Herbert Spencer (Philosopher)

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

— Herbert Spencer belief

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

— Herbert Spencer man

All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.

— Herbert Spencer light

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

— Herbert Spencer end

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.

— Herbert Spencer life

Limiting the liberty of each by the like liberty of all, excludes a wide range of improper actions, but does not exclude certain other improper ones.

— Herbert Spencer action

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

— Herbert Spencer sex

A clever theft was praiseworthy amongst the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale.

— Herbert Spencer art

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature — this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

— Herbert Spencer time

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

— Herbert Spencer man

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

— Herbert Spencer feelings

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.

— Herbert Spencer race

Note that this essay was written six years prior to the July 1, 1858 presentation of papers byand , to the , on the theory of evolution by natural selection. The following quotes are fromWatts & Co. (1907).

— Herbert Spencer quotes

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.

— Herbert Spencer lie

Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief but assume that their own needs none.

— Herbert Spencer belief

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

— Herbert Spencer change

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.

— Herbert Spencer men

The supporters of the Development Hypothesis... can show that any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.

— Herbert Spencer success

Throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind... as the cause, these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes—an influence, which to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.

— Herbert Spencer time

That by any series of changes a protozoon should ever become a mammal, seems to those who are not familiar with zoology, and who have not seen how clear becomes the relationship between the simplest and the most complex forms when intermediate forms are examined, a very grotesque notion. Habitually, looking at things rather in their statical aspect than in their dynamical aspect, they never realize the fact that, by small increments of modification, any amount of modification may in time be generated.

— Herbert Spencer time

The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becomes astonishing when we remember that complex organic forms are daily being thus produced. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect... Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other: changed so gradually, that at no moment can it be said—Now the seed ceases to be, and the tree exists.

— Herbert Spencer success

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

— Herbert Spencer time

Surely if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.

— Herbert Spencer man

We have, indeed, in the part taken by many scientific men in this controversy of "Law versus Miracle," a good illustration of the tenacious vitality of superstitions. Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. ...Whence ...this notion of "special creations"...Why, after rejecting all the rest of the story, he should strenuously defend this last remnant of it, as though he had received it on valid authority, he would be puzzled to say.

— Herbert Spencer art

Poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

— Herbert Spencer art

There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.

— Herbert Spencer war

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

— Herbert Spencer success

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

— Herbert Spencer poetry

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

— Herbert Spencer power

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

— Herbert Spencer life

Every cause produces more than one effect.

— Herbert Spencer

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

— Herbert Spencer

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

— Herbert Spencer men

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.

— Herbert Spencer art

We too often forget that not only is there "a soul of goodness in things evil," but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

— Herbert Spencer truth

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

— Herbert Spencer men

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

— Herbert Spencer reality

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

— Herbert Spencer

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

— Herbert Spencer change

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

— Herbert Spencer art

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

— Herbert Spencer understanding

It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out ofwith the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die; and that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest. Out of the fittest thus multiplied, there will, as before, be an overthrowing of the moving equilibrium wherever it presents the least opposing force to the new incident force.

— Herbert Spencer lies

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

— Herbert Spencer nature

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.

— Herbert Spencer time

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

— Herbert Spencer beauty

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

— Herbert Spencer war

Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.

— Herbert Spencer nature

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

— Herbert Spencer world

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

— Herbert Spencer men

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.

— Herbert Spencer nature

The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

— Herbert Spencer knowledge

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

— Herbert Spencer life

The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

— Herbert Spencer feelings

The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.

— Herbert Spencer service

People … become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

— Herbert Spencer happiness

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems, … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

— Herbert Spencer truth

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

— Herbert Spencer happiness

He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter.

— Herbert Spencer happiness

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

— Herbert Spencer religion

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

— Herbert Spencer words

Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.

— Herbert Spencer life

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstablelong maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

— Herbert Spencer war

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

— Herbert Spencer freedom

When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.

— Herbert Spencer men

— Herbert Spencer art

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.Pt. I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, concluding paragraph

— Herbert Spencer life

Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.Pt. II, Ch. 2, Derivation of a First Principle.

— Herbert Spencer man

Limiting the liberty of each by the like liberty of all, excludes a wide range of improper actions, but does not exclude certain other improper ones.Pt. II, Ch. 2, Derivation of a First Principle.

— Herbert Spencer action

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.Pt. II, Ch. 16, The Rights of Women.

— Herbert Spencer women

— Herbert Spencer education

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.Pt. III, Ch. 25, Poor-Laws.

— Herbert Spencer man

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.Pt. IV, Ch. 30, General Considerations.

— Herbert Spencer feelings

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.Pt. IV, Ch. 30, General Considerations.

— Herbert Spencer morality

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.Pt. IV, Ch. 30, General Considerations.

— Herbert Spencer happy

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man;—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473

— Herbert Spencer time

— Herbert Spencer war

— Herbert Spencer success

— Herbert Spencer poetry

— Herbert Spencer art

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.Education: What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?

— Herbert Spencer life

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.On Manners and Fashion.

— Herbert Spencer man

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.On Manners and Fashion.

— Herbert Spencer men

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.On the Origin and Function of Music.

— Herbert Spencer art

The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

— Herbert Spencer philosophy

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

— Herbert Spencer education

It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each childs mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us.

— Herbert Spencer education

We too often forget that not only is there a soul of goodness in things evil, but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science; quoting from There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out, William Shakespeare, Henry V, act iv. sc. i.

— Herbert Spencer truth

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science; quoting from There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out, William Shakespeare, Henry V, act iv. sc. i.

— Herbert Spencer religion

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science.

— Herbert Spencer religion

— Herbert Spencer knowledge

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation.

— Herbert Spencer

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution continued.

— Herbert Spencer change

— Herbert Spencer art

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.Vol. I, Part III, Ch. 2 General Aspects of the Special-Creation-Hypothesis.

— Herbert Spencer time

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty.

— Herbert Spencer beauty

— Herbert Spencer war

— Herbert Spencer nature

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation.

— Herbert Spencer world

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