The father, as well as an uncle and the paternal grandfather, were teachers of private schools; and yet the son, who was to be the most famous English philosopher of his century, remained till forty an uneducated man. Herbert was lazy, and the father was indulgent. At last, when he was thirteen, Herbert was sent to Hinton to study under his uncle, who had a reputation for severity. But Herbert promptly ran away from the uncle, and trudged all the way back to the paternal home at Derby—48 miles the first day, 47 the next, and 20 the third, all on a little bread and beer. Nevertheless he returned to Hinton after a few weeks, and stayed for three years. It was the only systematic schooling that he ever received. He could not say, later, just what it was he learned there; no history, no natural science, no general literature. He says, with characteristic pride: “That neither in boyhood nor youth did I receive a single lesson in English, and that I have remained entirely without formal knowledge of syntax down to the present hour, are facts which should be known; since their implications are at variance with assumptions universally accepted.”4 At the age of forty he tried to read the Iliad, but “after reading some six books I felt what a task it would be to go on—felt that I would rather give a large sum than read to the end.”5 Collier, one of his secretaries, tells us that Spencer never finished any book of science.6 Even in his favorite fields he received no systematic instruction. He burnt his fingers and achieved a few explosions in chemistry; he browsed entomologically among the bugs about school and home; and he learned something about strata and fossils in his later work as a civil engineer; for the rest he picked his science casually as he went along. Until he was thirty he had no thought at all of philosophy.7 Then he read Lewes, and tried to pass on to Kant; but finding, at the outset, that Kant considered space and time to be forms of sense-perception rather than objective things, he decided that Kant was a dunce, and threw the book away.8 His secretary tells us that Spencer composed his first book, Social Statics, “having read no other ethical treatise than an old and now forgotten book by Jonathan Dymond.” He wrote his Psychology after reading only Hume, Mansel and Reid; his Biology after reading only Carpenter’s Comparative Physiology (and not the Origin of Species); his Sociology without reading Comte or Tylor, his Ethics without reading Kant or Mill or any other moralist than Sedgwick.9 What a contrast to the intensive and relentless education of John Stuart Mill!
Where, then, did he find those myriad facts with which he propped up his thousand arguments? He “picked them up,” for the most part, by direct observation rather than by reading. “His curiosity was ever awake, and he was continually directing the attention of his companion to some notable phenomenon . . . until then seen by his eyes alone.” At the Athenaeum Club he pumped Huxley and his other friends almost dry of their expert knowledge; and he ran through the periodicals at the Club as he had run through those that passed through his father’s hands for the Philosophical Society at Derby, “lynx-eyed for every fact that was grist to his mill.”10 Having determined what he wanted to do, and having found the central idea, evolution, about which all his work would turn, his brain became a magnet for relevant material, and the unprecedented orderliness of his thought classified the material almost automatically as it came. No wonder the proletaire and the business man heard him gladly; here was just such a mind as their own—a stranger to book-learning, innocent of “culture” and yet endowed with the natural, matter-of-fact knowledge of the man who learns as he works and lives.
For he was working for his living: and his profession intensified the practical tendency of his thought. He was surveyor, supervisor and designer of railway lines and bridges, and in general an engineer. He dripped inventions at every turn; they all failed, but he looked back upon them, in his Autobiography, with the fondness of a father for a wayward son; he sprinkled his reminiscent pages with patent salt-cellars, jugs, candle-extinguishers, invalid-chairs, and the like. As most of us do in youth, he invented new diets too; for a time he was vegetarian; but he abandoned it when he saw a fellow-vegetarian develop anemia, and himself losing strength: “I found that I had to rewrite what I had written during the time I was a vegetarian, because it was so wanting in vigor.”11 He was ready in those days to give everything a trial; he even thought of migrating to New Zealand, forgetting that a young country has no use for philosophers. It was characteristic of him that he made parallel lists of reasons for and against the move, giving each reason a numerical value. The sums being 110 points for remaining in England and 301 for going, he remained.
His character had the defects of its virtues. He paid for his resolute realism and practical sense by missing the spirit and zest of poetry and art. The only poetical touch in his twenty volumes was due to a printer who made Spencer speak of “the daily versification of scientific predictions.” He had a fine persistence whose other side was an opinionated obstinacy; he could sweep the entire universe for proofs of his hypotheses, but he could not see with any insight another’s point of view; he had the egotism that bears up the nonconformer, and he could not carry his greatness without some conceit. He had the limitations of the pioneer: a dogmatic narrowness accompanying a courageous candor and an intense originality; sternly resisting all flattery, rejecting proffered governmental honors, and pursuing his painful work for forty years in chronic ill-health and modest seclusion; and yet marked, by some phrenologist who gained access to him—“Self-esteem very large.”12 The son and grandson of teachers, he wielded the ferule in his books, and struck a high didactic tone. “I am never puzzled,” he tell us.13 His solitary bachelor life left him lacking in the warmly human qualities, though he could be indignantly humane. He had an affair with that great Englishwoman, George Eliot, but she had too much intellect to please him.14 He lacked humor, and had no subtlety or nuances in his style. When he lost at his favorite game of billiards, he denounced his opponent for devoting so much time to such a game as to have become an expert in it. In his Autobiography he writes reviews of his own early books, to show how it should have been done.15
Apparently the magnitude of his task compelled him to look upon life with more seriousness than it deserves. “I was at the Fête of St. Cloud on Sunday,” he writes from Paris: “and was much amused by the juvenility of the adults. The French never entirely cease to be boys; I saw gray-haired people riding on whirligigs such as we have at our own fairs.”16 He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live it. After seeing Niagara Falls he jotted down in his diary: “Much what I had expected.”17 He describes the most ordinary incidents with the most magnificent pedantry—as when he tells us of the only time he ever swore.18 He suffered no crisis, felt no romance (if his memoirs record him well); he had some intimacies, but he writes of them almost mathematically; he plots the curves of his tepid friendships without any uplifting touch of passion. A friend said of himself that he could not write well when dictating to a young woman stenographer; Spencer said that it did not bother him at all. His secretary says, “The passionless thin lips told of a total lack of sensuality, and the light eyes betrayed a lack of emotional depth.”19 Hence the monotonous levelness of his style: he never soars, and needs no exclamation-points; in a romantic century he stands like a sculptured lesson in dignity and reserve.