HERBERT SPENCER.
IN Mr. Herbert Spencer almost the last of the great figures of the Victorian era has departed. Few men have ever more completely dominated national thought in their own lifetime. By a happy accident, he began his career at a time when the great thesis of Darwin was being propounded, and a new world seemed to open for scientific discovery. With the enthusiasm of youth, Mr. Spencer set himself to map out this new world, and with a rare fidelity he continued his labours unremittingly to the end of a long life. To marry science and abstract thought, to deduce from the isolated discoveries of departmental science a guiding principle, and to work out this principle in every domain of human activity, was the task he set him- self. He was well fitted for it by the possession of a consider- able scientific training and a mind extraordinarily apt at acquiring and systematising knowledge. He was probably one of the most learned men of our time, a great polymath, whose encyclopaedic learning may justly entitle him to rank with those other synthetic philosophers, Aristotle and Bacon. If in his desire for a complete system of thought there was a suggestion of the German metaphysician, in most respects he was a typical English philosopher. He was, above all things, practical, desiring to bring Philosophy into the market-place and keep her there. He was keenly interested in current politics, and resisted Socialism with all the intense dislike of State interference which character- ised the mid-Victorian school of political philosophy. Taken as a whole, his life was a noble and influential one. He made popular the greatest of modern scientific truths, and he was an intellectual leader to thousands who desired some complete scheme of thought. The gravity and moderation of his argumentative methods, his high chsrpoter. his fidelity to his enormous self-imposed task, were all influences of the highest value in a world which is becoming daily more disposed to judge men and things from a low material standpoint, and look askance at the self-sacrificing life of the thinker and scholar.
His work remains to this generation a very stately creation, spreading its roots far under the soil of most departments of knowledge, and sheltering the fowls of the air in its branches in the shape of a dozen minor schools of political and scientific thought. His terminology is still too much in use, and his ideas are still too familiar, for us to be able to judge him with any true perspective. How far, we wonder, will future ages value him:? In a sense his work is already done. Owing more to him than to any other save its propounder, the idea of evolution has come to stay ; it has been stated in comprehensible terms, and it has become an integral part of every form of • thought. The task of the interpreter is over when his interpretation is accepted. We are even now revising our thoughts on evolution, and we shall probably continue to limit the application of the doctrine. The famous defini- tion, "the passing from an indefinite, incoherent homo- geneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity," may come in time to be only curious. But Mr. Spencer himself was the chief protester against any narrow and formal interpre- tation, as when in his famous "Factors in Organic Evolution" he insisted on the inadequacy of natural selection taken by itself. He will be judged in future ages by the Synthetic Philosophy, that system which he worked out into every detail of the practical and the theoretical life. Merely to have created so huge a structure is a claim to immortality, for though every axiom and conclusion were denied, later generations might well wonder at the vitality which could carry one thinker through so many arduous paths. But every system must be judged on the qualitative as well as the quantitative side ; it must not only be complete, it must be true. A laborious industry in collecting facts will not avail if the basis of the synthesis is false or inadequate. It is Mr. Spencer's chief claim on the attention of posterity that he built broad his foundations on the organic unity of the world. Partly, no doubt, as with Darwin, a biological conception, this idea of life as an organism with mutually related parts was the basis of all his departmental inquiries. From the evolution of life he passes to the evolution of consciousness, and thence to the evolution of the forms of consciousness in laws, ethics, and social institutions. Whatever fault we may find with particular applications of the conception, we must admit its fruit-, fulness and its high value in any synthesis of knowledge.
The chain had its weak links. Mr. Spencer was never, properly speaking, a metaphysician, and as a philosopher, in the German sense, he will probably have little influence on posterity. The old Teutonic taunt that in England a man was called a philosopher who invented mechanical toys is not without a shade of justification even in his case. Twenty years ago his influence over English specu- lation was not to be compared with T. H. Green's ; and since then the works of Mr. Bradley, to name one instance, have attracted the best speculative minds in a way in which Mr. Spencer's metaphysics of the unknowable are powerless to do. His psychology, to take another case, is out of date, both as to methods and results, as compared with the newer psychological laboratory work of Leipsic and Harvard. Sometimes, too, his conception of the organic broke down utterly, as in his laissez-faire theory of the State, which Huxley well described as "administrative Nihilism." But on the whole his synthesis is consistent, rich in suggestion, and liberal in its scope. He is par excellence in modern history the scientific thinker, not merely because the subject-matter of his thought is scientific data, but because he shows more than most philosophers the accuracy and order of a great scientist.
No writer of the first order has less claim to distinction of style. He has none of the literary graces which make Plato and Bacon, and even Fichte and Hegel, attractive, in part at any rate, to others than professed students of philosophy. At times, however, the simple and noble character of the man appears through his level sentences with something of an old Roman dignity. Such an occasion is the preface to the "Principles of Sociology," where he recounts the difficulties of his great undertaking, and the despair with which he embarked on it :—" Doubt- less in earlier days some exultation would have resulted ; • but as age creeps on, feelings weaken, and now my chief pleasure is in my emancipation. Still there is satisfaction in the consciousness that losses, discouragements, and shattered health have not prevented me from fulfilling the purpose of my life." And in his latest volume of "Facts and Comments" there is a passage which shows at the best that humane philosophic temper which, while far indeed from orthodox creeds, has so profound a compassion for mankind that it is not concerned, in the face of so much uncertainty, to deny value to any sincere belief. Some sen- tences may be quoted as a fitting comment on Mr. Spencer's life:—" The many who are reckless even of themselves and brutally regardless of human welfare may be passed by; unless indeed, some good may be done by proving that there are natural penalties which in large measure coincide with alleged supernatural penalties. On the other hand • those on whom fears of eternal punishment weigh heavily, may fitly be shown that merciless as is the Cosmic process worked out by an Unknown Power, yet vengeance is no- where to be found in it. Meanwhile, sympathy commands silence toward all who, suffering under the ills of life, derive comfort from their creed. While it forbids the dropping of hints that may shake their faiths, it suggests the evasion , of questions which cannot be discussed without unsettling their hopes."
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