Some lefty blogger somewhere is making fun of me for my post asking to talk to a Herbert Spencer expert (scroll down). The talking points found in the email are generally the same: “Lazy hack,” “why not cut and paste?” etc etc.

These are clearly from people who don’t know much about writing books or about the prolific Spencer. None of the Herbert Spencer experts I talked to yesterday thought it unreasonable that I not read the multivolume Principles of Biology, the multivolume Descriptive Sociology etc simply to confirm what I’ve learned from reading a lot of secondary literature and a fair bit of the relevent work by Spencer. I’m trying to nail down a few pages in a chapter about a discrete aspect of his thought, not write a book on Spencer himself. That’s why I wanted to query some experts on the subject. Sigh. That’s why we have experts, or didn’t you know?