THE EXPLODED QUACK. THE late Mr Herbert Spencer, as elderly men will remember, was the author of a system of speculation entitled the "Synthetic Philosophy." He had selected the epithet in preference to others, such as "Cosmic" (and, for aught we know, Cosmetic); nor was his judgment at fault, for "Synthetic" has the true flavour of the patent pill and the chemist's shop. The Synthetic Philosophy occupies many volumes. Το these were added after his death two more of "laborious dulness in the shape of an Autobiography. A gentleman who had "devilled" for him, and is one of his testamentary trustees, has also enriched the world with an official Life. Besides these, many essays, pamphlets, lectures, and articles dealing with his life and work have made their appearance. And now there enters upon the scene Mr Hugh Elliot with 8 monograph1 forming one of a series by various hands, sufficiently comprehensive in its scope to embrace that eminent occidental philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, and that eminent oriental philanthropist, Abdul Hamid. We would urgently entreat the editor, Mr Basil Williams, to waive chronological punctilio, and to lose no time in admitting the Kaiser, the philanthropist of "Mittel- Europa, to this chosen band. His Imperial Majesty would form an invaluable connecting link between East and West, and would fitly round off an unique group. The admirers of Mr Spencer who remain unto this present for worshippers there now are none—are extremely chary of eulogy in regard to their hero's life. It would be hopeless indeed to make believe that it was heroic. No one with any knowledge of the world expects a philosopher to be perfect, still less to be philosophical. He is entitled to a generous allowance of foibles without forfeiting his character. But when a philosopher is fault-finding and censorious, uncharitable and interfering, singularly unpractical but with a a profound belief in his turn for everyday affairs, mankind are justified in scrutinising his claims to authority with some strictness. The philosopher has a right, fortified by immemorial prescription, to writhe under the hands of his dentist. He has no right thus to discourse upon his teeth and other organs, as Mr Spencer does "One of the traits of a constitution which, though not vigorous, was organically good, appears to have been a well-finished development of the structures which arise out of the 1 Herbert Spencer.' "Makers of the Nineteenth Century." By Hugh Elliot. London: Constable & Co., Ltd. 1917. dermal system. I was thirty-two before I had any sign of decay of teeth. I never had a tooth taken out or stopped. Of the eyes, which are also dermal structures, the like may be said. [We believe that cases in which the eyes are extracted or stopped are comparatively rare.] They have all through life remained strong. Down even to my present age (eightytwo) I read without spectacles; sometimes putting on a pair, but finding the inconvenience such that, on the whole, I prefer to do without them. The like holds with my ears. [He saw to the stopping of those organs himself.] Those around me say that my hearing is perfect. Is there any significance in this perfection and long endurance of teeth, eyes, and ears, all of them developed from the dermal layer? The implication seems to be that in the process of development there was no failure of nutrition at the periphery." 1 It is hard to determine whether the mincing self-complacency or the grotesque pedantry of the passage is the more conspicuous. In point of fact, as Mr Elliot does not omit to remark, "it would have been very much better for him if he had foregone his dental prejudices, and had his teeth properly attended to."2 Health-first his own and then other people's-was never long absent from his thoughts. No old wife ever expatiated upon her symptoms at greater length, or with a keener relish. When he grew tired of feeling his own pulse, he fell to prescribing for other people. Two children were once allowed to stay with him in the country for a fortnight, and this is how he writes to their mother upon the termination of the visit "The difference in their state is almost exclusively due to difference of regimen. I stopped the tepid bath in the morning and gave them hot. Chilling the skin, with their state of lungs, is very detrimental. They were, as you have seen, more thickly clothed both indoors and out, and they ought to have flannel next the skin all over. The bare or ill-clothed legs which the present fashion of children's dresses involves is the cause of no end of illnesses, and undermines no end of constitutions. Further, their necks should be clothed. With their delicate mucous membranes and liability to colds the skin around the throat should be protected." And he goes on to specify ad longum the the particulars in which he varied his guests' diet. Compared with this synthetic philosopher, Miss Emma Woodhouse's father was the embodiment of robust commonsense. Mr Spencer, moreover, had an incurable and insufferable mania for teaching other people their business. From statesman to kitchenmaid, there was no sort or condition of person whom he was not prepared to instruct in the practice of his vocation, and to whom he was not eager to explain "all about it." The mysteries of lighting fires, hanging pictures, and arranging flowers on a dinner table, were among the important branches of industry his theories on which he was in the habit of stuffing down the throats of his acquaintance.1 As chairman of special House Committee at the Athenæum, he harangued 1 Duncan's 'Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer.' London: 1908. P. 529. 2 Elliot, p. 51. 4 See Duncan, p. 510. 3 Duncan, p. 286. his colleagues, in the dialect prehensible, for they infliot of his writings, on the subject pain on other creatures and of toughness, and accused the "sear the sympathies." So club butcher to his face of was chess, "because of the supplying meat that contained humiliation entailed upon the an undue proportion of connec- loser in a game of so purely tive tissue.1 It is not without an intellectual character." 2 reason that the attitude of But billiards was in con 66 formity with ethical principles "because he happened to like it. The truth is that, while by the age of thirty or thereabouts he had "lost any capacity he may have had for falling in love," his passionate attachment to himself knew no bounds and never flagged. It is significant to observe the biographers clutching at straws, as Mr Duncan appears to do in the following inimitable paragraph: "In many respects Spencer was a model club-man. In his relations with his fellow-members he invari the biographers is uniformly apologetic-never enthusiastic. He, himself, during his lifetime, was constantly engaged in correcting "misrepresentations of his doctrine. Even so do they busy themselves in brushing away misconceptions as to his walk and conversation, and denying apocryphal aneodotes. He was not, it seems, quite so sensitive, or uncompanionable, or generally odious, as the world has been apt to suppose. Sometimes a gleam of courage lights up a biographer's eye. He nerves himself for a good hard knock at obscurantism and orthodoxy. Mr Spencer, he asseverates, was no Puritan or ascetic. On the contrary, he inculcated the pursuit of pleasure in so far as not incompatible with the pursuit of health. We are afraid that Mr Spencer's exhortations to enjoyment always leave us cold; for they remind us of nothing so much as of Mr Pecksniff's efforts to promote the brisk circulation of the currant wine at his own table, ("It is a a poor heart that never rejoices, Every sentence yields quoth he), the while he secretly gem of the purest water, and discusses within himself the throws a flood of light upon best remedies for colic. Field the manners and customs of sports and football were re- the Athenæum. But what 1 See Duncan, p. 509. ably showed delicacy and good feel- 2 Elliot, p. 197. We are not responsible for Mr Elliot's grammar. 3 Ib., p. 21. 4 Duncan, p. 496. : ever a an epitaph! He scrupulously his comforts, and was inordinabstained, it seems, from ex- ately vain. But there was pectorating in the fireplace; something eminently human, he comported himself with and therefore likeable, in his "studied decorum"; he never, composition. The fatal flaw in we are to suppose, stood on Mr Herbert Spencer's character his head, or danced the High- was his essential inhumanity. land fling in the smoking- It is plain that not one of his room; he was on his guard friends felt towards him as against "incautious behav- Adam Smith felt towards his iour"; as who should say, great fellow-countryman and against a ruthless accumula- contemporary. tion of all the evening papers, and a refreshing slumber on the top of them! Probably the most flattering account of the sage is that which we owe to two of the three ladies who kept house for him between 1889 and 1897.1 Yet it requires little perspicacity to see that these must have been trying years, and that Mr Spencer must have been far from easy to live with. To use his own vocabulary, the organism signally failed to adapt itself to its environment. There is nothing in the little book to throw doubt upon Mr Elliot's unvarnished statement that, while in society his behaviour was "much like that of ordinary middle-class people," and "tended to be representative of the Bayswater boardinghouses" where he had lived so long, "his personality was everywhere intruded, and could suffer no limitations and live under no compulsion." 2 In plain English, he was intolerably arrogant and selfish. "His personality outside his works was meagre and petty." " David Hume, too, was fond enough of Few men have commenced philosopher more scantily equipped for their undertaking than Mr Spencer. His schooling had been scrappy. He had never looked into Hobbes nor perused Locke. Paley and Bentham were to him little more than names. Of Hume and Berkeley he says nothing. When twenty-four he "met with a translation of Kant [he had no German], and read the first few pages. Forthwith rejecting his doctrine of Time and Space, I read no further."4 He could not read Kant, Mr Elliot officiously explains, because in so doing "a subtraction from his own personality was involved."5 We prefer the pregnant fact to the explanation, which tells us nothing. "Twice or thrice," writes Mr Spencer to Mr Leslie Stephen in 1899, "I have taken up Plato's 'Dialogues' and have quickly put them down with more or less irritation. And of Aristotle I know even less than of Plato." He calls to our mind a certain worthy minister of Inverkip, who professed, according to John Lock 1Home Life with Herbert Spencer.' By Two. 1906. Duncan, p. 418. 2 Elliot, p. 54. 5 Elliot, p. 55. Bristol: Arrowsmith, hart, "never to have bought or borrowed a book since he cam' to years o' discretion." In other respects also he had a spiritual ancestor in the same divine, who "found an old system of logic in the manse when he was married, and has thought fit to divide his discourses logice in consequence. He always sets out with a definition. For instance, he has been lecturing and preaching on the supper at Cana for those nine weeks, and the first thing he did was to define wine and water for the elucidation of the metamorphosis performed in his text. 'Wine,' quoth he, 'is a pleasant exhilarating liquor, taken after dinner and at other times-by genteel people -in moderation most excellent, but in excess odious. Water is a pure, perspicuous substance, useful in cleansing or purifying of things defiled." 1 In a word, Mr Spencer's state was ever one of "facetious and rejoicing ignorance." One result of this, it need scarce be said, is, that he is, or was, held in the highest esteem by the dreary crowd who never give that spavined and broken-winded screw "Education," the rest it so sorely needs. Veneration for antiquity he declared, early in his career, to be "one of the greatest obstacles not only to the advancement of architecture but to the progress of every species of improvement"; and the main source of veneration for antiquity "exists in the present system of classical education."2 "Soience alone," he opined, "fully develops the intellectual faculties," for it "abhors authority." From the point of 3 view both of utility and of mental discipline, "the study of science should be the preeminent ingredient in a good education." He does not inthe furious animosity against deed appear to have nourished the ideal of the scholar and the gentleman which throws Mr H. G. Wells into such alarming tantrums-otherwise their views seem to be identical. Now the curious thing is that, if Mr Spencer was sadly to seek in philosophy he was even worse found in science. His standard of scientific knowledge hardly rose above that of the man in the street. "Most of the sciences on which he wrote were in their infancy; and it was possible at that time to write upon them with very little previous knowledge. Moreover, the commercial success which ultimately attended his works is doubtless due in part to the fact that he started from ground that was common to most educated people, and could therefore be appreciated by the more intelligent of the general public. Had his philosophy been based upon the technical knowledge already known (sic), it might possibly have had a more enduring value, but would certainly have had a less wide popular appeal." 24 1 Lang's Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart,' 1897, 3 Elliot, p. 295. 2 Duncan, p. 34. VOL, CCI.NO. MCCXIX. every P. 68. 4 Ib., p. 24. 2 z |