opposed.[1] Young Spencer was kept at home till he was just fourteen, thus reaping the advantage of his father's personal training and attention, and breathing an intellectual atmosphere unusually clear and stimulating. He was then placed in charge of his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, at that time perpetual curate of the parish of Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath. With this relative, who, it should be said, though an Episcopal clergyman, was a vigorous thinker and an energetic social reformer, he spent three years, making little of Greek Testament and Latin grammar, but manifesting extraordinary originality in the mathematical and mechanical studies to which a portion of his attention was devoted.
The design at this period entertained by Thomas Spencer, himself an academic honors man and to a certain extent an advocate of classical culture, of sending Herbert to Cambridge, was gradually relinquished as impracticable, and Spencer thus adds another to the long list of English leaders of thought who owe nothing directly to one or other of the great institutions of learning. On leaving Hinton the lad returned to his father's house, where he spent what was, to outward seeming, an idle and profitless year. Then, after a brief experiment in teaching, he made his real start in life in a profession to which the bias of his interests and the line of his studies alike pointed—that of the civil engineer. This was in the autumn of 1837. It was then the early days of the railroad excitement, and for a time the career he had chosen continued to offer a promising field. But presently the tide of activity ebbed gradually away, and after eight or ten years of intermittent work Spencer finally abandoned a calling in which he now saw little chance of substantial success, and thus at twenty-six found himself but slightly advanced toward a definite settlement in life.
Meanwhile, the expansion of his thought had already begun. At the age of twenty, while engaged on the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, he had read Lyell's Principles of Geology, and had espoused what was then known as the Development Hypothesis; accepting the Lamarckian view (combated by Lyell) so far as to believe in the evolution of species, but rejecting all the great Frenchman's theories save that of the adaptation of the organism to its environment by the inheritance of acquired characters. His first piece of philosophical reasoning had also seen the light. In 1842 he had contributed to a paper called The Nonconformist a series of letters, subsequently revised and reissued in pamphlet form, on The Proper Sphere of Govern-
- ↑ In this and a few other matters I am able, through the kindness of Mr. Spencer himself, to correct not only some current misapprehensions, but also several errors of detail in the biographical chapter in my Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
