As it seems to me, we have in Herbert Spencer not only the pro foundest thinker of our time, but the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time. Aristotle and his master were no more beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle. Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling are gropers in the dark by the side of him. In all the history of science, there is but one name which can be compared to his, and that is Newton’s . . .
F. A. P. BARNARD
I am an ultra and thoroughgoing American. I believe there is great work to be done here for civilization. What we want are ideas—large, organizing ideas—and I believe there is no other man whose thoughts are so valuable for our needs as yours are.
EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS to HERBERT SPENCER
“The peculiar condition of American society,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher to Herbert Spencer in 1866, “has made your writings far more fruitful and quickening here than in Europe.”1 Why Americans were disposed to open their minds to Spencer, Beecher did not say; but there is much to substantiate his words. Spencer’s philosophy was admirably suited to the American scene. It was scientific in derivation and comprehensive in scope. It had a reassuring theory of progress based upon biology and physics. It was large enough to be all things to all men, broad enough to satisfy agnostics like Robert Ingersoll and theists like Fiske and Beecher. It offered a comprehensive world-view, uniting under one generalization everything in nature from protozoa to politics. Satisfying the desire of “advanced thinkers” for a world-system to replace the shattered Mosaic cosmogony, it soon gave Spencer a public influence that transcended Darwin’s. Moreover it was not a technical creed for professionals. Presented in language that tyros in philosophy could understand,2 it made Spencer the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic. Although its influence far outstripped its merits, the Spencerian system serves students of the American mind as a fossil specimen from which the intellectual body of the period may be reconstructed. Oliver Wendell Holmes hardly exaggerated when he expressed his doubt that “any writer of English except Darwin has done so much to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe.”3
When Spencer’s philosophy was winning its way in America, transcendentalism was in its twilight and the newer philosophical idealism inspired by Hegel was barely apparent on the horizon. Pragmatism was just emerging in the minds of Chauncey Wright and the little-appreciated Charles Peirce. The latter’s now-famous article, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” appeared in 1878, fourteen years after the first volume of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy; and James’s epoch-making California Union address, the opening gun in the campaign to popularize pragmatism, did not come until 1898. In the history of the American mind, however, the Synthetic Philosophy (which appeared in a series of volumes after 1860) is more than a colorless tenant of the vacancy between transcendentalism and pragmatism; although Emerson called Spencer a “stock writer” and James hurled at the Victorian Aristotle some of his sharpest barbs, Spencer was to most of his educated American contemporaries a great man, a grand intellect, a giant figure in the history of thought.
The ground for an American reception of Spencer’s philosophy was well prepared in New England, which was, if one may judge by prominent persons among those answering Youmans’ solicitations for advance subscribers to the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy, the nursery of Spencerian influence. The presence on early subscription lists of such names as George Bancroft, Edward Everett, John Fiske, Asa Gray, Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell, Wendell Phillips, Jared Sparks, Charles Sumner, and George Ticknor attests the power of New England intellectualism to provide for Spencer an American audience.4 The effect of transcendentalism and Unitarianism in breaking up old orthodoxies and liberating the minds of American intellectuals cannot be measured but may certainly be sensed by any student of post-Civil War intellectual trends. Indeed, Americans were responsible for Spencer’s chance to continue turning out the successive volumes of his project. In 1865, when the small returns from sales of his first volumes threatened to compel Spencer to give up his work, Youmans raised the necessary $7,000 among sympathetic Americans.5
Within a few years of his announcement of the Synthetic Philosophy, Spencer’s work was known to a considerable body of American readers. The Atlantic Monthly commented in 1864:
Mr. Herbert Spencer is already a power in the world. . . . He has already influenced the silent life of a few thinking men whose belief marks the point to which the civilization of the age must struggle to rise. In America, we may even now confess our obligations to the writings of Mr. Spencer, for here sooner than elsewhere the mass feel as utility what a few recognize as truth. . . . Mr. Spencer represents the scientific spirit of the age. He makes note of all that comes within the range of sensuous experience, and declares whatever may be derived therefrom by careful induction. As a philosopher he does not go farther. . . . Mr. Spencer has already established principles which, however compelled for a time to compromise with prejudices and vested interests, will become the recognized basis of an improved society.6
In the three decades after the Civil War it was impossible to be active in any field of intellectual work without mastering Spencer.7 Almost every American philosophical thinker of first or second rank—notably James, Royce, Dewey, Bowne, Harris, Howison, and McCosh—had to reckon with Spencer at some time. He had a vital influence upon most of the founders of American sociology, especially Ward, Cooley, Giddings, Small, and Sumner. “I imagine that nearly all of us who took up sociology between 1870, say, and 1890 did so at the instigation of Spencer,” acknowledged Cooley. He continued:
His book, The Study of Sociology, perhaps the most readable of all his works, had a large sale and probably did more to arouse interest in the subject than any other publication before or since. Whatever we may have occasion to charge against him, let us set down at once a large credit for effective propagation.8
The Appleton publications, under the leadership of Youmans, pressed Spencer’s interest incessantly, with the result that articles by him or about him were sprinkled throughout the popular magazines. The generation that acclaimed Grant as its hero took Spencer as its thinker. “Probably no other philosopher,” wrote Henry Holt in later years,
. . . ever had such a vogue as Spencer had from about 1870 to 1890. Most preceding philosophers had presumably been mainly restricted to readers habitually given to the study of philosophy, but not only was Spencer considerably read and generally talked about by the whole intelligent world in England and America, but that world was wider than any that preceded it.9
Spencer’s impact upon the common man in the United States is impossible to gauge, although its effects are dimly perceptible. That he was widely read by persons who were partly or largely self-educated, by those who were laboriously plodding their way out of theological orthodoxy in a thousand towns and hamlets, is suggested by casual references to him in the lives of men who later achieved some fame. Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Hamlin Garland have given intimations of Spencer’s influence on their formative years. John R. Commons, in his autobiography, remarks on the fascination Spencer had for his father’s friends during the writer’s Indiana boyhood:
He and his cronies talked politics and science. Every one of them in that Eastern section of Indiana was a Republican, living on the battle cries of the Civil War, and every one was a follower of Herbert Spencer, who was then the shining light of evolution and individualism. Several years later, in 1888, I was shocked, at a meeting of the American Economic Association, to hear Professor Ely denounce Herbert Spencer who had misled economists. I was brought up on Hoosierism, Republicanism, Presbyterianism, and Spencerism.10
The sales of Spencer’s books in America from their earliest publication in the 1860’s to December 1903 came to 368,755 volumes, a figure probably unparalleled for works in such difficult spheres as philosophy and sociology.11 The number of persons who fell under his influence must be measured also by the extent to which copies were passed from hand to hand, and circulated through libraries. Of course it is impossible to say that the acceptance of his ideas was proportionate to their circulation. Certainly there was no lack of criticism. A Nation reviewer commented in 1884, before the vogue was over, that “the books examining or refuting Spencer now make an imposing library.”12 This criticism itself was another measure of the man’s towering influence.
Herbert Spencer and his philosophy were products of English industrialism. It was appropriate that this spokesman of the new era should have trained to be a civil engineer, and that the scientific components of his thought—the conservation of energy and the idea of evolution—should have been indirectly derived from earlier observations in hydrotechnics and population theory. Spencer’s was a system conceived in and dedicated to an age of steel and steam engines, competition, exploitation, and struggle.
Spencer was born in 1820 into a lower-middle-class, traditionally nonconformist English family; to these beginnings he ascribed his lifelong maniacal hatred of state power. In his early years on the staff of the Economist, a free-trade propaganda organ, he was associated for a short time with a Godwinian philosophical anarchist, Thomas Hodgskin, whose principles he apparently absorbed. Spencer’s thinking took shape in the bright light of English science and positive thought, and his great Synthetic Philosophy was an amalgam of the nonconformism of his family and the scientific learning so prominent in his intellectual environment. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Lamarck’s theory of development, Von Baer’s law in embryology, Coleridge’s conception of a universal pattern of evolution, the anarchism of Hodgskin, the laissez-faire principles of the Anti-Corn Law League, the gloomy prognoses of Malthus, and the conservation of energy were the elements from which Spencer composed his monolithic system. His social ideas are intelligible only in the setting of this philosophy; his social laws were but special cases of his general principles,13 and much of the appeal of his social theories in America lay in their association with his synthetic integration of knowledge.
The aim of Spencer’s synthesis was to join in one coherent structure the latest findings of physics and biology. While the idea of natural selection had been taking form in the mind of Darwin, the work of a series of investigators in thermodynamics had also yielded an illuminating generalization. Joule, Mayer, Helmholtz, Kelvin, and others had been exploring the relations between heat and energy, and had brought forth the principle of the conservation of energy which Helmholtz enunciated most clearly in his Die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847). The concept won general acceptance along with natural selection, and the convergence of the two discoveries upon the nineteenth-century mind was chiefly responsible for the enormous growth in the prestige of the natural sciences. Science, it was believed, had now drawn the last line in its picture of a self-contained universe, in which matter and energy were never destroyed but constantly changing form, whose varieties of organic life were integral, intelligible products of the universal economy. Previous philosophies paled into obsolescence much as pre-Newtonian philosophies had done in the eighteenth century. The transition to naturalism was marked by an efflorescence of mechanistic world-systems, whose trend is suggested by the names of Edward Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, and Herbert Spencer. Among these new thinkers, Spencer most resembled the eighteenth-century philosophers in his attempt to apply the implications of science to social thought and action.
The conservation of energy—which Spencer preferred to call “the persistence of force”—was the starting point of his deductive system. The persistence of force, manifested in the forms of matter and motion, is the stuff of human inquiry, the material with which philosophy must build. Everywhere in the universe man observes the incessant redistribution of matter and motion, rhythmically apportioned between evolution and dissolution. Evolution is the progressive integration of matter, accompanied by dissipation of motion; dissolution is the disorganization of matter accompanied by the absorption of motion. The life process is essentially evolutionary, embodying a continuous change from incoherent homogeneity, illustrated by the lowly protozoa, to coherent heterogeneity, manifested in man and the higher animals.14
From the persistence of force, Spencer inferred that anything which is homogeneous is inherently unstable, since the different effects of persistent force upon its various parts must cause differences to arise in their future development.15 Thus the homogeneous will inevitably develop into the heterogeneous. Here is the key to universal evolution. This progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity—in the formation of the earth from a nebular mass, in the evolution of higher, complex species from lower and simpler ones, in the embryological development of the individual from a uniform mass of cells, in the growth of the human mind, and in the progress of human societies—is the principle at work in everything man can know.16
The final result of this process, in an animal organism or society, is the achievement of a state of equilibrium—a process Spencer called “equilibration.” The ultimate attainment of equilibration is inevitable, because the evolutionary process cannot go on forever in the direction of increasing heterogeneity. “Evolution has an impassable limit.”17 Here the pattern of universal rhythm comes into play: dissolution follows evolution, disintegration follows integration. In an organism this phase is represented by death and decay, but in society by the establishment of a stable, harmonious, completely adapted state, in which “evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.”18
This imposing positivistic edifice might have been totally unacceptable in America, had it not also been bound up with an important concession to religion in the form of Spencer’s doctrine of the Unknowable. The great question of the day was whether religion and science could be reconciled. Spencer gave not only the desired affirmative answer, but also an assurance for all future ages that, whatever science might learn about the world, the true sphere of religion—worship of the Unknowable—is by its very nature inviolable.19
To determined representatives of religious orthodoxy, Spencer’s compromise was no more acceptable than that of Gray and Le Conte, and denunciations of his philosophy appeared frequently in the theological journals of the 1860’s. Religious leaders who were willing to dally with liberalism, however, saw much in Spencer to praise. While thinkers like McCosh found the Unknowable too vague and uncomforting for faith and worship, some could identify it with God.20 Still others found an analogy between his views of the transition from egoism to altruism and the preachings of Christian ethics.21
Spencer’s supposition that a general law of evolution could be formulated led him to apply the biologic scheme of evolution to society. The principles of social structure and change, if the generalizations of his system were valid, must be the same as those of the universe at large. In applying evolution to society, Spencer, and after him the social Darwinists, were doing poetic justice to its origins. The “survival of the fittest” was a biological generalization of the cruel processes which reflective observers saw at work in early nineteenth-century society, and Darwinism was a derivative of political economy. The miserable social conditions of the early industrial revolution had provided the data for Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and Malthus’ observations had been the matrix of natural-selection theory. The stamp of its social origin was evident in Darwinian theory. “Over the whole of English Darwinism,” Nietzsche once observed, “there hovers something of the odor of humble people in need and in straits.”22 Darwin acknowledged his great indebtedness to Malthus:
In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement “Malthus on Population,” and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.23
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, likewise acknowledged that Malthus had given him “the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.”24
Spencer’s theory of social selection, also written under the stimulus of Malthus, arose out of his concern with population problems. In two famous articles that appeared in 1852, six years before Darwin and Wallace jointly published sketches of their theory, Spencer had set forth the view that the pressure of subsistence upon population must have a beneficent effect upon the human race. This pressure had been the immediate cause of progress from the earliest human times. By placing a premium upon skill, intelligence, self-control, and the power to adapt through technological innovation, it had stimulated human advancement and selected the best of each generation for survival.
Because he did not extend his generalization to the whole animal world, as Darwin did, Spencer failed to reap the full harvest of his insight, although he coined the expression “survival of the fittest.”25 He was more concerned with mental than physical evolution, and accepted Lamarck’s theory that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is a means by which species can originate. This doctrine confirmed his evolutionary optimism. For if mental as well as physical characteristics could be inherited, the intellectual powers of the race would become cumulatively greater, and over several generations the ideal man would finally be developed. Spencer never discarded his Lamarckism, even when scientific opinion turned overwhelmingly against it.26
Spencer would have been the last to deny the primacy of ethical and political considerations in the formulation of his thought. “My ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes,” he wrote in the preface to his Data of Ethics, “has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large, a scientific basis.” It is not surprising that he began his literary career with a book on ethics rather than metaphysics. His first work, Social Statics (1850), was an attempt to strengthen laissez faire with the imperatives of biology; it was intended as an attack upon Benthamism, especially the Benthamite stress upon the positive role of legislation in social reform. Although he consented to Jeremy Bentham’s ultimate standard of value—the greatest happiness of the greatest number—Spencer discarded other phases of utilitarian ethics. He called for a return to natural rights, setting up as an ethical standard the right of every man to do as he pleases, subject only to the condition that he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. In such a scheme, the sole function of the state is negative—to insure that such freedom is not curbed.
Fundamental to all ethical progress, Spencer believed, is the adaptation of human character to the conditions of life. The root of all evil is the “non-adaptation of constitution to conditions.” Because the process of adaptation, founded in the very nature of the organism, is constantly at work, evil tends to disappear. While the moral constitution of the human race is still ridden with vestiges of man’s original predatory life which demanded brutal self-assertion, adaptation assures that he will ultimately develop a new moral constitution fitted to the needs of civilized life. Human perfection is not only possible but inevitable:
The ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain—as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance that all men will die. . . . Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.27
Despite its radicalism on incidental themes—the injustice of private land ownership, the rights of women and children, and a peculiar Spencerian “right to ignore the state” which was dropped from his later writings—the main trend of Spencer’s book was ultra-conservative. His categorical repudiation of state interference with the “natural,” unimpeded growth of society led him to oppose all state aid to the poor. They were unfit, he said, and should be eliminated. “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.” Nature is as insistent upon fitness of mental character as she is upon physical character, “and radical defects are as much causes of death in the one case as in the other.” He who loses his life because of his stupidity, vice, or idleness is in the same class as the victims of weak viscera or malformed limbs. Under nature’s laws all alike are put on trial. “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”28
Spencer deplored not only poor laws, but also state-supported education, sanitary supervision other than the suppression of nuisances, regulation of housing conditions, and even state protection of the ignorant from medical quacks.29 He likewise opposed tariffs, state banking, and government postal systems. Here was a categorical answer to Bentham.
In Spencer’s later writings social selection was less prominent, although it never disappeared. The precise degree to which Spencer based his sociology upon biology was never a matter of common agreement, and the inconsistencies and ambiguities of his system gave rise to a host of Spencer exegesists, among whom the most tireless and sympathetic was Spencer himself.30 Accused of brutality in his application of biological concepts to social principles, Spencer was compelled to insist over and over again that he was not opposed to voluntary private charity to the unfit, since it had an elevating effect on the character of the donors and hastened the development of altruism; he opposed only compulsory poor laws and other state measures.31
Spencer’s social theory was more fully developed in the Synthetic Philosophy. In The Principles of Sociology there is a long exposition of the organic interpretation of society, in which Spencer traces the parallels between the growth, differentiation, and integration of society and of animal bodies.32 Although the purposes of a social organism are different from those of an animal organism, he maintained that there is no difference in their laws of organization.33 Among societies as among organisms, there is a struggle for existence. This struggle was once indispensable to social evolution, since it made possible successive consolidations of small groups into large ones and stimulated the earliest forms of social cooperation.34 But Spencer, as a pacifist and internationalist, shrank from applying this analysis to contemporary society. In the future these intersocial struggles, he asserted, would lose their utility and die out. The very process of social consolidation brought about by struggles and conquest eliminates the necessity for continued conflict. Society then passes from its barbarous or militant phase into an industrial phase.
In the militant phase, society is organized chiefly for survival. It bristles with military weapons, trains its people for warfare, relies upon a despotic state, submerges the individual, and imposes a vast amount of compulsory cooperation. In contests among such societies those best exemplifying these militant traits will survive; and individuals best adapted to the militant community will be the dominating types.35
The creation of larger and larger social units through conquests by militant states widens the areas in which internal peace and application to the industrial arts become habitual. The militant type now reaches the evolutionary stage of equilibration. There emerges the industrial type of society, a regime of contract rather than status, which unlike the older form is pacific,36 respectful of the individual, more heterogeneous and plastic, more inclined to abandon economic autonomy in favor of industrial cooperation with other states. Natural selection now works to produce a completely different individual character. Industrial society requires security for life, liberty, and property; the character type most consonant with this society is accordingly peaceful, independent, kindly, and honest. The emergence of a new human nature hastens the trend from egoism to altruism which will solve all ethical problems.37
Spencer emphasized that, in the interest of survival itself, cooperation in industrial society must be voluntary, not compulsory. State regulation of production and distribution, as proposed by socialists, is more akin to the organization of militant society, and would be fatal to the survival of the industrial community; it would penalize superior citizens and their offspring in favor of the inferior, and a society adopting such practices would be outstripped by others.38
In The Study of Sociology, first published in the United States in 1872–73 in serial form by the Popular Science Monthly and incorporated in the International Scientific Series, Spencer outlined his conception of the practical value of social science. Written to show the desirability of a naturalistic social science and to defend sociology from the criticisms of theologians and indeterminists, the book had a notable influence on the rise of sociology in the United States.39 Spencer was animated by the desire to foster a science of society that would puncture the illusions of legislative reformers who, he believed, generally operated on the assumption that social causes and effects are simple and easily calculable, and that projects to relieve distress and remedy ills will always have the anticipated effect. A science of sociology, by teaching men to think of social causation scientifically, would awaken them to the enormous complexity of the social organism, and put an end to hasty legislative panaceas.40 Fortified by the Darwinian conception of gradual modification over long stretches of time, Spencer ridiculed schemes for quick social transformation.
The great task of sociology, as Spencer envisioned it, is to chart “the normal course of social evolution,” to show how it will be affected by any given policy, and to condemn all types of behavior that interfere with it.41 Social science is a practical instrument in a negative sense. Its purpose is not to guide the conscious control of societal evolution, but rather to show that such control is an absolute impossibility, and that the best that organized knowledge can do is to teach men to submit more readily to the dynamic factors in progress. Spencer referred to the function of a true theory of society as a lubricant but not a motive power in progress: it can grease the wheels and prevent friction but cannot keep the engine moving.42 “There cannot be more good done,” he said, “than that of letting social progress go on unhindered; yet an immensity of mischief may be done in the way of disturbing, and distorting and repressing, by policies carried out in pursuit of erroneous conceptions.”43 Any adequate theory of society, Spencer concluded, will recognize the “general truths” of biology and will refrain from violating the selection principle by “the artificial preservation of those least able to take care of themselves.”44
With its rapid expansion, its exploitative methods, its desperate competition, and its peremptory rejection of failure, post-bellum America was like a vast human caricature of the Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Successful business entrepreneurs apparently accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to portray the conditions of their existence.45 Businessmen are not commonly articulate social philosophers, but a rough reconstruction of their social outlook shows how congenial to their thinking were the plausible analogies of social selection, and how welcome was the expansive evolutionary optimism of the Spencerian system. In a nation permeated with the gospel of progress, the incentive of pecuniary success appealed even to many persons whose ethical horizons were considerably broader than those of business enterprise. “I perceive clearly,” wrote Walt Whitman in Democratic Vistas, “that the extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand. My theory includes riches, and the getting of riches . . .” No doubt there were many to applaud the assertion of the railroad executive Chauncey Depew that the guests at the great dinners and public banquets of New York City represented the survival of the fittest of the thousands who came there in search of fame, fortune, or power, and that it was “superior ability, foresight, and adaptability” that brought them successfully through the fierce competitions of the metropolis.46 James J. Hill, another railroad magnate, in an essay defending business consolidation, argued that “the fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest,” and implied that the absorption of smaller by larger roads represents the industrial analogy to the victory of the strong.47 And John D. Rockefeller, speaking from an intimate acquaintance with the methods of competition, declared in a Sunday-school address:
The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.48
The most prominent of the disciples of Spencer was Andrew Carnegie, who sought out the philosopher, became his intimate friend, and showered him with favors. In his autobiography, Carnegie told how troubled and perplexed he had been over the collapse of Christian theology, until he took the trouble to read Darwin and Spencer.
I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. “All is well since all grows better,” became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned to the light; he stands in the sun and looks upward.49
Perhaps it was comforting, too, to discover that social laws were founded in the immutable principles of the natural order. In an article in the North American Review, which he ranked among the best of his writings, Carnegie emphasized the biological foundations of the law of competition. However much we may object to the seeming harshness of this law, he wrote, “It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Even if it might be desirable for civilization eventually to discard its individualistic foundation, such a change is not practicable in our age; it would belong to another “long succeeding sociological stratum,” whereas our duty is with the here and now.50
The reception accorded to Spencer’s social ideas cannot be dissociated from that accorded to the main body of his thought; however some part of his success probably came because he was telling the guardians of American society what they wanted to hear. Grangers, Greenbackers, Single Taxers, Knights of Labor, trade unionists, Populists, Socialists Utopian and Marxian—all presented challenges to the existing pattern of free enterprise, demanded reforms by state action, or insisted upon a thorough remodeling of the social order. Those who wished to continue in established ways were pressed for a theoretical answer to the rising voices of criticism. Said ironmaster Abram S. Hewitt:
The problem presented to systems of religion and schemes of government is, to make men who are equal in liberty—that is, in political rights and therefore entitled to the ownership of property—content with that inequality in its distribution which must inevitably result from the application of the law of justice.51
This problem the Spencerian system could solve.
Conservatism and Spencer’s philosophy walked hand in hand. The doctrine of selection and the biological apology for laissez faire, preached in Spencer’s formal sociological writings and in a series of shorter essays, satisfied the desire of the select for a scientific rationale. Spencer’s plea for absolute freedom of individual enterprise was a large philosophical statement of the constitutional ban upon interference with liberty and property without due process of law. Spencer was advancing within a cosmic framework the same general political philosophy which under the Supreme Court’s exegesis of the Fourteenth Amendment served so brilliantly to turn back the tide of state reform. It was this convergence of Spencer’s philosophy with the Court’s interpretation of due process which finally inspired Mr. Justice Holmes (himself an admirer of Spencer) to protest that “the fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”52
The social views of Spencer’s popularizers were likewise conservative. Youmans took time from his promotion of science to attack the eight-hour strikers in 1872. Labor, he urged in characteristic Spencerian vein, must “accept the spirit of civilization, which is pacific, constructive, controlled by reason, and slowly ameliorating and progressive. Coercive and violent measures which aim at great and sudden advantages are sure to prove illusory.” He suggested that, if people were taught the elements of political economy and social science in the course of their education, such mistakes might be avoided.53 Youmans attacked the newly founded American Social Science Association for devoting itself to unscientific reform measures instead of a “strict and passionless study of society from a scientific point of view.” Until the laws of social behavior are known, he declared, reform is blind; the Association might do better to recognize a sphere of natural, self-adjusting activity, with which government intervention usually wreaks havoc.54 There was precious little scope for meliorist activities in the outlook of one who believed with Youmans that science shows “that we are born well, or born badly, and that whoever is ushered into existence at the bottom of the scale can never rise to the top because the weight of the universe is upon him.”55
Acceptance of the Spencerian philosophy brought with it a paralysis of the will to reform. One day, some years after the publication of Progress and Poverty, Youmans in Henry George’s presence denounced with great fervor the political corruption of New York and the selfishness of the rich in ignoring or promoting it when they found it profitable to do so. “What do you propose to do about it?” George asked. Youmans replied, “Nothing! You and I can do nothing at all. It’s all a matter of evolution. We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things.”56
The peak of Spencer’s American popularity probably was reached in the fall of 1882, when he made a memorable visit to the United States. In spite of his aversion to reporters, Spencer received much attention from the press, and hotel managers and railway agents competed for the privilege of serving him.57 Finally yielding one synthetic “interview” with the gentlemen of the press, Spencer expressed (it was a slightly jarring note) his fear that the American character was not sufficiently developed to make the best use of its republican institutions.58 The prospect for the future, however, was encouraging; from “biological truths,” he told the reporters, he inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population would produce “a finer type of man than has hitherto existed.” Whatever difficulties the Americans might have to surmount, they might “reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known.”59
The climax of the visit was a hastily arranged banquet at Delmonico’s, which gave American notables an opportunity to pay personal tribute. The dinner was attended by leaders in American letters, science, politics, theology, and business. Spencer’s message to this distinguished audience was somewhat disappointing. He had observed, he said, an excess of hurry and hard labor in the tempo of American life, too much of the gospel of work; his friends would ruin their constitutions with exertion. The guests rewarded this appeal against strenuosity with a strenuous round of fulsome tributes, which painfully embarrassed even the vain Spencer.60 William Graham Sumner ascribed the foundations of sociological method to the guest of honor; Carl Schurz suggested that the Civil War might have been averted if the South had been familiar with his Social Statics; John Fiske asserted that his services to religion were as great as his services to science; and Henry Ward Beecher struck a rather incongruous note at the end of a hearty testimonial by promising to meet him once again beyond the grave.
However imperfect the appreciation of the guests for the niceties of Spencer’s thought, the banquet showed how popular he had become in the United States. When Spencer was on the dock, waiting for the ship to carry him back to England, he seized the hands of Carnegie and Youmans. “Here,” he cried to reporters, “are my two best American friends.”61 For Spencer it was a rare gesture of personal warmth; but more than this, it symbolized the harmony of the new science with the outlook of a business civilization.62
The rise of critical reformism in economics and sociology, of pragmatism in philosophy, and of other tendencies that undermined Spencer’s vogue and displaced his ideas—this remains to be treated elsewhere. It is enough to say that, surviving until 1903, he outlived by many years the popularity of his works. In his old age he was aware that the current of the times was running against his preaching, and a visitor of this period reported finding him “grievously disappointed” at the neglect of his political doctrines, the decline of individualism, and the rise of socialist ideals.63 “Herbert Spencer was a name to conjure with twenty-five years ago,” taunted a religious observer in 1917. “But how the mighty are fallen! How little interest is shown in Herbert Spencer at the present time!”64
While it was true that for younger men Spencer’s name no longer carried its old ring of authority, the writer had forgotten that men who were then in their maturity—the publicists, industrialists, teachers, and writers of the governing generation—had spent their youth with Spencer. Whatever had become of the Synthetic Philosophy, the mark of his evolutionary individualism was indelible. As late as 1915, the Forum had seen fit to reprint a collection of Spencer’s individualistic essays, “The Man Versus the State,” “The New Toryism,” “The Coming Slavery,” “Over-Legislation,” “The Sins of Legislators,” and others, along with commentaries by a galaxy of Republican Party luminaries brilliant enough to dispel all doubt of the vitality of Spencer’s influence among outstanding national leaders.65 Nicholas Murray Butler, Charles William Eliot, Representative Augustus P. Gardner, Elbert H. Gary, David Jayne Hill, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Harlan Fiske Stone responded to the editor’s request for contributions by “leaders of thought in America who know the tremendous value of Spencer’s work in our social system.” Hill’s remark that he saw at work in this country the same fatal and illogical procedure that Spencer had been fighting in England, “namely, the gradual imposition of a new bondage in the name of freedom . . . the increasing subjection of the citizens to the growing tyranny of officialism,” made it clear that the essays were being republished as a manifesto against Wilson’s New Freedom.66
Spencer’s doctrines were imported into the Republic long after individualism had become a national tradition. Yet in the expansive age of our industrial culture he became the spokesman of that tradition, and his contribution materially swelled the stream of individualism if it did not change its course. If Spencer’s abiding impact on American thought seems impalpable to later generations, it is perhaps only because it has been so thoroughly absorbed.67 His language has become a standard feature of the folklore of individualism. “You can’t make the world all planned and soft,” says the businessman of Middletown. “The strongest and best survive—that’s the law of nature after all—always has been and always will be.”68