68 Facts About Herbert Spencer

1.

Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist.

2.

The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Herbert Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he supported Lamarckism.

3.

Herbert Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies.

4.

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on 27 April 1820, the son of William George Herbert Spencer.

5.

Herbert Spencer's father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority.

6.

Herbert Spencer 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 which had been founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

7.

Herbert Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

8.

Thomas Herbert Spencer imprinted on his nephew his own firm free-trade and anti-statist political views.

9.

Herbert Spencer worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics.

10.

Herbert Spencer published his first book, Social Statics, whilst working as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist from 1848 to 1853.

11.

Herbert Spencer predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state.

12.

Herbert Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would later win fame as 'Darwin's Bulldog' and who remained Herbert Spencer's lifelong friend.

13.

Herbert Spencer argued that both these theories were partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas were embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, and these could be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance.

14.

Comte's Systeme de Philosophie Positive had been written with the ambition of demonstrating the universality of natural law, and Herbert Spencer was to follow Comte in the scale of his ambition.

15.

However, Herbert Spencer differed from Comte in believing it was possible to discover a single law of universal application which he identified with progressive development and was to call the principle of evolution.

16.

In 1858 Herbert Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy.

17.

Herbert Spencer envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to complete; in the end it took him twice as long and consumed almost all the rest of his long life.

18.

Herbert Spencer's works were widely read during his lifetime, and by 1869 he was able to support himself solely on the profit of book sales and on income from his regular contributions to Victorian periodicals which were collected as three volumes of Essays.

19.

Herbert Spencer's works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and into many other languages and he was offered honours and awards all over Europe and North America.

20.

The last decades of Herbert Spencer's life were characterised by growing disillusionment and loneliness.

21.

Herbert Spencer never married, and after 1855 was a life-long hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains and maladies that no physician could diagnose at that time.

22.

Herbert Spencer had been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with Huxley; but he gave it up because there was a difference on some scientific question between them, and this might have given rise to an argument, which Spencer's nerves could not bear.

23.

The exception to Herbert Spencer's growing conservatism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism.

24.

Herbert Spencer was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1883.

25.

Herbert Spencer invented a precursor to the modern paper clip, though it looked more like a modern cotter pin.

26.

In 1902, shortly before his death, Herbert Spencer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, that was assigned to the German Theodor Mommsen.

27.

Herbert Spencer continued writing all his life, in later years often by dictation, until he succumbed to poor health at the age of 83.

28.

Herbert Spencer's ashes are interred in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery facing Karl Marx's grave.

29.

Herbert Spencer followed positivism in his insistence that it was only possible to have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it was idle to speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality.

30.

Herbert Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.

31.

In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of the scientific method, Herbert Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution.

32.

Herbert Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while undergoing increasing integration of the differentiated parts.

33.

The principles described by Herbert Spencer received a variety of interpretations.

34.

Bertrand Russell stated in a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1923: 'I don't know whether [Herbert Spencer] was ever made to realize the implications of the second law of thermodynamics; if so, he may well be upset.

35.

Herbert Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalised Darwin's work on natural selection.

36.

Herbert Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism was necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity.

37.

Herbert Spencer tried to apply the theory of biological evolution to sociology.

38.

Herbert Spencer proposed that society was the product of change from lower to higher forms, just as in the theory of biological evolution, the lowest forms of life are said to be evolving into higher forms.

39.

Herbert Spencer claimed that man's mind had evolved in the same way from the simple automatic responses of lower animals to the process of reasoning in the thinking man.

40.

Herbert Spencer believed in two kinds of knowledge: knowledge gained by the individual and knowledge gained by the race.

41.

However, despite its popularity, this view of Herbert Spencer's sociology is mistaken.

42.

The evolutionary progression from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to complex, differentiated heterogeneity was exemplified, Herbert Spencer argued, by the development of society.

43.

Herbert Spencer developed a theory of two types of society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to this evolutionary progression.

44.

Society, which Herbert Spencer conceptualised as a 'social organism' evolved from the simpler state to the more complex according to the universal law of evolution.

45.

Hence too much individual benevolence directed to the 'undeserving poor' would break the link between conduct and consequence that Herbert Spencer considered fundamental to ensuring that humanity continued to evolve to a higher level of development.

46.

Herbert Spencer termed this code of conduct 'Absolute Ethics' which provided a scientifically-grounded moral system that could substitute for the supernaturally-based ethical systems of the past.

47.

Herbert Spencer thought that the origin of music is to be found in impassioned oratory.

48.

Herbert Spencer rejected theology as representing the 'impiety of the pious.

49.

Therefore, Herbert Spencer concluded, religion and science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable of 'relative' knowledge.

50.

Herbert Spencer has been claimed as a precursor by right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists.

51.

Politics in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Herbert Spencer disliked, and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and individualists in Europe and America that they are still in use in the 21st century.

52.

Herbert Spencer denounced Irish land reform, compulsory education, laws to regulate safety at work, prohibition and temperance laws, tax funded libraries, and welfare reforms.

53.

Herbert Spencer vehemently attacked the widespread enthusiasm for annexation of colonies and imperial expansion, which subverted all he had predicted about evolutionary progress from 'militant' to 'industrial' societies and states.

54.

Herbert Spencer anticipated many of the analytical standpoints of later right-libertarian theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, especially in his "law of equal liberty", his insistence on the limits to predictive knowledge, his model of a spontaneous social order, and his warnings about the "unintended consequences" of collectivist social reforms.

55.

For many, the name of Herbert Spencer is virtually synonymous with Social Darwinism, a social theory that applies the law of the survival of the fittest to society and is integrally related to the nineteenth century rise in scientific racism.

56.

Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Herbert Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or firms improve the well being of the rest of society.

57.

Herbert Spencer viewed private charity positively, encouraging both voluntary association and informal care to aid those in need, rather than relying on government bureaucracy or force.

58.

Herbert Spencer further recommended that private charitable efforts would be wise to avoid encouraging the formation of new dependent families by those unable to support themselves without charity.

59.

Herbert Spencer was perhaps the only philosopher in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own lifetime.

60.

In post-1863-Uprising Poland, many of Herbert Spencer's ideas became integral to the dominant fin-de-siecle ideology, "Polish Positivism".

61.

Herbert Spencer's ideas became very influential in China and Japan largely because he appealed to the reformers' desire to establish a strong nation-state with which to compete with the Western powers.

62.

Herbert Spencer's thought was introduced by the Chinese scholar Yen Fu, who saw his writings as a prescription for the reform of the Qing state.

63.

Herbert Spencer influenced the Japanese Westernizer Tokutomi Soho, who believed that Japan was on the verge of transitioning from a "militant society" to an "industrial society," and needed to quickly jettison all things Japanese and take up Western ethics and learning.

64.

Herbert Spencer corresponded with Kaneko Kentaro, warning him of the dangers of imperialism.

65.

Herbert Spencer aimed to free prose writing from as much "friction and inertia" as possible, so that the reader would not be slowed by strenuous deliberations concerning the proper context and meaning of a sentence.

66.

Herbert Spencer argued that by making the meaning as readily accessible as possible, the writer would achieve the greatest possible communicative efficiency.

67.

Herbert Spencer influenced literature inasmuch as many novelists and short story authors came to address his ideas in their work.

68.

Herbert Spencer influenced not only the administrators who shaped their societies' inner workings, but the artists who helped shape those societies' ideals and beliefs.