HERBERT SPENCER AND HIS WORK. 443 



"whicli, for a number of years, "he was slowly feeling his way to an 

 answer. In liis earliest publication the Letters on the Proper 

 Sphere of Government there was already implied the belief that 

 societies are not manufactured, but grow; and it was from the 

 side of natural law, therefore, that this question of progress was 

 at once approached. It was in the pages of Social Statics that he 

 elaborated his first reply. There, borrowing from Coleridge the 

 theory that Coleridge in turn had derived from German specula- 

 tion that life is " a tendency toward individuation " he under- 

 took to show that it is in the fulfillment of this tendency that all 

 progress will be found to consist. Individuation, then, was the 

 master-principle of his thought. But, examined closely, this tend- 

 ency toward individuation resolves itself into two closely related 

 processes : one making for more and more sharply defined sepa- 

 rateness ; the other for increasing unity of organization. Uni- 

 versal specialization, with resulting development of complexity, 

 represents one side of the movement we call progress ; increasing 

 interdependence among the specialized parts of the organism rep- 

 resents the other. 



Progress, therefore or, to substitute the proper word, evolu- 

 tion was already recognized by Mr. Spencer as a double-sided 

 process, comprising diii'erentiation, with consequent growth in 

 complexity, and integration, with consequent growth in unifica- 

 tion. But though this second-named element unification was 

 never entirely lost sight of by him, and is given clear statement, 

 for example, in the essays on The Philosophy of Style and The 

 Genesis of Science, it was upon the former element differentia- 

 tion that for a time his attention was fixed. Taking this prin- 

 ciple by itself, and detaching it from all other considerations, he 

 attempted, in his essay on Progress : its Law and Cause, to ex- 

 pand it into a complete theory of universal evolution. In this he 

 was helped by von Baer's law, with which he had become ac- 

 quainted in 1852 " that the series of changes gone through dur- 

 ing the development of a seed into a tree, or an ovum into an 

 animal, constitute an advance from homogeneity of structure to 

 heterogeneity of structure." Overlooking the principle of inte- 

 gration, Mr. Spencer announces this generalization as his text. 

 " We propose," he writes, in the early part of his essay, " to show 

 that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress." In 

 other words, evolution is made to consist wholly in the increase 

 of complexity in the transformation of the homogeneous into 

 the heterogeneous by successive differentiations. 



Satisfied that he had now reached not only a law of evolution, 

 but also ilie law of evolution, Mr. Spencer, when he began work 

 on the Synthetic Philosophy, proceeded to elaborate his thesis in 

 the first edition of First Principles. Further thought, however. 



