Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/734

 710 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

his books to pay their bills. The articles which have appeared since his death afford meager details of his private life. His will gives vague glimpses of an intimate sort. The autobiography is eagerly awaited.

Spencer's personality discloses a significant dualism. In certain traits e. g., persistence and independence almost typically British, he was in the main detached and isolated from the fundamental national life. Born in a dissenting family, but never sensitive to reli- gious feeling; influenced, but not made zealous, by the political radicalism of father and uncle; tutored privately outside school and University; early thinking for himself about scientific and political problems, Spencer was relatively untouched by those great conven- tionalizing forces, the class system, the established church, the univer- sities, and political parties.

The unconventionally of Spencer's early education, his freely gratified interest in nature, his training and experience as a civil engineer, his political and economic speculations, his brief editorial career, his unrestrained reading and private study, all conspired to give his genius diversified and flexible means of growth and expres- sion. He had inventive powers of no mean order, as his railway velocimeter and scheme of composite photography testify. His use of systematized information and his habit of cumulative illustration display his vast resources both of private study and of organized investigation. His reading was, however, almost wholly within the limits of his philosophical field. He read Shakespeare with pleasure, but he had little patience with fiction, especially that of the analytical type. He even spoke slightingly of the work of his early friend George Eliot, to whom he is rumored to have first suggested this form of writing.

Spencer is described by a friend as having a "tyrannical con- science." He once spent a whole day in seeing justice done a passen- ger from whom an omnibus conductor demanded a fare which had already been paid. In Montreal, when it was proposed to drive past the new palace of a man who had made a fortune by notoriously dis- reputable means, Spencer not only refused to go, but on the spot he dilated upon the disastrous consequences of showing honor to such a person. In his intense political individualism Spencer stood like a rock against every form of collective encroachment, and, in spite of all traditions of loyalty and patriotism, he mercilessly exposed the blunders and inefficiency of government in general, and of the British government in particular. In time of war Spencer stood boldly and