SPENCER, HERBERT (182o-19o3), English philosopher, was born at Derby on April 27, 182o. His father, William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and his parents' religious convic tions familiarized him with the doctrines of the Methodists and Quakers. He declined an offer from his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, to send him to Cambridge, and so was practically self taught. During 1837-46 he was employed as an engineer on the London and Birmingham railway; in 1848-53 as sub-editor of the Economist. From about this time to 186o he contributed numer ous articles to the Westminster Review, which contain the first sketches of his philosophic doctrines. He also published two larger works, Social Statics in 185o, and Principles of Psychology in 1855. In 186o he sent out the syllabus of his Synthetic Philosophy in ten volumes, which he completed in 1896 with the Principles of Sociology. He died on Dec. 8, 1903.
Spencer's significance in the history of English thought depends on his position as the philosopher of the great scientific move ment of the second half of the 19th century, and on his friend ship with men like Darwin, G. H. Lewes, and Huxley. He tries to express in a general formula the belief in progress which per vaded his age, and to erect it into the supreme law of the universe. But to the specialists in sciences which were advancing rapidly to results which often transformed their initial assumptions, Spencer has often appeared too much of a philosopher and defec tive in specialist knowledge ; to the technical philosophers he has not seemed philosophic enough.
Spencer claims, with some reason, that he was always an evolutionist. But his notions of what "evolution" is developed gradually. At first he seems to have meant only the belief that progress is real, and that the existing order of nature is the result of a gradual process. In Social Statics (185o) he still regards the process teleologically, and argues after the fashion of Paley that "the greatest happiness is the purpose of creation" (ch. iii. § I). In The Development Hypothesis (1852) he objects strongly to the incredibility of the special creation of the myriad forms of life, without, however, suggesting how development has been effected. In Progress, its Law and Cause (1857) he adopted Von Baer's law, that the development of the individual proceeds from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. This is at once con
nected with the nebular hypothesis, and subsequently "deduced" from the ultimate law of the "persistence of force," and finally supplemented by a counter-process of dissolution, all of which appears to Spencer only as "the addition of Von Baer's law to a number of ideas that were in harmony with it." Spencer wel comed Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and enriched its doc trines with the phrase "survival of the fittest"; but he did not give up the (Lamarckian) belief in the hereditary transmission of the modifications of organisms by the exercise of function.
Of his First Principles (1862) the first part shows that while ultimate metaphysical questions are insoluble they compel to a recognition of an inscrutable Power behind phenomena which is called the Unknowable ; the second part is devoted to the formu lation of the Law of Evolution. In the first part Spencer's argu ment rests on Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought and Hamil ton's "philosophy of the conditioned" (and so ultimately on Kant), and tries to show that in scientific and religious thought the ultimate terms are "inconceivable" (not by him distinguished from "unimaginable"). In science, the more we know the more extensive "the contact with surrounding nescience." In religion the vital and constant element is the sense of mystery. This is illus trated by the difficulties inherent in the conception of Cause, Space, Time, Matter, Motion, the Infinite, and the Absolute, and by the "relativity of knowledge," which precludes knowledge of the Unknowable, since "all thinking is relationing." Yet of the Unknowable we may have an "indefinite knowledge," positive, though vague. Hence both science and religion must recognize as the "most certain of all facts that the Power which the Uni verse manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." In the edition of his First Principles, published in 1900, he adds a "postscript" which shows some consciousness of the contradiction involved in his knowledge of the Unknowable, and finally contends that his account of the Knowable in part ii. will stand even if part i. be rejected. But, in reality, a really inscrutable Unknowable would destroy all confidence in the order of nature and render all knowledge precarious.