Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

           Herbert Spencer was born on April 27, 1820 at Derby, Derbyshire, England and died at December 8, 1903 in Brington, Sussex. Herbert Spencer are English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge, advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science over religion. His magnum opus was The "Synthetic Philosophy in 1896, a comprehensive work containing volumes on the principles of biology, psychology, morality, and sociology. He is best remembered for his doctrine of Social Darwinism, according to which the principles of evolution, including natural selection, apply to human societies, social classes, and individuals as well as to biological species developing over geologic time. In Herbert Spencer’s day social Darwinism was invoked to justify laissez-faire economics and the minimal state, which were thought to best promote unfettered competition between individuals and the gradual improvement of society through the “survial of the fittes” a term that Spencer himself introduced.Herbert Spencer’s father is William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and his parents dissenting religious convictions inspired in him a nonconformity that continued active even after he had abandoned the Christian faith. Spencer declined an offer from his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, to send him to Cambridge, and in consequence his higher education was largely the result of his own reading, which was chiefly in the natural sciences. He was, for a few months, a schoolteacher and from 1837 to 1841 a railway civil engineer.In 1842 he contributed some letters (republished later as a pamphlet, The proper Sphere of Government in 1843) to The nonconformist, in which he argued that it is the business of governments to uphold natural rights and that they do more harm than good when they go beyond that. After some association with progressive journalism through such papers as The Zoist (devoted to mesmerism, or hyponosis, and phrenology) and The Pilot (the organ of the Complete Suffrage Union), Spencer became in 1848 a subeditor of The Economist. In 1851 he published Social statics, which contained in embryo most of his later views, including his argument in favour of an extreme form of economic and social laissez-faire. About 1850 Spencer became acquainted with the novelist George Eliot, and his philosophical conversations with her led some of their friends to expect that they would marry, but in his Autobiography in1904, Herbert Spencer denies any such desire, much as he admired Eliot’s intellectual powers. Other friends were George Henry Lewes, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Stuart Mill. In 1853 Herbert Spencer, having received a legacy from his uncle, resigned his position with The Economist.

           Herbert Spencer was one of the most-argumentative and most-discussed English thinkers of the Victorian period. His strongly scientific orientation led him to urge the importance of examining social phenomena in a scientific way. He believed that all aspects of his thought formed a coherent and closely ordered system. Science and philosophy, he held, gave support to and enhanced individualism and progress. Though it is natural to cite him as the great exponent of Victorian optimism, it is notable that he was by no means unaffected by the pessimism that from time to time clouded the Victorian confidence. Evolution, he taught, would be followed by dissolution, and individualism would come into its own only after an era of socialism and war.

          Spencer saw philosophy as a synthesis of the fundamental principles of the special sciences, a sort of scientific summa to replace the theological systems of the Middle Ages. He thought of unification in terms of development, and his whole scheme was in fact suggested to him by the evolution of biological species. In First principles he argued that there is a fundamental law of matter, which he called the law of the persistence of force, from which it follows that nothing homogenous can remain as such if it is acted upon, because any external force must affect some part of it differently from other parts and cause difference and variety to arise. From that, he continued, it would follow that any force that continues to act on what is homogeneous must bring about an increasing variety. That “law of the multiplication of effects,” due to an unknown and unknowable absolute force, is in Spencer’s view the clue to the understanding of all development, cosmic as well as biological.It should be noted that Spencer published his idea of the evolution of biological species before the views of Charles Darwin and the British naturalist Alfred Wallace were known. Spencer at that time thought that evolution was caused by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, whereas Darwin and Wallace attributed it to natural selection. Spencer later accepted the theory that natural selection was one of the causes of biological evolution.