lOG Herlert Spencer's Sijnihdid Philosophy. . 



I will now endeavor to give a brief synopsis of Mr. Spen- 

 per's doctrine of evolution. 



1. Under the appearances which the universe presents to 

 our senses, there persists, unchanging in quantity but ever 

 changing in form and ever transcending human knowledge 

 and conception, an unknown and unknowable power or real- 

 ity, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit in 

 space and without beginning or end in time. 



Matter, motion, space, and time are forms which the un- 

 knowable reality assumes in consciousness. Matter and 

 motion are manifestations of force, and space and time are 

 cohesions — one of coexistence, the other of succession — in 

 the manifestation of force. Force, then, is the primary da- 

 tum, but that we only know as states of consciousness ; in 

 other words, as the changes in us produced by an unknow- 

 able reality, of which our conceptions of matter and mo- 

 tion are symbols. That which appears to be, outside of con- 

 sciousness, as matter and force, is the same _ as that Avhich 

 appears in consciousness as thought and feeling. In Spen- 

 cer's own language: "A power of which the nature re- 

 mains forever inconceivable, and to which no limit in time 

 and space can be imagined, works in us certain effects. 

 These effects have certain likenesses of kind, the most gen- 

 eral of which we class under the names of matter and 

 force, and between these effects there are likenesses of kind, 

 the most constant of which we class as laws of the highest 

 certainty." 



2. The field of science and philosophy is in the phenome- 

 nal world. It is the function of philosophy to give to knowl- 

 edge a unity that shall comprehend the fundamental truths 

 of all the sciences, as the general definitions and proposi- 

 tions of each include all the diversified phenomena of its 

 recognized province. The sciences deal with different orders 

 of phenomena, and their formulae are those which express 

 the changes and relations of these orders respectively. Phi- 

 losophy is a synthesis of all these sciences into a universal 

 system. 



3. Force is persistent, and is revealed to us under the two 

 opposite modes of attraction and expansion — in the ceaseless 

 redistribution of matter and motion, wliich extends tlirough- 

 out tiie universe, involving, on the one hand, the integra- 

 tion of matter and the dissipation of motion, and on the 

 other a disintegration of matter and aljsorption of motion. 



4. Where the integration of matter and the dissipation 



