"Herbert Spencer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not to expect Isaiah and Plato in every country house, and the warning was characteristic of the time when one really might have met Ruskin or Herbert Spencer. How uncalled for it would be now! If Isaiah or Plato were to appear at any country house, what a shock it would give the company, even if no one present had heard of their names and death before! We do not know how prophets and philosophers would ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... as seen on the firing line,—to point out the goal before us, universal education, of course, and social efficiency for each member of the group. That suggests at once as a definition of education, the one made famous by Herbert Spencer more than a half century ago, "Preparation for complete living." That was good as a start in the new direction, but one of the most prominent generals of our educational forces now commanding at the front, John Dewey of Columbia University, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... for its broad scholarship; and it has been pronounced "the most complete and exhaustive exhibition of the cognitive faculties of the human soul to be found in our language." His other important works are: "The Sciences of Nature versus the Science of Man," which is a review of the doctrines of Herbert Spencer; "American Colleges and the American Public;" and the book from which the following selection is taken, namely, "Books and Reading." Besides these he wrote numerous essays, contributions to periodicals, etc. During his professorship he was called upon to act as chief ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... have been written on snake-worship, in which a wonderful amount of metaphysical lore has been expended. Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes several pages to the snake, and the reason for its appearance in the religion of primitive peoples. He ascribes to savages a psychical acuteness that I am by no means willing to allow them, inasmuch as he makes them give a psychical causation for their adoption of the serpent as a deity, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside over the accumulation. In "Life and Habit," following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it was for variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be touched upon ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Mr. Herbert Spencer be correct in deducing all artistic activities from our primaeval instincts of play, it seems to me certain that these artistic activities have for us adults much the same importance as the play activities have for a child. They represent the only perfectly free exercise, and therefore, free ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... 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 dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... in the economic chapters of 'Progress and Poverty' its author saw the possibility of society's approaching the 'ideal of Jeffersonian Democracy, the promised land of Herbert Spencer, the abolition of government. But of government only as a directing and repressive power.' At the same time and in the same degree of approach, he regarded it as possible for society also to realize the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... office by four o'clock—and we'll see what we can do for you. It's absolutely useless sending anything to the editor of a daily paper without an introduction. You might write with the pen of the angel Gabriel, or turn out leaders which were a judicious mean between Gladstone, Burke, and Herbert Spencer, and it would profit you nothing, for the simple reason that he hasn't got the time to read them. He would toss Junius and Montesquieu into the waste paper basket, and accept copy on the shocking murder in the Borough Road from one of his regular contributors instead. He ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 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 rare dialectic ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer.[12] No more persuasive rabbi exists. 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 dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in 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
... extreme is the child—or the grown person—who apparently without any effort balances the reasons that may be given on the opposite sides of a problem, and makes his choice solely on the strength of the reasoned argument. Herbert Spencer tells in his Autobiography how, when a young man, he wrote down, as in a ledger, all the advantages and all the disadvantages he could think of in regard to the married state. After checking off the items on the two sides of the account, he found a balance in ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Herbert Spencer had been sent to Lerwick and Bressay to write a report on what they saw, I daresay the difference of their accounts would have astonished every reader. Lamb would probably have swilled porter in the Ultima ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... place would be put to. In vain we conjectured, and I hope not 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 ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... analogy on the Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible—we are as weeds and shall be rooted out. This is no figment of the imagination, it seems to be the only conclusion we can come to if Nature is the work of Nature's God, and Man is made in the image (spiritual) of that God. Herbert Spencer came to the same conclusion when defining everlasting existence. He says: "Perfect correspondence would be perfect life; were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and were it never ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... which Mr. Herbert Spencer has prefixed to his, in many respects, highly philosophical treatise on the Mind,(91) he criticises some of the doctrines of the two preceding chapters, and propounds a theory of his own on the subject of first principles. Mr. Spencer agrees with me in considering axioms to be ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... went to Geneva and remained on the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served for some time as editor of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW. She then formed a strong friendship with Herbert Spencer, and through Spencer she met George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe and the German philosophers, and who was the editor of the LEADER, the organ of the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... entirely overlooked it, as have others since his time. The theory of the change from an arboreal life and climbing posture to an erect one, and the transformation of the hinder pair of hands into the feet of the erect human animal, remind us of the very probable hypothesis of Mr. Herbert Spencer, as to the modification of the quadrumanous posterior pair of hands to form ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... worship after death, so that ultimately they were promoted from the ranks of the deified dead into the select Olympus of individual gods. This has been a favourite theory of the making of a god from the time of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. There are religions in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in view of the peculiar character of ancestor ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... As for us theologians, who are we, that we should limit, 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. ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... economical use of time, careful observation, close attention to details, but as respects the uses of Drawing. The observations which he makes as to the accurate knowledge of this art are very important. In this matter he concurs with Mr. Herbert Spencer in his work on Education. "It is very strange," Mr. Nasmyth said some years ago, "that amidst all our vaunted improvements in education, the faculty of comparison by sight, or what may be commonly called the correctness of eye, has been so little attended to" He accordingly urges the teaching ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... be admitted to be very doubtful; we cannot in any certain way apply to the Universe, which is not a finite system, a proposition demonstrated, and that not unreservedly, in the sharply limited case of a finite system. Herbert Spencer, moreover, in his book on First Principles, brings out with much force the idea that, even if the Universe came to an end, nothing would allow us to conclude that, once at rest, it would remain so indefinitely. We may recognise that the state in which we are began at the end of a former ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... the military nobles, the daimio, and the court nobles, the kuge—these higher, sybaritical nobles being fighters only in name. Below them were masses of the common people—mechanics, tradesmen, and peasants—whose life was devoted to arts of peace. Thus what Herbert Spencer gives as the characteristics of a militant type of society may be said to have been exclusively confined to the samurai class, while those of the industrial type were applicable to the classes above and below it. This is well illustrated by the position of woman; ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... 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 wrong. They are quite clear they don't want ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... all fitness in form and function has lost its prestige at the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets with universal acceptance is the law of the survival of the fittest, a limited application of Darwin's great idea as expressed by Herbert Spencer." But let that pass. In another place the author makes it clear that the explanations of to-day, including his own, do not exhaust the subject, for he says "it is incumbent on us to discover the ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... and try to find something in regard to the nature of this Power. We can conceive no beginning: we can conceive no end. And let me say right here that, as the result of all his lifelong study and thinking as an evolutionist, Mr. Herbert Spencer has said that the existence of this infinite and eternal Power, of which all the phenomenal universe is only a partial and passing manifestation, is the one item of human knowledge of which we are ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... But he only obeys that Will as "revealed" so far as it agrees with Utility. He no longer slays the heretic, and he suffers the witch to live. He does not give his cloak to the thief who has stolen his coat, but he hands over the thief to the policeman. Moreover, as Herbert Spencer pointed out, he follows virtue as leading to heaven; if right conduct led him to everlasting torture, would he still pursue it? Or would he revise his idea of right conduct? The martyr dies for the truth he sees, ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... 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 wiser to do justice to his spacious feel for the great objects of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... to recall Herbert Spencer's definition of 'Life'? I read it thirty years ago. He may have altered it afterward, for anything I know, but in all that time I have been unable to think of a single word that could profitably be changed or added or removed. It seems to me ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... 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
... 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
... of the State's police power in deference to the natural rights of liberty and property, the Court next proceeded to read into the latter currently accepted theories of laissez faire economics, reinforced by the doctrine of evolution as elaborated by Herbert Spencer, to the end that "liberty", in particular, became synonymous with governmental hands-off in the field of private economic relations. In Budd v. New York,[74] decided in 1892, Justice Brewer in a dictum declared: "The paternal ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... favour of the theory that the best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of critical folly have been denunciations. One remembers that Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass." One remembers that Byron thought nothing of Keats—"Jack Ketch," as he called him. One remembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin. One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... often thought that in this he was like my own ancestor, Hugo Wharncliffe, whose deference and respectfulness and patience had not descended to me, while unfortunately the effects of his physical infirmities had. I sometimes used to reflect bitterly enough on the truth of Herbert Spencer's teaching as to heredity, so clearly shown in my own case. In the year 1683, through the abominable cruelty and harshness of his brother Randolph, this Hugo Wharncliffe, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, was immured in Newgate, and his constitution was thereby so much impaired ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... 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 has happily expressed it, of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Synthetic Philosophy. Mr. William Black was for many years a familiar figure on the Kemp Town parade, and Brighton plays a part in at least two of his charming tales—The Beautiful Wretch, and an early and very sprightly novel called Kilmeny. Brighton should be proud to think that Mr. Herbert Spencer chose her as a retreat in which to come to his conclusions; but I doubt if she is. Thackeray's affection is, however, cherished by the town, his historic praise of "merry cheerful Dr. Brighton" having a commercial ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Empedocles and Lucretius to Goethe and Tennyson, have sought in their verses to illustrate the beauty of evolutionary ideas; and philosophers, from Aristotle and Strabo to Kant and Herbert Spencer, have recognised the principle of evolution as harmonising with, and growing out of, the highest conceptions of science. Yet it was not till the Nineteenth Century that any serious attempts were made to establish the hypothesis of evolution as a definite ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... though we seem to sacrifice happiness; but that the two are in the beginning identical, that, as expressed by Mr. Herbert Spencer, "whether perfection of nature, virtuousness of action, or rectitude of motive, be assigned as the proper aim, the definition of perfection, virtue, rectitude, brings us down to happiness experienced in some form, at some time, by some person as the ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... was standing before the bookcase, turning over a volume here and another one there. When Miss Kinross came in she was at Herbert Spencer's Education, thinking that surely so wise and practical an observer of youth as he must have offered some recipe for such a situation as ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... Evolution. In fact, science merely corroborates the Hermetic Teachings. The latter merely teaches that 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 workings of the Natural Laws that have ever been promulgated, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat of a freethinker; at the least a latitudinarian: he was a man, besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible authority, to task. "There is something wrong about your graveyard," said I, "which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 essential unity with the whole ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... "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 wolf-boy and been ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... even 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
... the Hindu is taught to respect the flocks browsing in the meadow, and will on no account lift his hand against a cow, for who knows but it may he his own grandmother? The recent researches of Mr. M'Lennan and Mr. Herbert Spencer have served to connect this feeling with the primeval worship of ancestors and with the savage ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... 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 becoming ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... less prolific, have found an entirely different solution of the problem. They practise parental care and they secure survival with greatly economised reproduction. This is a trend of evolution particularly characteristic of the higher animals. So much so that Herbert Spencer formulated the generalisation that the size and frequency of the animal family is inverse ratio to the degree of evolution to which the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... Zarathustra' (1896, p. xix), has been bemused in an even more wonderful manner. He enumerates "the best known representatives" of Anarchic tendencies in political thought as "Humboldt, Dunoyer, Stirner, Bakounine, and Auberon Spencer"! The vision of Mr Auberon Herbert and Mr Herbert Spencer doubled up into a single individual is 'a thing imagination boggles at.' Perhaps it is the ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... of the moment: the monochronos haedonae. Of the great pedagogues, I had known, but never sat at the feet of Jowett, whom I found far less inspiring than any of the great men above mentioned. Among the dead, I had studied Herbert Spencer and Matthew Arnold, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Guyau: I had conversed with that living Neo-Latin, Anatole France, the modern Rousseau, and had enjoyed the marvellous irony and eloquence of his writings, which, while they delight the society in which he lives, may ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... face that I have consented to appear before you to-day and lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology and geology of evolution. It is for this that I have poured over such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius and Hoyle. It is for the purpose of advancing the cause of common humanity and to jerk the rising generation out of barbarism into the dazzling effulgence of clashing intellects and fermenting brains that I have sought the works of Pythagoras, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide in their mass effect with the story of his life. He was not a good animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the successful life. He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because he possessed poor adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid, which combined to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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
... was worked out by an Englishman, Herbert Spencer. Like Comte's, it was based on science, and attempts to show how, starting with a nebular universe, the whole knowable world, psychical and social as well as physical, can be deduced. His Synthetic Philosophy perhaps did more than anything ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... "Mr. Mill, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Browning, Mr. Morris, Mr. Rossetti—all these writers have a wider audience in America than in England. So too has Mr. Tupper. The imagination staggers in attempting to realise the number of copies of his works which have been published abroad. Unlike most of his ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in the form of the Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... rewarded in the evening with a little bridge. If I am ever Lady Pendragon (sounds well, doesn't it?) it shall be all bridge and skittles, for me—and devil take politics, military science, history, the classics, Herbert Spencer, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and all other boring or out-of-date things and writers (if he hasn't already taken them) on which I am now obliged to keep up a sort of ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 Importance ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... however, a prevalent view, for the popularization of which Herbert Spencer is largely responsible, that primitive man has feeble powers of inhibition. Like the equally erroneous view that early man is a free and unfettered creature, it arises from our habit of assuming that, because his inhibitions and unfreedom do not correspond with our own restraints, they do ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... private enterprise. It is little marvel that under the typical eighteenth century monarchy, when the way to ship, regiment and the apostolic succession alike lay through the ante-chamber of the king's mistress, there was begotten that absolute repudiation of State Control to which Herbert Spencer was destined at last to give the complete expression, that irrational, passionate belief that whatever else is right the State is necessarily incompetent ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... sectarianism or prejudice; where the children of the poorest may learn the wisdom of the Occident; where there is not a boy or a girl of fourteen ignorant of the great names of Tyndall, of Darwin, of Huxley, of Herbert Spencer. The little hands that break the Fox-god's nose in mischievous play can also write essays upon the evolution of plants and about the geology of Izumo. There is no place for ghostly foxes in the beautiful nature-world revealed by new studies to the new generation The omnipotent exorciser and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... after physical self-preservation is secure," says Herbert Spencer, and with culture it is the same, and so the word is not in the bright lexicon of pioneers. All of their service is of the Connecticut variety—if you need things, they have them for sale. And so we get the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... defence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind. "The first requisite," said Herbert Spencer, "is a good animal," and not even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal—the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268} concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring—from becoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... reason has no power against the enchantment. Out of Nature's mystery, somehow or other, this strange magic suddenly illuminates the senses of a man; then vanishes again, as noiselessly as it came. It is a very ghostly thing, and can not be explained by any theory not of a very ghostly kind. Even Herbert Spencer has devoted his reasoning to a new theory about it. I need not go further in this particular than to tell you that in a certain way passion is now thought to have something to do with other lives than the present; in short, it is a kind of organic memory of relations that existed in thousands ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... time. To the task they brought genius, scholarship, and a capacity for hard work and patient research. In each of these qualities they were supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception, which place him in a class by himself. ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... sonnets to an eye-brow? Or Aristotle singing to a maiden with his lute? Imagine wise old Plato, with his pale and massive high-brow. Wrinkling it by thinking how his love he'd prosecute; Do you think Professor Agassiz learned all he knew by sighing? Or that Mr. Herbert Spencer thought out ethics at a ball? If our own lamented Emerson of love had been a-dying, We never should have heard of his ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of Human Character itself, we find that it "asserts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and social inequality"; and the author then proceeds at some length to show how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, "if there be such a thing as a social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Herbert Spencer's, in his book on Sociology, which has often helped me in dealing with great moral ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... 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, their relations ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... on the part of the listener? Does the extreme materializing of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those without a sense of humor—or rather with a sense of humor?—or, except, possibly to those who might excuse it, as Herbert Spencer might by the theory that the sensational element (the sensations we hear so much about in experimental psychology) is the true pleasurable phenomenon in music and that the mind should not be allowed to interfere? Does the success of program music depend more upon the program than ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... made to my discourse that I have considered our student as possessing the purse of Fortunatus and have lost sight of Herbert Spencer's doctrine that a very important part of education is to fit a man to acquire the means of living. I may reply that there are a number of Harvard students who will not have to work for their bread and whose parents would be glad to have them follow the course that I have recommended. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... of Western knowledge, literature, laws? Yes! Is that all? Are you to send shirting and not the Gospel? Are you to send muskets that will burst, and gin that is poison, and not Christianity? Are you to send Shakespeare, and Milton, and modern science, and Herbert Spencer, and not Evangelists and the Gospels? Are you to send the code of English law and not Christ's law of love? Are you to send godless Englishmen, 'through whom the name of God is blasphemed amongst the Gentiles,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow, darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... writer in The Daily Mail had converted his suspicion to a certainty. He proposed to deal with the matter more fully in an imaginary dialogue between KLINGSOR and Sir OSWALD STOLL (who was a devout follower of HERBERT SPENCER) which would shortly appear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... 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 of a Great ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... gas-fitter of Sociological tastes. He classes Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, and Lombroso as light literature. He also helps us with our young criminals. I should ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... talked a good deal about Claudius, they called on the Countess the same afternoon, and there, sure enough, was the Swede, sitting by the Countess's side in the garden, and expounding the works of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Barker and the Duke remained half an hour, and Claudius would have gone with them, but Margaret insisted upon finishing the chapter, so ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... classified on the basis of any single function, it must be classified on the basis of product. Thus by selecting essential function as a basis when possible, and resulting effect when the functional basis is not possible, one may approximate to the correct classification described by Herbert Spencer as follows: "A true classification includes in each class those objects that have more characteristics in common with one another than any of them have with ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have but little to record for some six thousand years—either in religion, morals, or physique—as making any changes in the history of that simple people which, in the mountainous regions of Ur, in ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... we have had or have the encyclopaedic intelligences like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert Spencer, who take all knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their province. The author of "Thoughts on the Universe" has something in common with these, but he appears also to have a good deal about him of what we call the humorist; that is, an individual ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... physical improbability that man, a walking animal, was descended from a climbing one, and the deplorable consequences which obliterate free will and necessitate the secularization of morals, as elaborated by Prof. Huxley's friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer. This part of the subject has a special interest to Americans, since the work in which Mr. Spencer's views are inculcated has been introduced as a manual in one of our oldest colleges, but its reproduction ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... the basis of equity. The sentiments by which they are determined have long and intricate roots in the prehistoric past; and we are yet very far from the millennial condition of absolute equality between the sexes. According to Herbert Spencer there is a hereditary transmission of qualities which are confined exclusively to the male, and of others which are confined to the female; and these are the results of the primitive environments and conditions ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... generation scarcely two naturalists in the world could state the whole problem of the theory exactly alike;—on all these accounts the theory of natural selection, or of the "survival of the fittest," to use the phrase of Herbert Spencer, became in the latter decades of ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... extinction 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 ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... frivolous," said 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 her without loss ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... "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 homogeneity ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... 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 Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Irish statesman of his day. He was undoubtedly ambitious of success in the grand style. But with his ambition went the mood of Ecclesiastes, which reminded him of the vanity of ambition. In his youth he adhered to Herbert Spencer's much-quoted saying: "What I need to realize is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything I can do, and how infinitely important it is that I should do it." But, while with Spencer this was a call to action, with Kettle it was rather a call ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... serious business of life. It is said that boys will be boys; and one can only add one wishes they would. Boys really want to be manly, and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this very dangerous and overstraining aspiration. All the people who have really worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as earnestly as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placed on the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying every day "Run ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... that of faith, and cleave an impassable chasm between the human and the divine intelligence. From this unfavorable ground his orthodox followers, Mansel and Mozley, defended with ability but poor success their Christianity against Herbert Spencer and his disciples, who also accepted the same theories, but followed them out to their legitimate ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... I 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
... of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his Synthetic Philosophy, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... men a new interest in religion. The intricacies of social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, "nine-points of belief." The social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts have been touched with a passion for social righteousness. A recent historian of the ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... 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
... between science and the Bible, but no such conflict exists. If there is any contradiction, it is not between the statements of Scripture and the facts of science, but between the false interpretations of Scripture and the immature conclusions of science. Herbert Spencer was right ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... for some time shown that there is coming to the front a number of writers of considerable intellectual power on the leading social and religious problems to which so many able thinkers are devoting themselves now-a-days. Herbert Spencer has his disciples and defenders, who prove themselves no contemptible adversaries of the orthodox school of religion. Very few of us probably sympathize with these modern iconoclasts who would destroy all motive for right doing in this world, by breaking ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... much said about profit, about advantage. "Reading," said Bacon, "maketh a full man," and reading has been justified a thousand times on this famous plea. But, some one else, I forget who, says, "You may as well expect to become strong by always eating, as wise by always reading." Herbert Spencer was once blamed by a friend for reading so little. Spencer replied, "If I read as much as you do, I should know as little as you do." Too many of the eulogies of books are utilitarian. A book has been termed "the home traveller's ship or horse," ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Egyptians," complaining of their robberies, and requiring them to depart the realm. In the same year first appeared the celebrated Act for the punishment of beggars and vagabonds and forbidding beggary, and requiring them to labor or be whipped. Herbert Spencer states in his "Descriptive Sociology" that it punishes with loss of an ear the third conviction for joining a trades-union, which, if true, would justify much of the bitterness of modern labor unions against the common law. The provision evidently referred to (22 Henry ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... forward on the 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, ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... of one's notes preparatory to writing will aid accuracy of statement and of presentation needs little argument. To paraphrase Herbert Spencer's words on reading: A reporter has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available. To recognize and interpret the facts recorded in his notes requires part of his power; to strike in ordered sequence the typewriter keys that will put those facts on paper requires an additional part; ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... Hering-Butler doctrine of continued personality from generation to generation, and of the working of unconscious memory throughout; and points out that, while this is implicit in much of the teaching of Herbert Spencer, Romanes, and others, it was nowhere—even after the appearance of "Life and Habit"—explicitly recognised by them, but, on the contrary, masked by inconsistent statements and teaching. Not Luck but Cunning, not ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... 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
... simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental method is to be applied ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... we may all be at our ease. A capital notion. Julian, sit down, write a note asking her to come to tea on Thursday, in the flat. I will show her my pictures, and you shall talk to her of Huxley and of Herbert Spencer." ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Herbert Spencer said that all the universe is in motion. So it is—and all perfect motion is rhythm. Part of rhythm is rest. Rest follows activity all through nature. Instances: day and night; spring—summer—autumn—winter; a period of rest between breaths; an instant of complete rest between heart ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Empire can 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
... in a carriage that would not be out of place in the Parks of London or Paris; and at Court ceremonies European dress is de rigueur. English is taught in all the better-class schools, and at the Universities the works of such authors as Bacon, Locke, Macaulay, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, are in constant request with the students. In short, on every side evidence is afforded, that be it for better or for worse, the old order is fast changing and giving ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... great forces of attraction and repulsion. Electricity and magnetism are but manifestations of it. This is the power or force which brings about that "continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations" which is the essence of life according to Herbert Spencer, and that "continuous adjustment of external relations to internal relations" which is the basis of transmigration of souls or punarjanmam (re-birth) according to the doctrines of the ancient ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Herbert Spencer was born at Derby, in England, in 1820. He was taught by his father who was a teacher, and by his uncle, a clergyman. At the age of seventeen he became a civil engineer, but about eight years later abandoned the profession because he believed it to be overcrowded. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... change in their number, kind and arrangement. Atom groups as decomposition products are constantly given off from it, and in return it receives from without other atom groups with which it regenerates its substance or increases in amount. All definitions of life convey this idea of activity. Herbert Spencer says, "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external conditions." The molecules of the substances forming the living material are large, complex and unstable, and as such they constantly tend to pass from the complex to the simple, from unstable to stable equilibrium. ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... 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," ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... almost powerless to resist. Gambling is in itself evil, apart from its deadly effects. (a) It proposes to confer gain without merit, and to reward those who do not deserve a reward, (b) It proposes to benefit us while injuring our neighbor. "Benefit received," says Herbert Spencer in his Sociology, referring to gambling, "does not imply effort put forth; but the happiness of the winner involves the misery of the loser. This kind of action is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... 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 ultimate ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various |
