But at that time everything would prove everything: nothing could be a fact, for nothing would be falsifiable. It is understandable that by 1874 physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait insisted on precise definitions of "force" and rested belief on observation and experiment rather than on Spencer's promise of the evolution of intuitive perceptions.
Spencer was encouraged in both his assurance that the sciences were the knowledge most worth having and in his belief in self-evident and radical truths by his father, William George Spencer. Born in Derby on 27 April 1820 to Harriet Holmes Spencer, Herbert early became so painfully aware of his mother's subservience to his father, a martinet, that the son later gave it as a reason for his never marrying. A private schoolmaster, the elder Spencer was honorary secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, founded by Erasmus Darwin in 1783 and famous in the field of English amateur science. He faithfully attended Quaker meeting Sunday mornings and practiced a fifteenth-century rebel custom, continued by the Quakers, of wearing a hat in the presence of authority. The father was a patient tutor and an always interested correspondent with his son, teaching him not to puzzle but to delight in his intuitions.
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