Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/21

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HERBERT SPENCER
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agencies. Spencer very soon adopted this view, incorporated it in his own system, and to the last maintained important qualifications of it as essential. But, even prior to the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species, Spencer, from 1852 downwards, had stated his general law of Evolution, using that term which had been common in French philosophy for more than a century, but always falling short of the theory of Natural Selection in the struggle for life.

And then, in 1860, Spencer put forth his encyclopaedic scheme of a general philosophy, based upon the laws of Evolution as applicable to the whole field of human knowledge—cosmical, material, vital, and human. Spencer's conception of Evolution, though it incorporated Darwin's laws as to the mutability of species, is not only utterly different from pure Darwinian Evolution, but is not commensurable with it. We could no more compare them than we can compare Kepler's laws of planetary motion with Bacon's Inductive method. Darwin was a naturalist: Spencer was a philosopher. And no one was more ready than Darwin himself to recognize the difference and the higher rank of the philosopher. Darwin rarely quits the ground of multiple inductions and massive observations of the organic world. Spencer was no specialist. He attempted a general co-ordination of phenomena, cosmical and human, dealing very largely in abstract propositions; using the deductive method even more than the inductive; using logic and hypothesis quite as much as observation. Not only is Spencer's Evolution disparate from Darwin's, but, to the last, Spencer maintained special views as to the Factors of Organic Evolution. He held to the inheritance of modifications that had been functionally produced during active life—