Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath—a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. He came up with the phrase "survival of the fittest" in his 1864 book *Principles of Biology*, after reading Charles Darwin's *On the Origin of Species* (1859). While the term strongly suggests natural selection, Spencer believed evolution also applied to sociology and ethics, and he supported Lamarckism. He built a sweeping theory of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, living organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. During his lifetime, he held enormous influence, especially in English-speaking academia, and was considered the most famous European intellectual in the late nineteenth century. But his impact dropped sharply after 1900; in 1937, sociologist Talcott Parsons famously asked, "Who now reads Spencer?"

Spencer was born in Derby, England, on 27 April 1820, to William George Spencer (usually called George). His father was a religious dissenter who moved from Methodism to Quakerism and passed on a strong opposition to authority. He ran a school using the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and served as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific group founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather. Spencer learned empirical science from his father, and members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian ideas about biological evolution, especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, a vicar near Bath, gave him some formal education in mathematics, physics, and enough Latin to translate simple texts, and also instilled in him firm free-trade and anti-statist political views. Apart from that, Spencer was self-taught, picking up most of his knowledge from narrow reading and conversations with friends and acquaintances.

As a teenager and young man, Spencer struggled to settle into any intellectual or professional field. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in religion and radical in politics. His first book, *Social Statics* (1851), came out while he was sub-editor at the free-trade journal *The Economist* from 1848 to 1853. In it, he predicted that humanity would eventually become fully adapted to living in society, leading to the state's disappearance. Radical publisher John Chapman, who lived across the Strand from *The Economist*’s offices, brought Spencer into his salon, which included leading radical and progressive thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), with whom Spencer had a brief romantic link. Spencer himself introduced biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (later known as "Darwin's Bulldog"), who became a lifelong friend. But it was his friendships with Evans and Lewes that introduced him to Mill's *A System of Logic* and Auguste Comte's positivism, setting him on his life's path—though he strongly disagreed with Comte.

Spencer's second book, *Principles of Psychology* (1855), explored a physiological basis for psychology, growing out of his friendship with Evans and Lewes. It rested on his core assumption that the human mind follows natural laws discoverable within general biology. This allowed a developmental perspective not just for individuals (as in traditional psychology) but also for species and races. He aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill's *Logic*—the idea that the mind is built from atomic sensations linked by association—with the more "scientific" theory of phrenology, which locates mental functions in specific brain areas. Spencer argued that both theories are partially correct: repeated associations of ideas get embodied in specific brain tissue strands, which can be passed down generations through the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. He believed this book would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. But it was not initially successful; the last of the 251 copies of its first edition weren't sold until June 1861.

Spencer's interest in psychology came from a deeper goal: to show the universality of natural law. Like others of his generation, including members of Chapman's salon, he wanted to prove that everything in the universe—human culture, language, and morality—could be explained by universal laws. This went against many theologians of the time, who insisted that parts of creation, especially the human soul, were beyond scientific investigation. Comte's *Système de Philosophie Positive* had aimed to demonstrate the universality of natural law, and Spencer shared that ambition.