HERBERT SPENCER.
The world loses one of its few great men in the death of Herbert Spencer. Thirty years ago there lived and worked in Great Britain a notable group of leaders—Darwin, Huxley, Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Gladstone and many more. One by one they have died, each time leaving an empty space that remains unfilled. We have still Kelvin, Watts, Swinburne and Meredith, but the voices of the Victorian era are now nearly silent. It is perhaps needful to go back to the Elizabethan age for a period of parallel efflorescence; and it may be that such will not again recur even after three hundred years.
Spencer believed in universal evolution rather than in miracles wrought by the individual; and it is certainly true that his own work was the result rather than the cause of certain leading tendencies of the nineteenth century. Evolution and the conservation of energy are the great legacy handed on to the twentieth century, no longer speculations of the philosophers, but part of the real life of every one. Spencer more completely and more perfectly than any other represented these truths and made them our common heritage. In the preface to the fourth edition of the 'First Principles,' he explains that the doctrine of evolution was maintained by him two or even four years before the publication of the 'Origin of Species.' As a matter of fact the idea of world evolution goes back almost to the beginning of thought; it is clearly stated for inorganic matter and living things by the Greek philosophers and again by Kant, Laplace, Goethe and Lamarck. It is a question whether even Darwin's 'natural selection,' which does not after all play a leading part in Spencer's philosophy, can not be found in Aristotle. Evolution was clearly 'in the air' in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Thus before Darwin or Spencer, Tennyson wrote and printed the line verses:
'So careful of the type?' but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.'
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The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man.
Of these ideas Spencer became the leading representative, his bold formulas appealing directly to the people to an extent that could not be expected of Darwin's patient investigations. The methods of the two men are compared in a letter from Darwin to John Fiske:
I find that my mind is so fixed by the inductive method that I can not appreciate deductive reasoning: I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please. This may be very narrow-minded; but the result is that such parts of H. Spencer as I have read with care impress my mind with the idea of his inexhaustible wealth of suggestion, but never convince me.
If others were as frank as Darwin, many would say with him: "With the exception of special points I did not even understand H. Spencer's general doctrine; for his style is too hard work for me." But Spencer appealed to the emotions as well as to the intellect.
