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Updated: October 28, 2003

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

"There are those to whom life under authority, with more or less of coercion, is both needful and wholesome, and in whom there is produced by it no distortion of moral attitude. There are others better fitted for self-regulation, less needing control, and to whom control is proportionately repugnant, and in whom by consequence, control is the cause of perpetual chafing and restiveness and a more or less abnormal state. All through my boyhood and up to the time I left home this was the case with me; and as soon as the restraints and the irritation consequent upon them were removed, a more healthful tone of feeling arose, and a beneficial change began, which had, it seems, at the date I name, become very marked. This trait of nature is evidently the same trait which I have just indicated in the description of my religious, or rather irreligious, condition of mind, as also in the tendencies above described to criticize the doings of those in authority, and to originate new plans or invent new appliances. Emotional nature is an all-important factor in the direction taken by intellectual activity. To discover, or to invent, implies a relatively large amount of self-confidence, and therefore a relatively smaller respect for authority; and this relatively small amount of reverence, which runs throughout the conduct towards human beings, is shown also in aversion to that current theory of the universe which makes it the product of a being who demands incessant homage."

Quoted in David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 490-91.