Herbert Spencer is Steiner's representative of the philosophic West: the thinker who built philosophy entirely from natural science and foundered when he extended it to the social organism.
Herbert Spencer in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's representative figure of the philosophic West: the English thinker (1820 to 1903) who says an unconditional yes to natural science and builds his whole world view from concepts won at nature. In the lecture Anthroposophy and Philosophy (Berlin, 7 March 1922, in The Impulse for Renewal in Culture and Science, GA 81), Steiner places Spencer beside Hegel and Vladimir Soloviev as the three faces of the philosophic West, Centre, and East. Spencer's system founders, Steiner argues, at the social organism: a human community possesses no sensorium, no centralised nervous system, so concepts drawn from natural organisms cannot crown a philosophy of society. What follows is the Western split Steiner diagnoses, exact science on one side and untouched private belief on the other. Anthroposophy answers that split by developing scientific method itself into the spiritual, the bridge Spencer never attempted.
Herbert Spencer stands in Steiner's Berlin course of March 1922 as the man of the world, the philosopher who trusts observation and experiment so completely that religion gets sealed off as private belief. Steiner honours the rigour and names the limit: a philosophy built only from nature's concepts arrives cornered before society, and before the spirit. In Spencer the West hands its unanswered question on to Anthroposophy.
In Steiner's Own Words
We find in Spencer a personality who totally agrees with science and out of this agreement arrives at a conclusion: ‘This is the way in which all philosophic thought in the world must be won by natural science.’ So we see how Spencer searched in science to determine certain steps to understand concepts, like for example how matter is constantly contracting and expanding, differentiating and consolidating. He saw this for instance in plants, how the leaves spread out and how they drew together in the seed, and he tried to translate such concepts into clear scientific forms with which to create his world view. He even tried to think about the human community, the social organism, only in such a way in which his thoughts would be analogous to the natural organism. Here he suddenly became cornered.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading of Spencer did not stay in 1922. In 1997 the Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, expanded in his book Rocks of Ages (1999): science holds authority over the empirical realm of fact and theory, religion over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value, and the two magisteria should never touch. It is a courteous truce, and it is recognisably the settlement Steiner watched Herbert Spencer make a century earlier: exact science on one side, an untouchable region of belief on the other. Spencer had given the arrangement its warrant in First Principles (1862), where everything beyond scientific method was consigned to the Unknowable.
Steiner treats that settlement not as an error but as a symptom. The West's finest observational talent, he says in GA 81, produces half of reality, and the half it leaves out returns as a question nobody is permitted to ask scientifically. The Thalira synthesis: Spencer and NOMA are the same gesture at the two ends of a century, and Anthroposophy wagers the opposite gesture, that scientific method, transformed rather than transplanted, can cross into the region both settlements fence off. The practical entry point: notice where your own thinking flips from evidence to belief, and ask, as Steiner asked of Spencer, whether that border is a fact of the world or a habit of the West.
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