Herbert Spencers Synthetic Philosophy. 91 



sensations as such, but also space and time, the very media 

 in which they appeared, and their whole synthesis in con- 

 sciousness, are products of the feeling and thinking indi- 

 vidual, and by his insisting on the existence of an outside 

 realm of things-in-themselves affecting the individual's sen- 

 sibility. Fichte tried to prove the synthetical power of the 

 individual to create the objective world ; Hegel, by identi- 

 fying thought with being, and subjective thought with uni- 

 versal thought (transcendental^ idealism) ; Schelling, by 

 making the subjective and objective both inhere in one and 

 the same all-comprising hyper-subjective and hyper-object- 

 ive substance or subject-object (transcendental realism). 

 Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, all founded their 

 systems on Kant's a priori elements in knowledge. The 

 main line of descent from Hume in England was repre- 

 sented by Hartley, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill ; and 

 none of them were able to reconcile with their experiential 

 philosophy the fact of a priori forms of intuition on which 

 Kant had rightly insisted. 



It remained for Herbert Spencer to apply the principle 

 of evolution to mind and to show that Kant's " forms of 

 thought," although a priori in the individual, are experi- 

 ential in the race in other words, were acquired in the 

 evolutionary process. Long before Spencer, instincts were 

 regarded as acquired mental habitudes that had become 

 organically fixed. Conscious experience and conscious 

 memory of it were thus held to pass, by means of organic 

 fixation and subsequent transmission of the modified struct- 

 ure, into organized experience and memory. This concep- 

 tion forms the nucleus of Spencer's mental philosophy. 

 Thus Herbert Spencer, " our great philosopher " as Darwin 

 called him in his Principles of Psychology, published be- 

 fore Darwin's Origin of Species had appeared, assuming the 

 truth of organic evolution, endeavored to show how man's 

 mental constitution was acquired. Spencer, recognizing the 

 existence of the subjective forms, with a grasp of thought 

 and philosophic insight never surpassed, shows that while 

 in the individual they are a priori, in the race they are ex- 

 periential, since they are constant, universal experiences or- 

 ganized as tendencies and transmitted, like any of the phys- 

 ical organs, as a heritage ; that thus such a priori forms as 

 those of space, time, causality, etc., must have had their 

 origin in experience. Says Dr. Carpenter : " No physiolo- 

 gist can deem it improbable that the intuitions which we 



