Herbert Spencer - Human Quotes

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The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.

Herbert Spencer
If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

Herbert Spencer
Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Herbert Spencer
During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.

Herbert Spencer
Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.

Herbert Spencer
Surely if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Herbert Spencer
The genuine man of science, we say, can truly know how utterly beyond, not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature, and Life, and Thought are manifestations. Education

Herbert Spencer
Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.

Herbert Spencer
The conceptions which developing science gives of the grandeur of creation, as well as the constancy and irresistibleness of its Omnipresent Cause, make all feel the comparative littleness of human power...

Herbert Spencer
Either unknowingly or in spite of themselves, Nature leads men by purely personal motives to fulfil her ends: Nature being one of our expressions for the Ultimate Cause of things, and the end, remote when not proximate, being the highest form of human life.

Herbert Spencer
It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

Herbert Spencer
Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Herbert Spencer