While evolution and dissolution, understood in this sense, are opposite processes, and as a whole every aggregate is undergoing one or the other, yet speaking more precisely, both are everywhere concurrent, and the observed effect is the resultant of the two.[1]
The truth of this principle can hardly be questioned, yet, simple as it appears at first sight, it has sometimes been misunderstood, and may possibly require some slight qualification. The following extract, taken from a well-known work on the concepts of science, shows the kind of errors that are likely to arise if Spencer's formula be regarded apart from those physical principles from which it has been deduced.
"According to Spencer where there is increase of motion there is decreasing aggregation of matter. Yet we have only to drop a weight to see increase of motion accompanying increased aggregation of matter, namely earth and weight approaching each other."[2]
The misunderstanding contained in this passage, though excusable in that it is directed to an allotropic and somewhat more ambiguous form of this principle which is contained in one of Spencer's essays, is one that any careful student of his work will have no difficulty in unraveling. To those who have followed this exposition, the reply will be simple. Matter is undoubtedly integrated (aggregated), and as a moment's consideration will show us, the motion is dissipated (not increased). In the first place bound in ether strains, distributed between the mass and each ponderable particle of the attracting earth, it changes first to kinetic motion, then to heat which is radiated into infinite space.
- ↑ First Principles, p. 257.
- ↑ Grammar of Science, 2d edition (1899) by Professor Karl Pearson, pp. 512-3. It is strange that Professor Pearson did not appear to recognize that the principle he criticises is the same as Spencer's formula of evolution and that he did not grasp its meaning. Whatever the reason may be, however, the error is not Spencer's but Professor Pearson's.
processes, neither process is ever unqualified by the other. For each aggregate is at all times both gaining motion and losing motion. Every mass from a grain of sand to a planet, radiates heat to other masses, and absorbs heat radiated by other masses, and in so far as it does the one it becomes integrated, while in so far as it does the other it becomes disintegrated. ... Here, as elsewhere, the integration or the disintegration is a differential result" (First Principles, p. 259).
