Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/29

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HERBERT SPENCER
21

solely of dynamical laws. The laws of Type, of a stability relative to human observations, are antecedent in fact, and also in order of thought. Complete philosophy must rest on a theory at once statical and dynamical. A full science of Ethic cannot be constituted by tabulating in a series the changes recorded in moral sentiment, whilst wholly ignoring the permanent instincts of the human heart, the qualities of the human will, the powers of the human intelligence, and the personal, domestic, tribal, and national institutions which cling round man under all conditions of development. In Ethic these types and axiomatic forms are far more dominant, and even more conspicuous, than are the changes and developments. We do not doubt that Ethic is subject to incessant development. But relatively and for real knowledge, the fixed types, even if only apparently fixed, are far more essential to us.

The successors of Spencer have got to face the big problem of the application of the Evolution Philosophy to the entire field of the Inorganic sciences. Spencer himself omitted these altogether on palpably insufficient grounds. Had he boldly attempted to show the relation of his sixteen dogmas to the Physical Sciences, to Astronomy, to Physics with all its corollaries, to Chemistry, and to Mechanics, he must have been confronted with the dilemma—how little any mere theory of Evolution and Dissolution, apart from any theory of invariable Order and Type, would serve to illumine any inorganic science. To the Astronomer, the Solar System may be bodily moving towards the constellation Hercules; the Sun and the Earth may be cooling; and the orbit of the Planets may be infinitesimally diminishing. But the essential laws are the