Herbert Spencer 451 
The new devotion to nature had its recompense in itself, because the 
new points of view made us see that nature could indeed “hold to 
ideas,” though perhaps not to those which we had cogitated beforehand. 
A most important question for philosophers to answer was whether 
the new views were compatible with an idealistic conception of life 
and existence. Some proclaimed that we have now no need of any 
philosophy beyond the principles of the conservation of matter and 
energy and the principle of natural evolution: existence should and 
could be definitely and completely explained by the laws of material 
nature. But abler thinkers saw that the thing was not so simple. 
They were prepared to give the new views their just place and to 
examine what alterations the old views must undergo in order to be 
brought into harmony with the new data. 
The realistic character of Darwin’s theory was shown not only in 
the idea of natural continuity, but also, and not least, in the idea of 
the cause whereby organic life advances step by step. This idea— 
the idea of the struggle for life—implied that nothing could persist, 
if it had no power to maintain itself under the given conditions. 
Inner value alone does not decide. Idealism was here put to its hardest 
trial. In continuous evolution it could perhaps still find an analogy 
to the inner evolution of ideas in the mind; but in the demand for 
power in order to struggle with outward conditions Realism seemed 
to announce itself in its most brutal form. Every form of Idealism 
had to ask itself seriously how it was going to “struggle for life” with 
this new Realism. 
We will now give a short account of the position which leading 
thinkers in different countries have taken up in regard to this 
question. 
I. Herbert Spencer was the philosopher whose mind was best 
prepared by his own previous thinking to admit the theory of Darwin 
to a place in his conception of the world. His criticism of the 
arguments which had been put forward against the hypothesis 
of Lamarck, showed that Spencer, as a young man, was an adherent 
to the evolution idea. In his Social Statics (1850) he applied 
this idea to human life and moral civilisation. In 1852 he wrote an 
essay on The Development Hypothesis, in which he definitely stated 
his belief that the differentiation of species, like the differentiation 
within a single organism, was the result of development. In the 
first edition of his Psychology (1855) he took a step which put him 
in opposition to the older English school (from Locke to Mill): he 
acknowledged “innate ideas” so far as to admit the tendency of 
acquired habits to be inherited in the course of generations, so that 
the nature and functions of the individual are only to be understood 
through its connection with the life of the species. In 1857, in his 
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