SPENCER AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 15 



sal process a matter which the aims and objects of Darwin's work 

 did not lead him to touch were worked out by Mr. Spencer quite 

 irrespective of the special process of natural selection ; and when 

 Darwin's book appeared, that process fell into its place in Spencer's 

 general system, quite naturally, as a supplementary and not in 

 any way as a disturbing element. Thus it appears that if any one 

 man is to be looked upon as the immediate progenitor of a doc- 

 trine which, in common phraseology, may be said to have been to 

 some extent in the air, that man is not he who first elucidated one 

 factor of its process in one domain of phenomena the biological; 

 but rather he who first seized iipon it as a universal law, under- 

 lying all the phenomena of creation ; in a word, it is not Charles 

 Darwin, but Herbert Spencer. 



One word only, in conclusion, about the train of causes which 

 immediately led up to the projection of the vast work with which 

 Mr. Spencer's name is more particularly associated the System 

 of Synthetic Philosophy. 



It was in 1858, while he was engaged on writing an essay on the 

 Nebular Hypothesis, that there dawned upon him the possibility 

 of dealing in a more systematic and connected manner than he 

 had hitherto found possible, with those foundation principles of 

 evolution to which he had been led by the miscellaneous studies 

 of the past eight or nine years. The germ of thought thus im- 

 planted forthwith began to develop with amazing rapidity, and 

 before long assumed the proportions of an elaborate scheme, in 

 which all orders of concrete phenomena were to fall into their 

 places as illustrations of the fundamental processes of evolution. 

 Thus the conception of evolution presented itself to him as the 

 basis of a system of thought under which was to be generalized 

 the complete history of the knowable universe, and by virtue of 

 which all branches of scientific knowledge were to be unified by 

 affiliation upon the primal laws underlying them all. Though a 

 rough sketch of the main outlines of the system, as they occurred 

 to him at the time, was mapped out almost immediately, it was not 

 till the following year, 1859 a year otherwise memorable for the 

 publication of Darwin's book that a detailed plan of the various 

 connected works in which these conceptions were to be developed 

 was finally drawn up ; and not till 1860 that it was given to the 

 small handful of readers interested in such subjects in the form 

 of a prospectus. This prospectus included a brief summary of a 

 proposed series of ten volumes, embracing thirty-three divisions 

 or topics ; and any one who cares to take the trouble of comparing 

 it, as it stood when it first saw the light, thirty years ago, with the 

 contents of the different volumes and portions of volumes which 

 have been published up to the present time, will, I think, be as- 

 tounded to observe the singular correspondence between them a 



