CHARACTERISTICS:--PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL
_The Autobiography--Physical Characteristics--Intellectual
Characteristics--Limitations--Development of Spencer's
Mind--Methods of Work--Genius?_
Spencer was much given to summing up what he called the "traits" of the
men he met, and he extended the process to himself in his
_Autobiography_, which is an elaborate piece of self-portraiture.
_The Autobiography._--Some one has called autobiography the least
credible form of fiction, but that is not the impression which Spencer's
gives. His self-analysis is candid and continuous; he is always
revealing his feet of clay, and that with a self-complacency which is
unintelligible to those who do not understand the impersonal scientific
mood which had become habitual to Spencer. He almost achieved the
impossible, of looking at himself from the outside.
Huxley wrote an autobiography in a score of pages, and he never wrote
anything better; Spencer occupied over a thousand pages with his account
of himself, and he never wrote anything worse. Dictated in outline in
1875, it was elaborated piecemeal, in small daily instalments, after the
most serious of the many breakdowns in health had precluded more
difficult work. Naturally enough, therefore, the _Autobiography_ is
often prolix and lacking in proportion, often slack in style and, it
must be confessed, tedious. Little details in a picture may be essential
to the effective impression, but Spencer often wearies us with trifling
incidents whose narration has no excuse except as happening in a great
life. Yet, if we lay the volumes aside, bored by their monumental
egotism, we return to them with sympathy, and are won again by their
unaffected frankness and candid sincerity.
With the _Autobiography_ before us, but exercising the right of private
judgment, we propose in this and the next chapter to sum up Spencer's
characteristics--physical, intellectual, and emotional, and to refer to
his methods of work and conduct of life.
_Physical Characteristics._--Spencer at his best was an impressive
figure, "tall, erect, a little gaunt, with a magnificent broad brow and
high domed head." "His face," Prof. W. H. Hudson writes, "was a
strikingly expressive one, with its strong frontal ridge, deep-set eyes,
prominent nose, and firmly-cut mouth and jaw--the face of a man marked
out for intellectual leadership."[1] It was not wrinkled with thought,
as one might have expected, but was smooth as a child's or as a
bishop's, the explanation being, as Spencer said, that he never worried
over things, but allowed his brain to do its own thinking without
pressure. He looked anything but an invalid, for his cheeks were ruddy
even in later years. He had a fine voice and "a rather rare laugh of
deep-chested musical qualities."
He lamented that he had not inherited his father's finely developed
chest organs, and that in consequence his cerebral circulation was
under par. More positively, he seems to have inherited a readily
fatigued nervous system, which limited his powers of protracted
attention and made him not infrequently irritable and difficult to get
on with. As we have seen he suffered periodically from over-taxing his
brain, which induced terrible insomnia. Like Carlyle, he suffered from
dyspepsia.
_Intellectual Characteristics._--1. Among his intellectual
characteristics, Spencer gave the foremost place to his "unusual
capacity for the intuition of cause." The capacity was inherited and it
was carefully nurtured. His restlessness to discover causes--"natural
causes"--was illustrated when, as a boy of thirteen, he called in
question the dictum of Dr Arnott respecting inertia, and it was
characteristic of his whole intellectual life. He cultivated this
inquisitiveness for causes till the mood became habitual, and resulted
in what we may almost call an interpretative instinct. That this never
led him astray, not even his most enthusiastic disciples would venture
to maintain.
While the scientific method is always fundamentally the same, there is
happily some legitimate elasticity in the order of procedure. Some minds
start with a clue perceived by a flash of insight and then proceed to
test and verify; others collect their data laboriously and never get a
glimpse of their conclusion until the induction is complete. Some seem
to have a selective instinct for getting hold of the most significant
facts, or for making the crucial experiment; others have to plod on
patiently from fact to fact and must make many "fools' experiments."
Some find a nugget while their neighbours get their gold in dust
particles after washing much ore.
Now Spencer had that passion for facts which is fundamental to all solid
scientific work, but he had the greater gift of getting rapidly beneath
facts to the question of their significance. He had not the love of
details which is essential to the descriptive naturalist for instance,
which sometimes becomes intellectual avarice for copper coinage, but he
was instinctively an aetiologist, an interpreter.
In his account of the working of his mind, he says:--
"There was commonly shown a faculty of seizing cardinal truths
rather than of accumulating detailed information. The implications
of phenomena were then, as always, more interesting to me than the
phenomena themselves. What did they prove? was the question
instinctively put. The consciousness of causation, to which there
was a natural proclivity, and which had been fostered by my father,
continually prompted analyses, which of course led me below the
surface and made fundamental principles objects of greater
attention than the various concrete illustrations of them. So that
while my acquaintance with things might have been called
superficial, if measured by the _number_ of facts known, it might
have been called the reverse of superficial, if measured by the
_quality_ of the facts. And there was possibly a relation between
these traits. A friend who possessed extensive botanical knowledge,
once remarked to me that, had I known as much about the details of
plant-structure as botanists do, I never should have reached those
generalisations concerning plant-morphology which I had reached."
(_Autobiography_ I.)
2. Another inherited capacity was "the synthetic tendency," the power of
generalising or of working out unifying formulae. His first book _Social
Statics_ set out with a general principle; his first essay was
entitled, "A theory of population, _deduced from the general law_ of
animal fertility"; his life-work was the _Synthetic Philosophy_. One of
George Eliot's witticisms made game of Spencer's aptitude for
generalisation. He had been explaining his disbelief in the critical
powers of salmon, and his aim in making flies "the best average
representation of an insect buzzing on the surface of the water." "Yes,"
she said, "you have such a passion for generalising, you even fish with
a generalisation." And this exactly describes what he spent much of his
life in doing.
Mr Francis Galton has graphically stated his impression, that Spencer's
composite mental photographs, in forming a generalisation, or in using a
general formula-term, were many times multiple of those of ordinary
mortals. A composite mental photograph from a small number of
intellectual negatives yields a blurred outline--a woolly idea, with
ragged edges and loose ends--but a composite mental photograph from a
very large number of impressions, yielded, in Spencer's case, a
generalisation which was crisp and well-defined. Some one has said that
Ruskin had the most analytic mind in modern Christendom: that Spencer
had one of the most synthetic minds can hardly be questioned.
3. It was one of the open secrets of Spencer's power that his analytic
tendency was almost equal to his synthetic tendency. "Both subjectively
and objectively, the desire to build up was accompanied by an almost
equal desire to delve down to the deepest accessible truth, which should
serve as an unshakable foundation." "It appears that in the treatment
of every topic, however seemingly remote from philosophy, I found
occasion for falling back on some ultimate principle in the natural
order."
The first volume of the Psychology is synthetic, the second volume is
analytic, "taking to pieces our intellectual fabric and the products of
its actions, until the ultimate components are reached"; and we find the
same two methods pursued in his other books.
"While, on the one hand, they betray a great liking for drawing
deductions and building them up into a coherent whole; on the other
hand, they betray a great liking for examining the premises on
which a set of deductions is raised, for the purpose of seeing what
assumptions are involved in them, and what are the deeper truths
into which such assumptions are resolvable. There is shown an
evident dissatisfaction with proximate principles, and a
restlessness until ultimate principles have been reached; at the
same time there is shown a desire to see how the most complex
phenomena are to be interpreted as workings of these ultimate
principles. It is, I think, to the balance of these two tendencies
that the character of the work done is mainly ascribable."
But while Spencer had beyond doubt analytic powers of a very high order,
it is to be feared that there is some justice in the criticism that he
sometimes confused abstraction with analysis, and reached an apparently
simple result by abstracting away some essential components.
4. "One further cardinal trait, which is in a sense a result of the
preceding traits, has to be named--the ability to discern inconspicuous
analogies." It was in part this ability that gave Spencer his power of
handling so many different orders of facts. "The habit of ignoring the
variable outer components and relations, and looking for the invariable
inner components and relations, facilitates the perception of likeness
between things which externally are quite unlike--perhaps so utterly
unlike that, by an unanalytical intelligence, they cannot be conceived
to have any resemblance whatever." It is this kind of insight which
enables the morphologist to unify a whole series of organic types by
detecting the similarities of architecture underlying the exceedingly
diverse external expression. It was this kind of insight which led
Spencer to his analogy between a social organism and an individual
organism, and to many others which have been found fruitful. But it is
to be feared that some of his analogies, notably that between inanimate
mechanisms and living creatures led him far astray.
5. Another power strongly developed was constructive imagination. The
boy who was so fond of building castles in the air, who grudged the
sleep which put an end to his fanciful adventures, grew up a man whose
mind was his kingdom. All sorts of things and thoughts pulled the
trigger of his imagination, with which he was often so preoccupied that
he would pass those living in the same house with him and look them in
the face without knowing that he had seen them.
Spencer found in the delight of constructive imagination part of
the explanation of his versatility. The products of his mental
action ranged "from a doctrine of State functions to a
levelling-staff; from the genesis of religious ideas to a watch
escapement; from the circulation in plants to an invalid bed; from
the law of organic symmetry to planing machinery; from principles
of ethics to a velocimeter; from a metaphysical doctrine to a
binding-pin; from a classification of the sciences to an improved
fishing-rod joint; from the general Law of Evolution to a better
mode of dressing artificial flies." "But for every interest in
either the theoretical or the practical, a requisite condition has
been--the opportunity offered for something new. And here may be
perceived the trait which unites the extremely unlike products of
mental action exemplified above. They have one and all afforded
scope for constructive imagination."
Clearness in exposition was another of Spencer's gifts, and he connected
this with the fact that his grandfather and father had been teachers.
But lucidity of exposition usually accompanies clear thinking, and
increases if there is opportunity for practice. His fearlessness and his
self-confidence, he also connected with the fact that in school the
master must be the absolute authority, but it seems much more plausible
to regard this characteristic independence of judgment as an outcrop of
the Nonconformist mood of his ancestors.
_Limitations._--Spencer was too scrupulous a self-analyst not to be
aware of many of his own limitations, and he has exposed the defects of
his qualities with the utmost frankness. Thus his disregard of
authority, which helped him to independent positions in science and
philosophy, seemed to become a habit of mind which prompted him to react
from current beliefs and opinions without always doing them justice. His
anti-classical bias led him "to underestimate the past as compared with
the present". "Lack of reverence for what others have said and done has
tended to make me neglect the evidence of early achievements."
One concrete instance may be selected,--his failure to appreciate
Plato's dialogues, which the wise are at one in regarding as
masterpieces of philosophical discussion, and as affording
invaluable discipline for the most modern of thinkers. Spencer
approached them with a strong bias, with a predisposition to
depreciate, and what was the result? "Time after time I have
attempted to read, now this dialogue and now that, and have put it
down in a state of impatience with the indefiniteness of the
thinking and the mistaking of words for things: being repelled also
by the rambling form of the argument. Once when I was talking on
the matter to a classical scholar, he said--'Yes, but as works of
art they are well worth reading.' So, when I again took up the
dialogues, I contemplated them as works of art, and put them aside
in greater exasperation than before. To call that a 'dialogue'
which is an interchange of speeches between the thinker and his
dummy, who says just what it is convenient to have said, is absurd.
There is more dramatic propriety in the conversations of our
third-rate novelists; and such a production as that of Diderot,
_Rameau's nephew_, has more strokes of dramatic truth than all the
Platonic dialogues put together, if the rest are like those I have
looked into. Still, quotations from time to time met with, lead me
to think that there are in Plato detached thoughts from which I
might benefit had I the patience to seek them out. The like is
probably true of other ancient writings." (!)
Disregard of authority is a great gift, if it go hand in hand with a
careful examination of the reasons which lead to a conclusion becoming
authoritative, but Spencer does not seem to have felt this
responsibility. He began every subject by cleaning the slate. Thus one
of the most conspicuous, and in some ways least agreeable
characteristics of his intellectual work was his indifference as to what
previous investigators had said. This was in part an expression of his
own strength and independence, but it also savoured of arrogance. The
virtue of it was that he approached a subject with the vigour of a fresh
mind, but its vice was repeatedly disclosed in his failure to realise
all the difficulties and subtleties of a problem--a failure which
sometimes involved nothing short of amateurishness. A skilful naturalist
has said that in tackling an unsolved problem there are only two
commendable methods,--one to read everything bearing on the question,
the other to read nothing. It was the second method that Spencer
habitually practised. He gathered facts, but took little stock in
opinions or previous deliverances.
Thus in beginning to plan out his _Social Statics_ he "paid little
attention to what had been written either upon ethics or politics. The
books I did read were those which promised to furnish illustrative
material." He wrote his _First Principles_ with a minimal knowledge of
the philosophical classics, and his _Psychology_ as if he had been
living before the invention of printing. Some one thought certain parts
of his _Education_ savoured of Rousseau, but he had not heard of _Emile_
when he wrote. He was greatly indebted to von Baer for a formula, but
there is no evidence that he ever read any part of the great
embryologist's works. The suggestion that he was indebted to Comte for
some sociological ideas might have been dismissed at once on _a priori_
grounds as absurd. And in point of fact when Spencer wrote his _Social
Statics_ he knew no more of Comte than that he was a French
philosophical writer, and it was not till 1853 that he began to nibble
at Comte's works, to which Lewes and George Eliot had repeatedly
directed his attention. He adopted two of Comte's words--"altruism" and
"sociology"--but beyond that his indebtedness was little. We may take
his own word for it: "The only indebtedness I recognise is the
indebtedness of antagonism. My pronounced opposition to his views led me
to develop some of my own views." That they both tried to organise a
system of so-called philosophy out of the sciences indicates a community
of aim, but there the resemblance ceases.
Spencer's intellectual development seems to have been peculiarly
detached and independent. He was of course influenced by his father and
by two of his uncles during his formative period, and he was also
doubtless influenced by George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, Huxley and
Hooker in later years--as who could help being--but in the main he was a
strong, self-sufficient, self-made Ishmaelite. Similarly as regards
authors, he was influenced by Lamarck's transformist theory, by
Laplace's nebular hypothesis, by Malthus's theory of population, by
Milne-Edwards' idea of the physiological division of labour, by von
Baer's formula, by Hamilton and Mansel, by Grove's correlation of the
physical forces, by Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and so on, but his own
thought was always far more to him than anything he ever read.
Just as independence may become a vice, so with criticism, and Spencer
had certainly the defect of this quality. Like his grandfather and his
father before him, he was perpetually criticising, and he developed a
hypersensitiveness to mistakes and shortcomings. For while sound
criticism is an intellectual saving grace, it defeats its own end when
the critic is constantly looking for reasons for disagreement, rather
than for supplementary construction. Comte was assuredly right in saying
that one only destroys when one replaces. Morever, Spencer's dominant
tendency greatly interfered with his power of admiration. He was so
keenly alive to "the many mistakes in _chiaroscuro_ which characterise
various paintings of the old masters" that he found little pleasure in
them. When looking at Greek sculpture he constantly discovered unnatural
drapery. When he went to the opera with George Eliot he remarked "how
much analysis of the effects produced deducts from enjoyment of the
effects." He could not even look at a beautiful woman without his
"phrenological diagnosis" discovering something which took the edge off
his admiration. "It seems probable," he quaintly remarks, "that this
abnormal tendency to criticise has been a chief factor in the
continuance of my celibate life."
_Development of Spencer's Mind._--Spencer has himself given us an
account of his mental development.
As a boy his mind was always set upon discovering natural causes,
and under his father's influence there grew up in him "a tacit
belief that whatever occurred had its assignable cause of a
comprehensible kind." Insensibly he relinquished the current creed
of supernaturalism and its associated story of creation.
The doctrine of the universality of natural causation has for its
inevitable corollary the doctrine that the Universe and all things
in it have reached their present forms through successive stages
physically necessitated. But no such corollary suggested itself
definitely until Spencer was twenty when he read Lyell's
_Principles of Geology_, and was led by Lyell's arguments against
Lamarck to a partial acceptance of Lamarck's evolutionist point of
view.
Two years afterwards, in _The proper Sphere of Government_, "there
was shown an unhesitating belief that the phenomena of both
individual life and social life conform to law"; and eight years
later in _Social Statics_, the social organism was discussed in the
same sort of way as the individual organism; a physiological view
of social actions was taken, and the same mode of progress was
shown to be common to all changing phenomena.
In 1852 the essay on the "Development Hypothesis" was an open
avowal of evolutionism; and other essays on population and
over-legislation "assumed that social arrangements and institutions
are products of natural causes, and that they have a normal order
of growth."
An acquaintance with von Baer's description of individual
development gave definiteness to Spencer's conception of progress,
and the idea of change from homogeneity to heterogeneity became his
formula of evolution, applicable to style, to manners and fashions,
to science itself, and to the growing mind of the child, as was
shown in a succession of essays on these themes.
The next great step was in the _Principles of Psychology_ which
sought to trace out the genesis of mind in all its forms, sub-human
and human, as produced by the organised and inherited effects of
mental actions. Increase of faculty by exercise, hereditary
entailment of gains, and consequent progressive adaptation, were
prominent ideas in this treatise. "Progressive adaptation became
increasing adjustment of inner subjective relations to outer
objective relations--increasing correspondence between the two."
So far, then, Spencer had recognised throughout a vast field of
phenomena the increase of heterogeneity, of speciality, of
integration--as traits of progress of all kinds; and thus arose the
question: Why is this increasing heterogeneity universal? "A
transition from the inductive stage to the deductive stage was
shown in the answer--the transformation results from the unceasing
multiplication of effects. When, shortly after, there came the
perception that the condition of homogeneity is an unstable
condition, yet another step towards the completely deductive stage
was made." "The theorem passed into the region of physical
science."
"The advance towards a complete conception of evolution was itself
a process of evolution. At first there was simply an unshaped
belief in the development of living things; including, in a vague
way, social development. The extension of von Baer's formula
expressing the development of each organism, first to one and then
to another group of phenomena, until all were taken in as parts of
a whole, exemplified the process of integration. With advancing
integration there went that advancing heterogeneity implied by
inclusion of the several classes of inorganic phenomena and the
several classes of super-organic phenomena in the same category
with organic phenomena. And then the indefinite idea of progress
passed into the definite idea of evolution, when there was
recognised the essential nature of the change, as a physically
determined transformation conforming to ultimate laws of force."
It is difficult to state with any certainty what led Spencer in
1857 to a coherent body of beliefs--to the first sketch of his
system. In the main the unification was probably a natural
maturation and integration of his thoughts, but it was perhaps
helped by the immediate task of revising and publishing a
collection of essays, and also by the fact that "the time was one
at which certain all-embracing scientific truths of a simple order
were being revealed." Notably the doctrine of the conservation and
transformability of energy was beginning to possess scientific
minds, and the doctrine of evolution was beginning to make its grip
felt.
Furthermore, in trying to understand Spencer, we must recognise
that he was the flower of a nonconformist dissenting stock, that
his mind matured in contact with engines and other mechanisms, and
that he was almost forced to exclude new influences after he
settled down with his system at the age of forty.
_Methods of Work._--While there was nothing remarkable in Spencer's
methods of work, it may be of interest to indicate certain general
features which the _Autobiography_ discloses.
In the first place, after a few disastrous experiments, he abandoned any
attempt at what is usually called working hard. Like many an artist who
will only paint when he feels in the mood and in good form, Spencer
would never write or dictate under pressure, or when he felt that his
brain was not working smoothly. When he was writing the _Principles of
Psychology_ (1854-5), he began between nine and ten and continued till
one; he then paused for a few minutes to take some slight refreshment,
usually a little fruit, and resumed till three, altogether about five
hours at a stretch. He then went for a walk, returned in time for dinner
between five and six, and did considerable proof-correcting thereafter.
But, as we have seen, the result of this strenuousness--which would be
quite normal to many students--was his first serious breakdown,
involving a loss of eighteen months. Thereafter, it was his custom to
work for short spells at a time, to sandwich work and exercise, and to
take a holiday whenever he began to feel tired.
His output of work was so large even for a long life that one naturally
thinks of him as a hard worker. But the reverse would be nearer the
truth. Partly as a self-justification of his "constitutional idleness,"
and partly as a precaution against his hereditary tendency to nervous
breakdown, he was a strong advocate of the proposition that "Life is not
for work, but work is for life." "The progress of mankind is, under one
aspect, a means of liberating more and more life from mere toil and
leaving more and more life available for relaxation--for pleasurable
culture, for aesthetic gratification, for travels, for games." Industry
is not a virtue in itself; over-work is blameworthy.
In the second place, Spencer made it a rule never to force his thinking.
If a problem was not clear to him, he let it simmer. "On one occasion
George Eliot expressed her surprise that the author of _Social Statics_
had no lines on his forehead, to which he answered, 'I suppose it is
because I am never puzzled.' This called forth the exclamation: 'O!
that's the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered.' To which I
rejoined: 'Not at all, when you know what I mean.' And I then proceeded
to explain that my mode of thinking did not involve that concentrated
effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows"
(_Autobiography_, i. p. 399).
Spencer did not set himself a problem and try to 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 thoughts which
slowly grew from a germ."
He had "an instinctive interest in those facts which have general
meanings"; he let these accumulate and simmer, thinking them over and
over again at intervals. "When accumulation of instances had given body
to a generalisation, reflexion would reduce the vague conception at
first framed to a more definite conception; and perhaps difficulties or
anomalies at first passed over for a while, but eventually forcing
themselves on attention, might cause a needful qualification and a truer
shaping of the thought. Eventually the growing generalisation, thus far
inductive, might take deductive form: being all at once recognised as a
necessary consequence of some physical principle--some established law.
And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious
intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and
organised theory" (_Autobiography_, i. 400, 401). In short, Spencer
gave his thinking machine time to do its work, or in other words he let
his thoughts grow. He distrusted strain and all forcing. Like a good
golfer, he would not "press." "The determined effort causes perversion
of thought."
A third feature in his work has been already alluded to--his practical
indifference to the literature of the subject at which he was working.
For this characteristic there were doubtless several reasons, though
none of them justified it. He was not fond of hard reading, and
conserved his energy for his own production; he had abundant
thought-material of his own, and no lack of confidence in its value.
Furthermore, he explains, "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. Tacitly giving an author credit for consistency, I,
without thinking much about the matter, 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" (i. p. 253). "All through my life," he says, "Locke's 'Essay'
had been before me on my father's shelves, but I had never taken it
down; or at any rate I have no recollection of having read a page of
it." More than once he tackled Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, but was
baulked at the start by the doctrine that time and space are merely
subjective forms. Nor did Mill's _Logic_ interest him.
At the same time it is not to be supposed that Spencer wove his system
out of himself as a spider its web. He had a wonderful aptitude for
collecting data by a strange sort of skimming reading.
"Though by some I am characterised as an _a priori_ thinker, it
will be manifest to any one who does not set out with an _a priori_
conception of me, that my beliefs, when not suggested _a
posteriori_, are habitually verified _a posteriori_. My first book,
_Social Statics_, shows this in common with my later books. I have
sometimes been half-amused, half-irritated, by one who speaks of me
as typically deductive, and whose own conclusions, nevertheless,
are not supported by facts anything like so numerous as those
brought in support of mine. But we meet with men who are such
fanatical adherents of the inductive method, that immediately an
induction, otherwise well established, is shown to admit of
deductive establishment, they lose faith in it" (_Autobiography_,
i. pp. 304-5).
No one who studies Spencer's works can fail to be impressed with the
logical orderliness and lucidity of his method. Thus, in beginning _The
Principles of Biology_, for instance, we are first asked to consider
what truths the biologist takes for granted; _e.g._, the conservation of
energy and the indestructibility of matter; then we are asked to notice
the inductions in regard to the phenomena of life which biologists agree
in accepting as well-established; and only then do we pass to Spencer's
particular interpretation of the facts in the light of his evolutionist
ideas. The same logical method is illustrated in his treatment of
psychology, sociology and ethics.
Like most men who get through much work, Spencer was very methodical and
orderly. In reference to his _Sociology_, he tells us how he classified
and reclassified his materials in fasciculi, placing them in a
semi-circle on the floor round his chair, inserting new "covers" where
there seemed need for them, and gradually filling these. As the plan
became clear, the materials for a chapter were raised to his large desk,
and then began a grouping into sections, and a grouping within each
section.
He did not begin to compose until he had thought out his subject to the
best of his ability. He then wrote or dictated a little at a time,
criticising every sentence with especial reference to clearness and
force. Except for his first book, which he revised, copied out, and
revised afresh, the original copy was always sent to press "sprinkled
with erasures and interlineations." He was more interested in vigour and
lucidity of style than in its beauty, and it was characteristic of him
to try to correlate effectiveness of style with the doctrine of the
conservation of energy. The main thesis in the essay on "The Philosophy
of Style" may be briefly stated. The reader has only a limited amount of
nervous energy, and it is important that this should not be dissipated
before he comes to the ideas of which the style is the vehicle. "In
proportion as there is less energy absorbed in interpreting the symbols,
there is more left for representing the idea, and, consequently, greater
vividness of the idea." "Every resistance met with in the progress from
the antecedent idea to the consequent idea, entails a deduction from the
force with which the consequent idea arises in consciousness."
It is common to speak of Spencer's works as "hard reading," but those
who say so must have a strange scale of hardness. He may be difficult to
agree with, but he is rarely difficult to understand; he deals with
difficult themes, but he is singularly clear in his expression of his
convictions. When he discusses less abstract questions, as in his
_Study of Sociology_ or _Education_, his style has almost every good
quality except beauty. And when he occasionally "lets himself go" a
little, as in the famous passage in the _First Principles_ at the end of
the discussion of the Unknowable, there is a ring of nobility in his
sentences.
Sometimes he sums up with epigrammatic terseness, and we submit a few of
his utterances which we have noted down as illustrating various
qualities:--
"Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and
working are for life."
"It is best to recognise the facts as they are, and not try to prop
up rectitude by fictions."
"Beliefs, like creatures, must have fit environments before they
can live and grow."
"Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep
as the viscera."
"Melody is an idealised form of the natural cadences of emotion."
"Logic is a science of objective phenomena."
"In proportion as intellect is active, emotion is rendered
inactive."
"Inherited constitution must ever be the chief factor in
determining character."
"Each nature is a bundle of potentialities of which only some are
allowed by the conditions to become actualities."
"Considering that the ordinary citizen has no excess of
individuality to boast of, it seems strange that he should be so
anxious to hide what little he has."
"Englishmen are averse to conclusions of wide generality."
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools."
"A nation which fosters its good-for-nothings will end by becoming
a good-for-nothing nation."
"I don't mean to get on. I don't think getting on is worth the
bother."
_Genius._--It doubtless requires genius to define genius, and until
that is done, the question of awarding or refusing this supreme title to
our hero need not be very seriously discussed. All will agree that
genius is more than unusually great talent; that it is neither "une
patience suivie" nor "an infinite capacity for taking pains"; that it is
not to be judged by its effectiveness; and that it may never receive the
unwithering laurels of immortality. Spencer poured contempt on Carlyle's
assertion that genius "means transcendent capacity of taking trouble
first of all"; the truth being, he said, that genius may be rightly
defined quite oppositely, as an ability to do with little trouble that
which cannot be done by the ordinary man with any amount of trouble.
Another of Spencer's remarks about genius is worth citing. Speaking of
Huxley's wonderful versatility as a thinker, he said that it lent "some
colour to the dictum--quite untenable, however--that genius is a unit,
and, where it exists, can manifest itself equally in all directions." As
it seems to us, there is much truth in the dictum which Spencer
dismissed as "quite untenable." The genius is a new variation of high
potential and is as such a unity, capable of expressing itself in many
diverse ways, and always with originality. The expression of genius may
be intellectual, emotional, or practical, according to the mood which is
constitutionally dominant and according to the opportunities afforded by
education and circumstances; but there seems much to be said, both on
general grounds and from a study of historical examples, for the view
that genius means something distinctive in the whole mental pattern or
personality, and is potentially at least many-sided.
Biologically regarded, a genius is a transilient variation on the
up-grade of psychical evolution, of such magnitude that it stands apart
as a new mental pattern, as a peculiar combination of moods at a high
potential, as a secret amalgam. Whether it be intellectual, emotional,
or practical, it sees or feels or does things in a new way. It makes
what it touches new; it affords a new outlook. "God said: Let Newton be!
and there was light"--that is genius.
In this sense we venture to think that Spencer was not far from the
kingdom of genius. He saw all things in the light of the evolution-idea;
he had a fresh vision of the unity of nature and the unity of science,
and the light that was in him was so clear that it radiated into other
minds. Had his emotional nature been stronger, had he been more than
luminiferous, he might have set the world aflame.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Herbert Spencer: A Character Study, "Fortnightly Review," 1904.