SPENCER AND EVOLUTION. 31 



We may here note Mr. Spencer's advanced position in dealing 

 with this subject. While yet the notion of Evolution as a process of 

 Nature was as vague and speculative as it had been in the time of 

 Anaximander and Democritus, he had grasped the problem in its uni- 

 versality and its causes, and had successfully applied it to one of the 

 most difficult and important of the sciences. He had traced the 

 operation of the law in the sphere of mind, and placed that study 

 upon a new basis. The conviction is now entertained by many that 

 the "Principles of Psychology," by Spencer, in 1855, is one of the 

 most original and masterly scientific treatises of the present century, 

 if, indeed, it be not the most fruitful contribution to scientific thought 

 that has appeared since the " Principia" of Newton. 1 For thousands 

 of years, from Plato to Hamilton, the world's ablest thinkers had been 

 engaged in the effort to elucidate the phenomena of mind ; Herbert 

 Spencer took up the question by a method first rendered possible by 

 modern science, and made a new epoch in its progress. From this 

 time forward, mental philosophy, so called, could not confine itself to 

 introspection of the adult human consciousness. The philosophy of 

 mind must deal with the whole range of psychical phenomena, must 

 deal with them as manifestations of organic life, must deal with tliem 

 genetically, and show how mind is constituted in connection w r ith the 

 experience of the past. In short, as it now begins to be widely recog- 

 nized, Mr. Spencer has placed the science of mind firmly upon the 

 ground of Evolution. Like all productions that are at the same time 

 new and profound, and go athwart the course of long tradition, there 

 were but few that appreciated his book, a single small edition more 

 than sufficing to meet the wants of the public for a dozen years. But 

 it began at once to. tell upon advanced thinkers, and its influence was 

 soon widely discerned in the best literature of the subject. The man 

 who stood, perhaps, highest in England as a psychologist, Mr. John 

 Stuart Mill, remarked in one of his books, that " it is one of the finest 

 examples we possess of the psychological method in its full power;" 

 and, as I am aware, after carefully rereading it some years later, he 

 declared that his already high opinion of the work had been raised 



1 This association of the name of Spencer with Newton, let it be remembered, does 

 not rest upon the authority of the present writer ; recent discussions of the subject in 

 the highest quarters are full of it. The Saturday Review says, " Since Newton there has 

 not in England been a philosopher of more remarkable speculative and systematizing 

 talent than (spite of some errors and some narrowness) Mr. Herbert Spencer." An able 

 writer in the Quarterly Review, in treating of Mr. Spencer's remarkable power of binding 

 together different and distant subjects of thought by the principle of Evolution, remarks : 

 "The two deepest scientific principles now known of all those relating to material things 

 are the Law of Gravitation and the Law of Evolution." The eminent Professor of Logic 

 in Owens College, Manchester, Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, in his recent treatise entitled 

 " The Principles of Science, a Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method," says, " I question 

 whether any scientific works which have appeared, since the 'Principia' of Newton, are 

 comparable in importance with those of Darwin and Spencer, revolutionizing as they do 

 all our views of the origin of bodily, mental, moral, and social phenomena." 



