characteristic of earlier individualism and domesticate them in the social and moral attitude of the modern man.
In the struggle of adjustment, Spencer is without a rival as a mediator, a vehicle of communication, a translator. It is, as we shall see, the successful way in which he exercises this function that gives him his hold upon the culture of our day, and which makes his image stand out so imposingly that to many he is not one creator with many others of the theory of evolution, but its own concrete incarnation. In support of the idea that Spencer's work was essentially that of carrying over the net earlier social and ethical individualism into the more organic conceptions characteristic of the nineteenth century science and action, we can here only refer to the Social Statics of 1850,—this being in my judgment one of the most remarkable documents, from the standpoint of tracing the origins of an intellectual development, ever produced. This book shows with considerable detail the individualistic method of the English theory of knowledge in process of transformation into something which is no longer a method of regulating belief, but is an attained belief in a method of action, and hence itself a substantial first principle, an axiom, an indisputable, absolute truth, having within itself substantial resources which may in due order—that is, by use of a deductive method—be delivered and made patent. It shows the individualistic creed dominant, militant; no longer a principle of criticism, but of reform and construction in social life, and, therefore, of necessity a formula of construction in the intellectual sphere. In this document, the world-formula of ’evolution' of later philosophy appears as the social formula of 'progress.' It repeats as an article of implicit faith the creed of revolutionary liberalism in the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. "Man has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation, and the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that in virtue of these processes, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity."[1]
In this characteristic sentence we have already present the
- ↑ Social Statics, pp. 31 f., edn. of 1892.
