506 
NATURE 
[APRIL 1, 1897 
THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY. 
The Principles of Sociology. By 
Vol. ii. Pp. viii + 635. (London: 
Norgate, 1896.) 
V J1TH this volume Mr. Spencer has completed his 
system of “Synthetic Philosophy,” the work of 
thirty-six years. This fact gives a very special interest 
to his preface, where he tells with dignity and reserve 
of the disadvantages and disappointments under which 
his untiring purpose was carried through. Mr. Spencers 
comprehensive survey of the sciences in the light of the 
conception of organic development has abundantly 
redeemed his promise to his subscribers. But “the first 
two volumes of the Principles of Sociology have ex- 
panded into three, and the third, which if written would 
now be the fourth, remains unwritten. It was to have 
treated of Progress.” Mr. Spencer has been too much 
of a pioneer, perhaps, to hope to say the last word of 
evolutionist science on progress. But if his pleasure in 
his emancipation, to which he refers as his dominant 
emotion on the completion of his task, be not too great, 
we may venture to hope for a further contribution on 
the subject from the master’s pen. 
Of the present volume the first part has already seen 
the light in book form, under the title ‘“ Ecclesiastical 
Institutions.” It traces the origin of the religious idea 
to the apparition of dead ancestors in dreams. “Gods 
arise by apotheosis.” Whatever may be said as to the 
derivation of certain forms of fetishism and of the animal 
cults connected with totemism from ancestor worship, 
it is unlikely that the worship of nature-powers was at 
its source “but an aberrant form of ghost-worship,” as 
Mr. Spencer holds. But at any rate, in the need to 
maintain right relations with ghostly powers, there arose 
the first professions—those of priest and medicine-man. 
The latter is essentially an exorcist, and his functions 
are gradually usurped upon by the propitiator of the 
beneficent spirits of the family, and specially of the 
chiefs family. So that it is from the priest, as he 
becomes the comparatively leisured and sole reposi- 
tory of knowledge, that the professions draw their 
origin. 
The second section, dealing with Professional Insti- 
tutions, has already appeared in the shape of review- 
articles. It finds all those modes of the enrichment and 
expansion of life, which we call the professions, in germ 
in the priestly office. Not only teacher, architect, and 
musician, but actor and lawyer, surgeon and physician, 
man of science and philosopher spring up in the service 
and under the shadow of religion. Even where medical 
appliances were natural, the ideas which accompanied 
them were supernatural, so that the priest rather than 
the medicine-man is the source of modern medicine. 
And notwithstanding much specialisation—witness the 
Indian rhinoplast—-and the empirical training of slave- 
doctors, the complete emancipation of surgery and medi- 
cine is quite modern. It was only the prohibition of 
clerical shedding of blood that freed the surgeon; it 
was because their medical duties too much engrossed 
the time of the clergy, that specialist physicians arose, 
whom in time a papal bull permitted to marry. . Under 
NO. 1431, VOL. 55] 
Herbert Spencer. 
Williams and 
Henry VIII. a licence to practise in London issued from 
bishop or dean, “assisted by the faculty.” As late as 
1858, a medical diploma was granted by his Grace of 
Canterbury. 
To interpret’ the sacred writings we need grammar. 
To determine the construction and orientation of altars 
and shrines, and to fix the seasons of sacrifice, we must 
have geometry and astronomy. It is the pontiff alone 
who has the secret of the arch. Hence even the con- 
crete studies of the men of science are priestly ; while 
in Greece alone of the ancient world were these and the 
abstract speculations of the philosopher emancipated, 
because “before there was time for an indigenous 
development of science and philosophy out of priestly 
culture, there was an intrusion of that science and 
philosophy which priestly culture had developed else- 
where,” and the political incoherence of Greek states 
prevented the dominance of a hierarchy. Equally in- 
genious is the treatment of other apparent exceptions, 
popular music side by side with sacred music in the 
mediaeval world, and the Roman contempt for the slave- 
actor. 
The closing part of the work deals with Industrial 
Institutions, and is wholly new. An account of the 
division of labour, which owes nothing to Adam Smith, 
a history of the origin of exchange, which lays stress on 
the pre-barter stage, and which draws from the experi- 
ences of Cameron a novel illustration of the necessity 
for the evolution of money, and from the observations 
of Coote a new example of the qualities found necessary 
for good money, are followed by a sketch of the develop- 
ment from status to contract, in which the control of 
family or of chief or, here only incidentally, of priest 
gives way to guilds originally based on kinship, to free 
labour and to trades unions, or in which the condition of 
slavery passes through serfdom to freedom of contract. 
In this part of Mr. Spencers work, brilliant though it 
is, the need that anthropology still has of an adequate 
method is apparent. 
With free labour and its efforts to establish new group- 
ings we pass to the treatment, not altogether convincing 
from the economist’s point of view, of trades unions, co- 
operation, profit-sharing, and socialism. Of the first, 
Mr. Spencer is the candid and not hostile critic, though 
he fears a recrudescence of militant policy, and observes 
that the guilds, as contrasted with the unions, enforced a 
standard of work. As regards the rest, Mr. Spencer, 
feeling sure that all the victories of civilisation have been 
won by an increase of liberty, is inclined to regard redin- 
tegration as a step backward. Though the consideration 
of the effects of machinery on the labourer, who under the 
coercion of circumstances as producer “loses heavily— 
perhaps more heavily than he gains” as consumer, gives 
pause to Mr. Spencer’s optimism, he concludes, as he 
began “nearly fifty years ago,” with the conviction that 
“the ultimate man will be one whose private require- 
ments coincide with public ones ; he will be that manner 
of man who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, 
incidentally performs the functions of a social unit, and 
yet is only enabled so to fulfil his own nature by all 
others doing the like.’ 
H. W. B. 
