to say much about Herbert Spencer, who is rather what people call a
philosopher than a professionally scientific man. But assuredly no
living thinker has done more to undermine orthodoxy than the author of
"First Principles." I have already said that Spencer is much more widely
known in this country than in England. During the first few weeks of my
sojourn in the United States I heard more inquiries and more talk about
Spencer than about almost any other Englishman living. Spencer's whole
life, his pure, rigorous, anchorite-like devotion to knowledge, is
indeed a wonderful phenomenon in an age like the present. He has labored
for the love of labor and for the good it does to the world, almost
absolutely without reward. I presume that as paying speculations Herbert
Spencer's works would be hopeless failures; and yet they have influenced
the thought of the whole thinking world, and will probably grow and grow
in power as the years go on. It is, I suppose, no new or unseemly
revelation to say that Spencer has lived for the most part a life of
poverty as well as of seclusion. He is a sensitive, silent, self-reliant
man, endowed with a pure passion for knowledge, and the quickest,
keenest love of justice and right. There is something indeed quite
Quixotic, in the better sense, about the utterly disinterested and
self-forgetting eagerness with which Herbert Spencer will set himself to
see right done, even in the most trivial of cases. Little, commonplace,
trifling instances of unfairness or injustice, such as most of us may
observe every day, and which even the most benevolent of us will think
himself warranted in passing by, on his way to his own work, without
interference, will summon into activity--into positively unresting
eagerness--all the sympathies and energies of Herbert Spencer, nor will
the great student of life's ultimate principles return to his own high
pursuits until he has obtained for the poor sempstress restitution of
the over-fare exacted by the extortionate omnibus-conductor, or seen
that the policeman on duty is not too rough in his entreatment of the
little captured pickpocket. As one man has an unappeasable passion for
pictures, and another for horses, so Herbert Spencer has a passion for
justice. All this does not appear on first, or casual, acquaintance; but
I have heard many striking, and some very whimsical, illustrations of it
given by friends who know Spencer far better than I do. Indeed I should
say that there are few men of great intellect and character who reveal
themselves so little to the ordinary observer as Herbert Spencer does.
His face is, above all things, commonplace. There is nothing whatever
remarkable, nothing attractive, nothing repelling, nothing particularly
unattractive, about him. Honest, homespun, prosaic respectability seems
to be his principal characteristic. In casual and ordinary conversation
he does not impress one in the least. Almost all men of well-earned
distinction seem to have, above all things, a strongly-marked
individuality. You meet a man of this class casually; you have no idea
who he is; perhaps you do not even discover, have not an opportunity of
discovering, that he is a man of genius or intellect; but you do almost
invariably find yourself impressed with a strong individual
influence--the man seems to be somebody--he is not just like any other
man. To take illustrations familiar to most of us--observe what a
strongly-marked individuality Charles Dickens, John Bright, Disraeli,
Carlyle, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Salisbury have; what a strongly-marked
individuality Nathaniel Hawthorne had, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner,
William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley have. Now, Herbert Spencer is the
very opposite of all this. All that Dr. Johnson said of Burke might be
conveniently reversed in the case of Spencer. The person sheltering
under the hedge, the ostler in the yard, might talk long enough with him
and never feel tempted to say when he had gone, "There has been a
remarkable man here." A London _litterateur_, who had long been a
devotee of Herbert Spencer, was induced some year or two back to go to a
large dinner-party by the assurance that Spencer was to be there and was
actually to have the chair next to his own at table. Our friend went,
was a little late, and found himself disappointed. Next to him on one
side was a man whom he knew and did not care about; on the other side, a
humdrum, elderly, respectable, commonplace personage. With this latter,
for want of a better, he talked. It was dull, commonplace, conventional
talk, good for nothing, meaning nothing. The dinner was nearly over when
our friend heard some one address his right-hand neighbor as "Spencer."
Amazed out of all decorum, he turned to the commonplace, dull-looking
individual, and broke out with the words "Why, you don't mean to say
that you are Herbert Spencer?" "Oh, yes," the other replied, as quietly
as ever, "I am Herbert Spencer."
I have wandered a little from my path; let me return to it. My object is
to illustrate the remarkable and fundamental difference between the
nature of the antagonism which old-fashioned orthodoxy has to encounter
to-day, and that which used to be its principal assailant. The sceptic,
the metaphysician, the "infidel" have given way to the professional
_savant_. Nobody now-a-days would trouble himself to read Tom Paine;
hardly could even the scepticism of Hume or Gibbon attract much public
attention. Auguste Comte has been an influence because he endeavored to
construct as well as to destroy. I cannot speak of Comte without saying
that Professor Huxley seems to me grievously, and almost perversely, to
underrate the value of what Comte has done. Huxley has not, I fancy,
given much attention to historical study, and is therefore not so well
qualified to appreciate Comte as a much inferior man of a different
school might be. Moreover, Huxley appears to have a certain
professional, and I had almost said pedantic, contempt for anything
calling itself science which cannot be rated and registered in the
regular and practical way. To me Comte's one grand theory or discovery,
call it what you will, seems, whether true or untrue, as strictly a
question of science as anything coming under Huxley's own professional
cognizance. But I have already intimated that the character of Huxley's
intellect seems to me acute and penetrating, rather than broad and
comprehensive. Perhaps he is all the better fitted for the work he and
his compeers have undertaken to do. They have taken, in this regard, the
place of the Rousseaus and Diderots; of the much smaller Paines and
Carliles (please don't suppose I am alluding to Thomas Carlyle); of the
yet smaller Holyoakes and Bradlaughs. Those only attempted to destroy:
these seek to construct. Huxley and his brethren follow the advice which
is the moral and the sum of Goethe's "Faust"--they "grasp into the
present," and refuse to "send their thoughts wandering over eternities."
They honestly and fearlessly seek the pure truth, which surely must be
always saving. Let me say something more. This advance-guard of
scientific scholars alone express the common opinion of the educated and
free Englishmen of to-day. The English journals, I wish distinctly to
say, do not express it. They do not venture to express it. There is a
tacit understanding that although it would be too much to expect an
intelligent journalist to write up old-fashioned orthodoxy, yet at least
he is never to be allowed to write it down. It is not very long since
one of the most popular, successful and influential of London journals
sneered at the Parliamentary candidature of my friend, Professor
Fawcett, M. P., on the ground that he was a man who, as an advocate of
the Darwinian theory, admitted that his great-grandfather was a frog.
Yet I know that the journal which indulged in this vapid and vulgar
buffoonery is written for by scholars and men of ability. Now, this is
indeed an extreme and unusual instance of journalism, well cognizant of
better things, condescending to pander to the lowest and stupidest
prejudices. But the same kind of thing, although not the same thing, is
done by London journals every day. You cannot hope to get at the
religious views of cultivated and liberal-minded Englishmen through the
London papers. "The right sort of thing to say," is what the journalists
commit to print, whatever they may think, or know, or say as individuals
and in private. But the scientific men speak out. They, and I might
almost say they alone, have the courage of their opinions. What educated
people venture to believe, they venture to express. Nor do they keep
themselves to audiences of _savans_ and professors and the British
Association. Huxley delivers lectures to the working men of Southwark;
Carpenter undertook Sunday evening discourses in Bloomsbury; Tyndall,
with all the pugnacity of his country, is ready for a controversy
anywhere. Sometimes the duty and honor of maintaining the right of free
speech have been claimed by the journalists alone; sometimes, when even
the journals were silent, by the pulpit, by the bar, or by the stage. In
England to-day all men say aloud what they think on all great subjects
save one--and on that neither pulpit, press, bar nor stage cares to
speak the whole truth. The scientific men alone are bold enough to
declare it, as they are resolute to seek it. I think history will
hereafter contemplate this moral triumph as no less admirable, and no
less remarkable, than any of their mere material conquests.