I remember hearing a Nonconformist divine of the Nineties denounce the young man who, instead of taking a class, spent his Sunday afternoon “reading Herbert Spencer.”

It struck me at the time that the reverend gentleman was fighting an unusually extinct Satan. For even in the Nineties the number of young men who desecrated the Sabbath in this particular fashion was very small. Herbert Spencer had reached the stage of being much quoted and little read. Indeed, the reverence in which he was held had a strong resemblance to that which men pay to the departing or the departed. Lord Morley has quoted a competent critic who warned him, a day or two before the last volume of Spencer’s work was published, that the system expounded by him was, if not already dead, at least on the eve of death.

But if that were the case in England, it was by no means so in a country in which Herbert Spencer had shown from time to time considerable interest. The new agnostic Empire of Japan had taken most kindly to the Spencerian philosophy, partly because it was exceedingly prosaic and partly because it put forward a rather arrogant pretension to finality. The Japanese is intensely matter-of-fact, which is by no means the same thing as being practical, and is often the reverse of being practical; thus a Japanese engineer, in giving an estimate for a factory or a railway, will often state the cost to a fraction of a farthing—and in the end prove inaccurate by hundreds of thousands of pounds. This trait is in no way connected with stupidity: it is part of the character of a people wholly in love with formality, and dominated by a tyrannical passion for neatness of arrangement. The Japanese loves to pack his ideas, and dovetail them with one another, with the same precision with which he makes two dozen lacquer boxes fit into one, or constructs a house to hold exactly eight hundred and twenty floor-mats, each of just the same size, without an inch to spare.

What enchanted the Japanese was Herbert Spencer’s solemn way of assuming that the heavens and the earth, and all that in them is, all space, all time, all life, and all humanity could be measured and reckoned up to a millimetre or a half-centime by his particular philosophical abacus. During the Nineties the Herbert Spencer school was extraordinarily potent in Japan. At the head of it was that remarkable man, Professor Fukuzawa, who, more than any other, was responsible for supplying the moral and philosophical basis of the new Japanese civilisation. Occasionally the English master favoured his Oriental disciples with an encyclical, applauding them for their skill in keeping the masterful European at bay, and giving them hints as to how best they could realise a perfect morality unalloyed with the smallest taint of the superstition which still disgraced (and was almost necessary to) the West. At one time Herbert Spencer had apparently great hopes that Japan might realise his ideal of the State in which men are guided wholly by reason—a State untainted with imperialism, militarism, aristocratic prejudice, or ecclesiastical faddism.

Japan’s subsequent essays in self-revelation are a sufficient commentary on these facts. In one sense Japan may still be called a Spencerian country; unread here, the philosopher is still conned by hundreds of thousands of eager students in the Eastern Empire; he has been expanded and adopted by a whole succession of native pedants. Japan still admires the synthetic philosophy, but remains aristocratic, bureaucratic, imperialistic, and militarist. Most truly she does not copy the West, but makes what she borrows her own. Herbert Spencer, who was really not far from an anarchist, has been converted into one of the chief buttresses of the State which is the nearest approach extant to the Prussianised German Empire.

It must have been something of a shock, for those Japanese who had grown up in the Spencerian dogma, to meet Herbert Spencer in the flesh. Baron Kikuchi has recorded an impression of Spencer going on a railway journey in the Nineties. For such an expedition great preparations were necessary. A hammock was slung diagonally across a saloon carriage; into this the philosopher was hoisted just before the train started, and from its depths he was laboriously recovered at the journey’s end. All this ritual Baron Kikuchi witnessed at Paddington. “What,” he says, “surprised the onlooker after seeing the hammock slung and the cushions carefully packed into it was to see a fresh-complexioned gentleman proceed from a waiting-room where he had been reclining in an invalid chair, walk nimbly across the platform, and then be hoisted into the hammock.”

There was at every stage of Spencer’s life this singular contrast between the self-sufficiency of his speculative habit and his mournful physical dependence. He lived till his eighty-third year; he was not cursed with a specially feeble constitution; but he coddled himself into a state of body which is, to a very considerable extent, an explanation of his state of mind. The sedentary thinker is prone to two opposite errors. Like Carlyle, Froude, or Treitschke, he may become an extravagant admirer of mere strength. Or, perhaps like Mr. Wells, and certainly like Mr. Galsworthy to-day, he may quite unduly depreciate the value of the qualities of ordinary mankind. Herbert Spencer’s whole thought was vitiated by the valetudinarian’s contempt for things in which he could have little part. He not merely undervalued physical courage; he even saw in it something ridiculous or indelicate. On the other hand, he altogether over-appraised the kind of moral courage which reveals itself in disputatiousness. It was his lot to live in a period when heterodoxy involved no serious danger or inconvenience, and at the same time earned for its professor the reputation of intellectual daring and distinction. Thus he enjoyed most of the luxuries with few of the pangs of martyrdom; he felt all the thrills of conflict without running any of the risks; in his kind of warfare the worst that could happen was a hurt to his feelings, and against that he was protected by a vanity of triple proof. But thought that involves the thinker in no kind of responsibility tends to be irresponsible; and though Spencer boasted that he “developed his ideas rationally”—so that he did not get wrinkled like inferior men “who think from the outside”—few men were in truth more under the dominion of prejudice; nearly everything he wrote on matters of human concern was influenced by the fact that he was excessively vain, timid, and self-indulgent.

“It was one of my misfortunes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “to have no brothers, and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters.” Brothers and sisters are blessings—or otherwise—that the gods give or deny us. But most men can get a wife if they really want one. Spencer’s lack of a wife was probably a greater handicap than the absence of brothers and sisters. For whatever arguments there may be in favour of a celibate priesthood, the celibate social philosopher most obviously suffers from a grave disadvantage; he lacks both the knowledge and the discipline that prevent men of thought becoming mere pedants and theorists. No doubt a wife would not have helped Spencer to write more profoundly about the limits of the unknowable. But she and hers would have given him a far juster impression of a large slice of the knowable. Perpetually lecturing married, child-rearing, householding, and taxpaying men, Spencer passed his own life as a fussy bachelor in a succession of boarding-houses, and can hardly have paid income-tax during a great part of it. We find him as early as the middle of the century in a “fairly lively boarding-house” in St. John’s Wood, Huxley having warned him that he must not live a solitary life. At the beginning of the Nineties he made almost a home in a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Regent’s Park; but towards the end of the period (and of his life) he found that gardens and trees were poor company, and, longing for the breadth and openness of the sea, removed to Brighton. Wherever he lived, he was something of a tyrant, and very much of a crank. In his fits of depression he insisted on being carried upstairs and down in an invalid chair, and seemed never to realise that his very considerable weight was an unfair burden to a man-servant and a maid. When he was (or thought himself) ill, his bell was perpetually ringing. “Few men,” writes (very acutely) one of the ladies who kept house for him in his seventies, “are so thoughtful and considerate as he was, or so oblivious to the trouble and inconvenience they cause.”

If there was “never yet philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently,” there have been many in all times above the smaller miseries which involve no actual torture. Herbert Spencer was none of these. It is at once painful and amusing to contrast the tone of his philosophical dissertations with that of his lamentations over some discomfort which a normal man would dismiss with an energetic monosyllable. The mind revealed in the printed page as disdainfully careless of any consideration but truth, which could face without a shudder the dread emptiness of eternity as Spencer imagined it, was in private occupied with all kinds of old-maidish whims. His bed “had to be made with a hard bolster beneath the mattress, raising a hump for the small of his back, while the clothes had a pleat down the centre, so that they never strained but fell in folds around him.” He devoted an enormous amount of thought to his ear-stoppers; at that time he could not live out of London, and yet he could not bear the noise of London; so that he “corked” himself, after the manner of Miss Betsy Trotwood, whether at the club or at his lodgings. He liked whiting for breakfast, and disliked haddock, and if haddock were served he was full of complaints about the “gross defects of integration, co-ordination, or whatever else the attendant molecular shortcoming might be.” “Moral training,” he once said, “should come into every branch of education, even that of cookery.” On a steamer he once created quite a scene because Stilton was served when he had ordered Cheddar. “Oh, the hardness of heart of these inveterate men! Oh, the accursed cruelty of their inhuman persecutions!” exclaimed Mr. Stiggins when informed that he could not have the “wanity” called pineapple rum with three lumps of sugar to the tumbler. The great Victorian philosopher was scarcely less eloquent over minute inconveniences and deprivations.

The AthenÆum Club had a large part in his life at this time. Elected at the age of forty-seven, he served for about seven years on the committee, but a self-admitted “lack of tact” interfered with his usefulness. Numberless stories are told of his pettishness when other members unconsciously offended. He used to drive almost daily from his lodgings to the Club, but would often stop the cab in the middle of Regent Street or some equally busy thoroughfare in order to feel his pulse. If it was regular he went on; if not he gave the order to return home. These habits of invalidism dated very far back. From the age of thirty, when he had some sort of nervous breakdown, he was continually engaged in self-analysis. There appeared to be really nothing very much the matter with him. “Appetite and digestion,” he himself says, “were both good, and my bodily strength seemingly not less than it had been.” But he slept badly: “Ordinarily my nights had from a dozen to a score wakings. For twenty-five years I never experienced drowsiness.” Possibly if he had acted a little more on instinct, and a little less on reason, things would have settled themselves; other people have managed better with worse handicaps. But he so carefully avoided one thing because he thought it did him harm, and so sedulously cultivated another because he thought it did him good, that for him the mere act of living was a business in itself. Thus he found racquets “conducive to mental calm,” and so played a game between the intervals of dictation; he dictated because he found his head would better bear that strain than writing. Sometimes he sculled in the Serpentine in order to soothe himself into tranquillity; for some time he took up vegetarianism, thinking it would be beneficial, but found that he had to rewrite what he had written during the time he was a vegetarian, because it was so “wanting in vigour.” With the same aim in view he took up billiards, fished, played cards, and sometimes occupied himself with a little shopping. We have a glimpse of him seeking a bronze for his sitting-room, but unsuccessfully, since the last available models were all French, and “French art, when not frivolous, is obscene.” His Æsthetic instincts were indeed singular; his favourite colour was “impure purple,” and it is believed that when the blue flowers in his dining-room carpet faded, he employed a charwoman to stain them with red ink!

Something of his hypochondriac and introspective disposition was no doubt hereditary. Spencer describes his forebears as late to contract marriage, and much given to forecasting—everywhere their record shows “a contemplation of remote results rather than immediate results, joined with an insistence of the first as compared with that of the last.” Thinking, possibly, that this very Spencerian jargon needed translation into the vernacular, he summarises the whole family character as prone to “dwell too much upon possible forthcoming events.” Spencer’s father and grandfather were both schoolmasters, who had never done any kind of manual work, and he derived from them a hand “smaller than the average woman’s.” The father, a Wesleyan, who afterwards joined the Quakers, bequeathed to him a “repugnance to priestly rule and priestly ceremonies,” and probably something of his disposition to question all authority. The elder Spencer was, indeed, a curious combination of the ascetic and the latitudinarian; himself piously self-disciplined, he disliked applying any sort of coercion to others. Thus novel-reading was not “positively forbidden” to Herbert, but “there were impediments,” and he knew nothing in childhood of the stories with which children commonly become familiar. How much he would have gained or lost by an occasional thrashing balanced by Gulliver and the Arabian Nights is a question for curious speculation. In the absence of the thrashing young Spencer—it is himself who speaks—was guilty of “chronic disobedience,” and developed his “most marked moral trait—a disregard of authority.” His uncle, a clergyman, to whom he was sent at the age of thirteen, describes him as having “no fear of the Lord nor fear of any law or authority.” On the former point the uncle was an excellent professional judge; on the latter, the fact that Herbert promptly ran away from the Vicarage, walking home (a distance of 120 miles) in three days, is sufficiently indicative. Under the tuition of this orthodox disciplinarian Spencer acquired some knowledge of mathematics, a little Latin, less Greek, and scarcely anything besides.

His first idea of getting a living was teaching; but his uncle obtained him an opening in civil engineering, and he started work on the London and Birmingham railway. But, as ever, he was much more inclined to teach other people their business than to learn his own; he objected, also, to over-work; and it “never entered into his thoughts to ingratiate himself with those above him.” He was, in fact, quite unfit to be “integrated”—to use his own favourite expression—in any corporate scheme: too self-centred, too disputatious, too thoughtful of his own small wants and comforts. In politics it was the same; he first mixed himself up with the Chartists, but soon found it necessary to unmix, as the Chartists were “too fanatical to work with,” and finally decided, no doubt wisely, for the lonely liberty of letters. It was only by following his trade as an engineer, however, that he could keep going until, in his twenty-eighth year, a position on the Economist, worth a hundred guineas a year, enabled him to begin serious work on his Social Statics. Like all his books, this involved him in some first loss; and but for two small legacies and the little property his father left, he would have been unable to carry on. He could, of course, have earned money in the way so many men do—by hack work. But he had no idea of “getting on,” not that he had any contempt for money, or disdain for the things money buys, but it was “not worth the bother”; work as work he always disliked. He was always warning his friends against over-work, and his protests against bearing any part of the curse of Adam were often nothing but unmanly. “On the whole,” he wrote to a friend at thirty-one, “I am quite decided not to be a drudge, and as I see no probability of being able to marry without being a drudge, why, I have pretty well given up the idea.”

One advantage of not being a drudge was that he could choose his company, and even “glare” at Carlyle in disapproval of the “absurd dogmas” (so imperfectly “co-ordinated”) of that sage; another that he could find leisure to sing part-songs with George Eliot; another that he could coddle himself to his heart’s content. But such very limited independence is a little irksome, and now and again he got restive over limited means, and even took abortive steps to get some Government employment which (at the public expense) would leave him ample time for his private work. He was fifty before “adverse circumstances” had ceased to worry him, and by this time he had advanced far in invalidism. In the Nineties his work was for all practical purposes over. He had achieved a singular position. A great legend with the public, he was something of a small jest with the rather narrow circle of his familiar acquaintance. It was possible for people who knew only his name and his writings to yield for his work the admiration it really deserved, not so much for the success of the achievement as for the splendid audacity (and even impudence) of the design. The young man who really read him on “Sunday afternoons” might picture the great sceptic as peering with stern and steadfast eyes into reality, unafraid of all save intellectual dishonesty. The enthusiast for social justice might rejoice to see him haling to the bar of eternal reason (not far from the leader page of The Times) this or that temporary political offender against the laws of correct “integration” and “co-ordination.” The remote revolutionary struggling more or less rightly to be free might welcome his as the authentic voice of intellectual England. But those who knew him mingled a smile with their reverence. They might recognise his single-mindedness and his uncompromising “honesty in ideas.” They might value him as a “great thinker,” while possibly deploring that he was also a crank of the most voluminous and pertinacious kind. But whether they admired wholly or with reservations, they could hardly avoid feeling a “very tragical mirth” over the contrast between the philosophy and the philosopher. The personality of the preacher, of course, does not affect the truth of the gospel, but it cannot but affect men’s reception of the gospel; and it was not easy for those who knew Herbert Spencer intimately, and were aware how a fast-trotting cab-horse would disorder his pulse for a week, to take quite seriously all his contributions to the intellectual output of his time.

As to the philosophy itself, three brief sentences from contemporaries have a certain justice. “To Spencer,” said Huxley, “tragedy is represented by a deduction spoiled by a fact.” “Spencer,” said Professor Sidgwick, “suffered from the fault of fatuous self-confidence.” “You have such a passion for generalising,” said George Eliot, “you even fish with a generalisation.”