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Tarde thinks that civilization results from an increase of similarity among the members of a group through generations of mutual imitation; here the movement of evolution is conceived as a progress towards homogeneity. Gothic architecture is surely more complex than that of the Greeks; but not necessarily a higher stage of artistic evolution. Spencer was too quick to assume that what was earlier in time was simpler in structure; he underrated the complexity of protoplasm, and the intelligence of primitive man.1 Finally, the definition fails to mention the very item which in most minds today is inalienably associated with the idea of evolution—namely, natural selection. Perhaps (imperfect though this too would be) a description of history as a struggle for existence and a survival of the fittest-of the fittest organisms, the fittest societies, the fittest moralities, the fittest languages, ideas, philosophies—would be more illuminating than the formula of incoherence and coherence, of homo- and heterogeneity, of dissipation and integration?

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"I am a bad observer of humanity in the concrete," says Spencer, "being too much given to wandering into the abstract.' This is dangerous honesty. Spencer's method, of course, was too deductive and à priori, very different from Bacon's ideal or the actual procedure of scientific thought. He had, says his secretary, "an inexhaustible faculty of developing à priori and à posteriori, inductive and deductive, arguments in support of any imaginable proposition; and the à priori arguments were probably prior to the others. Spencer began, like a scientist, with observation; he proceeded, like a scientist, to make hypotheses; but then, unlike a scientist, he resorted not to experiment, nor to impartial observation, but to the selective accumulation of favorable data. had no nose at all for "negative instances." Contrast the procedure of Darwin, who, when he came upon data unfav

1 Cf. Boas: The Mind of Primitive Man.

2 Autob., ii, 461.

3 Royce, 194,

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orable to his theory, hastily made note of them, knowing that they had a way of slipping out of the memory a little more readily than the welcome facts!

2. Biology and Psychology

In a foot-note to his essay on "Progress," Spencer candidly confesses that his ideas of evolution were based on Lamarck's theory of the transmissibility of acquired characters, and were not really an anticipation of Darwin, whose essential idea was the theory of natural selection. He is rather the philosopher of Lamarckianism, then, than the philosopher of Darwinism. He was almost forty when the Origin of Species appeared; and at forty, one's categories are hardened into immutability.

Aside from lesser difficulties, like the failure to reconcile his illuminating principle that reproduction decreases as development advances-with such facts as the higher rate of reproduction in civilized Europe as compared with savage peoples, the major defects of his biological theory are his reliance on Lamarck and his failure to find a dynamic conception of life. When he confesses that life "cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms," the "admission is fatal to his formula of evolution, to his definition of life, and to the coherence of the Synthetic Philosophy." The secret of life might better have been sought in the power of mind to adjust external to internal relations than in the almost passive adjustment of the organism to the environment. On Spencer's premises, complete adaptation would be death.

The volumes on psychology formulate rather than inform. What we knew is reshaped into an almost barbarously complex terminology, which obscures where it should clarify. The reader is so fatigued with formulas and definitions and questionable reductions of psychological facts to neural structures that he may fail to observe that the origin of mind and con1 Biology, i, 120.

2 J. A. Thomson, Herbert Spencer, p. 109.

sciousness is left quite unexplained. It is true that Spencer tries to cover up this gaping chasm in his system of thought by arguing that mind is the subjective accompaniment of nerve processes evolved mechanically, somehow, out of the primeval nebula; but why there should be this subjective accompaniment in addition to the neural mechanism, he does not say. And that, of course, is just the point of all psychology.

3. Sociology and Ethics

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Magnificent as the Sociology is, its 2000 pages give many an opening for attack. Running through it is Spencer's usual assumption that evolution and progress are synonymous, whereas it may well be that evolution will give to insects and bacteria the final victory in their relentless war with man. is not quite evident that the industrial state is either more pacific or more moral than the "militant" feudalism that preceded it. Athens' most destructive wars came long after her feudal lords had yielded power to a commercial bourgeoisie; and the countries of modern Europe seem to make war with blithe indifference as to whether they are industrial or not; industrial imperialism may be as militaristic as land-hungry dynasties. The most militaristic of modern states was one of the two leading industrial nations of the world. Further, the rapid industrial development of Germany seems to have been aided, rather than impeded, by state control of certain phases of transport and trade. Socialism is obviously a development not of militarism but of industrialism. Spencer wrote at a time when the comparative isolation of England made her pacifist (in Europe), and when her supremacy in commerce and industry made her a firm believer in free trade; he would have been shocked had he lived to see how readily the free trade theory would disappear along with commercial and industrial supremacy, and how the pacifism would disappear as soon as Germany's assault on Belgium threatened English isolation. And of course Spencer exaggerated the virtues of

the industrial régime; he was almost blind to the brutal exploitation that flourished in England before the state interfered to mitigate it; all that he could see "in the middle of our century, especially in England," was "a degree of individual freedom greater than ever before existed." No wonder that Nietzsche reacted in disgust from industrialism, and exaggerated, in his turn, the virtues of the military life.2

The analogy of the social organism would have driven Spencer into state socialism had his logic been more powerful than his feelings; for state socialism represents, in a far higher degree than a laissez-faire society, the integration of the heterogeneous. By the yard-stick of his own formula Spencer would have been compelled to acclaim Germany as the most highly evolved of modern states. He tried to meet this point by arguing that heterogeneity involves the freedom of the parts, and that such freedom implies a minimum of government; but this is quite a different note than that which we heard in "coherent heterogeneity." In the human body integration and evolution leave rather little freedom to the parts. Spencer replies that in a society consciousness exists only in the parts, while in the body consciousness exists only in the whole. But social consciousness-consciousness of the interests and processes of the group-is as centralized in society as personal consciousness is in the individual; very few of us have any "sense of the state." Spencer helped to save us from a regimental state socialism, but only by the sacrifice of his consistency and his logic.

And only by individualistic exaggerations. We must remember that Spencer was caught between two eras; that his political thinking had been formed in the days of laissez-faire, and under the influence of Adam Smith; while his later years were lived in a period when England was struggling to correct,

1 Sociology, iii, 607. Cf. The Study of Sociology, p. 335: "The testimony is that higher wages commonly result only in more extravagant living or in drinking to greater excess."

2 Cf. The Joyful Wisdom, sect. 40.

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by social control, the abuses of her industrial régime. He never tired of reiterating his arguments against stateinterference; he objected to state-financed education, or to governmental protection of citizens against fraudulent finance; 1 at one time he argued that even the management of war should be a private, and not a state, concern; 2 he wished, as Wells put it, "to raise public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national policy." He carried his MSS. to the printer himself, having too little confidence in a government institution to entrust them to the Post Office. He was a man of intense individuality, irritably insistent on being let alone; and every new act of legislation seemed to him an invasion of his personal liberty. He could not understand Benjamin Kidd's argument, that since natural selection operates more and more upon groups, in class and international competition, and less and less upon individuals, a widening application of the familyprinciple (whereby the weak are aided by the strong) is indispensable for the maintenance of group unity and power. Why a state should protect its citizens from unsocial physical strength and refuse protection against unsocial economic strength is a point which Spencer ignores. He scorned as childish the analogy of government and citizen with parent and child; but the real analogy is with brother helping brother. His politics were more Darwinian than his biology.

But enough of these criticisms. Let us turn back to the man again, and see in fairer perspective the greatness of his work.

IX. CONCLUSION

First Principles made Spencer almost at once the most famous philosopher of his time. It was soon translated into most of the languages of Europe; even in Russia, where it had to face and defeat a government prosecution.

1 Autob. ii, 5.

2 I, 239.

8 Collier, in Royce, 221.

He was ac

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