Part 3 (2/2)
[2] ”The Education of the Wage-Earners.” Boston, Ginn & Company, 1904.
VI
HERBERT SPENCER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY[1]
”G.o.d moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.” If the greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of outline, from gothic to cla.s.sic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic, and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of whom can _go_, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned the supreme miracle of creative ingenuity. Rarely has Nature performed an odder or more d.i.c.kens-like feat than when she deliberately designed, or accidentally stumbled into, the personality of Herbert Spencer.
Greatness and smallness surely never lived so closely in one skin together.
The opposite verdicts pa.s.sed upon his work by his contemporaries bear witness to the extraordinary mingling of defects and merits in his mental character. Here are a few, juxtaposed:--
”A philosophic saw-mill.”--”The most capacious and powerful thinker of all time.
”The Arry' of philosophy.”--”Aristotle and his master were not more beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle.”
”Herbert Spencer's chromo-philosophy.”--”No other man that has walked the earth has so wrought and written himself into the life of the world.”
”The touch of his mind takes the living flavor out of everything.”--”He is as much above and beyond all the other great philosophers who have ever lived as the telegraph is beyond the carrier-pigeon, or the railway beyond the sedan chair.”
”He has merely combined facts which we knew before into a huge fantastic contradictory system, which hides its nakedness and emptiness partly under the veil of an imposing terminology, and partly in the primeval fog.”--”His contributions are of a depth, profundity, and magnitude which have no parallel in the history of mind. Taking but one--and one only--of his transcendent reaches of thought,--namely, that referring to the positive sense of the Unknown as the basis of religion,--it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that the a.n.a.lysis and synthesis by which he advances to the almost supernal grasp of this mighty truth give a sense of power and reach verging on the preternatural.”
Can the two thick volumes of autobiography which Mr. Spencer leaves behind him explain such discrepant appreciations? Can we find revealed in them the higher synthesis which reconciles the contradictions?
Partly they do explain, I think, and even justify, both kinds of judgment upon their author. But I confess that in the last resort I still feel baffled. In Spencer, as in every concrete individual, there is a uniqueness that defies all formulation. We can feel the touch of it and recognize its taste, so to speak, relis.h.i.+ng or disliking, as the case may be, but we can give no ultimate account of it, and we have in the end simply to admire the Creator.
Mr. Spencer's task, the unification of all knowledge into an articulate system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or Descartes. Most thinkers have confined themselves either to generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a fas.h.i.+on, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics.
Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. His civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life was pure. He was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character was wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt), and from the perverse egoisms that so often go with greatness.
Surely, any one hearing this veracious enumeration would think that Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant human being. Such wide curiosities must have gone with the widest sympathies, and such a powerful harmony of character, whether it were a congenital gift, or were acquired by spiritual wrestling and eating bread with tears, must in any case have been a glorious spectacle for the beholder. Since Goethe, no such ideal human being can have been visible, walking our poor earth.
Yet when we turn to the ”Autobiography,” the self-confession which we find is this: An old-maidish personage, inhabiting boarding-houses, equable and lukewarm in all his tastes and pa.s.sions, having no desultory curiosity, showing little interest in either books or people.
A petty fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth of any wide designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of things, yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession of a world-formula which by dint of his extraordinary pertinacity he proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it made him a philosopher in spite of himself. He appears as modest enough, but with a curious vanity in some of his deficiencies,--his lack of desultory interests, for example, and his nonconformity to reigning customs. He gives a queer sense of having no emotional perspective, as if small things and large were on the same plane of vision, and equally commanded his attention. In spite of his professed dislike of monotony, one feels an awfully monotonous quality in him; and in spite of the fact that invalidism condemned him to avoid thinking, and to saunter and potter through large parts of every day, one finds no twilight region in his mind, and no capacity for dreaminess or pa.s.sivity. All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare, like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are no mysteries or shadows.
”Look on this picture and on that,” and answer how they can be compatible.
For one thing, Mr. Spencer certainly writes himself _down_ too much.
He complains of a poor memory, of an idle disposition, of a general dislike for reading. Doubtless there have been more gifted men in all these respects. But when Spencer once buckled to a particular task, his memory, his industry, and his reading went beyond those of the most gifted. He had excessive sensibility to stimulation by a challenge, and he had preeminent pertinacity. When the notion of his philosophic system once grasped him, it seemed to possess itself of every effective fibre of his being. No faculty in him was left unemployed,--nor, on the other hand, was anything that his philosophy could contain left unstated. Roughly speaking, the task and the man absorbed each other without residuum.
Compare this type of mind with such an opposite type as Ruskin's, or even as J. S. Mill's, or Huxley's, and you realize its peculiarity.
Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities. Spencer tossed all his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back on them forever. His books seem to have expressed all that there was to express in his character.
He is very frank about this himself. No _Sturm und Drang Periode_, no problematic stage of thought, where the burden of the much-to-be-straightened exceeds the powers of straightening.
When George Eliot uttered surprise at seeing no lines on his forehead, his reply was:--”I suppose it is because I am never puzzled.”--”It has never been my way,” he continues, ”to set before myself a problem and puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived at unawares--each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thought which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct observation, or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me; apparently because I had a sense of its significance. . . . A week afterwards, possibly, the matter would be remembered; and with further thought about it, might occur a recognition of some wider application: new instances being aggregated with those already noted. Again, after an interval,” etc., etc. ”And thus, little by little, in un.o.btrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organized theory” (vol. i, page 464).
A sort of mill, this, wound up to grind in a certain way, and irresponsive otherwise.
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