Herbert Spencer

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Lore & Background

Spencer was born in Derby, Derbyshire, England, on 27 April 1820, the son of William George Spencer. His father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism and transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. He ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and served as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin. Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while members of the society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, completed his limited formal education by teaching him mathematics, physics, and enough Latin to translate easy texts, and imprinted free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also writing for provincial journals. He published his first book, Social Statics (1851), while working as sub-editor on The Economist from 1848 to 1853. Radical publisher John Chapman introduced Spencer to his salon, attended by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), with whom he was briefly romantically linked. Spencer introduced biologist Thomas Henry Huxley to the salon. His second book, Principles of Psychology (1855), explored a physiological basis for psychology, aiming to reconcile associationist psychology with phrenology via the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. The book was not initially successful; the last of the 251 copies of its first edition were not sold until June 1861. In 1858, Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy, a ten-volume work intended to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applies in biology, psychology, sociology, and morality. It took him twice as long as anticipated and consumed almost all the rest of his long life. By the 1870s he had become the most famous philosopher of the age, able to support himself solely on book sales and income from periodical contributions. His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, and he was offered honours and awards all over Europe and North America. He became a member of the Athenaeum and the X Club, a dining club of nine founded by T.H. Huxley that included physicist-philosopher John Tyndall and banker-biologist Sir John Lubbock.

Reader's Guide

Spencer's significance lies in his ambitious attempt to unify all knowledge under a single law of evolution, which he extended beyond biology into sociology, ethics, psychology, and morality. He coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, though he also supported Lamarckism. His synthetic philosophy, though immensely influential in the late nineteenth century, saw a sharp decline after 1900: 'Who now reads Spencer?' asked Talcott Parsons in 1937. The last decades of Spencer's life were characterised by growing disillusionment and loneliness. He never married, and after 1855 was a life-long hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains and maladies that no physician could diagnose. His nervous sensibility was extreme: 'A game of billiards was enough to deprive him of his night's rest.' By the 1890s his readership had begun to desert him, many of his closest friends died, and he doubted the confident faith in progress that had been the centre-piece of his philosophical system. His political views became increasingly conservative: whereas Social Statics had been the work of a radical democrat who believed in votes for women and even children, by the 1880s he had become a staunch opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the drift towards 'socialism'.

Did You Know?

• Spencer coined the expression 'survival of the fittest' in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
• His first book, Social Statics (1851), predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to living in society, with the consequential withering away of the state.
• The last of the 251 copies of the first edition of Principles of Psychology (1855) were not sold until June 1861.
• Spencer never married and after 1855 was a life-long hypochondriac; a game of billiards was enough to deprive him of his night's rest.
• By the 1880s, Spencer had become a staunch opponent of female suffrage, despite having earlier believed in votes for women in Social Statics.

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