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Herbert Spencer   /hˈərbərt spˈɛnsər/   Listen
Herbert Spencer

noun
1.
English philosopher and sociologist who applied the theory of natural selection to human societies (1820-1903).  Synonym: Spencer.






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"Herbert Spencer" Quotes from Famous Books



... thought of the social organism, the great being, somewhat mystically as itself an individual and a person, Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, thought of it realistically as a great animal, a leviathan, as Hobbes called it, and a very low-order leviathan ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... Population" (1840), who reasoned inductively that the material improvement of the human race is a proof that man can produce more than he consumes, or that in the progress of society preventive checks necessarily arise; by W. R. Greg, "Enigmas of Life" (1873); and by Herbert Spencer, "Westminster Review" (April, 1852), and "Principles of Biology," (part vi, ch. xii and xiii), who worked out a physiological check, in that with a mental development out of lower stages there comes an increased ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... "Ordinary people think an Anarchist means a man with a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist. But for that fatal admission of his on page 793, he would be a complete Anarchist. Otherwise, he agrees ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity. It had begun to be recognised with a great burst of enthusiasm and astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said the last word on all things in heaven and earth. And now there was exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the giving of political power to woman may disagree with our notions of propriety, we conclude that, being required by that first prerequisite to greater happiness, the law of equal freedom, such a concession is unquestionably right and good.—[HERBERT SPENCER. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... mind, and bold strength of character, as much or more in the distribution of wealth as he had shown skill and foresight in its acquisition. We had become known to one another more than twenty years before through Matthew Arnold. His extraordinary freshness of spirit easily carried Arnold, Herbert Spencer, myself, and afterwards many others, high over an occasional crudity or haste in judgment such as befalls the best of us in ardent hours. People with a genius for picking up pins made as much as they liked of this: it was ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... providence; a something which cannot be addressed by veneration or worship; whose sole effects are subjective, that is, upon the worshipper, not upon the worshipped. Nothing also can be more illogical than the awe and respect claimed by Mr. Herbert Spencer for a being of which the very essence is that nothing can be known of it. And, as the idea grows, the several modes and forms of the UNKNOWABLE, the Hormuzd and Ahriman of the Dualist, those personifications of good and evil; the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... "play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself. He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free to create. Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy between the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... government—is far from being specially utilitarian. It belonged more properly to the adherents of the 'rights of man,' or the believers in abstract reason. It is to be found in Price and Paine, and in the French declaration of the rights of man; and Mr. Herbert Spencer, its chief advocate (in a new form) at the present day remarks himself that he was partly anticipated by Kant. Bentham expressly repudiated this view in his vigorous attack upon the 'anarchical fallacies' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises them to look hard at spotty walls for inspiration, I cannot say. He was also the first, to my knowledge, to don ear-caps in tedious society—as Herbert Spencer later used to do. He had many pupils, but latterly could not bear them in his presence and was therefore but an indifferent instructor. As a deviser of pageants he was more in demand than as a painter; but his brush was not idle. Both ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... and nebulous among the impressions of very early childhood: that of one Herbert Spencer; and this was curious, for Abel Gallup was what he would himself have described as "a sincere Believer." Nevertheless, he was immensely attracted by the philosopher's Study of Sociology, and little Eloquent was made to learn and repeat many long bits from ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... of a Book Skeptical Critics Robert Burton Hegel on Greek Love Shelley on Greek Love Macaulay, Bulwer-Lytton, Gautier Goldsmith and Rousseau Love a Compound Feeling Herbert Spencer's Analysis Active Impulses Must be Added Sensuality the Antipode of Love The Word Romantic Animals Higher than Savages Love the Last, Not the First, Product of Civilization Plan of this Volume Greek Sentimentality ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... the old man. "Why, Mr. Brown, you are crazy! I have educated her upon the combined principles of Rousseau, of Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you—you only graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediaeval institution! No, sir! not till I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I consent ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... tell you that a pig, after being assassinated, is invariably boiled to loosen the hair. By long usage the custom of getting into hot water has become a habit which the living pig inherits from the dead pork. (See Herbert Spencer on "Heredity.") ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... not accomplished automatically as scientists would have us believe,—an assertion which has been proven in The Rosicrucian Cosmo Conception and other places in our literature. Herbert Spencer also rejected the nebular theory because it required a First Cause, which he denied, though unable to form a better hypothesis of the formation of solar systems,—but it is accomplished through the activity ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... according to the vulgar superstition the tail of a snake that has been killed wiggles till sundown, so this book of Mallock's is merely a false show of life made by a theory that received its deathblow long since. It is the wiggling of the tail of the snake that Herbert Spencer killed thirty years ago with his little book "The Study of Sociology." The environment philosophy in one form or another has come to occupy the entire field of human thought. We now look for the explanation of every phenomenon ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... to board with Mr. Chapman's family in London. How different this from the quiet life at Foleshill! The best society, that is, the greatest in mind, opened wide its doors to her. Herbert Spencer, who had just published Social Statics, became one of her best friends. Harriet Martineau came often to see her. Grote was ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... higher price will have to be paid for the extirpation of religion out of France, and the education of the French people into what M. Jules Ferry fantastically supposes to be 'Herbert Spencer's' gospel, identifying ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... wider acquaintance with differing types of humanity, and, above all, a newly-won acquaintance with the contemporary literature of other countries, made a deep impression upon Bjornson's vigorously receptive mind. He browsed voraciously upon the works of foreign writers. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Taine, Max-Mueller, formed a portion of his mental pabulum at this time—and the result was a significant alteration of mental attitude on a number of questions, and a determination to make the attempt to embody his theories in dramatic form. ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... and confirmed by all that we know of the early history of literature, that the first forms of it were in verse. This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert Spencer on a different but related theme, that "Ornament was before dress," the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian preoccupations. History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... and must be overthrown, so that the Continent of Europe may flourish and develop according to the dictates of Europe's will. According to Herbert Spencer's view, Europe must exercise the highest ethics, viz., 'give the highest possible total of human beings, life, happiness and above ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... Paradise Lost, but consider it on the whole too light and childish a book for persons of our age. It is all very well, as small children to read pretty stories about Satan and Belial, when we have only just mastered our "Oedipus" and our Herbert Spencer, but when we grow older we get to like Captain Marryat and Mr. Kingston and when we are men we know that Cinderella is much better than any of those babyish books. As regards one question which you asked, I may remark that the children ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... discounts the assumption "that if only the people had freedom they would walk continuously in the paths of justice and righteousness." [Footnote: Newer Ideals of Peace, pp. 31-32.] H. G. Wells remarks, "We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate happy- go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a natural philosophy. Everything would adjust itself-if only it was left alone." [Footnote: Social Forces in England and America, p. 80.] It is ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... causes of evolution have been set forth in a variety of different hypotheses, only the chief of which need be mentioned here. Historically speaking the first of these was that which was put forward by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Herbert Spencer. It consists in putting together the following facts ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a—well, for a perversion. If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that the spelling casts a doubt upon his claim. If the late Jonathan Edwards should rise up and tell me he wrote Mr. Dooley's books, I should answer and say that the marked difference between his style and Dooley's is argument against ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... me,' said Dick, as he put them down. 'They buy their linen at Doucet's and read Herbert Spencer with avidity. And what's more, they seem to like him. An Englishwoman can seldom read a serious book without feeling a prig, and as soon as she feels a prig she leaves off ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham

... poor useless subjects he can in a sort of way teach, and practically nothing is done to help or equip him to teach anything else. By reason of this uproar, the world is full now of anxious muddled parents, their poor brains buzzing with echoes of Froebel, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, Herbart, Colonel Parker, Mr. Harris, Matthew Arnold, and the Morning Post, trying to find something better. They know nothing of what is right, they only know very, very clearly that the ordinary school is extremely ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... matter with me?" he asked himself almost with irritation, as at last he laid down the volume of Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, over which he had been laboring in vain. "I can't read a single paragraph with understanding. I can't keep my attention upon the lines as I read them. I must be tired out—though I don't know what has tired me. Fortunately ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... of the chief functions of the school was to prepare citizens to profit by the hours of freedom from toil. Herbert Spencer, in his great work on Education, gives a prominent place to training for leisure hours. Such training is attracting the attention of the American educator to-day as never before. A few decades ago the majority of the American population lived on farms, spent long ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... essays are entirely popular, but those that follow are somewhat more technical. "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" was the Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in 1914, and was published by the Clarendon Press, which has kindly allowed me to include it in this collection. "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter" was an address to the Manchester Philosophical Society, early in 1915, and was published in the Monist in July of that year. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... of Mill—of neither I had ever heard—but there was still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be a literary man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on Education some four years agone by a writer of that name; a certain Herbert Spencer, whom I ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... drops of life known as unicellular organisms. Such a creature is a tiny cell, capable of performing in itself all the functions of life. That one pulsating morsel of matter is invested with an irritability which, as Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with outer relations," to correspond to its environment—in short, to live. That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its environment uncongenial to its ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... in the texture of the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops. Then comes the sensation of butting one's head against a stone wall, of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the discomfort in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. Tolstoy is indeed a case in point. He is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already classics; and this position is unaffected by ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... Wallace. Now that the plan is completed, Darwin and Wallace are together in this wonderful galaxy of the great men of science of the nineteenth century. Several illustrious names are missing from this eminent company; foremost amongst them being that of Herbert Spencer, the lofty master of that synthetic philosophy which seemed to his disciples to have the proportions and qualities of an enduring monument, and whose incomparable fertility of creative thought entitled him to share the throne with Darwin. It was ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... from his home in Long Whatton on Wednesday morning last, Herbert Spencer Whiles, Surgeon. The above reward will be paid to any one giving information which will lead to the discovery of his present whereabouts. Was last seen in a motor car, Limousine body, painted dark green, leaving Long Whatton ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception of man and the world which has grown up under the influence of modern science. The most original and effective expression of this philosophy is given by Herbert Spencer. What new light does the evolutionary philosophy throw on man's chief problem, the right conduct of his ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... silently as she sat stitching the embroidery designed to provide the daily meal. She knew full well that vain pride baulked his employment; and after many a struggle she prevailed upon him to become a letter-writer. "An undergraduate, who has read Herbert Spencer, Comte and Voltaire," said he, "cannot demean himself to letter-writing for the public," to which she justly replied that an education which prevents a man earning his daily bread ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... then, of most value are those which establish intrinsic connections between part and part; for it is only by means of systems of this character that action can be determined and knowledge extended. In this sense we may agree with Herbert Spencer[5] that science or systematised knowledge is of chiefest value both for the guidance of conduct and for the discipline of mind. At the same time we must not fall into the Spencerian error of identifying science "with the study of surrounding phenomena," and in making the antithesis between ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... amongst the defective would be sufficient to counteract their disposition to a high fertility. But in all civilized nations, the fertility of the fit is rapidly departing from that normal rate, and Mr. Herbert Spencer declares, with the gloomiest pessimism, that the infertility of the best citizens is the physiological result of their intellectual development. I have already expressed the opinion that prudence and social selfishness, operating through sexual self-restraint on the part of the ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the legend. Not only in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the tradition runs, these people—the Chamats—will one day break through the hills and rule the world; 'make over the world' is the literal translation of the constant phrase in the tale. It was Herbert Spencer who pointed out that there is a basis of fact in every myth and legend of man. It is possible that these survivors I am discussing form Spencer's fact basis for the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... Scott, to please help him to help Brunton; and how Scott replied in desperation that he envied the hermit of Prague who never saw pen nor ink. How many of us have in our day thought longingly of that blessed anchorite! Surely Mr. Herbert Spencer must, consciously or unconsciously, have shared Scott's sentiments, when he wrote a letter to the public press, explaining with patient courtesy that, being old, and busy, and very tired, it was no longer possible for him to answer all the unknown correspondents who demanded information ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... manner of the British male; and whatever I have said, the effect has been the same. I've talked about theatres and music-halls, of events of the day, I've even—Heaven help me—talked of racing and football, but I might as well have talked of Herbert Spencer. I suppose I didn't talk about them in the right way. I'm sure it must be my fault somewhere, for certainly they seem easy enough to please, poor things! However, my failure remains, and sometimes even I find ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... other hand, we may take the following passage from Mr. Herbert Spencer as a specimen of the largely Latinised vocabulary needed for expressing the exact ideas of science or philosophy. Here also borrowed words ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... experience seriously qualified the meaning of progress on this earth by the limiting of the earth's duration; men have come also to distrust, as a quite unjustified flourish of sentimentality, the mid-Victorian confidence in an automatic evolution which willy-nilly lifts humanity to higher levels. Said Herbert Spencer, "Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity." "This advancement is due to the working of a universal law; . . . in virtue of that law it must continue until the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting the theories of creation and evolution—reasoning with great force in favour of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of reasoning ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... poetry, at all, where there is so much good prose to be read? Herbert Spencer in his essay on "Style" gives some reasons for the superiority of poetry to prose. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... everyone's relief The Delineator appeared at breakfast looking himself again; he replied to the enquiries showered upon him that his indisposition could be explained in the words used by Herbert Spencer, when he defined life as "The continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." The Delineator said that that formula, when one considered the various cookings, including the Oriental style we had lately sampled, ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... accumulation and transmission of variations, but they do not agree as to the causes to which the variations are due. The view held by the older evolutionists, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, who have been followed by many modern thinkers, including Herbert Spencer and Butler, is that the variations occur mainly as the result of effort and design; the opposite view, which is that advocated by Mr. Wallace in "Darwinism," is that the variations occur merely as the result of chance. The former is ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... to a letter of Herbert Spencer and to an anti-socialist book of M. Garofalo. It shows the present state of social science, and of the struggle between ultra-conservative orthodoxy, which is blinded to the sad truths of contemporary life by its traditional syllogisms and innovating heterodoxy which is ever ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... priori, the power of God? 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?' asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that 'natural selection,' or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the 'survival of the fittest,' is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety - that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of science, on their own grounds. We, meanwhile, always ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley

... trail fly. The best rule is: when you find a favourite fly on a salmon river, use it: its special favouritism may be a superstition, but, at all events, salmon do take it. We cannot afford to be always making experiments, but Mr. Herbert Spencer, busking his flies the reverse way, used certainly to be at least as successful with sea trout as his less speculative ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang

... object of sex, that is to say, is by no means to aid reproduction, but rather to subordinate and check reproduction in order to evolve higher and more complex beings. Here we come to the great principle, which Herbert Spencer developed at length in his Principles of Biology, that, as he put it, Individuation and Genesis vary inversely, whence it followed that advancing evolution must be accompanied by declining fertility. Individuation, which means complexity of structure, has ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... go on multiplying examples in this direction quite indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate—what was instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction of our ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... relationship existed, though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term "forty-second cousin" would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the tie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its laws are imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual, is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied suasions, its agencies ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... 'Herbert Spencer says,' continued the Good Stockbroker, 'that the tendency to monogamy is innate, and all the other forms of marriage have been temporary deviations, each bringing their own retributive evils. After all, monogamous marriage was instituted for the protection of women, and ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... ago I sent an outline of this argument to Herbert Spencer, who replied: "I recognize a novelty and value in your inference that the law implies an increasing width of gap between lower and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... progress from deepest ignorance to highest enlightenment," remarks Herbert Spencer in his Social Statics, "is a progress from entire unconsciousness of law, to the conviction that ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... reported that George Eliot herself preferred Silas Marner. This is the report of Justin McCarthy, who was a frequent visitor on Sunday afternoons at the Priory, the home of George Eliot, where many distinguished visitors, such as Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, and Huxley, loved to gather. "There is a legend," writes Mr. McCarthy, "that George Eliot never liked to talk about her novels. I can only say that she started the subject with me one day. It was, to be sure, about a picture some painter had sent her, representing a scene in Silas ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... and of all human relations. That, he, and we, may well take for granted. It has surely been amply demonstrated and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. But with the further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view every problem of life from another angle. To see life steadily and see it whole is one stage. ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... to the abyss of madness. Nature imposes limits to sympathy in most minds, barriers of forgetfulness without which healthy thought is impossible. The danger to the mind of indulging in unlimited sympathy has been emphasized by the most divergent students of psychological law. Herbert Spencer analysed it with characteristic thoroughness. Nietzsche went farther. He reacted violently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and in philosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. The ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... the one side one found Rousseau, and on the other Herbert Spencer. Thyrsis had read Spencer, and had cordially disliked him for his dogmatism and his callousness; but now he read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution", and came to a realization of how the whole science of biology had been distorted to suit the convenience of the British ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... no reverence for the principles of Comenius, Pestalozzi, or Herbert Spencer as applied to poultry, and when the ducks and geese came out of the pond badly the other night and went waddling and tumbling and hissing all over creation, did not approve of my sending them back into the pond ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... the view that founds moral distinctions on the mere arbitrary will of God. The most eminent modern advocates of Utilitarianism are Hume, Bentham, Paley, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Sir James Mackintosh, John Austin, Samuel Bailey, Herbert Spencer, and Bain. ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous

... Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous intellectual movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Herbert Spencer on the treatment of offspring—Absurdity of undertaking to rear children without any knowledge of how to do it—Foolish management of parents generally the cause of evils ascribed to Providence—Errors of management during the first two years—Food of child ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."—HERBERT SPENCER: Principles of Biology. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... a more philosophical turn of mind, have discussed the principles of the subject, and among these some have undertaken to develop their theories from the true starting-point of a definition. But among all these, from Plato, who was the earliest systematic writer on the subject, to Herbert Spencer, the latest and the most pretentious, not one has given a definition of it which ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... I accept Herbert Spencer's theory that the idea of justice contains two sentiments, positive and negative; the one the sentiment of the individual that he has the right by nature to the unimpeded use of his faculties and to the benefits he acquires ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery

... results of science are the divine message to our age; to neglect them, to fear them, is to remain under the old law whilst the new is demanding our adherence, to repeat the Jewish error of bygone time. Less of St Paul, and more of Darwin! Less of Luther, and more of Herbert Spencer!' ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... Mumbo-Jumbo?" returned the King, with startling animation. "Does a man of your intelligence come to me with these damned early Victorian ethics? If, on studying my features and manner, you detect any particular resemblance to the Prince Consort, I assure you you are mistaken. Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you—did he ever convince anybody—did he ever for one mad moment convince himself—that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do you believe that, if you rule ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... who had a word to say for Evolution—and his advocacy was not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks, the only person known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was, at the same time, a thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley

... "Herbert Spencer was nearly forty before he caught the vision of his greatest efficiency and desire. I'm none so slow. I didn't have to wait till I was thirty to catch mine. Right here is my efficiency and desire. Almost, Yellow Face, do I wish I had been born a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... paper was gone at the corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in the book—she would pick it up at every spare moment—excited in me an ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the title-page, Introduction to the Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer. Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... a physical communication of world with world which, in the dawn of the twentieth century, may transcend in sober fact the wildest dreams of all the philanthropists and the philosophers who have sought to educate humanity from Socrates to Herbert Spencer." ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... metaphysical train of reasoning on account of its embodying the supposition of unknowable causes. Distinction between "inconceivability" in a formal or symbolical, and in a material or realisable sense. Reply of a supposed Atheist to the previous pleading of the supposed Theist. Herbert Spencer quoted on inconceivability of cosmic evolution as ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and with those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthful minds ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... taught the gradual development of all forms of existence from a single creative cause. He died in 1820, the year in which Herbert Spencer, the English Apostle of Evolution, was ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... "Talking of Herbert Spencer," he began, "do you really find no logical difficulty in regarding Nature as a process of involution, passing from definite coherent ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... his faith was neither that of the ordinary theist, the atheist, nor the pantheist, but that his religious theory of the universe was identical with that suggested by Spinoza, adopted by Goethe, and recently elaborated in the first part of the "First Principles" of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, while Lessing cannot be considered an antagonist of Christianity, neither did he assume the attitude of a defender. He remained outside the theological arena; looking at theological questions from the point of view of a layman, or rather, as M. Cherbuliez ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... {46} Mr. Herbert Spencer has recently argued ('Principles of Biology,' 1865, p. 37 et seq.) with much force that there is no fundamental distinction between the foliar and axial organs ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... the nature of the Universe is "Mental," while modern science has taught that it is "Material"; or (of late) that it is "Energy" at the last analysis. The Hermetic Teachings have no fault to find with Herbert Spencer's basic principle which postulates the existence of an "Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed." In fact, the Hermetics recognize in Spencer's philosophy the highest outside statement of ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... Herbert Spencer. The Authorized Copyright Works. (Appleton's edition.) First Principles, 1 vol.; Principles of Biology, 2 vols.; Principles of Psychology, 2 vols.; Principles of Sociology, 3 vols.; Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... Vera seriously. She then bought casually Mr. Punch on the Continong, and left orders for books by Plato, Herbert Spencer, and various other thoughtful writers, to be sent to ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... Legallois (1812) and then Flourens for vivisection.—Hartley and James Mill at the end of the eighteenth century follow Condillac on the same psychological road; all contemporary psychologists have entered upon it. (Wundt, Helmholz, Fechner, in Germany, Bain, Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... it under that book of Herbert Spencer's my daughter gave me yesterday. Under it, Wilkins—and, h'm, Wilkins—you needn't mention it to anybody. Ouida ain't cultured, Wilkins, but she's damn' good reading. I suppose that's ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... from anyone it is Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer, of whom he often speaks, although one does not know if he studied them very deeply. In all his books, excepting, of course, in the case of lines from the great tragic poets, one finds only one credited reference, which in to Sir John Lubbock's work on ants, an extract from which is ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... manifestly Balliol was not the place for R. L. S., though he might have been happy with his contemporary John Churton Collins. He, I remember—even to the velvet coat—was like Stevenson, and was a rebel. Grant Allen, too, would have been his contemporary—the only man in Oxford who took to Herbert Spencer, whom Stevenson also ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... advancing wave of monistic philosophy, he has, in its specification, attempted such precision of materialistic detail, and subjected it to so narrow and limited a view of the totality of experience, that the progress of thought has left him, as well as his great English exemplar, Herbert Spencer, somewhat high and dry, belated and stranded by the tide of opinion which has now begun to flow in another direction. He is, as it were, a surviving voice from the middle of the nineteenth century; he represents, in clear and eloquent fashion, opinions which then were ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... a peculiar psychic quality of woman, a power of prophecy and a property of divinity which has made her an object of fear and worship, it may be well to review the modern explanations of the origin of this unique feminine power. Herbert Spencer was of the opinion that feminine penetration was an ability to distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around and was the result of long ages of barbarism during which woman as the weaker sex was obliged to resort to the arts of divination and to cunning to make up for her lack ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... what is meant by vivisection reform. Every unprejudiced mind can see at once that it is not the same as antivivisection. Is it the enemy of science? The leading name affixed to this declaration of principles was that of the late Herbert Spencer, the chief apostle of modern science. Is it against the interests of education? It was signed by eleven presidents of American universities and colleges, and by a large number of men closely connected with institutions of ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... deuce do I know? Your mother embroiders and reads The Atlantic Monthly; your father tucks his hands behind him and critically inspects the landscape; and when he doesn't do that he reads Herbert Spencer. Your efficient sister nourishes her progeny and does all things thoroughly and well; Gordon digs up some trees and plants others and squirts un-fragrant mixtures over the shrubbery, and sits on fences talking to various Rubes. Stephanie floats about like a well-fed angel, with a fox-terrier, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... the most massive and enduring gratifications is the feeling of personal worth, ever afresh, brought into consciousness by effectual action; and an idle life is balked of its hopes partly because it lacks this.—Herbert Spencer. ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman

... the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of "elective ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... philosophy only to take a theistic view. Voltaire's saying here holds true: that if there were no God known, it would be necessary to invent one. It is the best, if not the only, hypothesis for the explanation of the facts. Whether the philosophy of Herbert Spencer (which is not to our liking) is here fairly presented, we have little occasion and no time to consider. In this regard, the close of his article No. 12 in the Contemporary Review shows, at least, his expectation of the entire permanence of our ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... are still superintending each other's reading. Last week he appeared with Herbert Spencer's "System of Synthetic Philosophy" for me to glance at. I gratefully accepted it, and gave him in return the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff." Do you remember in college how we used to enrich our daily speech with quotations ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... contemporaries was invariably such as to command respect for his intellectual capacity. Considering his deep, philosophic mind, says one critic, if his lines had been cast in more serious places, he might have been a sociologist, the equal of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. There is proof enough of this in that wonderful encyclopaedic work of "London Labour and London Poor," which displayed his original mind and his power of research, as much as other books displayed his marvellous invention, fancy, and initiative, and it is the only one of his undertakings ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... prosperous and satisfactory condition. Trade was flourishing. Neither had literature fallen behind. Perhaps it had rarely shown a more brilliant galaxy of contemporary names, including those of John Stuart Mill in logic, Herbert Spencer in philosophy, Charles Darwin in natural science, Ruskin in art criticism, Helps as an essayist. And in this year Tennyson brought out his "In Memoriam," and Kingsley his "Alton Lock". It seemed but natural that the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... Method is three-fold in action. From this it takes the name "Unit Method." The first Unit of Treatment has for its purpose the building up of physical efficiency. "The first requisite is to be a good animal," says Herbert Spencer. This is certainly true of the stammerer, for in his case, normal health is a valuable aid during the time of treatment. Consequently, the first step is to build up the physical organs and be sure that these are ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... intellectual grounds, Syndicalism is prone to expect that non-intellectual forces will suffice to achieve the State as it should be." [Footnote: Ernest Barker in his Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day, p. 248.] Other tendencies of the same type are noticeable. For example, Mr. Bertrand Russell's work on The Principles of Social Reconstruction is based on the view that impulse is a larger factor in our ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... Turkish throne of old, "Amurath to Amurath succeeds"; the philological theories of religion and myth have now yielded to anthropological methods. The centre of the anthropological position was the "ghost theory" of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the "Animistic" theory of Mr. E. R. Tylor, according to whom the propitiation of ancestral and other spirits leads to polytheism, and thence to monotheism. In the second edition (1901) of this work the author argued that the belief in a "relatively supreme being," anthropomorphic ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... work on Education, Herbert Spencer states that "acquirement of every kind has two values—value as knowledge and value as discipline. Besides its use for guidance in conduct, the acquisition of each order of facts has also its use as mental exercise." Many students ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... A call, says Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Sociology, is 'evidently a remote sequence of that system under which a subordinate ruler had from time to time to show loyalty to a chief ruler by presenting himself to do homage.' The idea is plausible: was it not for this very reason that Cleopatra galleyed ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren

... a gramophone and a dozen opera records, and a brier-wood pipe and two pounds of English "Honey-Dew," and a smoking-jacket, and some new ties and socks and shirts, and a brand new Stetson, for Dinky-Dunk's old hat is almost a rag-bag. And I ordered half a dozen of the newer novels and a set of Herbert Spencer which I heard him say he wanted, and a sepia print of the Mona Lisa (which my lord says I look like when I'm planning trouble) and a felt mattress and a set of bed-springs (so good-by, old sway-backed friend whose humps have bruised me in body and spirit ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... in nature is rhythmic. I need not trouble my readers with the evidences of a fact which is well known in science, but will refer them to the lucid demonstration in Herbert Spencer's First ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... to Herbert Spencer at once. He was about her age, and their admiration for each other was mutual. Miss Evans, writing to a friend in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, says, "Spencer is kind, he is delightful, and I always feel better after being with him, and we have agreed together that there is no reason why we should ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... their farms for harvest, sitting in a case through July, while the days passed in lengthy examinations of witnesses—one man was on the stand eight days—and the lawyers bandied words and names like socialist, pagan, bolsheviki, anarchy, ideal republic, Aristotle, Plato, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Tolstoi, Jane Addams, Lenin. Then when he felt assured he had removed all the reasons for supporting the present jury system he could proceed to advance his ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... given time and place. We do not realize how large a part of our law is open to reconsideration upon a slight change in the habit of the public mind. No concrete proposition is self evident, no matter how ready we may be to accept it, not even Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme, of perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr. Herbert Spencer (in his Social Statics) as a disproof of the pretentions of utility to be a sufficient guide to right; since (he says) the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that everybody has an equal right to happiness. It may ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill

... at the throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles," Martin ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... born and bred, and which every one expected him to accept, and without which he could not continue his useful occupation, contained the truth, he had already decided the answer. And to clear up the question he did not read Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, or Comte, but the philosophical works of Hegel and the religious works of Vinet and Khomyakoff, and naturally found in them what he wanted, i.e., something like peace of mind and a vindication of that religious teaching in which he was educated, which his reason had long ceased ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... "Lay Sermons" was published his essays found in the United States an eager audience, who appreciated above all things his directness and honesty of purpose and the unflinching spirit in which he pursued the truth. Whether or not, as some affirm, the American public "discovered" Mr. Herbert Spencer, they responded at once to the influence of the younger evolutionary writer, whose wide and exact knowledge of nature was but a stepping-stone to his interest in human life and its problems. And when, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ceremonies. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... country, as Emerson says, "Every rider drives too fast." It is hard to be simple and slow. We must build fast, eat fast, and live fast. But Emerson says again, "Nature has no respect for haste." Herbert Spencer has given us in a kindly spirit some hints on this score which it would be well to heed. But we are wandering from our immediate subject. Our desire is to illustrate, in the very words of the people of the period we refer to, the views they ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various

... As Herbert Spencer says: "To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge." Character rather than acquirement is the chief aim of education. Hence we cannot ignore the place of religion in education without doing violence to ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner

... gathered posies of bog-bean bloom and walked round the big boulders with which this sterile region is thickly strewn. The natives know nothing of Home or any other Rule, and you might as well speak to them of the Darwinian theory, or the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, or the Homeric studies of the Grand Old Man, or the origin of the Sanskrit language. The only opinion I could glean was the leading idea of simple Irish agriculturists everywhere. A young fellow who appeared to be in a state of intellectual advancement so far beyond that ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... presumptions apply are coarse developments of insanity. Dr. Prichard was among the first of English medico-psychologists to recognize the existence of a more subtle form of disease, which he termed "moral insanity." Herbert Spencer supplied the key-note to this mystery of madness when he propounded the doctrine of "dissolution;" and Dr. Hughlings Jackson has since applied that hypothesis to the elucidation of morbid mental states and their correlated phenomena. When disorganizing—or, ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... of the Royal Society? Where are the secret conspirators against this tyranny, whom I am supposed to favour, and yet not have the courage to join openly? And to think of my poor oppressed friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer, 'compelled to speak with bated breath' (p. 338) certainly for the first time in my thirty-odd years' acquaintance with him!" My alarm and horror at the supposition that while I had been fiddling (or at any rate physicking), my beloved Rome had been ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... to a rounded whole: And nowhere more persistently than in relation to institutions. The college should be complete as to its objective scheme. There may be onesidedness here. There may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed pressing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer; or there may be an undue exaltation of what he calls 'the decorative element.' The theoretic maybe too exclusively pursued; or there may be a practicalness which has too little of theory, like a cone required to stand firm on its apex. There should be ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... of all these phenomena. In point of fact, to G.K.C. everybody is either a contemporary or a Victorian, and "I also was born a Victorian." Little Dorrit sets him talking about Gissing, Hard Times suggests Herbert Spencer, American Notes leads to the mention of Maxim Gorky, and elsewhere Mr. George Moore and Mr. William Le Queux are brought in. If Chesterton happened to be writing about Dickens at a time when there ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... of John Stuart Mill, whom Malthusians are ever quoting, it should be noted that the foregoing blasphemy is nothing more nor less than a burlesque of Positivism or of Agnosticism. The teaching of Mill, Bain, and of Herbert Spencer was that the knowledge of God and of His nature is impossible, because our senses are the only source of knowledge. Their reasoning was wrong—because a primary condition of all knowledge is memory, in itself an intuition, because primary mathematical axioms ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... trouble is that when monarchs fight nothing is settled as a rule; what one loses to-day, he tries to win back to-morrow, and so the masses are kept in a state of perpetual war, or preparation for war, equally expensive. If Herbert Spencer had never formulated anything but the law underlying these sad contentions between man and man, he would have deserved to rank as one of our greatest benefactors. "When power is arbitrarily held by chief or king, the military spirit is developed, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... anticipated all that is rational in the opinions respecting the position and education of women which are now held by the ladies who are stigmatized as the Strong-minded, as well as by John Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other economists of the modern school. It demanded fair play for the understanding of women. It proclaimed the essential equality of the sexes. It denounced the awful libertinism of that age, and showed that the-weakness, the ignorance, the vanity, and the seclusion of women ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer." ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... dandies and diplomats and statesmen. On the 16th of June, 1863, Matthew Arnold wrote—"On Sunday I dined with Monckton Milnes,[51] and met all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume.... The philosophers were fearful! George Lewes, Herbert Spencer, a sort of pseudo-Shelley called Swinburne, and so on. Froude, however, was ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others."—HERBERT SPENCER. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... fluid," out of which the heavens and the earth had been slowly fashioned. For a time this view of the nebulae gave place to that which regarded them as external galaxies—cosmical "sand heaps," too remote to be resolved into separate stars, though, indeed, in 1858, Mr. Herbert Spencer showed that the observations of nebulae up to that time were really in favor of an evolutional progress. In 1864 he (the speaker) brought the spectroscope to bear upon them; the bright lines which flashed upon the eye showed the source of the light to be glowing gas, and so restored ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... amidst rural surroundings, where there are hills and woods and rocks and streams and waterfalls, these being the conditions which are most favourable to it—the scenes which have "inherited associations" for us, as Herbert Spencer has said. In large towns and all populous places, where nature has been tamed until it appears like a part of man's work, almost as artificial as the buildings he inhabits, it withers and dies so early in life that ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... to them, and so thoroughly recognize the value of most of them, that it seems almost unnecessary to speak of them as socialistic measures. Yet such they are, and all of them are objected to upon this very ground by men of the political school of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert. ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... trip abroad (1849) was followed by some editorial work on The Westminster Review, then the organ of the freethinkers. This in turn led to her association with Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and other liberals, and to her union with George Henry Lewes in 1854. Of that union little need be said except this: though it lacked the law and the sacrament, it seems to have been in other respects a fair covenant which was honestly kept by both ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... makes amusement a bore. Is it not clear that the physical sins—partly our ancestors' and partly our own—which produce this ill health deduct more from complete living than anything else, and to a great extent make life a failure and a burden, instead of a benefaction and a pleasure?"—Herbert Spencer. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... have gone on to say that the suggestion, with reference to this very book of Herbert Spencer's, came from a French sociologist he had been reading; but it did not seem to ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... dictum of Thucydides or Plato and assessing the fate of the British Commonwealth in terms borrowed from some judgement of Sallust or Tacitus on its wholly different Roman prototype. It is flippancy or pedantry like this which gives rise to the onslaughts of a Cobden or Herbert Spencer or an H. G. Wells and to the practical man's suspicion of a classical education. One might as well go to last year's market reports for guidance in a business deal of to-day as have recourse to Plato, or, for that matter, to Macchiavelli, in an existing political emergency. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... Herbert Spencer, in his essay on "Justice," says that he once favored woman suffrage "from the point of view of a general principle of individual rights." Later he finds that this cannot be maintained, because he "discovers mental ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... a higher organisation, he actually became a disorganiser. "All things are growing or decaying," says Herbert Spencer. And in Beethoven, so far as sonata and sonata-form are concerned, we seem, as it were, to perceive the beginning of a ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... impertinently, the characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue that offered itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but they were such as these, not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays. I recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I wish I knew who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have a fondness for such dangerous ground; from some ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... Earl; and they all went to billiards, the Jesuit marking with much attention and precision. Later he took a cue, and was easily the master of every man there, though better acquainted, he said, with the foreign game. The late Pope used to play, he said, nearly as well as Mr. Herbert Spencer. Even for a beginner, Miss Willoughby was not a brilliant player; but she did not cut the cloth, and her arms were remarkably beautiful—an excellent but an extremely rare thing in woman. She was rewarded, finally, by a choice between bedroom candles lit ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... Mr. Herbert Spencer and the extreme individualists of his school admitted that national defence is a proper function of the State, and that a government may rightly use compulsory powers to safeguard ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... Herbert Spencer says that "our intellectual operations are indeed mostly confined to the auditory feelings as integrated into words and the visual feelings as integrated into ideas of objects, ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... is used in the phrase "absolute knowledge'' to imply knowledge per se. It has been held, however, that, since all knowledge implies a knowing subject and a known object, absolute knowledge is a contradiction in terms (see RELATIVITY.) So also Herbert Spencer spoke of "absolute ethics,'' as opposed to systems of conduct based on particular local or temporary laws ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... however, in an average of 1,606 cubic centimeters for the skulls of men, and 1,581 for the skulls of women,—accordingly, both considerably larger than those of the eleventh, twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Mrs. Nadejde concluded therefrom that Herbert Spencer was right when he claimed in his physiology that brain weight depended upon the amount of motion and the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... rising from his armchair and swinging his long arms as he strides to the window, and looks out and up, with, "Well, I declare!" Herbert is pretending to read Herbert Spencer's tract on the philosophy of style but he loses much time in looking at the Young Lady, who is writing a letter, holding her portfolio in her lap,—one of her everlasting letters to one of her fifty everlasting friends. She is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... some years is Sussex House, Ship Street. Paston House was the home of William Black before he removed to Rottingdean. Ainsworth produced a goodly portion of his historical novels at No. 5, Arundel Terrace, and at 4 Percival Terrace, Herbert Spencer spent the last years of his life and here died. The name of Holyoake, the social reformer, is connected with Eastern Lodge, Camelford Street. A list of such names might be extended indefinitely, and if the celebrities who have been regular visitors were mentioned the record ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... be reprinted, for the benefit of this generation, for its author has forestalled all subsequent writers on this all-important subject. There is scarcely anything said by Rev. Morgan Dix, in his excellent Lenten Lectures, which was not said by Hannah More in the last century. Herbert Spencer may be more original, possibly more profound, but he is not so practical or clear or instructive as the great woman who preceded him more than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... scarcely justify us in thinking the religion of the Zendavesta to be Pantheistic in our sense of the term. For though it would appear that Ormuzd (or Ahuramazda), the God of light and goodness, originated in, or was born from and one with a nameless impersonal Unity, such as may answer to Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable," it cannot be accurately said that, according to the Persian view of the world, there is nothing but God. For, to say nothing of the apparently independent existence of the principle of darkness and evil called Ahriman, the relation of the Amshaspands, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... knows nothing of health and disease, unless it assumes this distinction as its starting-point. It knows only the order of sequences. Suppose, then, we were to find that civilization had pitted itself against Man, so that it was a case of Man versus Civilization, as Herbert Spencer conceived an antagonism between Man and the State. Should we not be compelled, in order to decide what condition of things was one of health, to open up conscious relations with our deepest trend of heart and will, and find out whether we flowed with humanity or with civilization? ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit

... by the great majority of people to this day, supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true; and the former are regarded as a more complex set of problems merely, with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away. Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and unknowable, but not in this sense as an element of inexactness running through all things. He thought, it ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... and Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... Herbert Spencer professes to be carrying out, a step farther, the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel, viz., "the philosophy of the Unconditioned." In other words, he carries that doctrine forward to its rigidly logical consequences, and utters the last word which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... too. She felt that it was harder, somehow, darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Sometimes ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair

... year, and if men did not know every succeeding season would provide, they would be desperate indeed. What is this but believing in a supreme Power? Even materialists admit that the great First Cause is beyond matter. Herbert Spencer speaks of it as the 'Universal Reality, without beginning ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson



Words linked to "Herbert Spencer" :   sociologist, philosopher



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