An anti-imperialist accused of cosmic imperialism
Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist
The provocation depends on Spencer's opposition to political empire. In ‘Imperialism and Slavery,’ collected in Facts and Comments (1902), he describes Britain's coercion of the Boer republics, rejects the supposed nobility of subjecting other people, and argues that imperial mastery also diminishes freedom in the conquering society. His governing distinction is between voluntary federation and supremacy maintained by force. See the essay, §§1–4, in Roderick T. Long's online transcription, which identifies itself as a work in progress.
Chesterton transfers this political vocabulary into cosmology: humanity becomes a small nation whose independent worth is overridden by the superior magnitude of its surroundings. The charge is therefore an accusation of inconsistency between Spencer's politics and the spiritual effect Chesterton attributes to his philosophy. It should not be read as evidence that Spencer advocated British imperial expansion. Nor does the political essay establish Chesterton's separate allegation that Spencer taught an inference from astronomical size to human insignificance; that requires a further, specifically philosophical source.
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