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Herbert Spencer: 162 quotes4 likes

“Surely if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.”

Herbert Spencer

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

“Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. IV, The Relativity of All Knowledge
First Principles (1862)

“Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.”

Herbert Spencer

Source: The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part II: The Inductions of Ethics, Ch. 1, The Confusion of Ethical Thought

“He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter.”

Herbert Spencer

Ethics (New York:1915), § 72, pp. 193-194
The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part I: The Data of Ethics

“If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.”

Herbert Spencer

Ethics (New York:1915), § 68, p. 187
The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part I: The Data of Ethics

“Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.”

Herbert Spencer

Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891)

“Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
First Principles (1862)

“Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
Social Statics (1851)

“Evil perpetually tends to disappear.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
Social Statics (1851)

“Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.”

Herbert Spencer

On the Origin and Function of Music
Essays on Education (1861)

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

Herbert Spencer

Commonly attributed to Spencer, information provided in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes and The Survival of a Fitting Quotation. (2005) by Michael StGeorge http://anonpress.org/spencer/, indicates the attribution may have originated with the book [w:The_Big_Book_(Alcoholics_Anonymous)|Alcoholics Anonymous]]. It was used exactly as written above in the personal stories section of the first edition in 1939 and in 'Appendix II: Spiritual Experience' of all subsequent editions. : "Contempt prior to examination" was a phrase used by William Paley, the 18th-century English Christian apologist. In A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), he wrote: ::The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolved into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument, or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination. :Paley's characterization of non-believers was later modified and used by other religious authors who uniformly attributed their words to Paley. In Anglo-Israel or, The British Nation: The lost Tribes of Israel (1879), Rev. William H. Poole may have been the first to render the quotation in its more familiar and enduring form: ::There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination. :Various authors following Rev. Poole would offer new iterations of the quotation into the early decades of the 20th century. Most of these credited William Paley, but by the early 1930s the first obscure publications to falsely attribute this quote to Spencer emerged. Its usage for decades since as a maxim in Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step recovery community has popularized its erroneous association with Herbert Spencer. Misattributed

“That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.”

Herbert Spencer

Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology http://books.google.com/books?id=ovgEAAAAYAAJ& see p. 473 The Development Hypothesis (1852)

“The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws
Social Statics (1851)

“Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)

“Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
First Principles (1862)

“We have, indeed, in the part taken by many scientific men in this controversy of "Law versus Miracle," a good illustration of the tenacious vitality of superstitions. Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. …Whence …this notion of "special creations"…Why, after rejecting all the rest of the story, he should strenuously defend this last remnant of it, as though he had received it on valid authority, he would be puzzled to say.”

Herbert Spencer

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

“The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.”

Herbert Spencer

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science
First Principles (1862)

“Every cause produces more than one effect.”

Herbert Spencer

On Progress: Its Law and Cause
Essays on Education (1861)

“With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.”

Herbert Spencer

The Principles of Biology, Vol. II (1867), Part VI: Laws of Multiplication, ch. 8: Human Population in the Future
Principles of Biology (1864)

“The supporters of the Development Hypothesis… can show that any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions.”

Herbert Spencer

They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.
The Development Hypothesis (1852)