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It was at Powick that Spencer first began to have a conscience about his very defective spelling (his _morals_ had always been _sans reproche_) and to take an interest in style. It was at Powick, too, in a physical and social environment that suited him, that Spencer invented his
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Velocimeter, a little instrument for showing by inspection the velocity of an engine, and two or three other devices. He had inherited his father's constructive imagination, and his father's discipline had increased it. The father wrote on July 3rd, 1840,
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I am glad you find your inventive powers are beginning to develop themselves. Indulge a grateful feeling for it. Recollect, also, the never-ceasing pains taken with you on that point in early life. And the son remarks gratefully that this conveys a lesson to educators; the inherited endowment is much, but the fostering of it is also much.
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Culture of the humdrum sort, given by those who ordinarily pass for teachers, would have left the faculty undeveloped. On the whole, however, Spencer attached most importance to the hereditary endowment, for he goes on to say that Edison,
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was a self-trained man, and that Sir Benjamin Baker,
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It was at Powick, too, that place of many inventions, that Herbert Spencer (aetat. 20) made the intimate acquaintance of an
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young lady, who
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Luckily or unluckily, the young lady was engaged; and Spencer remarks,
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It was pretty clear that had it not been for the pre-engagement our intimacy would have grown into something serious. This would have been a misfortune, for she had little or nothing and my prospects were none of the brightest.
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of bridge-building at Bromsgroove and Defford, of
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too, for he dreamt of making a fortune by successful inventions, of testing engines, and other routine duties,--a life involving considerable wear and tear which began to tell on Spencer's eyes. During this period he renewed his youth by collecting fossils, and
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as he afterwards said,
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It was then that the purchase of Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ led him, curiously enough, to adopt the supposition that organic forms have arisen, not by special creation, but by progressive modifications, physically caused and inherited. In spite of Lyell's chapter refuting Lamarck's views concerning the origin of species, it was with Lamarck that Spencer, at the age of twenty, sided. The idea of natural genesis was in harmony with the general idea of the order of Nature towards which Spencer had been growing.
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My belief in it never afterwards wavered, much as I was, in after years, ridiculed for entertaining it.
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The incident illustrates the general truth that the acceptance of this or that particular belief, is in part a question of the type of mind. There are some minds to which the marvellous and the unaccountable strongly appeal, and which even resent any attempt to bring the genesis of them within comprehension. There are other minds which, partly by nature and partly by culture, have been led to dislike a quiescent acceptance of the unintelligible; and which push their explorations until causation has been carried to its confines. To this last order of minds mine, from the beginning, belonged.
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To apply day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of increasing ability, was not in him, though he could work hard when the end in view was definite or large enough. Moreover an article in the _Philosophical Magazine_ led to an immediate abandonment of the idea of an electro-magnetic engine.
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Thus, within a month of my return to Derby, it became manifest that, in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp, I had left behind a place of vantage from which there might probably have been ascents to higher places.
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The emotion produced in me was, I think, a mixture of joy and awe,--the awe resulting from the manifestation of size and power, and the joy, I suppose, from the sense of freedom given by limitless expanse.
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The journey left its mark because, in the course of it, I found that practice in modelling had increased my perception of beauty in form. A good-looking girl, who was one of our fellow-passengers for a short interval, had remarkably fine eyes: and I had much quiet satisfaction in observing their forms.
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Every day in every life there is a budding out of incidents severally capable of leading to large results; but the immense majority of them end as buds, only now and then does one grow into a branch, and very rarely does such a branch outgrow and overshadow all others. The visit to Hinton led to political conversations with Thomas Spencer, to a letter of introduction to the editor of _The Nonconformist_, to the letters on
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The Proper Sphere of Government,
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The Complete Suffrage Movement. For a youth of twenty-two he took a big plunge into politics.
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It produced in me a high tide of mental energy ; the signature on a draft democratic bill
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The printer's bill was £10 2s. 6d., and the publisher's payment to me on the first year's sales was fourteen shillings and threepence!