SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 605 



by him, many years ago, in a well-known essay entitled the " Social 

 Organism ; " it has since received further elucidation in a discussion 

 with Prof. Huxley in this Review / and it has once more been expounded 

 anew, and with fresh illustration, in the present volume. There is a 

 certain sense in which, I presume, the doctrine of " Social Evolution " 

 would be now pretty widely accepted, at least among those who have 

 concerned themselves with the philosophy of history and kindred spec- 

 ulations. I mean the sense in which it expresses the fact that each 

 stage in human progress is the outcome and result of the stage which 

 has immediately preceded it, and that the whole series of stages, be- 

 giuning with savage life and ending with the most advanced existing 

 civilization, represents a connected chain, of which the links are bound 

 together as sequences, in precisely the same way as in the instances 

 of causation presented by other departments of Nature. Some such 

 assumption as this must necessarily form the basis of all attempts at a 

 rational interpretation of history. But, as enunciated and expounded 

 by Mr. Spencer, social evolution carries with it a meaning much more 

 precise and significant. As his readers are aware, Mr. Spencer insists 

 very strongly on the analogy of evolution, as exhibited in the animal 

 kingdom, whether in the individual animal or in the species, and evo- 

 lution in human society in other words, between the development, 

 individual and specific, of the animal organism, and the development 

 of what he calls " the social organism," meaning, thereby, organized 

 social life. He finds in this analogy not merely a metaphor and an 

 illustration, but a type, and even a clew. Thus he observes a law of 

 development governing the growth of an individual organism from 

 birth to maturity ; and, again, a similar law governing the develop- 

 ment of species from existence in an all but amorphous germ to the 

 attainment of a very high and complex form of animal life ; and he 

 transfers these laws from physiology and zoology to the domain of 

 social science ; treating them not merely as the means of elucidating 

 social phenomena, but as exhibiting the real character of the processes 

 by which mankind have in fact attained their present civilization, and 

 as foreshadowing, also, the lines along which society in its future de- 

 velopment is destined to move. It is, for instance, a characteristic 

 of the evolution of individual organisms under the laws of animal 

 growth, as well as of that of the several species of animals under the 

 influence of the struggle for existence and the law of the " survival of 

 the fittest," that development takes place " spontaneously " that is 

 to say, is the incidental result of actions not consciously undertaken 

 with that object in view. This is evidently so in the growth of an 

 individual animal, and it is no less certainly so in the development of 

 species. In neither case is the progress attained the result of efforts 

 consciously put forth for its accomplishment. And the whole drift of 

 Mr. Spencer's teaching on this subject is to show that the process is 

 similar in the case of human society ; that its growth and development 



