body of scientific particulars and generalizations, getting themselves read into the political and social formula, and thereby effecting transformation into the system outlined by the prospectus of 1860. This fusion is, indeed, already foreshadowed in the Social Statics itself.
This is not the time or place to go into detail, but I think I am well within the bonds of verifiable statement when I say that Spencer's final system of philosophy took shape through his bringing into intimate connection with each other the dominating conception of social progress, inherited from the Enlightenment, certain larger generalizations of physiology (particularly that of growth as change from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and of 'physiological division of labor' with accompanying interdependence of parts) and the idea of cosmic change derived from astronomy and geology,—particularly as formulated under the name of the nebular hypothesis. Social philosophy furnished the fundamental ideals and ideas; biological statements provided the defining and formulating elements necessary to put these vague and pervasive ideals into something like scientific shape; while the physical-astronomic speculations furnished the causal, efficient machinery requisite for getting the scheme under way, and supplied still more of the appearance of scientific definiteness and accuracy. Such, at least, is my schematic formula of the origin of the Spencerian system.[1]
- ↑ If our main interest here were in the history of thought, it would be interesting to note the dependence of the development of Spencer's thought, as respects the second of the above factors, upon factors due to the post-Kantian philosophy of Germany. I can only refer in passing to some pages of the Social Statics (255 to 261), in which, after making the significant statement that "morality is essentially one with physical truth—is, in fact, a species of transcendental physiology," he refers in support of his doctrine to "a theory of life developed by Coleridge." This theory is that of tendency towards individuation, conjoined with increase of mutual dependence,—a fundamental notion, of course, of Schelling. An equally significant foot-note (page 256) tells us that it was in 1864, while writing "The Classification of the Sciences," that Spencer himself realized that this truth has to do with "a trait of all evolving things, inorganic as well as organic." In his essay on "Transcendental Physiology," Spencer refers to the importance of carrying over distinctions first observed in society into physiological terms, so that they become points of view for interpretation and explanation there. The conception also dominates the essay on "The Social Organism." In fact, he makes use of the idea of division of labor, originally worked out in political economy, in his biological speculations, and then in his cosmological,
