Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/35

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HERBERT SPENCER
27

geneity, through successive differentiation and integration!' That may all be quite true. I hold it to be very largely true, and profoundly suggestive. But it is not definite enough—not specific, not itself sufficiently differentiated. Mill, adopting a phrase of Novalis, called Comte a 'morality-intoxicated man.' Comte might perhaps have looked on Spencer as a man intoxicated with evolution.

It is a singular fact that the Synthetic Philosophy of Evolution contains no history of human civilization in its entirety, as a continuous biography of man. There is not in it, and never was even projected, any Philosophy of general History, the Dynamics in fact of Sociology. In the 'Principles of Sociology' there are a body of acute but miscellaneous observations, and some profound suggestions, as to the origin of institutions, primitive habits, rudimentary groups. But we never get further than glimpses of savage life, the variations in primaeval rites, and the survival of ancient customs. In all Spencer's vast output there is nothing that can be called any theory of general history. What we have is the embryology of society. But no science is constituted, if its conclusions are limited to embryology.

Take the rise of the Persian Empire in the East, when pre-historic and most disparate tribes were consolidated into a military tyranny. Is that adequately explained by the law of 'Transformation from an indefinite homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity?' Take the course of the Greek world from Agamemnon to Alexander. Is that a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity? Or take the Roman world from Romulus to Trajan. Was it more homogeneous in the first century of Rome than in the first century A. D.? Was