NURTURE
_Boyhood--School--At Hinton--At Home_
Herbert Spencer was born at Derby on the 27th of April 1820. His father
and mother had married early in the preceding year, at the age of about
29 and 25 respectively. Except a little sister, a year his junior, who
lived for two years, he was practically the only child, for of the five
infants who followed none lived more than a few days. As Spencer
pathetically remarks: "It was one of my misfortunes to have no brothers,
and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters." But is it not
recompense enough of any marriage to produce a genius?
In reference to his father's breakdown soon after marriage, Spencer
writes: "I doubt not that had he retained good health, my early
education would have been much better than it was; for not only did his
state of body and mind prevent him from paying as much attention to my
intellectual culture as he doubtless wished, but irritability and
depression checked that geniality of behaviour which fosters the
affections and brings out in children the higher traits of nature. There
are many whose lives would have been happier had their parents been more
careful about themselves, and less anxious to provide for others."
_Boyhood._--The father's ill-health had this compensation, that Herbert
Spencer spent much of his childhood (aet. 4-7) in the country--at New
Radford, near Nottingham. In his later years he had still vivid
recollections of rambling among the gorse-bushes which towered above his
head, of exploring the narrow tracks which led to unexpected places, and
of picking the blue-bells "from among the prickly branches, which were
here and there flecked with fragments of wool left by passing sheep." He
was allowed freedom from ordinary "lessons," and enjoyed a long latent
receptive period.
In 1827 the family returned to Derby, but for some time the boy's life
was comparatively unrestrained. There was some gardening to do--an
educational discipline far too little appreciated--and there was "almost
nominal" school-drill; but there was plenty of time for exploring the
neighbourhood, for fishing and bird-nesting, for watching the bees and
the gnat-larvae, for gathering mushrooms and blackberries. "Beyond the
pleasurable exercise and the gratification of my love of adventure,
there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous knowledge of
things, and the perceptions were beneficially disciplined." "Most
children are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would
readily pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones.
My father was wise in such matters, and I was not simply allowed but
encouraged to enter on natural history."
He had the run of a farm at Ingleby during holidays; he enjoyed fishing
in the Trent, in which he was within an ace of being drowned when about
ten years old; he was a keen collector of insects, watching their
metamorphoses, and often drawing and describing his captures; and he was
also encouraged to make models. In short, he had in a simple way not a
few of the disciplines which modern paedagogics--helped greatly by
Spencer himself--has recognised to be salutary.
In his boyhood Spencer was extremely prone to castle-building or
day-dreaming--"a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature
life; finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or
less practicable." For his tendency to absorption, without which there
has seldom been greatness of achievement, he was often reproached by his
father in the words: "As usual, Herbert, thinking only of one thing at a
time."
He did not read tolerably until he was over seven years old, and
_Sandford and Merton_ was the first book that prompted him to read of
his own accord. He rapidly advanced to _The Castle of Otranto_ and
similar romances, all the more delectable that they were forbidden
fruits. While John Stuart Mill was working at the Greek classics,
Herbert Spencer was reading novels in bed. But the appetite for reading
was soon cloyed, and he became incapable of enjoying anything but novels
and travels for more than an hour or two at a time.
_School._--As to more definite intellectual culture, the first school
period (before ten years) seems to have counted for little, and is
interesting only because it revealed the boy's general aversion to
rote-learning and dogmatic statements. Shielded from direct punishment,
he lived in an atmosphere of reproof, and this "naturally led to a
state of chronic antagonism." But when he was ten (1830) he became one
of his Uncle William's pupils, and this led to some progress. There was
drawing, map-making, experimenting, Greek Testament without grammar, but
comparatively little lesson-learning. "As a consequence, I was not in
continual disgrace." The boy was quick in all matters appealing to
reason, and "had a somewhat remarkable perception of locality and the
relations of position generally, which in later life disappeared."
Apart from school he had the advantage of hearing discussions between
his father and his friends on all sorts of topics, of preparing for the
scientific demonstrations which his father occasionally gave, of
sampling scientific periodicals which came to the Derby Philosophical
Society of which his father was honorary secretary, and of reading such
works as Rollin's _Ancient History_ and Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_. He was continually prompted to "intellectual
self-help," and was continually stimulated by the question, "Can you
tell me the cause of this?"
"Always the tendency in himself, and the tendency strengthened in me,
was to regard everything as naturally caused; and I doubt not that while
the notion of causation was thus rendered much more definite in me than
in most of my age, there was established a habit of seeking for causes,
as well as a tacit belief in the universality of causation." "A tacit
belief in the universality of causation" seems a big item to be put to
the credit of a boy of thirteen, but we have the echo of it in Clerk
Maxwell's continual boyish question, "What is the go of this?" That the
question of cause was acute in both cases implies that both had
hereditarily fine brains, but it also suggests that the question is
normal in those who are naturally educated. The sensitive, irritable,
invalid father was no ideal parent, but he did not snub his son's
inquisitiveness, nor coerce his independence, nor appeal to authority as
such as a reason for accepting any belief.
Spencer has given in his _Autobiography_ a picture of himself as a boy
of thirteen. His constitution was distinguished "rather by good balance
than by great vital activity"; there was "a large margin of latent
power"; he was more fleet than any of his school-fellows. He was
decidedly peaceful, but when enraged no considerations of pain or danger
or anything else restrained him. He was affectionate and tender-hearted,
but his most marked moral trait was disregard of authority. His memory
was rather below par than above; he was "averse to lesson-learning and
the acquisition of knowledge after the ordinary routine methods," but he
picked up general information with facility; he could not bear prolonged
reading or the receptive attitude. From about ten years of age to
thirteen he habitually went on Sunday morning with his father to the
Friends' Meeting House, and in the evening with his mother to the
Methodist Chapel. "I do not know that any marked effect on me followed;
further, perhaps, than that the alternation tended to enlarge my views
by presenting me with differences of opinion and usage." While John Mill
kept his son away from conventional religious influences, Spencer's
father excluded none; and the result seems to have been much the same
in the two cases. In this and other connections, Prof. W. H. Hudson
points out the contrast between the methods of the two fathers of the
two remarkable sons--John Stuart Mill was constrained along carefully
chosen paths, Herbert Spencer enjoyed more elbow-room and free-play,
what German biologists call "Abaenderungsspielraum."
At thirteen, Herbert Spencer had little Latin and less Greek; he was
wholly uninstructed in "English"; he had no knowledge of mathematics,
English history, ancient literature, or biography. "Concerning things
around, however, and their properties, I knew a good deal more than is
known by most boys." Through physics and chemistry in certain lines,
through entomology and general natural history, through miscellaneous
reading in physiology and geography, he had in many ways an intellectual
grip of his environment; but on the lines of the "humanities" he was
wofully uneducated.
On the other hand, his education had been stimulating and emancipating,
and even as a boy of thirteen his intelligence was alert and
independent. Much in the open air, he had kept an open mind. He had
learned to use his brains and to enjoy nature. After that, everything is
possible.
_At Hinton._--When Herbert Spencer was thirteen (in the summer of 1833)
his parents took him to his Uncle Thomas, at Hinton Charterhouse, near
Bath. The journey was a revelation to the boy, and his early days at
Hinton were full of delight, especially in regard to the new
butterflies. But when he discovered that he had come to stay and to be
schooled, he had a feverish _Heimweh_, and soon followed his parents
homewards. "That a boy of thirteen should, without any food but bread
and water and two or three glasses of beer, and without sleep for two
nights, walk 48 miles one day, 47 the next, and some 20 the third, is
surprising enough." It was a rather absurd boyish escapade, mainly due
to lack of parental frankness, but not without the compliment implied in
all nostalgia, and it gives us an inkling of Spencer's obstinacy and
doggedness.
A fortnight after the escapade, the runaway returned peacefully to
Hinton--content with his dramatic assertion of himself. For about three
years he remained under his uncle's tutorship, and this was a formative
period. Hinton stands high in a hilly country, between Bath and Frome,
with picturesque places all round. His uncle was "a man of energetic,
strongly-marked character," "intellectually above the average," with a
good deal of originality of thought. Like his kindly wife, he belonged
to the evangelical school.
"The daily routine was not a trying one. In the morning Euclid and
Latin, in the afternoon commonly gardening, or sometimes a walk; and in
the evening, after a little more study, usually of algebra I think, came
reading, with occasionally chess. I became at that time very fond of
chess, and acquired some skill." The aversion to linguistic studies
continued, but there was an enthusiasm for mathematics and physics. To a
modern educationist the regime at Hinton cannot but seem narrow; there
was no history, no letters, no concrete science, and no play. There was
certainly no over-pressure, but there was some brain-stretching and
some salutary moral discipline. Stimulating, doubtless, was the
table-talk and Mr Spencer's arguments with his nephew, whom he found
"very deficient in the principle of _Fear_." We must not forget the
visits to London (including the then private Zoological Gardens), or the
first appearances in print--two letters in the newly started _Bath
Magazine_ on curiously shaped floating crystals of common salt, and on
the New Poor Law! In June 1836, Herbert Spencer returned to Derby,
benefited by the rural life and bracing climate of Hinton, "strong, in
good health, and of good stature."
Looking backward after many years, Herbert Spencer felt that he was
treated as a youth "with much more consideration and generosity than
might have been expected. There was shown great patience in prosecuting
what seemed by no means a hopeful undertaking." It is interesting, of
course, to speculate what might have been the result if the boy's
education had been less of a family affair; and it would be unfair to
conclude that the success which attended the easy-going, personal,
familiar instruction of this boy of uncommon brains would also attend a
similar treatment of those of humbler parts. But would it not be well to
make the experiment oftener, since the material abounds, and since the
results of the conventional discipline of public schools and the like
are not dazzlingly successful?
Spencer felt strongly, as he indulged in retrospect, that his
well-meaning educators "had to deal with intractable material--an
individuality too stiff to be easily moulded." That we may, in time,
come to have not an occasional stiff haulm with a big ear, but a whole
crop of them, must be the prayer of all who believe in education and
race-progress.
Another of Spencer's retrospective convictions is one that makes all
human nature kin--that he was not so black as he was painted. His father
and his uncle had been eminently "good" boys, and they gauged boy-nature
by their own standard. Had he gone to a public school, Spencer thinks
that his "_extrinsically_-wrong actions would have been many, but the
_intrinsically_-wrong actions would have been few." This distinction
will doubtless appeal to the wise.
_At Home._--For a year and a half after leaving Hinton, Herbert Spencer
remained at home, enjoying another period of freedom. He made in a day,
without previous experience, a survey of his father's small property at
Kirk Ireton--two fields and three cottages with their gardens; he made
designs for a country house; he hit upon a remarkable property of the
circle; and he fished. Meanwhile, however, his father who "held, and
rightly held, that there are few functions higher than that of the
educator," induced him to engage in school-work, and this experiment
lasted for three months. It appears to have been directly a success,
Spencer's lessons were at once "effective and pleasure-giving," and
"complete harmony continued throughout the entire period"; it was not
less important eventually, for we cannot doubt that part of the
effectiveness of Herbert Spencer's book on _Education_ is traceable to
the fact that he had, for a term at least, personal experience of
teaching.
Even at this early age (17 years) Spencer had ideals of "intellectual
culture, moral discipline, and physical training." But as he disliked
mechanical routine, had a great intolerance of monotony, and had ideas
of his own, it seems likely enough that if he had embraced the
profession of teacher, he would sooner or later have "thrown it up in
disgust." The experiment was not to be tried further, however, for in
November 1837, his uncle William wrote from London that he had obtained
for his nephew a post under Mr Charles Fox as a railway engineer. "The
profession of a civil engineer had already been named as one appropriate
for me; and this opening at once led to the adoption of it."
We may sum up the first two periods of Spencer's life. The period of
childhood was marked by a more than usual freedom from the conventional
responsibilities of juvenile tasks, by the large proportion of open-air
life, and by much more intercourse with adults than with other children.
The table talk between his father and uncles had an important moulding
influence, all the more that there was "a comparatively small interest
in gossip." "Their conversation ever tended towards the impersonal....
There was no considerable leaning towards literature.... It was rather
the scientific interpretations and moral aspects of things which
occupied their thoughts." The period of boyhood and of more definite
education was marked by freedom and variety, by a relative absence of
linguistic discipline, by a preponderance of scientific training, by
much family influence, and by an unusual amount of independent
thinking.