PERIOD OF PRACTICAL WORK
_Engineering--Many Inventions--Glimpse of Evolution-Idea--A Resting
Period--Beginning to Write--Experimenting with Life_
Herbert Spencer's life after boyhood may be conveniently divided into
four periods:--
1. For about ten years he was engaged in varied practical
work--surveying, plan-making, engineering, secretarial business, and
superintendence (1837-1846).
2. After an unattached couple of years, during which he continued his
self-education, experimented, invented, and meditated, there began a
period of miscellaneous literary work, of journalism, and essay-writing,
during which he wrote his _Principles of Psychology_ and felt his way to
his System (1848-1860).
3. At the age of forty, he settled down to something like unity of
occupation--developing and writing _The Synthetic Philosophy_
(1860-1882).
4. Finally, during a prolonged period of pronounced invalidism, he
withdrew almost completely from social life, husbanding his meagre
supply of mental energy for the completion of his System, the revision
of his works, and his _Autobiography_ (1882-1903).
_Engineering._--For about ten years (1837-46) Herbert Spencer had a
varied experience of practical life. He began as assistant, at L80 a
year, to Mr Charles Fox, who had been one of Mr George Spencer's
pupils,--a man of mechanical genius, who was at that time resident
engineer of the London division of the "London and Birmingham" railway,
and afterwards became well known as the designer and constructor of the
Exhibition-Building of 1851. Spencer had surveying and measuring,
drawing and calculating to do, and he threw off the slackness which
marked his school-days. During the first six months in London he never
went to any place of amusement and never read a novel, but gave his
leisure to mathematical questions and to suggesting little inventions or
improved methods.
A transference for the summer months to Wembly, near Harrow, gave him
even more time for study, and we read of an appliance by which he
proposed to facilitate some kinds of sewing. He seems to have pleased
his employer well, for in September 1838 he was advanced to a post of
draughtsman in connection with the "Gloucester and Birmingham" railway,
at a salary of L120 yearly. Thus the next two years were spent at
Worcester, where he had his first experience of working alongside of
other young men, to whom he appeared rather an "oddity," though not one
to be "quizzed." His "mental excursiveness" grew stronger and stronger,
and had occasionally useful results, leading, for instance, to an
article in _The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal_ (May 1839) on a
new plan of projecting the spiral courses in skew bridges, to a
re-invention of Nicholson's Cyclograph, and to an improvement in the
apparatus for giving and receiving the mail-bags carried by trains.
_Many Inventions._--In 1840, Spencer became engineering secretary to
his chief, Captain Moorson, and went to live in the little village of
Powick, about three miles out of Worcester. He enjoyed his work, and had
the new experience of establishing relations with a number of children,
with whom he soon became a favourite. Long afterwards, in his declining
years he found much gratification in making friends with children, and
referred to it quaintly as "a vicarious phase of the philoprogenitive
instinct." It was at Powick that Spencer first began to have a
conscience about his very defective spelling (his _morals_ had always
been _sans reproche_) and to take an interest in style. It was at
Powick, too, in a physical and social environment that suited him, that
Spencer invented his "Velocimeter," a little instrument for showing by
inspection the velocity of an engine, and two or three other devices. He
had inherited his father's constructive imagination, and his father's
discipline had increased it. The father wrote on July 3rd, 1840, "I am
glad you find your inventive powers are beginning to develop themselves.
Indulge a grateful feeling for it. Recollect, also, the never-ceasing
pains taken with you on that point in early life." And the son remarks
gratefully that this conveys a lesson to educators; the inherited
endowment is much, but the fostering of it is also much. "Culture of the
humdrum sort, given by those who ordinarily pass for teachers, would
have left the faculty undeveloped." On the whole, however, Spencer
attached most importance to the hereditary endowment, for he goes on to
say that Edison, "probably the most remarkable inventor who ever lived,"
was a self-trained man, and that Sir Benjamin Baker, "the designer and
constructor of the Forth Bridge, the grandest and most original bridge
in the world, received no regular engineering education." It was at
Powick, too, that place of many inventions, that Herbert Spencer (aetat.
20) made the intimate acquaintance of an "intelligent, unconventional,
amiable, and in various ways attractive" young lady, who "tended to
diminish his _brusquerie_." Luckily or unluckily, the young lady was
engaged; and Spencer remarks, "It was pretty clear that had it not been
for the pre-engagement our intimacy would have grown into something
serious. This would have been a misfortune, for she had little or
nothing and my prospects were none of the brightest." Here the ancestral
prudence crops out.
_Glimpses of Evolution-Idea._--The year 1840-41 was "a nomadic period,"
of bridge-building at Bromsgroove and Defford, of "castle-building,"
too, for he dreamt of making a fortune by successful inventions, of
testing engines, and other routine duties,--a life involving
considerable wear and tear which began to tell on Spencer's eyes. During
this period he renewed his youth by collecting fossils, and "making a
collection is," as he afterwards said, "the proper commencement of any
natural history study; since, in the first place, it conduces to a
concrete knowledge which gives definiteness to the general ideas
subsequently reached, and, further, it creates an indirect stimulus by
giving gratification to that love of acquisition which exists in all."
It was then that the purchase of Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ led
him, curiously enough, to adopt the supposition that organic forms have
arisen, not by special creation, but by progressive modifications,
physically caused and inherited. In spite of Lyell's chapter refuting
Lamarck's views concerning the origin of species, it was with Lamarck
that Spencer, at the age of twenty, sided. The idea of natural genesis
was in harmony with the general idea of the order of Nature towards
which Spencer had been growing. "My belief in it never afterwards
wavered, much as I was, in after years, ridiculed for entertaining it."
"The incident illustrates the general truth that the acceptance of this
or that particular belief, is in part a question of the type of mind.
There are some minds to which the marvellous and the unaccountable
strongly appeal, and which even resent any attempt to bring the genesis
of them within comprehension. There are other minds which, partly by
nature and partly by culture, have been led to dislike a quiescent
acceptance of the unintelligible; and which push their explorations
until causation has been carried to its confines. To this last order of
minds mine, from the beginning, belonged."
Spencer's engagement with Capt. Moorson came to a natural termination,
and an offer of a permanent post on the Birmingham and Gloucester
railway was declined, one motive being a desire to prepare for the
future by a course of mathematical study, another being to work at an
idea his father had arrived at of an electro-magnetic engine. Thus his
twenty-first birthday was spent at home in Derby, after an absence of
three and a half years,--which had been on the whole "satisfactory, in
so far as personal improvement and professional success were
concerned."
_A Resting Period._--But when he got home he found his study of a work
on the Differential Calculus a weariness to the flesh. "To apply day
after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of
increasing ability," was not in him, though he could work hard when the
end in view was definite or large enough. Moreover an article in the
_Philosophical Magazine_ led to an immediate abandonment of the idea of
an electro-magnetic engine. "Thus, within a month of my return to Derby,
it became manifest that, in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp, I had left
behind a place of vantage from which there might probably have been
ascents to higher places."
As a consolation for what was at the time a disappointment, Herbert
Spencer made a herbarium, which still retained in 1894 a specimen of
Enchanter's Nightshade gathered in the grove skirting the river near
Darley. In company with Edward Lott, with whom he formed a life-long
friendship, he often spent the early summer morning, in rowing up the
Derwent, which in those days was rural and not unpicturesque above
Derby. As they rowed they sang popular songs, making the woods echo with
their voices, and now and then arresting their "secular matins" for the
purpose of gathering a plant. It is refreshing to read of Spencer having
in his head a considerable stock of sentimental ballads.
It was during this fallow year that at the age of one-and-twenty he went
with his father on a walking tour in the Isle of Wight, and first saw
the sea. "The emotion produced in me was, I think, a mixture of joy and
awe,--the awe resulting from the manifestation of size and power, and
the joy, I suppose, from the sense of freedom given by limitless
expanse." His father and he were good companions.
We read of various activities during this period,--of investigations,
with inadequate mathematics, concerning the strength of girders, of
experiments in electrotyping and the like, of botanical excursions, of
some enthusiastic exercise in part-singing, drawing and modelling. In
the early summer of 1842 Spencer paid a visit to his old haunts at
Hinton. "The journey left its mark because, in the course of it, I found
that practice in modelling had increased my perception of beauty in
form. A good-looking girl, who was one of our fellow-passengers for a
short interval, had remarkably fine eyes: and I had much quiet
satisfaction in observing their forms." Our hero had not much sense of
humour.
_Beginning to write._--Of greater importance is the fact that Spencer
began in 1842 to write letters to _The Nonconformist_ on social
problems, in which prominence was given to such conceptions as the
universality of law and causation, progressive adaptation in organisms
and in Man, and the tendency to equilibrium through self-adjustment.
"Every day in every life there is a budding out of incidents severally
capable of leading to large results; but the immense majority of them
end as buds, only now and then does one grow into a branch, and very
rarely does such a branch outgrow and overshadow all others." The visit
to Hinton led to political conversations with Thomas Spencer, to a
letter of introduction to the editor of _The Nonconformist_, to the
letters on "The Proper Sphere of Government," to the _Social Statics_
and eventually to the _Synthetic Philosophy_!
Spencer's next activity was an inquiry into his father's system of
short-hand, which he found to be better than Pitman's. He passed to
speculations on the methods to be followed in forming a universal
language, and to shrewd criticisms of the decimal system of enumeration.
In the autumn of 1842 he interested himself enthusiastically in "The
Complete Suffrage Movement." For a youth of twenty-two he took a big
plunge into politics. "It produced in me a high tide of mental energy";
the signature on a draft democratic bill "has a sweep and vigour
exceeding that of any other signature I ever made, either before or
since."
In the spring of 1843 Herbert Spencer went to London and tried very
unsuccessfully to get editors to accept his wares. He made a pamphlet of
his _Nonconformist_ letters, but perhaps a hundred copies were sold!
"The printer's bill was L10 2s. 6d., and the publisher's payment to me
on the first year's sales was fourteen shillings and threepence!"
_Experimenting with Life._--Spencer's half year in London came
to little. As he says, he was too much "in the mood of Mr
Micawber,--waiting for something to turn up, and waiting in vain." So he
raised the siege and retreated to Derby. There he read Mill's _System of
Logic_, Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_ and some of Emerson's essays. He
tried his hand at improving watches, printing-presses, type-making, and
what not; he speculated on the role of carbon in the earth's history,
and on phrenology; and in 1844 he migrated to Birmingham to be
sub-editor of a short-lived paper called _The Pilot_.
It was then that he made a superficial acquaintance with Kant's
_Critique of Pure Reason_, only to give it "summary dismissal." He was
deterred from pursuing the acquaintance by the "utter incredibility" of
the proposition that time and space are "nothing but" subjective forms,
and by "want of confidence in the reasonings of any one who could accept
a proposition so incredible."
After about a month of sub-editing, he reverted to his former profession
of railway engineer, having been commissioned to help with mapping out a
projected branch line between Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. The country
was dreary enough, but Spencer had abundant open-air work, and it was
during this short period that he made a lasting friendship with Mr W. F.
Loch which was important in his life.
Then followed an interval, partly in London and partly in the fields of
Warwickshire, occupied in various ways connected with railway
development, which was then becoming a mania. He seems to have done his
work effectively, but it led to no important personal results, and the
failure of his chief employer's schemes in 1846 ended Spencer's
connection with railway projects and engineering. In afterwards
discussing the question whether he should have made a good engineer or
not, Spencer notes with his characteristic self-impartiality that he had
adequate inventiveness but insufficient patience, enough of intelligence
but too little tact. He had an "aversion to mere mechanical humdrum
work," "inadequate regard for precedent," no interest in financial
details, and a "lack of tact in dealing with men, especially superiors."
The frank analysis is interesting, especially in indicating how Spencer
was weak where Darwin was strong, in "la patience suivie," in dogged
persistence at detailed work. It may seem strange to say this when we
think of his indomitable perseverance with his life-work, but this was
quite consistent with a "constitutional idleness," with a shirking from
everything tedious except his own thinking. As Thomas Hardy says of one
of his characters, "he was a thinker by instinct, but he was only a
worker by effort." He never learned or tried to learn what it was to put
his nose to the grindstone: he would not learn "lessons," he recoiled
from languages, he baulked at the differential calculus, he trifled with
Kant and Comte, he was always "an impatient reader." He elected to think
for himself, and had the defect of this rare quality.