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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Herbert Spencer's "First Principles" serves as a foundational text for the understanding of evolution in both biological and social contexts. Written in a distinctive and assertive style, Spencer synthesizes various philosophical ideas to articulate his theory of the 'Universal Law of Evolution.' Through a systematic exploration of concepts such as development, change, and adaptation, Spencer positions his work at the crossroads of metaphysics, ethics, and sociology. This pioneering text contributed significantly to the dialogue surrounding Darwinism in the late 19th century, stimulating intellectual debates that resonate to this day. Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher and sociologist, became one of the leading figures in promoting the idea of evolution beyond biological sciences. His early influences from the fields of biology and sociology inspired him to apply the evolutionary framework to human society and culture. Spencer's commitment to individualism and his critique of institutionalized authority reflect his belief in natural selection not only in nature but also in social structures, shaping societal progress. "First Principles" is a compelling read for anyone interested in the intersections of philosophy, sociology, and evolutionary theory. Its thorough analysis and profound insights encourage readers to ponder the complexities of existence and progress. An essential addition to the library of any scholar, this text invites contemplation on the principles governing both life and society. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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First Principles
Table of Contents
Introduction
A mind seeks the bedrock beneath all sciences and finds, at once, the limits of knowledge and a universal rhythm of evolution.
First Principles is considered a classic because of the audacity and reach of its project: to provide a coherent foundation for all branches of inquiry during an era when knowledge was rapidly fragmenting. In the landscape of nineteenth-century prose, it stands as a landmark of intellectual architecture, shaping how readers approached grand syntheses of science, philosophy, and culture. Its influence radiated through public debates and the essay tradition, informing the ways Victorian readers—and many after them—imagined the relation between facts and meanings, between empirical discovery and the larger narratives that make those discoveries humanly intelligible.
Written by Herbert Spencer and first published in 1862, First Principles inaugurates his multi-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy. The book emerged in the high Victorian period, amid breakthroughs in geology, biology, and thermodynamics, and the cultural shocks they produced. Spencer’s aim is neither narrow nor purely speculative: he seeks a disciplined method for unifying knowledge, setting out the bounds of what can be known and the general laws that govern the knowable. Without retelling its arguments in detail, this introduction notes that Spencer revised the work in subsequent editions, shaping a text that remained central to his system throughout his career.
At its core, the book proposes a way to reconcile the zeal for scientific explanation with a philosophical humility about ultimate realities. Spencer distinguishes between what inquiry can grasp and what must remain beyond adequate conceptual capture, thereby arguing for both methodological boldness and metaphysical restraint. On the knowable side, he advances principles that aim to hold across domains, culminating in a sweeping account of evolution as a pervasive process. The result is not a set of isolated theses but a structured platform intended to support later treatments of life, mind, society, and conduct across the Synthetic Philosophy.
Spencer’s intention is synthetic rather than merely aggregative: he does not simply collect facts but seeks the first principles by which facts become a system. He argues that the sciences, despite their diversity, share fundamental commitments and constraints, and he articulates those commitments as the groundwork for a general law of development. The book’s opening move, to demarcate the unknowable, is not a retreat but a strategic clearing of philosophical ground. By identifying the ultimate limits of speculation, Spencer means to secure the legitimacy of scientific generalization while avoiding the confusions that arise when inquiry outstrips its proper reach.
The book’s status in intellectual history owes much to its timing and scope. Appearing soon after revolutionary scientific advances had unsettled customary beliefs, First Principles supplied a grand framework that many teachers, readers, and public intellectuals engaged with, whether in support or critique. It circulated widely in the English-speaking world, making Spencer one of the most discussed philosophers of his century. While later generations have reassessed aspects of his system, the book’s ambition—to align disparate sciences under shared axioms and a unifying developmental logic—continues to mark it as a formative text in modern thought.
Enduring themes run through these pages: the aspiration to unify knowledge without erasing difference; the insistence on methodological clarity; the exploration of evolution as a pattern that spans cosmos, organism, and society; and the abiding question of what thought can responsibly claim. Spencer’s treatment encourages readers to weigh the balance between empirical rigor and philosophical overview. It invites a disciplined optimism about inquiry’s reach, tempered by a recognition of its boundaries. That combination—bold synthesis paired with principled restraint—has helped the book outlast its moment, not as a relic, but as a stimulus to renewed reflection.
Stylistically, Spencer’s prose is systematic and cumulative, moving step by step from definitions and axioms to general conclusions. Readers encounter an argument that builds by articulation, refinement, and application, rather than by anecdote or rhetorical flourish. Yet the work is never merely technical; it continually gestures outward to the broader consequences of its claims for culture, religion, and public discourse. The apparatus of reason is present in full, but so too is a sense of the stakes: how a civilization might orient itself intellectually when confronted by proliferating facts, accelerating technologies, and a widening horizon of explanatory power.
The book influenced, and was contested by, a wide range of thinkers across disciplines. Scientists, philosophers, and sociologists debated its proposals regarding the reach of scientific method and the place of evolution outside biology. In university settings and periodicals, its framework became a point of reference—sometimes a point of departure—for subsequent systems and critiques. Even where later authors rejected elements of Spencer’s project, they often did so by adopting his insistence on clarity, systematic method, and engagement with the best available science, thereby confirming the book’s role in shaping the terms of modern intellectual exchange.
Historically, First Principles arises from a moment of remarkable transformation: industrial expansion, new communications, and unprecedented scientific discovery strained inherited categories. Spencer’s response is neither a nostalgic defense nor a reckless severing from the past; it is an attempt to show how disciplines might hang together without being reduced to a single vocabulary. His approach positions philosophy as both a partner to the sciences and a guardian against unwarranted speculation. In this, the book reflects and refracts the Victorian crisis of confidence, offering a method for moving forward that neither dismisses tradition nor surrenders to dogma.
For readers today, approaching the book is most productive when one treats it as a scaffolding for thought rather than a catalogue of pronouncements. The early chapters establish limits that protect inquiry from overreach; the later sections elaborate general principles intended to be tested against the best evidence. The argument proceeds deliberately, and patience with its architecture yields clarity about its aims. While the details of certain examples reflect the science of its time, the overarching methodological commitments—synthetic integration, disciplined generalization, and respect for the unknowable—retain their capacity to orient careful reading and critical engagement.
First Principles endures because it evokes the thrill and responsibility of thinking at scale. Its themes—evolutionary development, the unity of knowledge, the limits of explanation, and the reconciliation of scientific confidence with metaphysical modesty—remain pertinent in an age of data abundance and specialized expertise. Spencer’s book invites readers to locate their own inquiries within a wider map, to ask what holds disciplines together and where boundaries lie. In doing so, it offers not a closed system but a durable provocation: to pursue coherence without simplification, and to embrace a humble ambition equal to the complexity of the world.
Synopsis
First Principles, published in 1862, inaugurates Herbert Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy and sets the plan for its later volumes. Spencer’s aim is to establish a few first principles capable of unifying the verified results of the sciences. He defines philosophy as the complete unification of knowledge, achieved by coordinating what experience discloses and avoiding assertions that exceed possible verification. The book is organized in two parts, The Unknowable and The Knowable. The first delimits the scope of human cognition and the rightful province of religion; the second formulates the fundamental data and laws from which a general doctrine of evolution is inductively drawn.
In The Unknowable, Spencer argues that all knowledge is relative to experience and conditioned by the forms of thought. Efforts to conceive absolute origin, absolute end, or ultimate substance entangle reason in contradictions. He maintains that both religion and science confront an underlying Reality that cannot be represented in consciousness, and thus cannot be described in positive terms. Religion is justified insofar as it affirms this mystery; science is justified insofar as it orders phenomena. By restricting each to its proper sphere, he contends, conflict subsides: reverence is directed to the Unknowable, while inquiry is confined to the knowable order.
The Knowable opens by identifying the ultimate data of philosophy as space, time, matter, motion, and force, terms denoting constant forms of experience rather than independent essences. Chief among these is the persistence of force, Spencer’s formulation of the conservation principle: force is neither created nor destroyed, though it is perpetually transformed. He correlates physical forces, showing their equivalence and mutual convertibility, and treats matter and motion as modes of manifesting force. This postulate provides a basis for deducing the most general laws of change without committing to a metaphysical account of substance, cause, or origin beyond experience.
From the persistence of force, Spencer investigates the redistribution of matter and motion under given conditions. He examines the direction of motion, the relations of matter and force, and the tendency of energy to diffuse, together with the countertendency of matter to concentrate. He describes rhythm as a universal trait of dynamical processes, arising from alternating actions and reactions. He considers how pressures, attractions, and resistances modify movements and structures across scales. These analyses prepare the ground for a single, comprehensive formula of change that, he contends, holds alike in physical, organic, mental, and social realms wherever forces are conserved and transformed.
He then states the law of evolution as a double process. Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity. Differentiations multiply while becoming more precisely arranged, and integrations bind parts into increasingly unified systems. The advance involves both increased variety and increased coordination. Spencer treats compound evolution as the accumulation of many simple differentiations and integrations, proceeding under continuous redistribution of motion. This formula is intended to describe the common character of constructive changes in systems ranging from stars to societies.
To explain why evolution proceeds toward heterogeneity and coherence, Spencer adduces several general principles. The instability of the homogeneous holds that uniform aggregates, subjected to uniform forces, inevitably develop differences because slight inequalities are magnified by their effects. The multiplication of effects holds that each cause, acting on diverse parts, produces numerous distinct consequences, further diversifying structure. Segregation describes the tendency of like components to separate from unlike through differential motions and attractions, sharpening distinctions and forming persistent groupings. Together, these principles account for increasing differentiation, integration, and definiteness across domains without invoking special agencies beyond the continuous play of forces.
Spencer next treats equilibration, the tendency of evolving systems to approach a balance among acting forces. As energies are redistributed, the rate of change diminishes, structures become more stable, and processes settle into relative constancy. When equilibrium is reached or external conditions alter so as to reverse prior redistributions, dissolution ensues, described as the absorption of motion and the loss of structural definiteness. Dissolution is the counterpart of evolution, restoring comparative uniformity and preparing conditions for new cycles. Thus the universal history of things is a sequence of integrations and disintegrations, governed by conserved forces and by changing relations with environments.
Having articulated the law and its corollaries, Spencer sketches its application across domains. In astronomy, he aligns nebular condensation and planetary formation with integration and differentiation. In geology, he reads crustal stratification and landform development similarly. In biology, he relates organization, specialization, and development to the same tendencies. He extends the pattern to psychology, interpreting increasing complexity and coordination of mental processes, and to sociology, tracing the differentiation and integration of institutions. He finally anticipates ethical implications in the evolution of conduct. These outlines indicate how a single formula might organize the many sciences without replacing their specific methods.
First Principles closes by reaffirming its two coordinated results. It preserves a sphere for religion by establishing the Unknowable as the ultimate ground beyond representation, and it secures a program for science by presenting evolution, grounded in the persistence of force, as the most general statement of the knowable. Spencer presents the work as a provisional synthesis, to be corrected by future discoveries yet already capable of binding diverse facts into a coherent view. The overall message is that one law of change governs phenomena at all levels, while human thought must recognize the limits that circumscribe ultimate explanation.
Historical Context
Herbert Spencer’s First Principles appeared in London in 1862, at the heart of mid-Victorian Britain’s industrial and imperial ascendancy. The metropolis, with its Royal Institution lectures and proliferating journals, was a clearinghouse for new scientific ideas and public controversies. Spencer, born in Derby in 1820 and trained as a railway engineer during the 1830s, physically and intellectually moved with the expanding railway and print networks that unified Britain. The period was marked by accelerating urbanization, the consolidation of a global empire centered on India, and a confident belief in progress. This milieu supplied the data, metaphors, and ambitions for Spencer’s attempt at a comprehensive, law-governed “Synthetic Philosophy.”
The intellectual climate that received First Principles was shaped by fierce debates over the authority of science and religion, practical reform movements, and the codification of new physical laws. After sub-editing The Economist (1848–1853), Spencer inhabited a world where statistics, public health reports, and geological findings challenged traditional certainties. London societies and provincial associations promoted cross-disciplinary conversation; figures like T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Charles Lyell popularized scientific naturalism. The book’s emphasis on the “Unknowable,” the conservation and transformation of forces, and a universal evolution drew directly from this environment of methodological rigor, empirical expansion, and contention over the scope and limits of knowledge.
The British Industrial Revolution reached a mature phase by the 1840s–1860s, transforming Manchester, Birmingham, and the West Riding into centers of cotton spinning, metallurgy, and machine-making. Railways knit markets after the 1830s, while the 1851 census revealed, for England and Wales, an urban majority for the first time. Factory Acts (1833, 1844, 1847) and new corporate practices reshaped labor and capital. This broad socio-technical upheaval provided Spencer with living examples of complex systems evolving from simple, localized workshops to integrated national industries. First Principles mirrors this process by defining evolution as a passage from “indefinite, incoherent homogeneity” to “definite, coherent heterogeneity,” using industrial organization as an illustrative analogy.
The institutionalization of science accelerated with the founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in York in 1831 and the flourishing of the Royal Institution in London. Regional philosophical societies and metropolitan lecture halls connected chemists, physicists, geologists, and the reading public. This professionalization both consolidated experimental standards and amplified scientific authority in public policy debates. First Principles relies on such institutional achievements by synthesizing findings across disciplines into a unified worldview. Spencer’s appeal to cross-domain “laws” reflects the Association’s ethos of generalization from carefully verified results, and his emphasis on method aligns with the new ideal of the scientist as a public, authoritative arbiter of reliable knowledge.
Breakthroughs in the conservation of energy shaped mid-century physics. James Prescott Joule’s experiments in Manchester (1840–1849) quantified the mechanical equivalent of heat; Julius Robert Mayer (1842) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1847) elaborated the principle of energy conservation; Rudolf Clausius (1850) and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) developed thermodynamics. John Tyndall popularized these results in London. First Principles adopts this framework as the “persistence of force,” asserting that the total amount of force remains constant while undergoing transformations. Spencer’s metaphysical generalization drew authority from these concrete laboratory achievements, translating their empirical laws into a universal principle guiding cosmic, biological, and social change.
Geology revolutionized historical thinking through Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833), which advanced uniformitarianism and deep time against earlier catastrophist models. British fieldwork—from Welsh slate quarries to Scottish Highlands transects—accumulated evidence of gradual deposition, uplift, and erosion. Fossils and stratigraphy supplied a narrative of incremental transformation over millions of years. First Principles depends on this temporal canvas; Spencer’s concept of evolution presupposes durable processes acting over vast durations. By framing change as continuous and law-governed, the book integrates geological reasoning into a general synthesis, arguing that the same logic of transformation underwrites physical, organic, and societal development.
Astronomy and cosmology provided a second axis of temporal and structural vastness. The Kant–Laplace nebular hypothesis (late eighteenth century) posited stellar and planetary formation from rotating gas clouds; nineteenth-century observers like William and John Herschel mapped nebulae; Kirchhoff and Bunsen’s spectroscopy (1859) enabled chemical analysis of stars. Kelvin’s 1852 paper on energy dissipation and his 1862 estimate of the Sun’s age reframed cosmic energetics. First Principles draws on these debates to claim that evolution is universal, from nebular condensation to planetary systems. Spencer used astronomical regularities to bolster his assertion that complex structures arise from simpler states under conserved forces, linking cosmology to biological and social organization.
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in London in November 1859, and the ensuing debates—most famously at the 1860 Oxford meeting where Bishop Samuel Wilberforce disputed T. H. Huxley—reorganized Victorian thought. Darwin offered a mechanism, natural selection, acting cumulatively over deep time to produce species divergence. The book sold out quickly; by 1860–1862, reviews, sermons, and public lectures made evolution a household controversy. Geographical distribution studies, pigeon-breeding experiments, and barnacle monographs supplied Darwin’s empirical ballast, while Lyell’s geology provided temporal scaffolding. Huxley championed “agnosticism” as a posture toward ultimate causes, disentangling method from metaphysics. In 1862, botanists such as Joseph Dalton Hooker and Asa Gray debated selection’s theological implications across the Atlantic, while periodicals like the Athenaeum tracked the controversy. Against this backdrop, Spencer’s First Principles proposed a more encompassing “law of evolution” than Darwin’s biological mechanism, generalizing change from multi-domain evidence and establishing “The Unknowable” to cordon off questions beyond empirical reach. Though Spencer did not coin “survival of the fittest” until 1864 in his Principles of Biology, First Principles supplied the philosophical scaffolding: conservation and transformation of forces, integration and differentiation, and equilibration. The book absorbed Darwin’s biological insights into a cosmological program, positioning natural selection as a special case within a universal pattern of increasing heterogeneity. This move both allied Spencer with scientific naturalism and distinguished his project as a synthesis that sought continuity from nebular formation to moral and social evolution, thereby converting a biological dispute into a civilizational blueprint grounded in law-like processes.
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, London, in 1851, drawing over six million visitors to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Displays of machinery, textiles, and precision instruments embodied a triumphalist narrative of progress orchestrated by Prince Albert and reform-minded elites. The Exhibition proclaimed a world increasingly ordered by technology, trade, and measurement. First Principles resonates with this ethos by offering a law of evolution that seems to vindicate the era’s cumulative advance in complexity and coordination. Spencer’s system codified the impression that industrial modernity reflected underlying, universal processes rather than episodic feats.
Mass politics surged through the Chartist movement (1838–1848), which demanded universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and parliamentary reforms via three national petitions (1839, 1842, 1848). The 1832 Reform Act had expanded representation, but working-class activists pressed further, culminating in the 1848 Kennington Common demonstration. Although Chartism ebbed, the franchise widened again in the 1867 Second Reform Act. First Principles responds indirectly by theorizing social structures as evolving organisms, cautioning against abrupt, coercive redesign while acknowledging long-run differentiation and integration. Spencer’s systems language supplied reform debates with a vocabulary of gradualism and spontaneous order, framing political change as an emergent, law-governed process.
The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, achieved by the Anti–Corn Law League led by Richard Cobden and John Bright in Manchester, entrenched free trade as Britain’s mid-century orthodoxy. The policy shift lowered grain prices, reoriented agriculture, and accelerated industrial export strategies. It also canonized laissez-faire as a moral and economic creed. First Principles harmonizes with this environment by grounding social order in decentralized adjustments rather than central orchestration. Spencer’s generalized evolution implies that complex equilibria arise from dispersed interactions, reinforcing the free-trade conviction that prosperity and coordination emerge when state interference is minimized and exchanges follow underlying economic “forces.”
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 restructured relief around workhouses, provoking controversy about poverty, responsibility, and the state’s role. Debates intensified with urban crises and the popularization of self-help ethics—famously articulated by Samuel Smiles in Self-Help (1859). Statist critics highlighted destitution and child labor; laissez-faire advocates warned against moral hazard. First Principles intervenes at the level of fundamentals: by characterizing social life as the interplay of conserved forces and adaptive structures, Spencer argued for evolution through voluntary cooperation, competition, and incremental institutional change. The book’s abstract architecture supplied a justificatory frame for limiting coercive relief, while still acknowledging systemic interdependence.
Public health emerged as a national concern after cholera outbreaks (1832, 1848–1849, 1853–1854) and the 1858 “Great Stink” in London. John Snow’s 1854 Broad Street pump study and the 1848 Public Health Act, followed by Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer works, exemplified evidence-based, infrastructural solutions. Florence Nightingale’s statistical advocacy extended these methods. First Principles appropriates this empirical spirit while questioning centralized compulsion as a universal remedy. By portraying society as an evolving organism whose functions differentiate and coordinate, Spencer suggested that sanitation successes illustrate lawful adaptations, yet warned that the same complexity makes blunt, uniform interventions risky unless guided by demonstrable, system-level understanding.
The Crimean War (1853–1856), fought in the Black Sea region over Ottoman-Russian tensions, exposed systemic failures in British administration, logistics, and military medicine. The siege of Sevastopol and scandals over supply mismanagement spurred reforms; Nightingale’s data-driven hospital work and the McNeill–Tulloch Report (1855–1856) modeled accountability. First Principles draws a lesson congenial to Spencer: durable improvements arise when institutions evolve via feedback, specialization, and coordination, not merely by decree. The war’s statistical and organizational inquiries validated his emphasis on functional differentiation and adaptive equilibration across complex systems, while reinforcing skepticism toward ad hoc state command detached from empirical constraints.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857, beginning at Meerut and spreading to Delhi, Cawnpore (Kanpur), Lucknow, and Jhansi, led to brutal reprisals and the 1858 Government of India Act, which transferred authority from the East India Company to the British Crown. The crisis forced reconsideration of imperial governance, religious policy, and cultural change. First Principles situates such upheavals within a broader schema of social evolution, implying that rapid, coercive transformations—whether missionary or administrative—destabilize complex arrangements. Spencer’s universalist law framed empire not as ordained tutelage but as a hazardous interference in the heterogeneous development of societies subject to their own adaptive equilibria.
As a social and political critique, First Principles confronts mid-Victorian confidence in dogmatic certainties—both theological and bureaucratic—by positing “The Unknowable” as a boundary on metaphysical claims. Spencer undercuts ecclesiastical authority by relocating legitimacy in empirical, law-like processes rather than revelation. Simultaneously, he critiques state overreach by arguing that complex orders—biological, social, economic—self-adjust through conserved forces and selective pressures. By making evolution a universal grammar of change, the book challenges inherited hierarchies, privileges, and teleologies, exposing how appeals to tradition mask resistance to lawful transformation grounded in observation, experiment, and measured, adaptive reform.
The work also exposes contemporary injustices by recasting class conflict, pauperism, and imperial paternalism as symptoms of misapplied compulsion within interdependent systems. Spencer’s insistence on voluntary cooperation indicts coercive poor relief and protectionism, while his systems analysis highlights how industrial and sanitary reforms succeed when they respect functional differentiation. By disciplining politics to evidence and limiting metaphysical pretensions, First Principles implicitly criticizes censorship, sectarian education, and arbitrary administration at home and abroad. Its universal evolution offers a standard to evaluate policy: do interventions cultivate stable, distributed equilibria, or do they violate the conditions for sustainable adaptation in societies undergoing rapid Victorian change?
Author Biography
Herbert Spencer was a Victorian British philosopher, sociologist, and polymath whose work sought to unify knowledge across the natural and social sciences. Active from the mid-19th century into the early 20th, he became one of the English-speaking world’s most widely read thinkers. He advanced a sweeping theory of evolution as a general law of development, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” His ideas shaped early sociology, political theory, and popular understandings of science, while also attracting strong criticism. Spencer wrote for a broad audience and aimed to build a comprehensive system, positioning himself as a synthesizer of scientific findings, moral philosophy, and social analysis.
Spencer’s education was largely informal, with early training that emphasized practical science and mathematics. He worked briefly in engineering, which grounded his later analogies between social systems and biological organisms. His intellectual formation drew on British liberalism and utilitarian debates, aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the rise of positivist and evolutionary thought. He engaged critically with Auguste Comte while adopting an empirical, science-oriented outlook. Charles Darwin’s work influenced the intellectual climate in which Spencer operated, though Spencer developed an evolutionary framework that extended beyond biological natural selection. He also drew on mid-19th-century geology and physics, helping him articulate a universal account of development and complexity.
Before achieving prominence as a philosopher, Spencer contributed to railway engineering projects in the late 1830s and then moved into journalism during the 1840s. He served as a sub-editor at The Economist, a post that sharpened his interest in political economy and institutional change. His early major book, Social Statics (early 1850s), advanced a theory of natural rights and argued for limited government based on the principle of equal freedom. Essays written across the 1850s and 1860s established his reputation as a provocative public intellectual. These formative years show him consolidating themes that would dominate his later system: evolution, individual liberty, spontaneous order, and the comparative study of societies.
From the early 1860s onward, Spencer developed his Synthetic Philosophy, an ambitious multi-volume project intended to integrate knowledge from physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics. First Principles outlined a general theory of evolution as a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity and introduced key metaphysical commitments. Principles of Psychology explored mind and behavior through evolutionary and associationist lenses. Principles of Biology, published in the mid-1860s, coined “survival of the fittest” to describe natural selection. Principles of Sociology and Principles of Ethics extended his framework to social organization and moral theory. The Study of Sociology and collections like Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative broadened his methodological and popular reach.
Politically, Spencer was a prominent advocate of classical liberalism and laissez-faire, arguing that social progress arose from voluntary cooperation rather than coercive state action. In The Man versus the State (mid-1880s), he criticized expanding legislation on welfare and regulation, warning of unintended consequences and bureaucratic overreach. He elaborated a distinction between “militant” and “industrial” social types, associating the former with compulsion and the latter with contractual relations. His political and social views became linked, for supporters and critics alike, to what later came to be known as Social Darwinism. While he rejected coercive policies and stressed individual rights, his application of evolutionary ideas to society generated enduring controversy.
As a theorist, Spencer proposed that evolution is a universal process encompassing the physical, biological, psychological, and social realms. He described society as a “super-organic” entity, using organic analogies to analyze interdependent institutions while maintaining that social improvement relies on individual action. He pursued a comparative method in sociology, drawing on cross-cultural reports to classify social structures and customs. His reliance on mechanisms such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics later faced scientific challenges, and critics faulted the teleological tone of his evolutionary schemas. Nonetheless, his functional analyses of institutions and systemic emphasis anticipated strands of later sociological theory and helped establish sociology as a distinct field.
In his later years, Spencer continued revising and extending his system, despite recurrent health problems that limited public appearances. He remained a significant presence in intellectual debates into the early 1900s and died in 1903. His reputation declined in the early to mid-20th century as evolutionary grand narratives fell from favor and biological concepts were reframed. Yet historians of ideas and social theorists have reappraised his contributions to systems thinking, liberal political theory, and the institutional analysis of societies. Today, Spencer is read critically for his influence on sociology and political economy, the ambition of his Synthetic Philosophy, and the cultural impact of concepts like “survival of the fittest.”
First Principles
PREFACE.
This volume is the first of a series described in a prospectus originally distributed in March, 1860. Of that prospectus, the annexed is a reprint.
A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY.
Mr. Herbert Spencer proposes to issue in periodical parts a connected series of works which he has for several years been preparing. Some conception of the general aim and scope of this series may be gathered from the following Programme.
FIRST PRINCIPLES.
Part I. The Unknowable.—Carrying a step further the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel[1]; pointing out the various directions in which Science leads to the same conclusions; and showing that in this united belief in an Absolute that transcends not only human knowledge but human conception, lies the only possible reconciliation of Science and Religion.
Part II. Laws of the Knowable.—A statement of the ultimate principles discernible throughout all manifestations of the Absolute—those highest generalizations now being disclosed by Science which are severally true not of one class of phenomena but of all classes of phenomena; and which are thus the keys to all classes of phenomena.[1]
[In logical order should here come the application of these First Principles to Inorganic Nature. But this great division it is proposed to pass over: partly because, even without it, the scheme is too extensive; and partly because the interpretation of Organic Nature after the proposed method, is of more immediate importance. The second work of the series will therefore be—]
THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY.
Vol. I.
Part I. The Data of Biology.—Including those general truths of Physics and Chemistry with which rational Biology must set out.
II. The Inductions of Biology.—A statement of the leading generalizations which Naturalists, Physiologists, and Comparative Anatomists, have established.
III. The Evolution of Life.—Concerning the speculation commonly known as “The Development Hypothesis”—its à priori and à posteriori evidences.
Vol. II.
IV. Morphological Development.—Pointing out the relations that are everywhere traceable between organic forms and the average of the various forces to which they are subject; and seeking in the cumulative effects of such forces a theory of the forms.
V. Physiological Development.—The progressive differentiation of functions similarly traced; and similarly interpreted as consequent upon the exposure of different parts of organisms to different sets of conditions.
VI. The Laws of Multiplication.—Generalizations respecting the rates of reproduction of the various classes of plants and animals; followed by an attempt to show the dependence of these variations upon certain necessary causes.[2]
THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.
Vol. I.
Part I. The Data of Psychology.—Treating of the general connexions of Mind and Life and their relations to other modes of the Unknowable.
II. The Inductions of Psychology.—A digest of such generalizations respecting mental phenomena as have already been empirically established.
III. General Synthesis.—A republication, with additional chapters, of the same part in the already-published The Principles of Psychology.
IV. Special Synthesis.—A republication, with extensive revisions and additions, of the same part, &c. &c.
V. Physical Synthesis.—An attempt to show the manner in which the succession of states of consciousness conforms to a certain fundamental law of nervous action that follows from the First Principles laid down at the outset.
Vol. II.
VI. Special Analysis.—As at present published, but further elaborated by some additional chapters.
VII. General Analysis.—As at present published, with several explanations and additions.
VIII. Corollaries.—Consisting in part of a number of derivative principles which form a necessary introduction to Sociology.[3]
THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY.
Vol. I.
Part I. The Data of Sociology.—A statement of the several sets of factors entering into social phenomena—human ideas and feelings considered in their necessary order of evolution; surrounding natural conditions; and those ever complicating conditions to which Society itself gives origin.
II. The Inductions of Sociology.—General facts, structural and functional, as gathered from a survey of Societies and their changes: in other words, the empirical generalizations that are arrived at by comparing different societies, and successive phases of the same society.
III. Political Organization.—The evolution of governments, general and local, as determined by natural causes; their several types and metamorphoses; their increasing complexity and specialization; and the progressive limitation of their functions.
Vol. II.
IV. Ecclesiastical Organization.—Tracing the differentiation of religious government from secular; its successive complications and the multiplication of sects; the growth and continued modification of religious ideas, as caused by advancing knowledge and changing moral character; and the gradual reconciliation of these ideas with the truths of abstract science.
V. Ceremonial Organization.—The natural history of that third kind of government which, having a common root with the others, and slowly becoming separate from and supplementary to them, serves to regulate the minor actions of life.
VI. Industrial Organization.—The development of productive and distributive agencies, considered, like the foregoing, in its necessary causes: comprehending not only the progressive division of labour, and the increasing complexity of each industrial agency, but also the successive forms of industrial government as passing through like phases with political government.
Vol. III.
VII. Lingual Progress.—The evolution of Languages regarded as a psychological process determined by social conditions.
VIII. Intellectual Progress.—Treated from the same point of view: including the growth of classifications; the evolution of science out of common knowledge; the advance from qualitative to quantitative prevision, from the indefinite to the definite, and from the concrete to the abstract.
IX. Æsthetic Progress.—The Fine Arts similarly dealt with: tracing their gradual differentiation from primitive institutions and from each other; their increasing varieties of development; and their advance in reality of expression and superiority of aim.
X. Moral Progress.—Exhibiting the genesis of the slow emotional modifications which human nature undergoes in its adaptation to the social state.
XI. The Consensus.—Treating of the necessary interdependence of structures and of functions in each type of society, and in the successive phases of social development.[4]
THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY.
Vol. I.
Part I. The Data of Morality.—Generalizations furnished by Biology, Psychology and Sociology, which underlie a true theory of right living: in other words, the elements of that equilibrium between constitution and conditions of existence, which is at once the moral ideal and the limit towards which we are progressing.
II. The Inductions of Morality.—Those empirically-established rules of human action which are registered as essential laws by all civilized nations: that is to say—the generalizations of expediency.
III. Personal Morals.—The principles of private conduct—physical, intellectual, moral and religious—that follow from the conditions to complete individual life: or, what is the same thing—those modes of private action which must result from the eventual equilibration of internal desires and external needs.
Vol. II.
IV. Justice.—The mutual limitations of men’s actions necessitated by their co-existence as units of a society—limitations, the perfect observance of which constitutes that state of equilibrium forming the goal of political progress.
V. Negative Beneficence.—Those secondary limitations, similarly necessitated, which, though less important and not cognizable by law, are yet requisite to prevent mutual destruction of happiness in various indirect ways: in other words—those minor self-restraints dictated by what may be called passive sympathy.
VI. Positive Beneficence.—Comprehending all modes of conduct, dictated by active sympathy, which imply pleasure in giving pleasure—modes of conduct that social adaptation has induced and must render ever more general; and which, in becoming universal, must fill to the full the possible measure of human happiness.[5]
In anticipation of the obvious criticism that the scheme here sketched out is too extensive, it may be remarked that an exhaustive treatment of each topic is not intended; but simply the establishment of principles, with such illustrations as are needed to make their bearings fully understood. It may also be pointed out that, besides minor fragments, one large division (The Principles of Psychology) is already, in great part, executed. And a further reply is, that impossible though it may prove to execute the whole, yet nothing can be said against an attempt to set forth the First Principles and to carry their applications as far as circumstances permit.
The price per Number to be half-a-crown; that is to say, the four Numbers yearly issued to be severally delivered, post free, to all annual subscribers of Ten Shillings.
This Programme I have thought well to reprint for two reasons:—the one being that readers may, from time to time, be able to ascertain what topics are next to be dealt with; the other being that an outline of the scheme may remain, in case it should never be completed.
The successive instalments of which this volume consists, were issued to the subscribers at the following dates:—Part I. (pp. 1–80) in October, 1860; Part II. (pp. 81–176) in January, 1861; Part III. (pp. 177–256) in April, 1861; Part IV. (pp. 257–334) in October, 1861; Part V. (pp. 335–416) in March, 1862; and Part VI. (pp. 417–504) in June, 1862.
London, June 5th, 1862
1.One of these generalizations is that currently known as “the Conservation of Force;” a second may be gathered from a published essay on “Progress: its Law and Cause;” a third is indicated in a paper on “Transcendental Physiology;” and there are several others.
2.The ideas to be developed in the second volume of the Principles of Biology the writer has already briefly expressed in sundry Review-Articles. Part IV. will work out a doctrine suggested in a paper on “The Laws of Organic Form,” published in the Medico-Chirurgical Review for January, 1859. The germ of Part V. is contained in the essay on “Transcendental Physiology:” See Essays, pp. 280–90. And in Part VI. will be unfolded certain views crudely expressed in a “Theory of Population,” published in the Westminster Review for April, 1852.
3.Respecting the several additions to be made to the Principles of Psychology, it seems needful only to say that Part V. is the unwritten division named in the preface to that work—a division of which the germ is contained in a note on page 544, and of which the scope has since been more definitely stated in a paper in the Medico-Chirurgical Review for Jan. 1859.
4.Of this treatise on Sociology a few small fragments may be found in already-published essays. Some of the ideas to be developed in Part II. are indicated in an article on “The Social Organism,” contained in the last number of the Westminster Review; those which Part V. will work out, may be gathered from the first half of a paper written some years since on “Manners and Fashion;” of Part VIII. the germs are contained in an article on the “Genesis of Science;” two papers on “The Origin and Function of Music” and “The Philosophy of Style,” contain some ideas to be embodied in Part IX.; and from a criticism of Mr. Bain’s work on “The Emotions and the Will,” in the last number of the Medico-Chirurgical Review, the central idea to be developed in Part X. may be inferred.
5.Part IV. of the Principles of Morality will be co-extensive (though not identical) with the first half of the writer’s Social Statics.
PART I.THE UNKNOWABLE.
CHAPTER I.RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
§ 1. We too often forget that not only is there “a soul of goodness in things evil[2],” but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous[4]. While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually a nucleus of reality, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing judgment on the opinions of others. A belief that is finally proved to be grossly at variance with fact, is cast aside with indignation or contempt;[1q] and in the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief which commended it to men’s minds. Yet there must have been something. And there is reason to suspect that this something was its correspondence with certain of their experiences: an extremely limited or vague correspondence perhaps; but still, a correspondence. Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image. And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may appear, the implication is that they germinated out of actual experiences—[2q]originally contained, and perhaps still contain, some small amount of verity.
More especially may we safely assume this, in the case of beliefs that have long existed and are widely diffused; and most of all so, in the case of beliefs that are perennial and nearly or quite universal. The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents. Admitting, as we must, that life is impossible unless through a certain agreement between internal convictions and external circumstances; admitting therefore that the probabilities are always in favour of the truth, or at least the partial truth, of a conviction; we must admit that the convictions entertained by many minds in common are the most likely to have some foundation. The elimination of individual errors of thought, must give to the resulting judgment a certain additional value. It may indeed be urged that many widely-spread beliefs are received on authority; that those entertaining them make no attempts at verification; and hence it may be inferred that the multitude of adherents adds but little to the probability of a belief. But this is not true. For a belief which gains extensive reception without critical examination, is thereby proved to have a general congruity with the various other beliefs of those who receive it; and in so far as these various other beliefs are based upon personal observation and judgment, they give an indirect warrant to one with which they harmonize. It may be that this warrant is of small value; but still it is of some value.
Could we reach definite views on this matter, they would be extremely useful to us. It is important that we should, if possible, form something like a general theory of current opinions; so that we may neither over-estimate nor under-estimate their worth. Arriving at correct judgments on disputed questions, much depends on the attitude of mind we preserve while listening to, or taking part in, the controversy; and for the preservation of a right attitude, it is needful that we should learn how true, and yet how untrue, are average human beliefs. On the one hand, we must keep free from that bias in favour of received ideas which expresses itself in such dogmas as “What every one says must be true,” or “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” On the other hand, the fact disclosed by a survey of the past, that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact, that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong. And the avoidance of these extremes being a prerequisite to catholic thinking[7], we shall do well to provide ourselves with a safe-guard against them, by making a valuation of opinions in the abstract. To this end we must contemplate the kind of relation that ordinarily subsists between opinions and facts. Let us do so with one of those beliefs which under various forms has prevailed among all nations in all times.
§ 2. The earliest traditions represent rulers as gods or demigods. By their subjects, primitive kings were regarded as superhuman in origin, and superhuman in power. They possessed divine titles; received obeisances[5] like those made before the altars of deities; and were in some cases actually worshipped. If there needs proof that the divine and half-divine characters originally ascribed to monarchs were ascribed literally, we have it in the fact that there are still existing savage races, among whom it is held that the chiefs and their kindred are of celestial origin, or, as elsewhere, that only the chiefs have souls. And of course along with beliefs of this kind, there existed a belief in the unlimited power of the ruler over his subjects—an absolute possession of them[6], extending even to the taking of their lives at will: as even still in Fiji, where a victim stands unbound to be killed at the word of his chief; himself declaring, “whatever the king says must be done.”
In times and among races somewhat less barbarous, we find these beliefs a little modified. The monarch, instead of being literally thought god or demigod, is conceived to be a man having divine authority, with perhaps more or less of divine nature. He retains however, as in the East to the present day, titles expressing his heavenly descent or relationships; and is still saluted in forms and words as humble as those addressed to the Deity. While the lives and properties of his people, if not practically so completely at his mercy, are still in theory supposed to be his.
Later in the progress of civilization, as during the middle ages in Europe, the current opinions respecting the relationship of rulers and ruled are further changed. For the theory of divine origin, there is substituted that of divine right[3]. No longer god or demigod, or even god-descended, the king is now regarded as simply God’s vice-gerent. The obeisances made to him are not so extreme in their humility; and his sacred titles lose much of their meaning. Moreover his authority ceases to be unlimited. Subjects deny his right to dispose at will of their lives and properties; and yield allegiance only in the shape of obedience to his commands.
With advancing political opinion has come still greater restriction of imperial power. Belief in the supernatural character of the ruler, long ago repudiated by ourselves for example, has left behind it nothing more than the popular tendency to ascribe unusual goodness, wisdom, and beauty to the monarch. Loyalty, which originally meant implicit submission to the king’s will, now means a merely nominal profession of subordination, and the fulfilment of certain forms of respect. Our political practice, and our political theory, alike utterly reject those regal prerogatives which once passed unquestioned. By deposing some, and putting others in their places, we have not only denied the divine rights of certain men to rule; but we have denied that they have any rights beyond those originating in the assent of the nation. Though our forms of speech and our state-documents still assert the subjection of the citizens to the ruler, our actual beliefs and our daily proceedings implicitly assert the contrary. We obey no laws save those of our own making. We have entirely divested the monarch of legislative power; and should immediately rebel against his or her exercise of such power, even in matters of the smallest concern. In brief, the aboriginal doctrine is all but extinct among us.
Nor has the rejection of primitive political beliefs, resulted only in transferring the authority of an autocrat to a representative body. The views entertained respecting governments in general, of whatever form, are now widely different from those once entertained. Whether popular or despotic, governments were in ancient times supposed to have unlimited authority over their subjects. Individuals existed for the benefit of the State; not the State for the benefit of individuals. In our days, however, not only has the national will been in many cases substituted for the will of the king; but the exercise of this national will has been restricted to a much smaller sphere. In England, for instance, though there has been established no definite theory setting bounds to governmental authority; yet, in practice, sundry bounds have been set to it which are tacitly recognized by all. There is no organic law formally declaring that the legislature may not freely dispose of the citizens’ lives, as early kings did when they sacrificed hecatombs of victims; but were it possible for our legislature to attempt such a thing, its own destruction would be the consequence, rather than the destruction of citizens. How entirely we have established the personal liberties of the subject against the invasions of State-power, would be quickly demonstrated, were it proposed by Act of Parliament forcibly to take possession of the nation, or of any class, and turn its services to public ends; as the services of the people were turned by primitive rulers. And should any statesman suggest a re-distribution of property such as was sometimes made in ancient democratic communities, he would be met by a thousand-tongued denial of imperial power over individual possessions. Not only in our day have these fundamental claims of the citizen been thus made good against the State, but sundry minor claims likewise. Ages ago, laws regulating dress and mode of living fell into disuse; and any attempt to revive them would prove the current opinion to be, that such matters lie beyond the sphere of legal control. For some centuries we have been asserting in practice, and have now established in theory, the right of every man to choose his own religious beliefs, instead of receiving such beliefs on State-authority. Within the last few generations we have inaugurated complete liberty of speech, in spite of all legislative attempts to suppress or limit it. And still more recently we have claimed and finally obtained under a few exceptional restrictions, freedom to trade with whomsoever we please. Thus our political beliefs are widely different from ancient ones, not only as to the proper depositary of power to be exercised over a nation, but also as to the extent of that power.
Not even here has the change ended. Besides the average opinions which we have just described as current among ourselves, there exists a less widely-diffused opinion going still further in the same direction. There are to be found men who contend that the sphere of government should be narrowed even more than it is in England. The modern doctrine that the State exists for the benefit of citizens, which has now in a great measure supplanted the ancient doctrine that the citizens exist for the benefit of the State, they would push to its logical results. They hold that the freedom of the individual, limited only by the like freedom of other individuals, is sacred; and that the legislature cannot equitably put further restrictions upon it, either by forbidding any actions which the law of equal freedom permits, or taking away any property save that required to pay the cost of enforcing this law itself. They assert that the sole function of the State is the protection of persons against each other, and against a foreign foe. They urge that as, throughout civilization, the manifest tendency has been continually to extend the liberties of the subject, and restrict the functions of the State, there is reason to believe that the ultimate political condition must be one in which personal freedom is the greatest possible and governmental power the least possible: that, namely, in which the freedom of each has no limit but the like freedom of all; while the sole governmental duty is the maintenance of this limit.
Here then in different times and places we find concerning the origin, authority, and functions of government, a great variety of opinions—opinions of which the leading genera above indicated subdivide into countless species. What now must be said about the truth or falsity of these opinions? Save among a few barbarous tribes the notion that a monarch is a god or demigod is regarded throughout the world as an absurdity almost passing the bounds of human credulity. In but few places does there survive a vague notion that the ruler possesses any supernatural attributes. Most civilized communities, which still admit the divine right of governments, have long since repudiated the divine right of kings. Elsewhere the belief that there is anything sacred in legislative regulations is dying out: laws are coming to be considered as conventional only. While the extreme school holds that governments have neither intrinsic authority, nor can have authority given to them by convention; but can possess authority only as the administrators of those moral principles deducible from the conditions essential to social life. Of these various beliefs, with their innumerable modifications, must we then say that some one alone is wholly right and all the rest wholly wrong; or must we say that each of them contains truth more or less completely disguised by errors? The latter alternative is the one which analysis will force upon us. Ridiculous as they may severally appear to those not educated under them, every one of these doctrines has for its vital element the recognition of an unquestionable fact. Directly or by implication, each of them insists on a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements. There are wide differences as to the power to which this subordination is due; there are wide differences as to the motive for this subordination; there are wide differences as to its extent; but that there must be some subordination all are agreed. From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance, down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity. Though, between the savage who conceives his life and property to be at the absolute disposal of his chief, and the anarchist who denies the right of any government, autocratic or democratic, to trench upon his individual freedom, there seems at first sight an entire and irreconcilable antagonism; yet ultimate analysis discloses in them this fundamental community of opinion; that there are limits which individual actions may not transgress—limits which the one regards as originating in the king’s will, and which the other regards as deducible from the equal claims of fellow-citizens.
It may perhaps at first sight seem that we here reach a very unimportant conclusion; namely, that a certain tacit assumption is equally implied in all these conflicting political creeds—an assumption which is indeed of self-evident validity. The question, however, is not the value or novelty of the particular truth in this case arrived at. My aim has been to exhibit the more general truth, which we are apt to overlook, that between the most opposite beliefs there is usually something in common,—something taken for granted by each; and that this something, if not to be set down as an unquestionable verity, may yet be considered to have the highest degree of probability. A postulate which, like the one above instanced, is not consciously asserted but unconsciously involved; and which is unconsciously involved not by one man or body of men, but by numerous bodies of men who diverge in countless ways and degrees in the rest of their beliefs; has a warrant far transcending any that can be usually shown. And when, as in this case, the postulate is abstract—is not based on some one concrete experience common to all mankind, but implies an induction from a great variety of experiences, we may say that it ranks next in certainty to the postulates of exact science.
Do we not thus arrive at a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous? While the foregoing illustration brings clearly home the fact, that in opinions seeming to be absolutely and supremely wrong something right is yet to be found; it also indicates the method we should pursue in seeking the something right. This method is to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting one another those various special and concrete elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant constituents have been eliminated; and to find for this remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent modifications.
§3. A candid acceptance of this general principle and an adoption of the course it indicates, will greatly aid us in dealing with those chronic antagonisms by which men are divided. Applying it not only to current ideas with which we are personally unconcerned, but also to our own ideas and those of our opponents, we shall be led to form far more correct judgments. We shall be ever ready to suspect that the convictions we entertain are not wholly right, and that the adverse convictions are not wholly wrong. On the one hand we shall not, in common with the great mass of the unthinking, let our beliefs be determined by the mere accident of birth in a particular age on a particular part of the Earth’s surface; and, on the other hand, we shall be saved from that error of entire and contemptuous negation, which is fallen into by most who take up an attitude of independent criticism.
Of all antagonisms of belief, the oldest, the widest, the most profound and the most important, is that between Religion and Science. It commenced when the recognition of the simplest uniformities in surrounding things, set a limit to the previously universal fetishism. It shows itself everywhere throughout the domain of human knowledge: affecting men’s interpretations alike of the simplest mechanical accidents and of the most complicated events in the histories of nations. It has its roots deep down in the diverse habits of thought of different orders of minds. And the conflicting conceptions of nature and life which these diverse habits of thought severally generate, influence for good or ill the tone of feeling and the daily conduct.
An unceasing battle of opinion like this which has been carried on throughout all ages under the banners of Religion and Science, has of course generated an animosity fatal to a just estimate of either party by the other. On a larger scale, and more intensely than any other controversy, has it illustrated that perennially significant fable concerning the knights who fought about the colour of a shield of which neither looked at more than one face. Each combatant seeing clearly his own aspect of the question, has charged his opponent with stupidity or dishonesty in not seeing the same aspect of it; while each has wanted the candour to go over to his opponent’s side and find out how it was that he saw everything so differently.
