Herbert Spencer.

The dominating idea of modern thought is Evolution. With that idea the name of Herbert Spencer is indissolubly connected. Herbert Spencer was born at Derby on 27th April 1820. He owed much to his father. A teacher by profession, the elder Spencer was remarkably free from the pedagogic spirit. A believer in the spontaneity of nature, he did not make the mistake of James Mill in setting himself to make his son an intellectual prodigy. The boy was seven years old before he could read. In due course he was sent to school, but his progress was not marked; he was restless, inattentive, and by no means pliable. Even at that early age it was noted that his reasoning capacities were ahead of his powers of mental assimilation. Learning by rote was distasteful, and only when nature's methods were allowed to assert themselves did he make progress. Science, even as a boy, had for him a special charm. Young Spencer's domestic environment was particularly fitted to develop in him the element of individuality for which he was so markedly distinguished; all the topics of the day were discussed with freedom in the family circle, and reason rather than authority was the supreme court of appeal. In religion, young Spencer breathed the vigorous atmosphere of Dissent. His father, though at first a Methodist, joined the Quakers, while his mother retained her love for the Wesleyan persuasion. On Sunday morning the boy attended the Quakers' meeting with his father, and the Methodist Chapel with his mother in the evening. Strange to say, religion never took vital hold of Spencer. The present writer once asked him if he had ever undergone those religious convulsions which are associated with so many thinkers who have sprung from middle-class Dissenting families. His reply was that religion never appealed to him; his mind seemed to lie outside of the range of the current creed.

When he was thirteen years of age, Spencer's education was undertaken by his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, perpetual curate at Hinton near Bath-a man of individuality, as may be gathered from the fact that he was a Radical in politics, an Anti-Corn-Law agitator, and a temperance advocate, rather a striking combination of qualities in a Church of England clergyman. The uncle hoped to fit his pupil for a university career; but his mind was not cast in that mould. Reluctantly the idea of a university career was abandoned; it was resolved to let the lad's tendencies follow their natural course. Spencer returned home rather uncertain as to his future. His father secured for him an assistantship in a school. His pedagogic career was cut short in 1837 by an offer from the resident engineer of the London division of the London and Birmingham Railway, then in progress of construction. As a civil engineer he was employed till the crisis which followed upon

the great railway mania; railway construction came to a standstill, and the profession of civil engineer entered upon dark days. At the age of twenty-six Spencer found himself stranded; he returned to his home at Derby, and occupied his leisure in intellectual pursuit. In 1842, in The Nonconformist, appeared the first-fruits of his intellectual activity in the shape of a series of articles on 'The Proper Sphere of Government -articles, it may be remarked, which contain the germs of his political philosophy. Possibly influenced by his success in his new sphere, he cast his eyes towards journalism, and in 1848 he was invited to the position of sub-editor of the Economist newspaper.

Mr Spencer found time in the midst of his journalistic work to study the deep problems of philosophy, science, and politics, which were disturbing the minds of nineteenth-century thinkers. In 1850 appeared Social Statics, in which he made an attempt to base the science of government on first principles. The fundamental thought of Social Statics is that society is an organism whose evolution is determined by laws. In societies he recognised a certain order of progress, from the simple to the complex; and as he pursued his studies he discovered the same order of development in other classes of phenomena, particularly in biology. The nucleus of the Spencerian philosophy is to be found in Social Statics, where, in the chapter entitled 'General Considerations,' it is stated as a biological truth that low types of animals are composed of many parts not mutually dependent, while higher animals are composed of unlike but mutually dependent parts. The same truth was observable in society; and thus Mr Spencer was led to the conclusion that the individual and the social organism follow the same line of development, the primary characteristic of which is integration and increase of definiteness -a characteristic which he also noted in mental evolution in his Principles of Psychology, published in 1855. Suddenly there arose in Mr Spencer's mind the conception that the law of development, which he had observed in separate classes of phenomena, was a universal law applicable to the entire Cosmos. In his essay on 'Progress, its Law and Cause' (1857), the subject is still further elucidated; though not till the publication of First Principles, in 1862, did Mr Spencer formulate in its full-orbed entirety the theory of Evolution. His life is mainly a record of the development of his ideas, or rather of the stages in the discovery of the fundamental idea in Evolution, and of his application of it as interpretative of the entire phenomenal world. The twelve years from 1850, when he published Social Statics, to 1862, when he came before the public with his theory of Evolution, were years of rapid intellectual development. He became a contributor to the Westminster Review, and came into contact with some of the leading writers of the day. George

Eliot early recognised the genius of the rising philosopher, and steadily his reputation increased.

The great aim of science and philosophy has been to discover the laws of the Cosmos, and, if possible, to reduce them to one comprehensive all-embracing law. Mr Spencer's aim was to bring about by strictly scientific methods the unification of phenomena, to comprehend the Universe from a single point of view. By way of preliminary in his First Principles, he defines his position by refusing to attack the problem from the metaphysical side. Taking his stand upon Sir William Hamilton's exposition of the relativity of knowledge, he shows that, from the constitution of the human mind, knowledge of Absolute existence is impossible. Speculation in this direction he relegated to the Unknowable. According to Mr Spencer, the task which lies before philosophy is the unification of knowledge, the reduction of phenomena to one fundamental law. When he came to the problem, phenomena had been embraced within three great generalisations-the Nebular theory, the law of Gravitation, and Conservation or Persistence of Force. The Nebular theory deals with the primitive constitution of the Universe, Gravitation with the law which governs all existences, and the Conservation of Force with the dynamic conditions of the Cosmos. What Mr Spencer did was to take these three separate generalisations and fuse them into one by his theory of Evolution. According to him the Universe is one fact, the result of one great cosmical process-namely, the Redistribution of Matter and Motion. The problem before Mr Spencer was this: Given a Universe composed of a fixed quantity of Matter and Motion, conceived in harmony with the law of Gravitation as manifesting co-existent forces of attraction and repulsion, to trace the process by which the Cosmos was evolved from its nebulous to its present state. The process is summed up in the following uncouth but pregnant formula: Evolution is an integration of Matter and concomitant dissipation of Motion, during which the Matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained Motion undergoes a parallel transformation. This law holds good of all existences whatsoever. For convenience, phenomena are divided into sections astronomy, geology, biology, psychology, and sociology; but the process is one, and the law of the process is one. Evolution is one in principle and in fact.

Mr Spencer's course was clear. Having formulated the law of the Cosmos in its totality, he had now to use the law to interpret and classify the various sections of phenomena in the order of their evolution. In a word, Mr Spencer set himself in his various works not only to unify but to interpret phenomena. In First Principles the inorganic evolution is outlined; and in the Principles of Biology Mr Spencer applies his evolution formula to the great problem of life, plant and animal. The

key to this branch of the subject is found in his definition of life as the continuous adjustment of inner to outer relations. Given an environment gradually increasing in complexity, it follows that organisms, in order to survive, must in the process of adaptation also increase in complexity. Parts of the organisms restrict themselves to certain processes, and thus by a kind of division of labour structural and functional complexities result. By another process, that associated with the name of Darwin, unfit organisms perish in the struggle for existence; only those survive which adapt themselves to their environment. In the sphere of biology Mr Spencer shows that organic life conforms to the universal law of evolution-inasmuch as development from the humblest protoplasmic forms to the highest types, with all their structural and functional complexities, is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous by means of successive integrations and differentiations. The Principles of Biology, published in 1867, in which the evolution view of organic life was elaborated in great detail, quite revolutionised the scientific attitude towards Nature.

In Principles of Psychology, though written before First Principles, evolution is shown to hold sway also in the world of mind. The starting-point of Psychology is Consciousness-not its ultimate nature, which is inscrutable, but its development. Mr Spencer finds Consciousness to take its rise in the recognition of likeness and unlikeness between primary states of feeling; he traces the reciprocal relations between mind and its environment, and notes the various stages in its evolution from the simplicity of primitive ideas to the complex intelligence of the civilised mind. In Psychology as in Biology, the one law of evolution holds good—from the simple to the complex through successive integrations and differentiations: instinct, memory, reason being all evolved in the mind by its efforts to adjust itself to its environment. A striking feature of Mr Spencer's Psychology is the attempt to close by his evolution theory the long dispute between the Experientialists and the Intuitionalists. Beliefs which had hitherto been accepted as necessary truths, and which the school of Mill had never been able to resolve into individual experiences, according to Spencer are beliefs which, though a priori to the individual, are a posteriori to the race. By some thinkers, however, the Spencerian theory is not accepted as a solution of the problem. They hold that the evolution of rationality presupposes the existence of reason, at least in the germ in the mind of primitive man. The neo-Hegelians in particular dissent from Mr Spencer's theory of the origin of necessary truths.

Another problem which the Spencerian psychology professes to have attacked successfully is that relating to External Perception. Taking his stand upon the doctrine of the relativity of Knowledge, Mr Spencer-unlike Mill, who landed in Idealismreached an entirely original theory which he calls

Transfigured Realism. By means of this theory Mr Spencer endeavours to combine the fragments of truth which are to be found in the crude Realism of the average man and the subtle Idealism of Mill. Transfigured Realism has not received extensive recognition by contemporary thinkers. In like manner ethical evolution is handled. Moral codes, however complex, are traced back to primitive facts of consciousness, to elementary pleasures and pains. Here, as in the region of ideas, Mr Spencer endeavours to mediate between the Utilitarians and the Intuitionalists. The difficulty of the Utilitarians in dealing with moral feelings was to explain their origin in individual experiences of

HERBERT SPENCER.

From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

utility. According to the evolution view, experiences of utility organised and consolidated through all past generations of the human race have, by means of hereditary transmission, taken the form of moral intuitions-emotional responses to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in individual experiences of utility. In Data of Ethics, published in 1879, are laid down the principles which are applied in later volumes to the detailed interpretation of ethical phenomena. The conclusion reached is that ethical development is from the simple to the complex, and is conditioned by social development. From the tribal to the national stage a gradual process can be traced, caused by the ever-broadening sympathies of human nature in response to the increasing complexity of civilisation-a process which justifies the philosopher of evolution in forecasting a time when the entire human race will be bound by the tie of brotherhood.

In Principles of Sociology, the first volume of which appeared in 1877, the evolution formula is applied to the social organism. Society, like an organism, begins in a state of relative simplicity, and by a series of structural and functional changes reaches a state of relative complexity. From the primitive tribe to the highest form of civilisation the law of evolution holds good. Viewed in detail, society seems a mass of confused strivings among individuals; but when the economic, political, and ethical elements are duly focussed, the great evolutionary law is detected. Civilisation is seen to be a colossal process of adjustment, whereby man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature develops in all its marvellous complexity in response to an environment also increasing in complexity.

In Political Institutions, published in 1882, Mr Spencer details the growth of governments on the lines of his theory; and in his Man versus the State (1884) he applies to modern conditions his theory that State interference is an evil, and should be reduced to a minimum in the interests of individual and social progress. In both Sociology and Political Institutions Mr Spencer lays stress upon the great change which took place when civilisation entered upon the industrial stage. Under the military regime the active virtues receive prominence. When success in war was the highest glory goodness was identified with bravery and strength, and the feelings of hatred and revenge engendered by strife deadened the sympathies and prevented the higher forms of ethical life from developing. With the rise of Industrialism human development entered upon a new phase. On contrasting the characters of the men of to-day with those of their ancestors, we see that with pacific industry has come a growing independence, a decrease of personal loyalty, and less faith in governments. Along with that has come increased assertion of individuality and greater development of sympathy arising out of the decay of the warlike spirit.

Religion, too, with its varied beliefs and institutions, is exhibited as subject to the law of development, rising from ancestor-worship, through the elaborate cults of paganism to the highly complex organisations of modern times. And just as morality increases in purity with the increase of civilisation, more particularly with the increasing sway of Industrialism, so religion rises to higher and nobler conceptions of the Universe beginning in ancestor-worship it culminates in Christianity, and shades off in the hands of philosophic thinkers into Pantheism. According to Mr Spencer there is a sphere for religion-the sphere of the Unknowable. This view of religion takes its rise in the Spencerian theory of Knowledge; positive Knowledge, it is contended, cannot satisfy the mind. Man is not content with tracing the Universe back to the Persistence of Force; for Science that is enough, but the philosopher and the religionist demand

an analysis of Force. Force is seen to be but a symbol of the Absolute, which, by virtue of the relativity of thought, man can never hope to apprehend. In this region the last word of the Spencerian philosophy is Agnosticism. The religious sentiment, according to Mr Spencer, will not be killed by science. The sense of mystery is deepened rather than weakened by increasing knowledge; scientific explanations leave man at last in presence of the inexplicable. One truth must grow ever clearer-the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.'

After forty years of toil, which resulted in several nervous collapses through overwork, Mr Spencer brought his system of philosophy to a conclusion. For twenty-four years he carried on his work at a loss. Fame came at last, and leisure was afforded him at Brighton, where he went to escape the distractions of London life, complete his system of philosophy, and round off his life-work by revising his earlier volumes, especially his Principles of Biology and Principles of Psychology, so as to bring them abreast of modern knowledge. Nearly all his works have been translated into French, German, and Russian, while several have found their way into the Polish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Greek, Japanese, and Chinese languages. Mr Spencer's influence is thus world-wide, and the historian of the nineteenth century will recognise in the philosophy of evolution the dominating factor in the higher reaches of scientific and speculative thought.

Evolution and Dissolution.

Here presents itself a final question which has probably been taking a more or less distinct shape in the minds of many. If Evolution of every kind is an increase in complexity and function that is incidental to the universal process of equilibration, and if equilibration must end in complete rest, what is the fate towards which all things tend? If the Solar System is slowly dissipating its forces-if the Sun is losing his heat at a rate which will tell in millions of years-if with diminution of the Sun's radiations there must go on a diminution in the activity of geologic and meteorologic processes as well as in the quantity of vegetal and animal existence-if Man and Society are similarly dependent on the supply of force that is gradually coming to an end; are we not manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death?' That such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on seems beyond doubt. . . This dissolution of the Earth, and, at intervals, of every other planet, is not, however, a dissolution of the Solar System. Viewed in their ensemble, all the changes exhibited throughout the Solar System are incidents accompanying the integration of the entire matter composing it: the local

And

integration of which each planet is the scene, com pleting itself long before the general integration is complete. But each secondary mass having gone through its evolution and reached a state of equilibrium among its parts, thereafter continues in its extinct state, until by the still progressing general integration it is brought into the general mass. though each such union of a secondary mass with the central mass, implying transformation of molar motion into molecular motion, causes partial diffusion of the total mass formed, and adds to the quantity of motion that has to be dispersed in the shape of light and heat; yet it does not postpone the period at which the total mass must become completely integrated, and its excess of contained motion radiated into space.

Here we come to the question raised at the close of the last chapter-does Evolution as a whole, like Evolution in detail, advance towards complete quiescence? Is that motionless state called death, which ends Evolution in organic bodies, typical of the Universal Death in which Evolution at large must end? And have we thus to contemplate as the outcome of things a boundless space holding here and there extinct suns fated to remain for ever without further change?

To so speculative an inquiry, none but a speculative answer is to be expected. Such answer as may be ventured must be taken less as a positive answer than as a demurrer to the conclusion that the proximate result must be the ultimate result. If, pushing to its extreme the argument that Evolution must come to a close in complete equilibrium or rest, the reader suggests that, for aught that appears to the contrary, the Universal Death thus implied will continue indefinitely, it is legitimate to point out how, on carrying the argument still further, we are led to infer a subsequent Universal Life. (From First Principles.)

Science and Religion.

Under one of its aspects, scientific progress is a gradual transfiguration of nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it reveals great complexity; where there seemed absolute inertness it discloses intense activity; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds a marvellous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called 'brute matter' powers which but a few years before the most instructed physicists would have thought incredible; as instance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, which, translated into multitudinous and varied electric pulses, are retranslated a thousand miles off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech when the explorer of nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surrounding bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their amounts-when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars when there is forced on him the inference that every point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions; the conception to which he tends is much less that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive; alive if not in the restricted sense, still in a general sense.

Science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious sentiment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been accompanied by an

increasing capacity for wonder. Among savages, the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of civilised art: astonishing the traveller by their indifference. And so little of the marvellous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena of nature that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish trifling. It is not the rustic, nor the artisan, nor the trader who sees something more than a mere matter of course in the hatching of a chick; but it is the biologist, who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phenomena, reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm under the microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes him feel that, however he formulates its processes, the actual play of forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in the deer - stalker climbing the mountains above him does a Highland glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport and of the picturesque; but it may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier-bound rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its surface since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human civilisation, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation which has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to which they are strangers. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that the heavens rested on mountain-tops, any more than in the modern inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that the heavens declare the glory of God,' that we find the largest conceptions of the Universe, or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it. Rather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the Sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our Earth might be plunged without touching its edges, and who by every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger.

Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and most instructed mind has neither the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolising in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or other division of Nature, the man of science usually does not know enough of the other division, even rudely, to conceive the extent and complexity of their phenomena; and supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them as a whole. Wider and stronger intellect may hereafter help him to form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. . . . By future more evolved intelligence the course of things now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible altogether, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man as his feeling is beyond that of the savage. And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but to be increased by that analysis of Knowledge which, while forcing him to agnosticism, yet continually prompts him to imagine some solution of the great enigma which he knows cannot be solved. Especially must this be so when he remembers that the very notions, origin, cause, and purpose are relative notions belonging to human thought, which are probably irrelevant to the Ultimate Reality transcending human thought; and when, though suspecting that explanation is a word without meaning when applied to this Ultimate Reality, he yet feels compelled to think there must be an explanation.

But one truth must grow ever clearer-the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested,

to which he can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.

(From Ecclesiastical Institutions.)

There is an Epitome of the synthetic philosophy by Collins (new ed. 1897), Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy by Fiske (1874), and books on Mr Spencer and his philosophy by Hudson (new ed 1894), A. D. White (1897), and the present writer (1900), besides German works by Fischer (1875), Michelet (1891), Kindermann (1884), Grosse (1890). And there are criticisms by Guthrie (1882), M'Cosh (1885), Watson (1895), and Ward (1899). Mr W. H. Hudson's book contains a complete list of Mr Spencer's writings HECTOR MACPHERSON.

Francis Trevelyan Buckland (1826-80), the Frank Buckland' of his friends and his readers, and son of the geologist Dean Buckland, was one of the keenest and kindliest observers of animals and their ways, and had a singular gift of making his subjects popular and attractive. He was born at Christ Church College, Oxford, his father being then canon of Christ Church; was educated at Winchester and Christ Church; and after five years' study of medicine at St George's Hospital, London, served for nine years as assistant-surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards (1854-63). From his boyhood he had manifested an enthusiastic delight in natural history. He contributed largely to the Times and Field, becoming one of the staff of the latter in 1856; in 1866 he started his own Land and Water. He was also author of Curiosities of Natural History (4 vols. 1857-72), Fish-hatching (1863), Logbook of a Fisherman and Zoologist (1876), Natural History of British Fishes (1881), and Notes and Jottings from Animal Life (1882). He was also a frequent and popular lecturer. He took a great interest in fish-culture, and at his own cost established under the Science and Art Department, South Kensington, a 'Museum of Economic Fish-culture.' In 1867 he was appointed inspector of salmon-fisheries for England and Wales, a post that suited him perfectly; in 1870 special commissioner on the salmon-fisheries of Scotland, and in 1877 on the Scotch herring-fisheries. In spite of the place of his birth, he was essentially antiacademic in mind and ways. As his geniality and unconventionality in personal habits bordered on roughness, so in his writings his plain speech and heartiness of manner tended to carelessness and looseness in style; but almost everything he wrote shows the result of fresh, sagacious, and original observation, conveyed in an entertaining manner. On the other hand, it should be noted that he was not a man of science in the modern sense; he rather despised pedantic precision; he was capable of disregarding or defying the experts, and not seldom either made mistakes or used terms so loosely as to mislead. Thus he would call a narwhal's teeth its horns, and speak of a marsupial carrying its young in a pocket of its stomach; and he was to the end a steady and unyielding antiDarwinian. See his Life by G. C. Bompas (1885).