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.
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