2. BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
In a foot-note to his essay on “Progress,” Spencer candidly confesses that his ideas of evolution were based on Lamarck’s theory of the transmissibility of acquired characters, and were not really an anticipation of Darwin, whose essential idea was the theory of natural selection. He is rather the philosopher of Lamarckianism, then, than the philosopher of Darwinism. He was almost forty when the Origin of Species appeared; and at forty, one’s categories are hardened into immutability.
Aside from lesser difficulties, like the failure to reconcile his illuminating principle—that reproduction decreases as development advances—with such facts as the higher rate of reproduction in civilized Europe as compared with savage peoples, the major defects of his biological theory are his reliance on Lamarck and his failure to find a dynamic conception of life. When he confesses that life “cannot be conceived in physico-chemical terms,”114 the “admission is fatal to his formula of evolution, to his definition of life, and to the coherence of the Synthetic Philosophy.”115 The secret of life might better have been sought in the power of mind to adjust external to internal relations than in the almost passive adjustment of the organism to the environment. On Spencer’s premisses, complete adaptation would be death.
The volumes on psychology formulate rather than inform. What we knew is reshaped into an almost barbarously complex terminology, which obscures where it should clarify. The reader is so fatigued with formulas and definitions and questionable reductions of psychological facts to neural structures that he may fail to observe that the origin of mind and consciousness is left quite unexplained. It is true that Spencer tries to cover up this gaping chasm in his system of thought by arguing that mind is the subjective accompaniment of nerve processes evolved mechanically, somehow, out of the primeval nebula; but why there should be this subjective accompaniment in addition to the neural mechanism, he does not say. And that, of course, is just the point of all psychology.
3. SOCIOLOGY AND ETHICS
Magnificent as the Sociology is, its 2000 pages give many an opening for attack. Running through it is Spencer’s usual assumption that evolution and progress are synonymous, whereas it may well be that evolution will give to insects and bacteria the final victory in their relentless war with man. It is not quite evident that the industrial state is either more pacific or more moral than the “militant” feudalism that preceded it. Athens’ most destructive wars came long after her feudal lords had yielded power to a commercial bourgeoisie; and the countries of modern Europe seem to make war with blithe indifference as to whether they are industrial or not; industrial imperialism may be as militaristic as land-hungry dynasties. The most militaristic of modern states was one of the two leading industrial nations of the world. Further, the rapid industrial development of Germany seems to have been aided, rather the impeded, by state control of certain phases of transport and trade. Socialism is obviously a development not of militarism but of industrialism. Spencer wrote at a time when the comparative isolation of England made her pacifist (in Europe), and when her supremacy in commerce and industry made her a firm believer in free trade; he would have been shocked had he lived to see how readily the free trade theory would disappear along with commercial and industrial supremacy, and how the pacifism would disappear as soon as Germany’s assault on Belgium threatened English isolation. And of course Spencer exaggerated the virtues of the industrial régime; he was almost blind to the brutal exploitation that flourished in England before the state interfered to mitigate it; all that he could see “in the middle of our century, especially in England,” was “a degree of individual freedom greater than ever before existed.”116 No wonder that Nietzsche reacted in disgust from industrialism, and exaggerated, in his turn, the virtues of the military life.117
The analogy of the social organism would have driven Spencer into state socialism had his logic been more powerful than his feelings; for state socialism represents, in a far higher degree than a laissez-faire society, the integration of the heterogeneous. By the yard-stick of his own formula Spencer would have been compelled to acclaim Germany as the most highly evolved of modern states. He tried to meet this point by arguing that heterogeneity involves the freedom of the parts, and that such freedom implies a minimum of government; but this is quite a different note than that which we heard in “coherent heterogeneity.” In the human body integration and evolution leave rather little freedom to the parts. Spencer replies that in a society consciousness exists only in the parts, while in the body consciousness exists only in the whole. But social consciousness—consciousness of the interests and processes of the group—is as centralized in society as personal consciousness is in the individual; very few of us have any “sense of the state.” Spencer helped to save us from a regimental state socialism, but only by the sacrifice of his consistency and his logic.
And only by individualistic exaggerations. We must remember that Spencer was caught between two eras; that his political thinking had been formed in the days of laissez-faire, and under the influence of Adam Smith; while his later years were lived in a period when England was struggling to correct, by social control, the abuses of her industrial régime. He never tired of reiterating his arguments against state-interference; he objected to state-financed education, or to governmental protection of citizens against fraudulent finance;118 at one time he argued that even the management of war should be a private, and not a state, concern;119 he wished, as Wells put it, “to raise public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national policy.” He carried his MSS. to the printer himself, having too little confidence in a government institution to entrust them to the Post Office.120 He was a man of intense individuality, irritably insistent on being let alone; and every new act of legislation seemed to him an invasion of his personal liberty. He could not understand Benjamin Kidd’s argument, that since natural selection operates more and more upon groups, in class and international competition, and less and less upon individuals, a widening application of the family-principle (whereby the weak are aided by the strong) is indispensable for the maintenance of group unity and power. Why a state should protect its citizens from unsocial physical strength and refuse protection against unsocial economic strength is a point which Spencer ignores. He scorned as childish the analogy of government and citizen with parent and child; but the real analogy is with brother helping brother. His politics were more Darwinian than his biology.
But enough of these criticisms. Let us turn back to the man again, and see in fairer perspective the greatness of his work.
IX. Conclusion
First Principles made Spencer almost at once the most famous philosopher of his time. It was soon translated into most of the languages of Europe; even in Russia, where it had to face and defeat a government prosecution. He was accepted as the philosophic exponent of the spirit of the age; and not only did his influence pass everywhere into the thought of Europe, but it strongly affected the realistic movement in literature and art. In 1869 he was astounded to find that First Principles had been adopted as a text-book at Oxford.121 More marvelous still, his books began, after 1870, to bring him returns that made him financially secure. In some cases admirers sent him substantial gifts, which he always returned. When Czar Alexander II visited London, and expressed to Lord Derby a desire to meet the distinguished savants of England, Derby invited Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, etc. The others attended, but Spencer declined. He associated with only a few intimates. “No man is equal to his book,” he wrote. “All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.”122 When people insisted on coming to see him he inserted stopping into his ears, and listened placidly to their conversation.