Page Two 



EVOLUTION 



July, 1928 



Spencer and the Synthetic Philosophy 



Br Alexander Goldenweiser 



IN a sense Herbert Spencer rather than Darwin should 

 be regarded as the father of Evolution. Under 

 the sweep of his integrating intellect, the hypothesis of 

 evolutionary development reached a comprehensiveness 

 and a logical rigor which no one else either before or 

 after Spencer was able to transcend or equal. 



Brought up in a nonconformist family and pos- 

 sessed of an independent temperament, little Herbert, 

 like many other eminent persons, was a bad boy. He 

 did pretty much as he liked, studied what he chose, and 

 neglected what he abhorred. 

 Always he was an indiffer- 

 ent student, except in sub- 

 jects that appealed to him. 



His early training, such 

 as it was, fitted him for 

 mathematical and mechani- 

 cal work, and as a young 

 man he spent some years as 

 a railroad engineer. His 

 thoughts, however, early 

 turned to the two subjects 

 to which the rest of his long 

 life was to be devoted: 

 evolution and the theory of 

 politics or government. His 

 article on the proper sphere 

 of government in which 

 Spencer laid down the prin- 

 ciples of his political phil- 

 osophy appeared as early 

 as 1842 (when Spencer was 

 twenty-two) and it con- 

 tained all the basic thoughts 

 later to be developed in his 

 sociology and ethics. 



Spencer was now in Lon- 

 don, out of a job, and about 

 to be introduced into a circle comprising some of the 

 leading minds of the time. Having a rather delicate 

 constitution and being a poor reader, Spencer hardly 

 could have achieved what he did, if not for the stimula- 

 tion he derived from the counsel and criticism of such 

 figures as John Tyndall, the physicist. John Stuart Mill, 

 Huxley, Hooker, George Eliot, and Lewis. The direct 

 inspiration for his evolutionary theory, Spencer derived 

 from Von Baer's work on embryology, Charles Lyell's 

 contributions to geology, and Malthus's Essay on Popu- 

 lation," which had inspired so many other notable 

 achievements. Darwin influenced Spencer only indirectly, 

 as the "Principles of Biology" had appeared before the 

 publication of "The Origin of Species." When Darwin's 

 book appeared, Spencer at once accepted the theory of 

 natural selection as a striking formulation of the mechan- 

 ism of biological evolution, and made it his own by 

 incorporating it in the second edition of the "Biology." 



But for Spencer, the world was a unity: evolution, if 

 true in biology, had to apply to the entire cosmos. Thus 



Herbert Spencer 



we find that in his "First Principles," Spencer enunci- 

 ated evolution as a universal process manifesting itself 

 in the phenomena of inanimate matter, life, mind and 

 society. This determined the scope of the synthetic 

 philosophy which comprised the "Principles" of Biol- 

 ogy, Psychology, Sociology, and Ethics. Unfortunately, 

 the two volumes which were to deal with cosmology and 

 geology remained unwritten, so that Spencer's ideas in 

 these two domains must be gleaned from the schematic 

 treatment in the "First Principles." 



Spencer's "Biology" con- 

 tains two important princi- 

 ples: 1. Individuation va- 

 ries inversely with propaga- 

 tion, or the more an organ- 

 ism does for the race, the 

 less is it able to do for it- 

 self; and 2. Acquired char- 

 acters are inherited, mean- 

 ing by this that physical or 

 psychic traits acquired by 

 an individual in the course 

 of his life are transmissable 

 to the offspring. Spencer 

 was firmly convinced of the 

 reality of this process and 

 was willing to let the entire 

 theory of evolution stand or 

 fall on the issue. Either 

 there was inheritance of ac- 

 quired characters, he insist- 

 ed, or there was no evolu- 

 tion. But when it came to 

 proofs, Spencer was only 

 able to present arguments. 

 Of his protracted contro- 

 versy with the German biol- 

 ogist, August Weismann, I 

 shall tell in the next issue. 



Spencer's "Sociology'" in which he traces the evolu- 

 tion of political, ceremonial, industrial, military, and 

 professional institutions, is notable for his sweeping 

 utilization of the so-called comparative method which 

 henceforth became the favorite operative tool of evolu- 

 tionary writers. The essence of this method consisted in 

 the accumulation of vast collections of data from many 

 tribes and peoples at different times and places. These 

 facts were then utilized to illustrate — or, as Uie evolu- 

 tionists thought, prove the process of evolution in the 

 history of human society. The principles the evolution- 

 ists were thus aiming to demonstrate were three: 1. civil- 

 ization develops uniformly, meaning by this that it 

 always passes through similar stages; 2. this develop- 

 ment of civilization is gradual, meaning by this that 

 sudden or conspicuous changes do not occur but that 

 cultural change proceeds by slow and slight accumula- 

 tion; and 3. the development of civilization is progres- 



