Herbert Spencer / by J. Arthur Thomson.

  • John Arthur Thomson
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Herbert Spencer / by J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    27 2 reach the limits of their emotional strength, and the tension of joy or of sorrow, of delight in nature or love of kin becomes almost an oppression, then they sometimes become religious. When men reach the limit of their intellectual endeavours after clearness and unity and are baffled, they sometimes become religious. As Spencer was never at his wit’s end practically, and was born too good to be troubled by a sense of sin, and as he had a somewhat lukewarm emotional nature, and was singularly devoid of any poetical or mystical sense, he was not likely to approach religion by either the practical or the emotional path. The third path, reached by baffled intelligence, was more or less closed by Spencer’s postulate of the Unknow- able, though there was even in this some tinge of religious feeling. He had been brought up among those who held almost as an axiom to the belief that “ In the begin- ning God created the heaven and the earth,” but this never seems to have meant anything practically or emotionally to him, while as a cosmological statement it seemed quite unverifiable. Most thinkers have tried by searching to find out God, to find some way of thinking of the ultimate origin, nature, and purpose of things, but at an early age Herbert Spencer fore- closed this quest, and was quite comfortable in so doing, chiefly, it must be suspected, because it never appealed to him save as a purely intellectual puzzle. “ Nur was du tubist, das ist dein Eigenthumb’ Thus when he was twenty-six (1848) he wrote to his father, “ As regards ‘ the ultimate nature of things or origin of them,’ my position is simply that I know nothing about it, and never can know anything about it, and must be
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