Spencer's Love for George Eliot

Many men of genius are often so neurally unstable that they suffer from chronic neurasthenia, melancholia, hypochrondria, insomnia, excessive irritability, eccentricity, temporary insanity and other psychopathic afflictions. The names of Socrates, Paul, Lucretius, Caesar, Luther, Newton, Darwin, Comte, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and others readily come to mind. I believe the name of Herbert Spencer should be included. I shall give the facts which prove his neural instability and then offer a tentative explanation of his nervous breakdown.

This is what I mean by saying the genius is often “neurally unstable. “He is extremely sensitive to stimuli; he is capable of rapid, accurate, retentive responses; in a given time, he has many more experiences than an ordinary person, and, because of his neuro-muscular constitution, they mean much more to him. He has a higher metabolic rate than normal people: he can release and direct effectively much more nervous energy than they. In short, he is a better thinking machine—a very delicately adjusted, marvelously complex hairspring and hairtrigger sort of mechanism. Hence, the genius is in greater danger of functional disorders than the ordinary individual. It is the difference between a Swiss watch and a sundial.

It is well known that Herbert Spencer suffered a “nervous breakdown “in the summer of 1855 which rendered him incapable of scholarly work until the early months of 1857. It was a more serious thing for him than the mere “loss of eighteen months “(Autobiography, Vol. I, Ch. 38), for he never fully recovered; during the remainder of his life he was unable to sleep well, read much, talk animatedly, or work more than two hours a day. (Id., 580.)

The accepted explanation for this breakdown is overwork on the “Psychology. “I shall attempt a different, or at least, a complementary one. Why did Spencer work himself to physical and nervous exhaustion on “The Principles of Psychology “? He was a temperate man who boasted