Talk:Herbert Spencer

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[edit] Sources

I've restructured this page to collect the quotes by source and to provide the complete source titles, where I could identify them, which also allowed removal of a lot of redundant source data. However, there are a few problems I ran into:

• Essays citations are ambiguous, as there are at least two Spencer publications that feature this term, and they may not even include all his essays.
• Page numbers aren't very helpful without exact publication editions. Specifically, the page numbers for "Over-Legislation" may be extremely inaccurate, given that there are two Essays publications (The Man versus the State and Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative) that include this essay.
• I could not find a Spencer essay called "The Americans".
• Some publication dates are suspect, as I found different years in different citations.

Would the editor who contributed these quotes please add the specific bibliographical information for their sources in the new References section? Thank you for your assistance. — Jeff Q (talk) 19:23, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Source of quote

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

This Spencer quote is included in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience". I have been unable to determine exactly where this quote comes from other than that book.