The world is keeping the centenary of Herbert Spencer's birth. He was a man of prodigious learning and of an even more prodigious industry. For a whole generation he exercised a greater influence over educated opinion than any other man of his day; nor was this influence confined to his own country; it extended from Moscow to New York, and when the news reached Paris that he had passed away, the Chambers adjourned out of respect to his attainments. Yet to-day, reading the memoirs, the appreciations, the criticisms, which the centenary has brought forth, it is impossible not to be impressed with the tone of hesitation that pervades them all. On such occasions the writer is expected to do the best for his subject. In the present instance, however, the eulogy is half-hearted, and the lack of robust appreciation marked. Still none of the critics seem quite to understand why. Yet the reason is, surely, perfectly plain. Herbert Spencer's success lay in the fact that his books were the reflection of his age. It was the age of the evolutionist and the agnostic. Macausland had dared to deal critically with Genesis, and though Oxford had cheered Disraeli when he declared himself on the side of the angels, London was unquestionably on the side of Darwin and the apes.
The world has traveled far since the mighty volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy were first given to it. It has been ranking itself ever more and more, without any Disraelian flippancy, on the side of the angels; and, as a consequence, it finds itself further and further every day from the Spencerian theory of the "unknowable," and more and more out of sympathy with the Spencerian contempt for metaphysics. It is hastening, in short, with giant strides, away from agnosticism, in an almost unconscious search for divine Science and divine metaphysics, and this for the simple reason that the teaching of Christian Science is forcing itself more and more steadily upon its attention, and proving more and more clearly after the lapse of twenty centuries, that, though heaven and earth may pass away, the words of the great Galilean teacher have not passed away.
One other thing Herbert Spencer's philosophy forced upon him. It was his conclusions with respect to character. Acquired characters were, he insisted, inherited. Such a theory scientifically places the cart before the horse. Moral codes do not produce moral sentiments. For twenty centuries the Christian world has been trained on the moral code of the Bible, without producing the effect demanded by Christ Jesus himself, namely, the repetition of the works accomplished by him. The outcome of that very training, on the contrary, was in the person of Spencer himself, an agnostic. The fact is as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 327 of Science and Health: "Reason is the most active human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments and awaken the man's dormant sense of moral obligation, and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense and the grandeur and bliss of a spiritual sense, which silences the material or corporeal."
