14 DARWINIAN AND SPENCERIAN 



existed are, from an abstract point of view, no more than 

 an expression of th'e public attitude towards Science and 

 Philosophy respectively. Spencer would have been read 

 and his fame established even if the principle of Selection 

 had not been discovered in his time. It must not be 

 forgotten that this Darwinian principle has as yet beeii 

 conclusively shown to hold good only in the world of life. 

 How far it can be legitimately extended, whether it can 

 indeed be extended at all into the domain of inorganic 

 nature, is a matter for future decision. But we are now 

 prepared for Evolution in every domain ; perhaps it is 

 not going too far to say that both Science and Philosophy 

 have accepted Evolution as a faith — it is for Science to 

 determine the modus operandi in each particular domain. 

 It will be remembered that, as in the case of most great 

 generalizations, thought had been moving in this direction 

 for many years before Spencer definitely formulated the 

 doctrine. Lamarck and Buffon had suggested a definite 

 mechanism of organic development, Kant, and Laplace 

 had suggested a principle of celestial evolution, while 

 Lyell had placed geology upon an evolutionary basis. 

 The principle of Continuity was beginning to be recog- 

 nized in physical science by those who, like Herschel, 

 Mary Somerville — a name perpetuated by this University 

 — and Grove, had approached the- subject from the 

 inorganic side. ' The correlation of the physical forces ' — 

 to use Grove's title — was the qualitative predecessor of 

 that quantitative doctrine which in the hands of Mayer, 

 .Helmholtz, Joule, and William Thomson, afterwards 

 Lord Kelvin, culminated in the great 'generalization now 

 known as the Conservation of Energy. It was Spencer 

 who brought these independent lines of thought to a focus, 

 and who was the first to make any systematic attempt to 

 show that the law of development expressed in its widest 

 and most abstract form was universally followed through- 

 out cosmical processes, inorganic, organic, and super- 

 organic.i 



^ In i860, when returning the proofs of the First Principles, Huxley 



