British Museum. The remains of his personal papers (seemingly only a small part) are at the Athenaeum (London). Otherwise his letters are widespread in the collected papers of his correspondents, especially T. H. Huxley (at Imperial College, London) and Beatrice Webb (Passfield Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science).

II. Secondary Literature. The indispensable work is D. Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1908). Among the great volume of contemporary or near-contemporary discussion, criticism, and paraphrase of Spencer’s work are F. H. Collins, An Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy (London, 1889): J. Arthur Thompson, Herbert Spencer (London, 1906): and William James, Memories and Studies (New York, 1911), which contains a judicious obituary assessment. J. Rumney. Herbert Spencer’s Sociology (London, 1937), stands almost alone in the period when Spencer was all but forgotten. Most present interest is in Spencer as social philosopher and forerunner of sociology. J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971), gives the fullest account of the social and intellectual background; see also J. W. Burrow. Evolution and Society (London, 1966); S. Eisen,“Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte,” in Journal of British Studies, 7 (1967); and “Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer: Embattled Unbelievers,” in Victorian studies, 12 (1968); D. Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” in Current Anthropology. 15 (1974); M. Harris. The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968): J. D. Y. Peel, “Spencer and the Neo-evolutionists,” in Sociology, 3 (1969); W. H. Simon, “Herbert Spencer and the Social Organism,” in Journal of the History of Ideas. 21 ( 1960); and G. W. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution (New York, 1968). For a greater emphasis on Spencer as natural scientist, see P. B. Medawar, “Herbert Spencer and the General Law of Evolution,” in The Art of the Soluble (London, 1967); and R. M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists,” in Past and Present, 43 (1969): and Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1970).

J. D. Y. Peel