Spencer, Herbert

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SPENCER, HERBERT

SPENCER, HERBERT (1820–1903), was an English philosopher who became the most influential exponent of social evolutionism. Born in Derby, England, and educated largely in an atmosphere of religious dissent (and especially influenced by Quakers and Unitarians of the Derby Philosphical Society), Spencer combined a practical bent (for railway engineering, inventions, etc.) with a constant search for scientific principles. He became assistant editor at the Economist in London in 1848. After an early essay (1852) on the "development hypothesis" (concerning the laws of progress), he settled on evolution as the basic principle governing all change in the universe and began propagating a theory of evolution even before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859.

The core of Spencer's literary output was published in several volumes under the general title A System of Synthetic Philosophy ; this huge endeavor was left unfinished at Spencer's death. Its bearing on religion was at least fourfold. First, the prefatory volume, called First Principles (1862), contains the earliest philosophic exposition of the position known as agnosticism. Proceeding beyond the fideism of William Hamilton and Henry Mansel, both of whom maintained that the existence of God was a matter of faith rather than certain knowledge, Spencer argued that the force behind the cosmic process of evolution was unknown and unknowable. Second, this work and his books The Principles of Biology (1864–1867) and The Principles of Psychology (1855–1870) defended evolution as a universal natural process of development from simple and homogenous to more complex and differentiated forms of life over millions of years. Thus Spencer became embroiled with Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and others in the debate with those who held to a literal interpretation of Genesis or who denied the simian ancestry of human beings. Spencer also used the evolution debate as a forum to attack the idea of established religion.

Social evolutionism was the third and most important of his system's implications for religious questions. In The Principles of Sociology (1876–1896), he presented a barely qualified unilineal account of religious evolution and also fleshed out the first "sociology of religion" (at least in English). Spencer thought that the origins of religion lay in the worship of ghosts or ancestors; he extrapolated this view from the balance of evidence found among "primitives," or what he had no hesitation in describing as "the lowest races of mankind." Although primitive religions had, according to Spencer, barely evolved, he believed that marks of progress could be found in the religions of the greater civilizations, and he tended to plot Greco-Roman and Hindu polytheisms, the "cruder" monotheisms of Jews and Muslims, and the relative refinements of Catholicism and Protestantism on an ascending scale, envisaging his own agnostic, scientific position as the pinnacle in the history of religious consciousness. Apart from suggesting that history reflected progress toward more mature insights and institutional complexity, Spencer outlined the kinds of religious activity worth investigation. He isolated ceremonial institutions, for example—a category in which he placed laws of intercourse, habits and customs, mutilations, and funeral rites, as well as ecclesiastical institutions.

Finally, his system also carried ethical implications. In The Principles of Ethics (1879–1893), and in various social essays (especially those in his book Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, 1861), he was seen as a liberal and an "individualist" who opposed punitive child-rearing, narrow biblicist morality, and state legislation that interferes in private affairs or with the entrepreneurial spirit.

Spencer's book sales were poor during his lifetime, and he eked out a frugal existence as a London bachelor until he was taken in by two elderly women in his old age. Through the later popularization of his ideas, however, his influence was immense, especially in the United States. His work and that of E. B. Tylor were crucial in conditioning the widespread preoccupation in English-speaking scholarship with the evolution of religion. Always ready for a lively interchange with other scholars and literati, Spencer struck up close intellectual friendships with George Eliot and her companion Henry Lewes and debated with Max Müller about mythology and the origins of religion. Spencer combined cautious distinctions and vitriolic attacks in an attempt to dissociate himself from Comtism and the views propounded by Frederick Harrison, an English disciple of Auguste Comte.

Spencer's written approach to religion suffered from a certain dilettantism: His knowledge of foreign languages was limited, and his educational background provided him no basis for the in-depth study of any single historical religion. He barely traveled outside Great Britain, although his encyclopedic tendencies, as well as his ability to collect data through travelers' accounts and mission reports from all over the world, made him a precursor to the armchair scholarship associated with James G. Frazer and The Golden Bough.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the liveliest popularizer of Spencer's ideas was W. H. Hudson, and his most cogent critic in matters of religious sociology was Émile Durkheim. His impact has waned with the decline of social evolutionism, but his influence on cosmological theory (that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for instance) and on evolution-oriented educational philosophy, especially that of John Dewey, has been more durable.

Bibliography

Other works by Herbert Spencer include Social Statics (1851; reprint, New York, 1954), The Study of Sociology (London, 1873), The Man versus the State (1884; reprint, London, 1950), and An Autobiography, 2 vols. (London, 1904). There is no monograph especially devoted to Spencer's ideas about religion, although one-half of my "The Origins of the Comparative Study of Religions" (M.A. thesis, Monash University, Clayton, Australia, 1967) analyzes these in depth. Of published works on Spencer's social theory, J. D. Y. Peel's Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971) and David Wiltshire's The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford, 1978) are the best. See also J. W. Burrow's Evolution and Society (London, 1966) on Spencer in the context of British evolutionist thought as a whole; Eric J. Sharpe's Comparative Religion: A History (London, 1975) on placing Spencer in the history of the field of comparative religion; and my "Radical Conservatism in Herbert Spencer's Educational Thought," British Journal of Educational Studies (1969): 267–280, on religious and philosophical assumptions underlying Spencer's views on education.