30 Causes of its Success 



and its ways, a feeling which Spencer says he 

 brought from his "dissenting family, antagonistic 

 to arbitrary control." Thus Spencer's philosophy 

 (and with it the philosophy of force), instead of 

 being established on a scientific basis, had a strong 

 bias of a priori conceptions of individual rights and 

 laissez-faire doctrines from the beginning. As 

 Barker says: 



He did not really approach politics through science, 

 without preconceptions drawn from other sources, 

 and with the sole idea of eliciting the political lessons 

 which science might teach; on the contrary, he was 

 already charged with political preconceptions when he 

 approached science, and he sought to find in science 

 examples or analogies to point a moral already drawn 

 and adorn a tale whose plot was already sketched.^ 



As Spencer and the sociologists brought to the 

 philosophy of force at the same time a distortion 

 and a reinforcement through their interpretation 

 in social and biological terms of the spirit of the 

 age, so Sir Henry Maine and the lawyers brought 

 to the philosophy of force distortion and reinforce- 

 ment from the side of political theory. 



Maine's Ancient Law was published in 1861, two 

 years after Darwin's Origin of Species. In this 

 work Maine popularized Savigny's conception of 

 law as a continuous historical development, and the 

 connection between this theory and the doctrine 



' Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the 

 Present Day, p. 85. 



