Herbert Spencer(1820–1903)

Herbert Spencer was born at Exeter Row in Derby, Derbyshire, on the twenty-seventh of April 1820, only surviving child of George Spencer, a Wesleyan-Quaker schoolmaster of the Derby Friends' Meeting, and Harriet Holmes. He was educated principally by his father and from twelve by his Anglican-clergyman uncle Thomas Spencer at Hinton Charterhouse in Somerset, took no formal university or grammar-school education, and trained between sixteen and twenty-six as a civil-engineering apprentice on the London and Birmingham Railway and the London and South-Western Railway. He published his first journalistic article in The Nonconformist in 1842 at twenty-two on the proper sphere of government, took the sub-editorship of The Economist in 1848 in his twenty-eighth year, and through the next five years built the philosophical-and-political-journalism reputation on which the rest of his career was built.

He published his first book Social Statics in 1851 in his thirty-first year, the foundational statement of his political philosophy of individual liberty within an evolutionary social-organism framework. Through the 1850s he developed the central insight on which the rest of his life's work would rest: the principle that the same evolutionary law (the transformation of homogeneous undifferentiated systems into heterogeneous specialised systems through the action of selection across time) underlies the development of every domain of natural-and-human reality from the formation of the solar system through the differentiation of biological species through the development of human language, ethics, political institutions, religion, art and the sciences. He published the principle as the System of Synthetic Philosophy across the next forty years in the nine-volume integrated treatise that became the foundational mid-Victorian work of philosophical synthesis.

The System of Synthetic Philosophy ran to: First Principles (1862), Principles of Biology (1864 to 1867), Principles of Psychology (the 1855 first edition expanded into the two-volume 1870 to 1872 second edition), Principles of Sociology (1876 to 1896 in three volumes), and Principles of Ethics (1879 to 1893 in two volumes). The Principles of Biology of 1864 contains, in Volume One Chapter Twelve, the phrase he coined to describe the central evolutionary mechanism: this survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr Darwin has called natural selection. Darwin adopted Spencer's phrase into the fifth edition of Origin of Species (1869) and the sixth edition (1872) as a more felicitous expression of the central principle, and the phrase has been the popular shorthand for the mechanism of biological evolution ever since.

His writings sold in the foundational period of his career on an unprecedented scale for serious philosophical-and-scientific prose: by 1903 the System of Synthetic Philosophy had sold over a million copies in English alone and was the foundational philosophical text translated into every major European language. Spencer was the first English-language philosopher to be translated systematically into Mandarin Chinese (the Yan Fu translations of the 1890s and 1900s, which made Spencer the central single foreign philosophical influence on the late-Qing reform movement and the early Chinese Republic), and his Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1861) was the standard nineteenth-century educational-theory text in the United States, Australia and the Russian Empire. He refused every honour offered to him: he declined a knighthood, declined eight honorary doctorates, and is the only major nineteenth-century English-language philosopher to have refused election to the Athenaeum Club.

He continued working at the System until the year of his death, published the Autobiography in 1904 (posthumous), and died at his Brighton lodgings on the eighth of December 1903 in his eighty-fourth year. He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes interred in Highgate Cemetery directly opposite the grave of Karl Marx, the philosophical contrast that the late-Victorian press took as the central single allegorical positioning of nineteenth-century social thought. The Spencer name in modern English-language philosophy and sociology carries the weight of the nine-volume System and the coining of the phrase survival of the fittest.