SPENCER AND DARWIN. 823 



or, as Mr. Spencer himself afterward called it, survival of the 

 fittest. Only, it is limited to the human race ; and it is not 

 recognized as an efficient cause of specific differentiation. As 

 Mr. Spencer himself remarks, the passage "shows how near one 

 may be to a great generalization without seeiDg it." Moreover, 

 Mr. Spencer here overlooks the important factor of spontaneous 

 variation, which forms the corner-stone of Darwin's discovery, 

 and which was also clearly perceived by Mr. Wallace. In short, 

 in Mr. Spencer's own words, the paragraph " contains merely a 

 passing recognition of the selective process, and indicates no sus- 

 picion of the enormous range of its effects, or of the conditions 

 under which a large part of its effects are produced." 



It is thus obvious not only that Mr. Spencer was a believer in 

 organic evolution long before the publication of Darwin's first 

 utterance on the subject, but also that he almost succeeded, like 

 Wallace, Wells, and Patrick Matthews, in anticipating the dis- 

 covery of natural selection. 



But, besides the misconception about Mr. Spencer's relation to 

 Darwin as regards organic evolution, there remains the far deeper 

 and more fatal misconception about his relation to Darwin as 

 regards evolution in general, viewed as a cosmical process. Most 

 people imagine, I gather, that Mr. Spencer is a philosopher who 

 has put into a higher and more abstract form Darwin's discov- 

 eries and theories. In short, they regard him as a disciple of 

 Darwin. And this brings me to the second of the two rectifi- 

 cations of public opinion which I promised above to attempt. 

 Nothing could be more absurdly untrue than to regard Mr. 

 Spencer as in any way or in either department a disciple of 

 Darwin's. In the first place, as regards organic evolution, he was 

 an avowed evolutionist long before the publication of Darwin's 

 first hint on the subject. He continued an evolutionist, in the 

 main on the same lines, after Darwin had brought out The Origin 

 of Species and its ancillary volumes. He adopted, it is true, the 

 theory of natural selection, as did every other evolutionist of his 

 time (except Mr. Samuel Butler), but he adopted it merely as one 

 among the factors of organic evolution, and, while valuing it 

 highly, he nevwr attributed to it the same almost exclusive impor- 

 tance as did Darwin himself certainly not the same quite exclu- 

 sive importance as has since been attached to it by the doctrinaire 

 school of Neo-Darwinians, who employ it as the sole key which 

 unlocks, in their opinion, all the problems of biology. On the 

 contrary, he has always steadily maintained the existence and 

 importance of other factors in organic evolution, and has com- 

 bated with extraordinary vigor and acuteness the essentially 

 Neo-Darwinian views of Weismann which make natural selection 

 alone into the deus ex machina of organic development. 



