"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform." If the
greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with
which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of
outline, from gothic to classic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory
nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic,
and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of
whom can _go_, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned the supreme
miracle of creative ingenuity. Rarely has Nature performed an odder or
more Dickens-like feat than when she deliberately designed, or
accidentally stumbled into, the personality of Herbert Spencer.
Greatness and smallness surely never lived so closely in one skin
together.
The opposite verdicts passed upon his work by his contemporaries bear
witness to the extraordinary mingling of defects and merits in his
mental character. Here are a few, juxtaposed:--
"A philosophic saw-mill."--"The most capacious and powerful thinker of
all time.
"The Arry' of philosophy."--"Aristotle and his master were not more
beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle."
"Herbert Spencer's chromo-philosophy."--"No other man that has walked
the earth has so wrought and written himself into the life of the
world."
"The touch of his mind takes the living flavor out of everything."--"He
is as much above and beyond all the other great philosophers who have
ever lived as the telegraph is beyond the carrier-pigeon, or the
railway beyond the sedan chair."
"He has merely combined facts which we knew before into a huge
fantastic contradictory system, which hides its nakedness and emptiness
partly under the veil of an imposing terminology, and partly in the
primeval fog."--"His contributions are of a depth, profundity, and
magnitude which have no parallel in the history of mind. Taking but
one--and one only--of his transcendent reaches of thought,--namely,
that referring to the positive sense of the Unknown as the basis of
religion,--it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that the analysis and
synthesis by which he advances to the almost supernal grasp of this
mighty truth give a sense of power and reach verging on the
preternatural."
Can the two thick volumes of autobiography which Mr. Spencer leaves
behind him explain such discrepant appreciations? Can we find revealed
in them the higher synthesis which reconciles the contradictions?
Partly they do explain, I think, and even justify, both kinds of
judgment upon their author. But I confess that in the last resort I
still feel baffled. In Spencer, as in every concrete individual, there
is a uniqueness that defies all formulation. We can feel the touch of
it and recognize its taste, so to speak, relishing or disliking, as the
case may be, but we can give no ultimate account of it, and we have in
the end simply to admire the Creator.
Mr. Spencer's task, the unification of all knowledge into an articulate
system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or
Descartes. Most thinkers have confined themselves either to
generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to
everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first
principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a
fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics.
Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on
in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. His
civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life
was pure. He was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character
was wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt), and
from the perverse egoisms that so often go with greatness.
Surely, any one hearing this veracious enumeration would think that
Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant human being. Such wide
curiosities must have gone with the widest sympathies, and such a
powerful harmony of character, whether it were a congenital gift, or
were acquired by spiritual wrestling and eating bread with tears, must
in any case have been a glorious spectacle for the beholder. Since
Goethe, no such ideal human being can have been visible, walking our
poor earth.
Yet when we turn to the "Autobiography," the self-confession which we
find is this: An old-maidish personage, inhabiting boarding-houses,
equable and lukewarm in all his tastes and passions, having no
desultory curiosity, showing little interest in either books or people.
A petty fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth of any
wide designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of things,
yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession of a
world-formula which by dint of his extraordinary pertinacity he
proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it made him a
philosopher in spite of himself. He appears as modest enough, but with
a curious vanity in some of his deficiencies,--his lack of desultory
interests, for example, and his nonconformity to reigning customs. He
gives a queer sense of having no emotional perspective, as if small
things and large were on the same plane of vision, and equally
commanded his attention. In spite of his professed dislike of
monotony, one feels an awfully monotonous quality in him; and in spite
of the fact that invalidism condemned him to avoid thinking, and to
saunter and potter through large parts of every day, one finds no
twilight region in his mind, and no capacity for dreaminess or
passivity. All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare,
like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are
no mysteries or shadows.
"Look on this picture and on that," and answer how they can be
compatible.
For one thing, Mr. Spencer certainly writes himself _down_ too much.
He complains of a poor memory, of an idle disposition, of a general
dislike for reading. Doubtless there have been more gifted men in all
these respects. But when Spencer once buckled to a particular task,
his memory, his industry, and his reading went beyond those of the most
gifted. He had excessive sensibility to stimulation by a challenge,
and he had preëminent pertinacity. When the notion of his philosophic
system once grasped him, it seemed to possess itself of every effective
fibre of his being. No faculty in him was left unemployed,--nor, on
the other hand, was anything that his philosophy could contain left
unstated. Roughly speaking, the task and the man absorbed each other
without residuum.
Compare this type of mind with such an opposite type as Ruskin's, or
even as J. S. Mill's, or Huxley's, and you realize its peculiarity.
Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental
temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and
leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities. Spencer tossed all
his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back
on them forever. His books seem to have expressed all that there was
to express in his character.
He is very frank about this himself. No _Sturm und Drang
Periode_, no problematic stage of thought, where the burden of the
much-to-be-straightened exceeds the powers of straightening.
When George Eliot uttered surprise at seeing no lines on his forehead,
his reply was:--"I suppose it is because I am never puzzled."--"It has
never been my way," he continues, "to set before myself a problem and
puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to
time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions
raised; but have been arrived at unawares--each as the ultimate outcome
of a body of thought which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct
observation, or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me;
apparently because I had a sense of its significance. . . . A week
afterwards, possibly, the matter would be remembered; and with further
thought about it, might occur a recognition of some wider application:
new instances being aggregated with those already noted. Again, after
an interval," etc., etc. "And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive
ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would
grow up a coherent and organized theory" (vol. i, page 464).
A sort of mill, this, wound up to grind in a certain way, and
irresponsive otherwise.
"To apply day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring
information, or of increasing ability, was not in me." "Anything like
passive receptivity is foreign to my nature; and there results an
unusually small tendency to be affected by others' thoughts. It seems
as though the fabric of my conclusions had in all cases to be developed
from within. Material which could be taken in and organized so as to
form part of a coherent structure, there was always a readiness to
receive. But ideas and sentiments of alien kinds, or unorganizable
kinds, were, if not rejected, yet accepted with indifference, and soon
dropped away." "It has always been out of the question for me to go on
reading a book the fundamental principles of which I entirely dissent
from. I take it for granted that if the fundamental principles are
wrong the rest cannot be right; and thereupon cease reading--being, I
suspect, rather glad of an excuse for doing so." "Systematic books of
a political or ethical kind, written from points of view quite unlike
my own, were either not consulted at all, or else they were glanced at
and thereafter disregarded" (vol. i, pages 215, 277, 289, 350).
There is pride rather than compunction in these confessions. Spencer's
mind was so narrowly systematized, that he was at last almost incapable
of believing in the reality of alien ways of feeling. The invariable
arrogance of his replies to criticisms shows his absolute
self-confidence. Every opinion in the world had to be articulately
right or articulately wrong,--so proved by some principle or other of
his infallible system.
He confesses freely his own inflexibility and censoriousness. His
account of his father makes one believe in the fatality of heredity.
Born of old nonconformist stock, the elder Spencer was a man of
absolute punctuality. Always he would step out of his way to kick a
stone off the pavement lest somebody should trip over it. If he saw
boys quarrelling he stopped to expostulate; and he never could pass a
man who was ill-treating a horse without trying to make him behave
better. He would never take off his hat to any one, no matter of what
rank, nor could he be induced to address any one as "Esquire" or as
"Reverend." He would never put on any sign of mourning, even for
father and mother; and he adhered to one style of coat and hat
throughout all changes of fashion. Improvement was his watchword
always and everywhere. Whatever he wrote had to be endlessly
corrected, and his love of detail led all his life to his neglecting
large ends in his care for small ones. A good heart, but a pedantic
conscience, and a sort of energetically mechanical intelligence.
Of himself Herbert Spencer says: "No one will deny that I am much given
to criticism. Along with exposition of my own views there has always
gone a pointing out of defects in those of others. And if this is a
trait in my writing, still more is it a trait in my conversation. The
tendency to fault-finding is dominant--disagreeably dominant. The
indicating of errors in thought and speech made by those around has all
through life been an incurable habit--a habit for which I have often
reproached myself, but to no purpose."
The "Autobiography" abounds in illustrations of the habit. For
instance:--
"Of late I have observed sundry cases in which, having found the right,
people deliberately desert it for the wrong. . . . A generation ago
salt-cellars were made of convenient shapes--either ellipses or
elongated parallelograms: the advantage being that the salt-spoon,
placed lengthwise, remained in its place. But for some time past,
fashion has dictated circular salt-cellars, on the edges of which the
salt-spoon will not remain without skilful balancing: it falls on the
cloth. In my boyhood a jug was made of a form at once convenient and
graceful. . . . Now, however, the almost universal form of jug in use
is a frustum of a cone with a miniature spout. It combines all
possible defects. When anything like full, it is impossible to pour
out a small quantity without part of the liquid trickling down beneath
the spout; and a larger quantity cannot be poured out without exceeding
the limits of the spout and running over on each side of it. If the
jug is half empty, the tilting must be continued a long time before any
liquid comes; and then, when it does come, it comes with a rush;
because its surface has now become so large that a small inclination
delivers a great deal. To all which add that the shape is as ugly a
one as can well be hit upon. Still more extraordinary is the folly of
a change made in another utensil of daily use"--and Spencer goes on to
find fault with the cylindrical form of candle extinguisher, proving by
a description of its shape that "it squashes the wick into the melted
composition, the result being that when, next day, the extinguisher is
taken off, the wick, imbedded in the solidified composition, cannot be
lighted without difficulty" (vol. ii, page 238).
The remorseless explicitness, the punctuation, everything, make these
specimens of public fault-finding with what probably was the equipment
of Mr. Spencer's latest boarding-house, sound like passages from "The
Man versus the State." Another example:--
"Playing billiards became 'my custom always of the afternoon.' Those
who confess to billiard-playing commonly make some kind of an
excuse. . . . It suffices to me that I like billiards, and the
attainment of the pleasure given I regard as a sufficient motive. I
have for a long time deliberately set my face against that asceticism
which makes it an offence to do a thing for the pleasure of doing it;
and have habitually contended that, so long as no injury is inflicted
on others, nor any ulterior injury on self, and so long as the various
duties of life have been discharged, the pursuit of pleasure for its
own sake is perfectly legitimate and requires no apology. The opposite
view is nothing else than a remote sequence of the old devil worship of
the barbarian, who sought to please his god by inflicting pains upon
himself, and believed his god would be angry if he made himself happy"
(vol. ii, page 263).
The tone of pedantic rectitude in these passages is characteristic.
Every smallest thing is either right or wrong, and if wrong, can be
articulately proved so by reasoning. Life grows too dry and literal,
and loses all aërial perspective at such a rate; and the effect is the
more displeasing when the matters in dispute have a rich variety of
aspects, and when the aspect from which Mr. Spencer deduces his
conclusions is manifestly partial.
For instance, in his art-criticisms. Spencer in his youth did much
drawing, both mechanical and artistic. Volume one contains a
photo-print of a very creditable bust which he modelled of his uncle.
He had a musical ear, and practiced singing. He paid attention to
style, and was not wholly insensible to poetry. Yet in all his
dealings with the art-products of mankind he manifests the same curious
dryness and mechanical literality of judgment--a dryness increased by
pride in his non-conformity. He would, for example, rather give a
large sum than read to the end of Homer's Iliad,--the ceaseless
repetition of battles, speeches, and epithets like well-greaved Greeks,
horse-breaking Trojans; the tedious enumeration of details of dresses,
arms, and chariots; such absurdities as giving the genealogy of a horse
while in the midst of a battle; and the appeals to savage and brutal
passions, having soon made the poem intolerable to him (vol. i, page
300). Turner's paintings he finds untrue, in that the earth-region is
habitually as bright in tone as the air-region. Moreover, Turner
scatters his detail too evenly. In Greek statues the hair is falsely
treated. Renaissance painting, even the best, is spoiled by unreal
illumination, and non-rendering of reflected light in the shadows.
Venetian gothic sins by meaningless ornamentation. St. Mark's Church
may be precious archaeologically, but is not aesthetically precious.
Of Wagner's music he admires nothing but the skilful specialization of
the instruments in the orchestra.
The fault-finding in all these cases rests on observation, true as far
as it goes; but the total absence of genial relations with the entirety
of the phenomenon discussed, the clutching at some paltry mechanical
aspect of it that lends itself to reasoned proof by _a_ plus _b_, and
the practical denial of everything that only appeals to vaguer
sentiment, show a mind so oddly limited to ratiocinative and explicit
processes, and so wedded to the superficial and flagrantly
_insufficient_, that one begins to wonder whether in the philosophic
and scientific spheres the same mind can have wrought out results of
extraordinary value.
Both "yes" and "no" are here the answer. Every one who writes books or
articles knows how he must flounder until he hits upon the proper
opening. Once the right beginning found, everything follows easily and
in due order. If a man, however narrow, strikes even by accident, into
one of these fertile openings, and pertinaciously follows the lead, he
is almost sure to meet truth on his path. Some thoughts act almost
like mechanical centres of crystallization; facts cluster of themselves
about them. Such a thought was that of the gradual growth of all
things, by natural processes, out of natural antecedents. Until the
middle of the nineteenth century no one had grasped it _wholesale_; and
the thinker who did so earliest was bound to make discoveries just in
proportion to the exclusiveness of his interest in the principle. He
who had the keenest eye for instances and illustrations, and was least
divertible by casual side-curiosity, would score the quickest triumph.
To Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of having been the first
to see in evolution an absolutely universal principle. If any one else
had grasped its universality, it failed at any rate to grasp him as it
grasped Spencer. For Spencer it instantly became "the guiding
conception running through and connecting all the concrete sciences"
(vol. ii, page 196). Here at last was "an object at once large and
distinct enough" to overcome his "constitutional idleness." "With an
important and definite end to achieve, I could work" (vol. i, page
215). He became, in short, the victim of a vivid obsession, and for
the first time in his life seems to have grown genuinely ambitious.
Every item of his experience, small or great, every idea in his mental
storehouse, had now to be considered with reference to its bearing on
the new universal principle. On pages 194-199 of volume two he gives
an interesting summary of the way in which all his previous and
subsequent ideas moved into harmonious coördination and subordination,
when once he had this universal key to insight. Applying it wholesale
as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his
gamebag. And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily
intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here
a merit. Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his
untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth
and you fully justify the popular estimate of him as one of the world's
geniuses, in spite of the fact that the "temperament" of genius, so
called, seems to have been so lacking in him.
In one sense, then, Spencer's personal narrowness and dryness were not
hindering, but helping conditions of his achievement. Grant that a
vast picture _quelconque_ had to be made before the details could be
made perfect, and a greater richness and receptivity of mind would have
resulted in hesitation. The quality would have been better in spots,
but the extensiveness would have suffered.
Spencer is thus the philosopher of vastness. Misprised by many
specialists, who carp at his technical imperfections, he has
nevertheless enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative
mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists
and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally. He is the
philosopher whom those who have no other philosopher can appreciate.
To be able to say this of any man is great praise, and gives the "yes"
answer to my recent question.
Can the "no" answer be as unhesitatingly uttered? I think so, if one
makes the qualitative aspect of Spencer's work undo its quantitative
aspect. The luke-warm equable temperament, the narrowness of sympathy
and passion, the fondness for mechanical forms of thought, the
imperfect receptivity and lack of interest in facts as such, dissevered
from their possible connection with a theory; nay, the very vividness
itself, the keenness of scent and the pertinacity; these all are
qualities which may easily make for second-rateness, and for
contentment with a cheap and loosely woven achievement. As Mr.
Spencer's "First Principles" is the book which more than any other has
spread his popular reputation, I had perhaps better explain what I mean
by criticising some of its peculiarities.
I read this book as a youth when it was still appearing in numbers, and
was carried away with enthusiasm by the intellectual perspectives which
it seemed to open. When a maturer companion, Mr. Charles S. Peirce,
attacked it in my presence, I felt spiritually wounded, as by the
defacement of a sacred image or picture, though I could not verbally
defend it against his criticisms.
Later I have used it often as a text-book with students, and the total
outcome of my dealings with it is an exceedingly unfavorable verdict.
Apart from the great truth which it enforces, that everything has
evolved somehow, and apart from the inevitable stimulating effect of
any such universal picture, I regard its teachings as almost a museum
of blundering reasoning. Let me try to indicate briefly my grounds for
such an opinion.
I pass by the section on the Unknowable, because this part of Mr.
Spencer's philosophy has won fewer friends than any other. It consists
chiefly of a rehash of Mansel's rehash of Hamilton's "Philosophy of the
Conditioned," and has hardly raised its head since John Mill so
effectively demolished it. If criticism of our human intellectual
constitution is needed, it can be got out of Bradley to-day better than
out of Spencer. The latter's way of reconciling science and religion
is, moreover, too absurdly _naïf_. Find, he says, a fundamental
abstract truth on which they can agree, and that will reconcile them.
Such a truth, he thinks, is that _there is a mystery_. The trouble is
that it is over just such common truths that quarrels begin. Did the
fact that both believed in the existence of the Pope reconcile Luther
and Ignatius Loyola? Did it reconcile the South and the North that
both agreed that there were slaves? Religion claims that the "mystery"
is interpretable by human reason; "Science," speaking through Spencer,
insists that it is not. The admission of the mystery is the very
signal for the quarrel. Moreover, for nine hundred and ninety-nine
men out of a thousand the sense of mystery is the sense of
_more-to-be-known_, not the sense of a More, _not_ to be known.
But pass the Unknowable by, and turn to Spencer's famous law of
Evolution.
"Science" works with several types of "law." The most frequent and
useful type is that of the "elementary law,"--that of the composition
of forces, that of gravitation, of refraction, and the like. Such laws
declare no concrete facts to exist, and make no prophecy as to any
actual future. They limit themselves to saying that if a certain
character be found in any fact, another character will co-exist with it
or follow it. The usefulness of these laws is proportionate to the
extent to which the characters they treat of pervade the world, and to
the accuracy with which they are definable.
Statistical laws form another type, and positively declare something
about the world of actuality. Although they tell us nothing of the
elements of things, either abstract or concrete, they affirm that the
resultant of their actions drifts preponderantly in a particular
direction. Population tends toward cities; the working classes tend to
grow discontented; the available energy of the universe is running
down--such laws prophesy the real future _en gros_, but they never help
us to predict any particular detail of it.
Spencer's law of Evolution is of the statistical variety. It defines
what evolution means, and what dissolution means, and asserts that,
although both processes are always going on together, there is in the
present phase of the world a drift in favor of evolution. In the first
edition of "First Principles" an evolutive change in anything was
described as the passage of it from a state of indefinite incoherent
homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity. The existence of a
drift in this direction in everything Mr. Spencer proves, both by a
survey of facts, and by deducing it from certain laws of the elementary
type, which he severally names "the instability of the homogeneous,"
"the multiplication of effects," "segregation," and "equilibration."
The two former insure the heterogeneity, while "segregation" brings
about the definiteness and coherence, and "equilibration" arrests the
process, and determines when dissolutive changes shall begin.
The whole panorama is resplendent for variety and inclusiveness, and
has aroused an admiration for philosophy in minds that never admired
philosophy before. Like Descartes in earlier days, Spencer aims at a
purely mechanical explanation of Nature. The knowable universe is
nothing but matter and motion, and its history is nothing but the
"redistribution" of these entities. The value of such an explanation
for scientific purposes depends altogether on how consistent and exact
it is. Every "thing" must be interpreted as a "configuration," every
"event" as a change of configuration, every predicate ascribed must be
of a geometrical sort. Measured by these requirements of mechanics
Spencer's attempt has lamentably failed. His terms are vagueness and
ambiguity incarnate, and he seems incapable of keeping the mechanical
point of view in mind for five pages consecutively.
"Definite," for example, is hardly a physical idea at all. Every
motion and every arrangement of matter is definitely what it is,--a fog
or an irregular scrawl, as much so as a billiard ball or a straight
line. Spencer means by definiteness in a thing any character that
makes it arrest our attention, and forces us to distinguish it from
other things. The word with him has a human, not a physical
connotation. Definite things, in his book, finally appear merely as
_things that men have made separate names for_, so that there is hardly
a pretence of the mechanical view being kept. Of course names increase
as human history proceeds, so "definiteness" in things must necessarily
more and more evolve.
"Coherent," again. This has the definite mechanical meaning of
resisting separation, of sticking together; but Spencer plays fast and
loose with this meaning. Coherence with him sometimes means
_permanence in time_, sometimes such _mutual dependence of parts_ as is
realized in a widely scattered system of no fixed material
configuration; a commercial house, for example, with its "travellers"
and ships and cars.
An honestly mechanical reader soon rubs his eyes with bewilderment at
the orgy of ambiguity to which he is introduced. Every term in
Spencer's fireworks shimmers through a whole spectrum of meanings in
order to adapt itself to the successive spheres of evolution to which
it must apply. "Integration," for instance. A definite coherence is
an Integration; and examples given of integration are the contraction
of the solar nebula, the formation of the earth's crust, the
calcification of cartilage, the shortening of the body of crabs, the
loss of his tail by man, the mutual dependence of plants and animals,
the growth of powerful states, the tendency of human occupations to go
to distinct localities, the dropping of terminal inflexions in English
grammar, the formation of general concepts by the mind, the use of
machinery instead of simple tools, the development of "composition" in
the fine arts, etc., etc. It is obvious that no one form of the motion
of matter characterizes all these facts. The human ones simply embody
the more and more successful pursuit of certain ends.
In the second edition of his book, Mr. Spencer supplemented his first
formula by a unifying addition, meant to be strictly mechanical.
"Evolution," he now said, "is the progressive integration of matter and
dissipation of motion," during which both the matter and the motion
undergo the previously designated kinds of change. But this makes the
formula worse instead of better. The "dissipation of motion" part of
it is simple vagueness,--for what particular motion is "dissipated"
when a man or state grows more highly evolved? And the integration of
matter belongs only to stellar and geologic evolution. Neither
heightened specific gravity, nor greater massiveness, which are the
only conceivable integrations of matter, is a mark of the more evolved
vital, mental, or social things.
It is obvious that the facts of which Spencer here gives so clumsy an
account could all have been set down more simply. First there is
solar, and then there is geological evolution, processes accurately
describable as integrations in the mechanical sense, namely, as
decrease in bulk, or growth in hardness. Then Life appears; and after
that neither integration of matter nor dissipation of motion play any
part whatever. The result of life, however, is to fill the world more
and more with things displaying _organic unity_. By this is meant any
arrangement of which one part helps to keep the other parts in
existence. Some organic unities are material,--a sea-urchin, for
example, a department store, a civil service, or an ecclesiastical
organization. Some are mental, as a "science," a code of laws, or an
educational programme. But whether they be material or mental
products, organic unities must _accumulate_; for every old one tends to
conserve itself, and if successful new ones arise they also "come to
stay." The human use of Spencer's adjectives "integrated," "definite,"
"coherent," here no longer shocks one. We are frankly on teleological
ground, and metaphor and vagueness are permissible.
This tendency of organic unities to accumulate when once they are
formed is absolutely all the truth I can distill from Spencer's
unwieldy account of evolution. It makes a much less gaudy and
chromatic picture, but what there is of it is exact.
Countless other criticisms swarm toward my pen, but I have no heart to
express them,--it is too sorry an occupation. A word about Spencer's
conception of "Force," however, insists on being added; for although it
is one of his most essential, it is one of his vaguest ideas.
Over all his special laws of evolution there reigns an absolutely
general law, that of the "persistence of force." By this Spencer
sometimes means the phenomenal law of conservation of energy, sometimes
the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is
unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen
without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence
of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same. This law
is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his
special vaguenesses "mental force" and "social force" are good examples.
These manifestations of the universal force, he says, are due to vital
force, and this latter is due to physical force, both being
proportionate to the amount of physical force which is "transformed"
into them. But what on earth is "social force"? Sometimes he
identifies it with "social activity" (showing the latter to be
proportionate to the amount of food eaten), sometimes with the work
done by human beings and their steam-engines, and shows it to be due
ultimately to the sun's heat. It would never occur to a reader of his
pages that a social force proper might be anything that acted as a
stimulus of social change,--a leader, for example, a discovery, a book,
a new idea, or a national insult; and that the greatest of "forces" of
this kind need embody no more "physical force" than the smallest. The
measure of greatness here is the effect produced on the environment,
not a quantity antecedently absorbed from physical nature. Mr. Spencer
himself is a great social force; but he ate no more than an average
man, and his body, if cremated, would disengage no more energy. The
effects he exerts are of no nature _of releases_,--his words pull
triggers in certain kinds of brain.
The fundamental distinction in mechanics between forces of
push-and-pull and forces of release is one of which Mr. Spencer, in his
earlier years, made no use whatever. Only in his sixth edition did he
show that it had seriously arrested his attention. In biology,
psychology, and sociology the forces concerned are almost exclusively
forces of release. Spencer's account of social forces is neither good
sociology nor good mechanics. His feeble grasp of the conception of
force vitiates, in fact, all his work.
But the task of a carper is repugnant. The "Essays," "Biology,"
"Psychology," "Sociology," and "Ethics" are all better than "First
Principles," and contain numerous and admirable bits of penetrating
work of detail. My impression is that, of the systematic treaties, the
"Psychology" will rank as the most original. Spencer broke new ground
here in insisting that, since mind and its environment have evolved
together, they must be studied together. He gave to the study of mind
in isolation a definitive quietus, and that certainly is a great thing
to have achieved. To be sure he overdid the matter, as usual, and left
no room for any mental structure at all, except that which passively
resulted from the storage of impressions received from the outer world
in the order of their frequency by fathers and transmitted to their
sons. The belief that whatever is acquired by sires is inherited by
sons, and the ignoring of purely inner variations, are weak points; but
to have brought in the environment as vital was a master stroke.
I may say that Spencer's controversy over use-inheritance with
Weismann, entered into after he was sixty, seems to me in point of
quality better than any other part of his work. It is genuine labor
over a puzzle, genuine research.
Spencer's "Ethics" is a most vital and original piece of
attitude-taking in the world of ideals. His politico-ethical activity
in general breathes the purest English spirit liberty, and his attacks
on over-administration and criticisms on the inferiority of great
centralized systems are worthy to be the textbooks of individualists
the world over. I confess that it is with this part of his work, in
spite of its hardness and inflexibility of tone, that I personally
sympathize most.
Looking back on Mr. Spencer as a whole, as this admirably truth-telling
"Autobiography" reveals him, he is a figure unique for quaint
consistency. He never varied from that inimitable blend of small and
vast mindedness, of liberality and crabbedness, which was his personal
note, and which defies our formulating power. If an abstract logical
concept could come to life, its life would be like Spencer's,--the same
definiteness of exclusion and inclusion, the same bloodlessness of
temperament, the same narrowness of intent and vastness of extent, the
same power of applying itself to numberless instances. But he was no
abstract idea; he was a man vigorously devoted to truth and justice as
he saw them, who had deep insights, and who finished, under terrible
frustrations from bad health, a piece of work that taken for all in
all, is extraordinary. A human life is greater than all its possible
appraisers, assessors, and critics. In comparison with the fact of
Spencer's actual living, such critical characterization of it as I have
been at all these pains to produce seems a rather unimportant as well
as a decidedly graceless thing.
[1] Written upon the publication of Herbert Spencer's "Autobiography."
Published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904.