Show 116 STUDENT LIFE he was obliged to defend his position The student of Spencer must not study Spencer alone but also the position taken by his contemporaries toward his doctrine Of Spencer's private life but little has been said and his friends are anxiously awaiting his autobiography which is said to be forthcoming lie was never physically strong and not infrequently was his great work interrupted by periods of physical prostration As a boy he found the routine of school work extremely distasteful lie was inclined to the method of obtaining his information at first hand and in this matter was allowed to follow his own bent lie never entered college chiefly because of his disregard for the qualifications required for admission In later life lie was equally indifferent to the honors which these same colleges whose entrance requirements he did not care to pass offered to bestow upon him At the age of 17 he began the practice of civil engineering and that profession became indebted to him for several contributions lie exhibited exceptional ingenuity and inventive power and ordinary obstacles did not long baffle him He early became interested in sociological problems as well as natural science and mathematics At the age of thirty he published his “Social Statics” consisting mainly of a protest against what he considered undue interference and restraint by the state in the natural It tendencies of the individual was not until i860 when he was forty years old that he announced to his friends his great purpose in life namely a unification of all knowledge In other words he was desirous of reducing the activities of the universe to a final analysis by outlining a science or philosophy which should embrace all the He would reduce special sciences philosophy to a scientific basis merge what had in religion been regarded as the supernatural with the natural and from a vast accumulation of evidence draw certain conclusions regarding the know-abl- e universe or rather the limits of man's knowledge of the universe The extent to which he carried out this stupendous task can be learned only by a careful study of a six or eight thousand page work which he called his “Synthetic Philosophy” As above suggested we must also study the conditions of his time and the frantic attacks of the clergy as its own dogmatic theories of the universe and its activities began Some of his to be undermined critics sav that while he advocated the inductive method and decried any a priori doctrine he himself It is used the deductive method true that he was unlike his worthy Darwin Charles contemporary who by the way was a constant inspiration to Spencer and who after accumulating a vast pile of biological facts proceeded to adopt one or another of the current hypotheses for their explanation discarding one after another as inadequate until finally lie found a satisfactory explanation in the doctrine of evolution |