THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

HERBERT SPENCER 269
and stayed for three years. It was the only systematic schooling that he
ever received. He could not say, later, just what it was he learned there;
no history, no natural science, no general literature. He says, with characteristic
pride: "That neither in boyhood nor youth did I receive a
single lesson in English, and that I have remained entirely without formal
knowledge of syntax down to the present hour, are facts which should be
known; since their implications are at variance with assumptions universally
accepted." 4 At the age of forty he tried to read the Iliad, but
"after reading some six books I felt what a task it would be to go on
felt that I would rather give a large sum than read to the end." 6
Collier,,
one of his secretaries, tells us that Spencer never finished any book of
science. 5 Even in his favorite fields he received no systematic instruction,
He burnt his fingers and achieved a few explosions in chemistry; he
browsed entomologically among the bugs about school and home; and
he learned something about strata and fossils in his later work as a civil
engineer; for the rest he picked his science casually as he went along.
Until he was thirty he had no thought at all of philosophy. 7 Then he
read Lewes, and tried to pass on to Kant; but finding, at the outset, that
Kant considered space and time to be forms of
sense-perception rather
than objective things, he decided that Kant was a dunce, and threw the
8 book away. His secretary tells us that Spencer composed his first book,
Social Statics, "having
read no other ethical treatise than an old and
now forgotten book by Jonathan Dymond." He wrote his Psychology
after reading only Hume, Mansel and Reid; his Biology after reading
only Carpenter's Comparative Physiology (and not the Origin of
his Ethics with-
Species] ; his Sociology without reading Comte or Tylor,
out reading Kant or Mill or any other moralist 9 than Sedgwick. What a
contrast to the intensive and relentless education of John Stuart Mill!
Where, then, did he find those myriad facts with which he propped up
his thousand arguments? He "picked them up," for the most part, by
direct observation rather than by reading. "His curiosity was ever awake,
and he was continually directing the attention of his companion to some
notable phenomenon . . . until then seen by his eyes alone." At the
Athenaeum Club he pumped Huxley and his other friends almost dry of
their expert knowledge; and he ran through the periodicals at the Club-
as he had run through those that passed through his father's hands for
the Philosophical Society at Derby, "lynx-eyed for every fact that was grist
to his mill." 10
Having determined what he wanted to do, and having*
found the central idea, evolution, about which all his work would turn,
his brain became a magnet for relevant material, and the unprecedented
4
P.viL *p. 300.
Appendix to Royce's Herbert Spencer.
7
Autob^ i, 438.
*Pp. 289, 291. Collier, in