HERBERT SPENCER 119 



to the end of his life. Biologists are now generally agreed that ac- 

 quired characters are not inherited, but their agreement on this 

 subject is so recent that it would hardly be fair to blame Spencer 

 on this score. Moreover, he was the first to extend this theory to a 

 general conception of the universe and to retrace in the de- 

 velopment not simply of living organisms, but of everything, an 

 evolution or a progress "from the homogeneous to the hetero- 

 geneous, from the simple to the complex, from the incoherent to 

 the coherent, from the indefinite to the definite/' Matter-of-fact 

 people may object that such a generalization is equally uncon- 

 trollable and useless, but that is to take a very crude view of the 

 subject. Spencer's generalization, his insistence, was a powerful 

 factor in the success of the evolutionary point of view. It helped 

 mightily to create a new scientific and philosophic atmosphere. 

 Is not that very much indeed, and what more could you expect 

 a philosopher to do? 



The "Synthetic Philosophy" did not embrace all the sciences. 

 Feeling the necessity of restricting his field, chiefly on account of 

 his insufficient scientific training, he made a systematic study only 

 of those branches of knowledge to which the application of scien- 

 tific methods was relatively new, to wit: biology, ethics, sociology. 

 Biological facts had inspired his theory of evolution, and his 

 biology in turn was dominated by it. On the other hand, in his 

 ethical and social studies he was chiefly guided by the concep- 

 tion that liberty is the greatest good. The industrial and legal 

 development of the last half-century seems to have proceeded in 

 the opposite direction; yet the main difficulties of our moral and 

 social life cannot be solved by artificial regulations, and now, even 

 more than in Spencer's time, the greatest political problem to be 

 solved is the one involved in the antinomy: freedom versus red 

 tape, or initiative versus automatism, or life versus stagnation. Of 

 course we all realize that a great many more regulations and social 

 restrictions are needed than Spencer was prepared to admit, but 

 the wise do not believe that these regulations are real factors of 

 progress. The best that they can do is to prevent us from sliding 



