SPENCER AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 13 



multiplying quotations), a man whose name is of infinitely 

 greater weight in the world of philosophy and of letters than 

 that of the pert critic of the Saturday Review, or the gallant 

 American colonel, or the well-known English lawyer a man 

 from whom, on account of his own contributions to the study of 

 psychology and of his wide and deep knowledge of England and 

 English thought, a more correct judgment might have been 

 looked for I mean M. Taine has thus summed up his view of 

 Mr. Spencer's work : " Mr. Spencer possesses the rare merit of 

 having extended to the sum of phenomena to the whole history 

 of Nature and of mind the two master-thoughts which for the 

 past thirty years have been giving new form to the positive sci- 

 ences ; the one being Mayer and Joule's Conservation of Energy, 

 the other Darwin's Natural Selection." 



Now, all this, to the extent to which expressly or by impli- 

 cation it relegates to Mr. Spencer merely the labors of an adapter, 

 enlarger, or popularizer of other men's thoughts, is entirely false 

 and unfounded ludicrously false and unfounded, as the general 

 survey of Mr. Spencer's writings which we have just taken shows 

 beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt. So far from its seeming 

 " rather absurd " to credit to Mr. Spencer any great personal con- 

 tribution to the formulation of the doctrine of evolution ; so far 

 from his being in any sense of the term a pupil or unattached fol- 

 lower of Darwin, we have seen that he had worked his own way 

 independently, from a different starting-point and through an en- 

 tirely dissimilar course of investigation, to a conception of evolu- 

 tion as a universal process underlying all phenomena whatsoever, 

 before Darwin himself had made public his special study of the 

 operation of one of the factors of evolution in the limited sphere 

 of the organic world. A simple comparison of dates will serve to 

 make this point sufficiently clear. The first edition of the Origin 

 of Species was published in the latter part of 1859. The essay on 

 the Development Hypothesis appeared in 1852 ; in 1855 or four 

 years before the advent of Darwin's book there came the first 

 edition of the Principles of Psychology, in which the laws of 

 evolution (already conceived as universal) were traced out in 

 their operations in the domain of mind ; and this was followed in 

 1857 by the essay on Progress : its Law and Cause, which con- 

 tains a statement of the doctrine of evolution in its chief outlines, 

 and an inductive and deductive development of that doctrine in 

 its application to all classes of phenomena. Spencer's independ- 

 ence of Darwin is thus placed beyond possibility of question. 



Let it not for a moment be imagined that I am endeavoring in 

 the slightest degree to underestimate the special value or impor- 

 tance of Darwin's magnificent work. Yielding him the fullest 

 meed of praise for the great part which he undoubtedly played in 



