SPENCER AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 5 



growth, implied dissatisfaction with, the current ideas of progress 

 as an irregular and fortuitous process, and bore testimony to at 

 least a vague germinal belief in a social development or evo- 

 lution. 



The momentous questions thus raised and briefly dealt with 

 by Mr. Spencer in this youthful production came in for more 

 thorough and extended treatment a few years later in his first con- 

 siderable work, Social Statics, which was published in 1850, when 

 the author was just thirty years of age. The conception of this 

 work had entered his mind not long after the appearance of the 

 just-mentioned pamphlet; for, owing to the rapid growth and ex- 

 pansion of his ideas at the time, Spencer soon became aware of 

 the inadequacy of his handling of the various problems there 

 opened up. " The writing of Social Statics," he has since said, 

 " arose from a dissatisfaction with the basis on which the doc- 

 trines set forth in those letters were placed." * Even the briefest 

 comparison of the earlier and later books is sufficient to show the 

 enormous strides which his mind had taken during the seven 

 critical years which divide them one from the other. In Social 

 Statics almost everything is made to turn upon the doctrine pre- 

 viously hardly more than hinted at that from the very begin- 

 ning of social life down to the present time there has been going 

 on, and that there still is going on, a process of slow but none the 

 less certain adjustment of the natures of men to society, and of 

 the social organization to the natures of its constituent units : 

 this adjustment being the result of a perpetual interaction be- 

 tween units and aggregate which ever tends to bring them into 

 more perfect adaptation the one to the other. Such adaptation, 

 it is further shown, is produced by the direct action of circum- 

 stances upon the natures of men, and by the preservation and 

 accumulation by inheritance from generation to generation of 

 the modifications thus initiated ; though another process comes 

 in for passing recognition the process of the dying out of those 

 individuals who fail to adapt themselves to the changing con- 

 ditions of their environment : which process may be conversely 

 stated as the survival of those only who so far change as to fit 

 themselves to the necessities imposed upon them by the totality 

 of their surroundings. Here, it will be seen, is a faint and partial 

 adumbration of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the 

 struggle for existence. Moreover, another important point is em- 

 phasized the point that all our social evils and imperfections are 

 due to want of complete adjustment between men and the con- 

 ditions of social life are, indeed, nothing more than the tempo- 

 rary jarring and wrenching of a machine the parts of which are 



* Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte 



