In 1937 Talcott Parsons could ask whether anyone still read Spencer and expect the question to answer itself. Two generations earlier the question would have been absurd, because he had answered a problem of scale that educated Britain could not get around. Geology had stretched the age of the earth past anything scripture could absorb, embryology and astronomy were each producing laws of their own, and theology still insisted that part of creation — the human soul above all — lay outside scientific explanation. What was missing was not another discovery but a frame large enough to hold the stars, the body, the mind and the state at once.
The man who supplied one had never attended a university. Herbert Spencer was taught science at home by a father who ran a school on Pestalozzi's methods, served as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, and passed on a suspicion of every authority going. A vicar uncle finished the job with some mathematics, some physics, enough Latin for easy texts, and free trade. Spencer spent the railway boom of the late 1830s as a civil engineer, then sub-edited The Economist from 1848 to 1853. He read narrowly, mostly what he already wanted to think about. In place of a training he had a conviction: nothing is exempt from natural law.
The law he proposed, set out in First Principles in 1862, fits in a sentence. Everything develops from the simple and uniform toward the complex and specialised, and the specialised parts grow more dependent on one another as they separate. A cloud of gas condenses into a solar system; an egg becomes a body with organs; a village of interchangeable labourers becomes a society of specialists who cannot feed themselves alone — one process, at every scale. He sketched it in an essay in 1857, two years before Darwin published, and in 1858 drew up a programme to demonstrate it across biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. He allowed twenty years; it took forty, and everything else he had.
It worked for a generation, on readers who had lost a creed and wanted a replacement science would not embarrass. Spencer sold over a million copies in his lifetime; his American publisher alone shifted 368,755 between 1860 and 1903 — this from an author whose Principles of Psychology was printed in 251 copies in 1855 and had not sold them all until June 1861. Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society is largely an argument with him.
After reading Darwin, Spencer produced in Principles of Biology in 1864 the four words now universally misattributed to Darwin: survival of the fittest. Wallace urged Darwin to adopt the phrase, and he did, in the fifth edition of the Origin, in 1869. The phrase has cost Spencer more than it earned him. He took natural selection grudgingly; the mechanism he believed in was Lamarck's — habits, faculties, even moral feeling, built up by use and inherited by one's children. His politics stood on that: if consequences shape character and character is heritable, shielding people from consequences damages the species, hence his opposition to poor relief, compulsory education, factory safety laws, tax-funded libraries. When biology discarded use-inheritance, the argument lost its floor.
He hardened as he aged. Social Statics (1851) was written by a radical who wanted votes for women and the land taken into common ownership; by the 1880s he was campaigning alongside landowners against Gladstone's reformers, and The Man Versus the State (1884) called their programme a new Toryism heading for slavery. One position never moved. He opposed empire and militarism all his life, and his attacks on the Boer War lost him readers at home.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 and died the following year. The verdict is disputed now: one line of scholarship treats him as an apologist for capitalism, another argues he was a liberal utilitarian caricatured first by G. E. Moore and then by Richard Hofstadter, and neither has carried the field. What is not disputed is the reach. William James credited Spencer with freeing the speculative minds of doctors, engineers and lawyers who would never have opened a philosopher otherwise.