HERBERT SPENCER AS CHAMPION OF THE EVOLUTION-IDEA
_The Evolution-Idea--Spencer's Historical Position--Von Baer's
Law--Evolution and Creation--Arguments for the Evolution-Doctrine_
Spencer has been called "the philosopher of the Evolution-movement," but
the appropriateness of this description depends on what is meant by
philosopher. What is certain is that he championed the evolutionist
interpretation at a time when it was as much tabooed as it is now
fashionable; that he showed its applicability to all orders of
facts--inorganic, organic, and super-organic; that he threw some light
on various factors in the evolution-process, and that he attempted to
sum up in a universal formula what he believed to be the common
principle of all evolutionary change. In judging of what he did it must
be remembered that he was pre-Darwinian, and that chemistry and physics,
biology and psychology have made enormous strides since he wrote his
_First Principles_ in 1861-2.
_The Evolution-Idea._--The general idea of evolution, like many other
great ideas, is essentially simple--that the present is the child of the
past and the parent of the future. It is the idea of development writ
large and historically applied. It is the same as the scientific
conception of human history. In general terms, a process of Becoming
everywhere leads, through the interaction of inherent potentialities and
environmental conditions, to a new phase of Being. The study of
Evolution is a study of _Werden und Vergehen und Weiterwerden_.
Stated concretely in regard to living creatures, the general doctrine of
organic evolution suggests, as we all know, that the plants and animals
now around us--with all their fascinating complexities of structure and
function, of life-history, behaviour, and inter-relations--are the
natural and necessary results of long processes of growth and change, of
elimination and survival, operative throughout practically countless
ages; that the forms we know and admire are the lineal descendants of
ancestors on the whole somewhat simpler except when we have to deal with
retrogressive or degenerative series; that these ancestors are descended
from yet simpler forms, and so on backwards, till we lose our clue in
the unknown, but doubtless momentous vital events of pre-Cambrian ages,
or, in other words, in the thick mist of life's beginnings. Though the
general idea of organic evolution is simple, it has been slowly evolved
both as regards concreteness and clarity; it has gradually gained
content as research furnished fuller illustration, and clearness as
criticism forced it to keep in touch with facts. It has slowly developed
from the stage of suggestion to that of verification; from being an _a
priori_ anticipation it has become an interpretation of nature; and from
being a modal interpretation of the animate world it is advancing to
the rank of a causal interpretation.
The evolution-idea is perhaps as old as clear thinking, which we may
date from the (unknown) time when man discovered the year--with its
marvellous object-lesson of recurrent sequences--and realised that his
race had a history. Whatever may have been its origin, the idea was
familiar to several of the ancient Greek philosophers, as it was to Hume
and Kant; it fired the imagination of Lucretius and linked him to
another poet of evolution--Goethe; it persisted, like a latent germ,
through the centuries of other than scientific preoccupation; it was
made actual by the pioneers of modern biology--men like Buffon, Lamarck,
Erasmus Darwin and Treviranus;--and it became current intellectual coin
when Spencer, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel and Huxley, with united but
varied achievements, won the conviction of the majority of thoughtful
men.[9]
_Spencer's historical position in regard to the Evolution-Idea._--In
1840, when Herbert Spencer was twenty, he bought Lyell's _Principles of
Geology_--then recently published. His reading of Lyell was a fortunate
incident, for one of the chapters, devoted to a refutation of Lamarck's
views concerning the origin of species, had the effect of giving Spencer
a decided leaning to them.
"Why Lyell's arguments produced the opposite effect to that intended, I
cannot say. Probably it was that the discussion presented, more clearly
than had been done previously, the natural genesis of organic forms. The
question whether it was or was not true was more distinctly raised. My
inclination to accept it as true in spite of Lyell's adverse criticisms,
was, doubtless, chiefly due to its harmony with that general idea of the
order of Nature towards which I had, throughout life, been growing.
Super-naturalism, in whatever form, had never commended itself. From
boyhood there was in me a need to see, in a more or less distinct way,
how phenomena, no matter of what kind, are to be naturally explained.
Hence, when my attention was drawn to the question whether organic forms
have been specially created, or whether they have arisen by progressive
modifications, physically caused and inherited, I adopted the last
supposition; inadequate as was the evidence, and great as were the
difficulties in the way. Its congruity with the course of procedure
throughout things at large gave it an irresistible attraction; and my
belief in it never afterwards wavered, much as I was in after years
ridiculed for entertaining it" (_Autobiography_, i. p. 176).
Thus early convinced, Spencer did not remain a mute evolutionist. The
idea was a seed-thought in his mind, and eventually it became the
dominant one, bearing much fruit. In his early letters to the
"Nonconformist" in 1842 on "The Proper Sphere of Government," "the only
point of community with the general doctrine of Evolution is a belief in
the modifiability of human nature through adaptation to conditions, and
a consequent belief in human progression." But in his _Social Statics_
(1850) there "may be seen the first step toward the general doctrine of
Evolution." Thus he says, "The development of society as well as the
development of man and the development of life generally, may be
described as a tendency to individuate--_to become a thing_. And rightly
interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us are
uniformly significant of this tendency."
It was a great moment in Herbert Spencer's intellectual life when in
1851 (_aetat._ 31) he first came across von Baer's formula "expressing
the course of development through which every plant and animal
passes--the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity." At the close of
his _Social Statics_ Spencer had indicated that progress from low to
high types of society or organism implied an advance "from uniformity of
composition to multiformity of composition." "Yet this phrase of von
Baer, expressing the law of individual development, awakened my
attention to the fact that the law which holds of the ascending stages
of each individual organism is also the law which holds of the ascending
grades of organisms of all kinds. And it had the further advantage that
it presented in brief form, a more graphic image of the transformation,
and thus facilitated further thought. Important consequences eventually
ensued."
Von Baer's formula of embryonic development, which he regarded as a
progress from the apparently simple to the obviously complex, and as the
individual's condensed and modified recapitulation of racial history,
accentuated and stimulated a thought already existing in Spencer's mind,
and in part expressed. It gave objective vividness to the concept of
development which Spencer had already realised in regard to societary
forms. In 1864 he wrote to G. H. Lewis, "If anyone says that had von
Baer never written I should not be doing that which I now am, I have
nothing to say to the contrary--I should reply it is highly probable."
Herbert Spencer spoke of his early recognition of von Baer's law as one
of the moments in his intellectual development. He realised objectively
and vividly that out of an apparently simple and homogeneous stage of
development, there is developed by division of labour and other
processes, a wondrous complexity of nervous, muscular, glandular,
skeletal, and connective tissues or organs, as the case may be. Organic
development is not like crystallisation; it is heteromorphic
crystallisation, so to speak. From a group of apparently similar cells,
heterogeneous tissues and organs are developed. Thus von Baer as an
embryologist gave Spencer as a general evolutionist a concrete basis for
the concept of development which was simmering in his mind.
_Von Baer's Law._--It does not appear, however, that Spencer ever read
von Baer's embryological memoirs, else he might have been less
well-satisfied with summing up individual development as a progress from
homogeneity to heterogeneity. Von Baer was much more cautious than some
of his followers and expositors, and subsequent research has justified
his caution. The once popular "Recapitulation Doctrine" that a
developing organism "climbs up its own genealogical tree," that
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," is now seen to be true only in a
very general way, and with many saving clauses. The germ is now known as
a unified mosaic of ancestral contributions, as a multiplex of
potentialities; it is even visibly very complex and anything but
homogeneous or "simple"; and the individual recapitulation of racial
history is verifiable rather in the stages of organogenesis than in the
history of the embryo as a whole. Thus while all are agreed that there
is a gradual emergence of the obviously complex from the apparently
simple, that development means progressive differentiation and
integration, and that past history is _in some measure_ resumed in
present development, it must also be allowed that germ-cells are
microcosms of complexity, that development is the realisation of a
composite inheritance, the cashing of ancestral cheques, and that the
"minting and coining of the chick out of the egg" is not adequately
summed up as "a progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity."
But although embryology does not appear to us to give unequivocal
support to Spencer's formula of progress from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous, it seemed all plain sailing to him, and he proceeded to
illustrate the utility of his formula by applying it to all orders of
facts. In a famous passage in the essay on "Progress: its Law and Cause"
(_Essays_, vol. i., 1883, p. 30) he wrote as follows:--
"We believe we have shown beyond question that that which the
German physiologists (von Baer, Wolff, and others) have found to be
the law of organic development (as of a seed into a tree and of an
egg into an animal) is the law of all development. The advance from
the simple to the complex, through a process of successive
differentiations (i.e. the appearance of differences in the parts
of a seemingly like substance), is seen alike in the earliest
changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back; and
in the earlier changes which we can inductively establish; it is
seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth, and of
every simple organism on its surface; it is seen in the evolution
of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilised individual, or
in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society
in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its
economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all
those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity
which constitute the environment of our daily life. From the
remotest past which Science can fathom up to the novelties of
yesterday, that in which Progress essentially consists is the
transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous." This was
written in 1857.
As far back as 1852 Spencer contributed to the 'Leader' an essay on
the 'Development Hypothesis' which is one of the most noteworthy of
the pre-Darwinian presentations of the general idea of evolution.
Supposing that there are some ten millions of species, extant and
extinct, he asks "which is the most rational theory about these ten
millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten
millions of special creations? or is it most likely that by
continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten
millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being
produced still?... Even could the supporters of the Development
Hypothesis merely show that the origination of species by the
process of modification is conceivable, they would be in a better
position than their opponents. But they can do much more than this.
They can show that the process of modification has effected, and is
effecting, decided changes in all organisms subject to modifying
influences.... They can show that in successive generations these
changes continue, until ultimately the new conditions become the
natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, domesticated
animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have
taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so
produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which
distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show,
too, that the changes daily taking place in ourselves--the facility
that attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins
when practice ceases--the strengthening of passions habitually
gratified, and the weakening of those habitually curbed--the
development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual
according to the use made of it--are all explicable on this same
principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic
nature there _is_ at work a modifying influence of the kind they
assign as the cause of these specific differences; an influence
which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the
circumstances demand it, produce marked changes--an influence
which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years,
and under the great varieties of condition which geological records
imply, any amount of change."
While Spencer did not discern the modifying influence of Natural
Selection, which it was reserved for Darwin and Wallace to disclose, his
clear presentation of the general doctrine of evolution seven years
before the publication of the "Origin of Species" (1859) should not be
forgotten.
In other essays before 1858 and in his _Principles of Psychology_
(1855), Spencer championed the evolutionist position, and the first
programme of his "Synthetic Philosophy" was drawn up in January 1858.
_Arguments for the Evolution-Doctrine._--The idea that the present is
the child of the past and the parent of the future, that what we see
around us is the long result of time, that there has been age-long
progress from relatively simple beginnings--the evolution-formula in
short--is now part of the intellectual framework of most educated men
with a free mind. We no longer trouble to argue about it; like wisdom it
is justified of its children. It has afforded a modal interpretation of
the world's history, an interpretation that works well, which no facts
are known to contradict. It has been the most effective organon of
thought that the world has known; it is becoming organic in all our
thinking.
We cannot indeed give an evolutionary account of the origin of life, or
of consciousness, or of human reason; we cannot read the precise
pedigree of many of the forms of life; we are in great doubt as to the
_modus operandi_ by which familiar results have been brought about, but
all this ignorance does not diminish our confidence in the scientific
value of the general evolution-idea. It may be that there are some
primary facts, such as life and consciousness, which we must be content
to postulate as at present irresoluble data, but it is also certain that
our inquiry into the _factors of evolution_ is still very young. So much
has been done in half a century, since serious aetiology began, that it
is premature to say _ignorabimus_ where we must confess _ignoramus_.
It seems possible to give a provisional evolutionist account of so many
of "the wonders of life," as Haeckel calls them, that there are few
nowadays who will maintain that, given certain postulates, a scientific
interpretation of nature is impossible. This is what the doctrine of
special creation or creations implies; it means an abandonment of the
scientific interpretation of nature as a hopeless task.
If the evolution key failed to open the doors to which we apply it, then
there would be justification for a rehabilitation of the creationist
doctrine, but the reverse is the case. To some minds, notably Mr Alfred
Russel Wallace, the problems of the origin of life, of consciousness,
and of man's higher qualities seem so hopelessly far from scientific
interpretation, that a combination of evolutionism with a moiety of
creationism appears necessary. But as we are only beginning to know the
scope and efficacy of the factors of evolution, and are not without hope
of discovering other factors, this dualism seems premature.
_Evolution and Creation._--But while the Evolution-Doctrine is now
admitted as a valid and useful genetic formula, it was far otherwise
when Spencer was writing his _Principles of Biology_ (1864-6). Then the
doctrine of descent was struggling for existence against principalities
and powers both temporal and spiritual, and then it was still relevant
to pit it against the theory of special creations. Yet for a younger
generation it is difficult to appreciate the warmth of Spencer's chapter
on the Special-Creation hypothesis (Sec. 109-Sec. 115 of vol. i. of the
original edition of _The Principles of Biology_).
"The belief in special creations of organisms is a belief that
arose among men during the era of profoundest darkness; and it
belongs to a family of beliefs which have nearly all died out as
enlightenment has increased. It is without a solitary established
fact on which to stand; and when the attempt is made to put it into
definite shape in the mind, it turns out to be only a pseud-idea.
This mere verbal hypothesis, which men idly accept as a real or
thinkable hypothesis, is of the same nature as would be one, based
on a day's observation of human life, that each man and woman was
specially created--an hypothesis not suggested by evidence, but by
lack of evidence--an hypothesis which formulates absolute ignorance
into a semblance of positive knowledge."...
"Thus, however regarded, the hypothesis of special creations turns
out to be worthless--worthless by its derivation; worthless in its
intrinsic incoherence; worthless as absolutely without evidence;
worthless as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless as not
satisfying a moral want. We must therefore consider it as counting
for nothing, in opposition to any other hypothesis respecting the
origin of organic beings."
The appreciation of the evolution-formula in the minds of thoughtful men
has been greatly modified--for the better--since the early Darwinian
days of hot-blooded controversy, when Spencer was a prominent champion
of the new way of looking at things. The special-creation hypothesis has
almost ceased to find advocates who know enough about the facts to bring
forward arguments worthy of consideration, and by a legitimate change of
front on the part of theologians it has come to be recognised that the
evolution-formula is not antithetic to any essential transcendental
formula. Naturalists, on the other hand, recognise that the
Evolution-formula is no more than a genetic description, that it does
not pretend to give any ultimate explanations, that as such it has
nothing whatever to do with such transcendental concepts as almighty
volition, and that it has no quarrel with the modern theological view of
creation as the institution of the primary order of nature--the
possibility of natural evolution included. Thus Spencer's destructive
attack on the Special-Creation hypothesis has now little more than
historical interest. And for this result, we have in part to thank
Spencer himself, who made the precise point at issue so definitely
clear.
The general theory of organic evolution--the theory of Descent--tacitly
makes the assumption, which is the basal hope of all biology, that it is
not only legitimate but promiseful to try to interpret scientifically
the history of life upon the earth. It formulates the idea that the
present phase of being is the natural and necessary outcome of a
previous, on the whole, simpler phase of being, and so on, backwards and
forwards in time, under the operation of more or less clearly
discernible natural factors and conditions--notably variation and
heredity, selection and isolation. Tested a thousand times, the general
evolution-formula seems to cover the facts, it gives them a new
rationality, it applies to minutiose details as well as to the general
progress of life, it even affords a basis for verified prophecy. The
formula is a key that fits all locks, though it has not yet, because of
our fumbling fingers, opened all.
But just here, as Spencer pointed out, there is a parting of the ways,
and there is no _via media_, no compromise. Is there no hopefulness in
trying to give a scientific account of the nature and history and
genesis of the confessedly vast and perplexing orders of facts which we
call Physical Nature, Animate Nature, and Human Nature?--then let us
become agnostics pure and simple, or let us remain philosophers or
theologians, poets or artists, and sigh over an impetuous science which
started so much in debt that its bankruptcy was a foregone conclusion!
On the other hand, if the scientific attempt at interpretation is
legitimate, and if it has already made good progress (considering its
youth), and if its results, achieved piecemeal, always make for greater
intelligibility, then let us give the scientific, _i.e._, evolutionist
formulation its due; let us rigidly exclude from our science all other
than scientific interpretations; let us cease from juggling with words
in attempting a mongrel mixture of scientific and transcendental
formulation; let us stop trying to eke out demonstrable factors, such as
variation and selection, by assuming alongside of these,
"ultra-scientific causes," "spiritual influxes," _et hoc genus omne_;
let us cease writing or reading books such as _God or Natural
Selection_, whose titular false antinomy is an index of the bathos of
their misunderstanding. To place scientific formulae in opposition to
transcendental formulae is to oppose "incommensurables," and to display
an ignorance of what the aim of science really is.
Logically, the antithesis is between the possibility or the
impossibility of giving a scientific interpretation of the world around
us (and ourselves). The hypothesis of special creations is irrelevant
until the scientific interpretation is shown to be inadequate or
fallacious.
_Arguments for the Evolution-Doctrine._--But what, it may be asked, is
the evidence substantiating the formula of organic evolution, and
compelling us to accept it? To this question, we propose to give in
brief resume Spencer's answer, but it is impossible to refrain from
observing that the question involves some measure of misunderstanding.
The evolution theory, as a modal formula, is just a particular way of
looking at things; it is justified wherever it is applied; it makes for
progress whenever it is utilised; but it cannot be proved by induction
or experiment like the law of gravitation or the doctrine of the
conservation of energy. Fritz Mueller said that he would be content to
stake the evolution theory on a study of butterflies alone, and he was
right. The formula is justified by its detailed applicability; there are
not any special evidences of evolution; any set of facts in regard to
organisms well worked-out illustrates the general thesis. At the same
time, it is possible to classify the different ways in which the
Evolution-Idea fits the facts, and this is what Spencer did in his
presentation of the "arguments for evolution"--a presentation which has
never been surpassed in clearness, though every illustration has been
multiplied many times since 1866.
I. The Arguments from Classification. Spencer started with the fact that
naturalists have utilised resemblances in structure and development as a
basis for the orderly classification of organisms in groups within
groups--varieties, species, genera, families, races, and so on. But
"this is the arrangement which we see arises by descent, alike in
individual families and among races of men." "Where it is known to take
place evolution actually produces these feebly-distinguished small
groups and these strongly-distinguished great groups." "The impression
made by these two parallelisms, which add meaning to each other, is
deepened by the third parallelism, which enforces the meaning of
both--the parallelism, namely, that as, between the species, genera,
orders, classes, etc., which naturalists have formed, there are
transitional types; so between the groups, sub-groups, and
sub-sub-groups, which we know to have been evolved, types of
intermediate values exist. And these three correspondences between the
known results of evolution (as in human races, domesticated animals, and
cultivated plants) and the results here ascribed to evolution have
further weight given to them by the fact, that the kinship of groups
through their lowest members is just the kinship which the hypothesis
of evolution implies." Even in the absence of these specific
agreements, the broad fact of unity amid multiformity, which organisms
so strikingly display, is strongly suggestive of evolution. Freeing
ourselves from pre-conceptions, we shall see good reason to think with
Mr Darwin, "that propinquity of descent--the only known cause of the
similarity of organic beings--is the bond, hidden as it is by various
degrees of modification, which is partly revealed to us by our
classifications" (_Principles of Biology_, Rev. Ed. vol. i. p. 448).
II. Arguments from Embryology. Organisms may be arranged on a tree which
symbolises their structural affinities and divergences. On the
evolutionist interpretation this is an adumbration of the actual
genealogical tree or _Stammbaum_. But when we consider the facts of
embryology we find that the developing organism advances from stage to
stage by steps which are more or less comparable to the various levels
and branchings of the classificatory tree. There is a resemblance,
sometimes a parallelism, between individual development and the grades
of organisation which have or have had persistent stability as living
creatures. "On the hypothesis of evolution this parallelism has a
meaning--indicates that primordial kinship of all organisms, and that
progressive differentiation of them which the hypothesis alleges. On any
other hypothesis the parallelism is meaningless." It is true that there
are nonconformities to the general law that individual development tends
to recapitulate racial history, or that ontogeny tends to recapitulate
phylogeny. There may be in the individual development condensations or
telescopings of the presumed ancestral stages, and there may be an
interpolation of developmental stages which are adaptive to peculiar
conditions of juvenile life and have no historical import, but the
deviations are such as may be readily interpreted on the
evolution-hypothesis (_Principles of Biology_, i. pp. 450-467).
III. Arguments from Morphology. In back-boned animals from frog to man
there is a great variety of fore-limb, adapted for running, swimming,
flying, grasping, and so forth, but throughout there is a unity of
structure and development. There are the same fundamental bones and
muscles, nerves and blood vessels, and the early stages are closely
similar. So it is throughout organic nature; there is unity of type,
maintained under extreme dissimilarities of form and mode of life. This
is "explicable as resulting from descent with modification; but it is
otherwise inexplicable." "The likenesses disguised by unlikenesses,
which the comparative anatomist discovers between various organs in the
same organism, are worse than meaningless if it be supposed that
organisms were severally framed as we now see them; but they fit in
quite harmoniously with the belief that each kind of organism is a
product of accumulated modifications upon modifications. And the
presence, in all kinds of animals and plants, of functionally-useless
parts corresponding to parts that are functionally-useful in allied
animals and plants, while it is totally incongruous with the belief in a
construction of each organism by miraculous interposition, is just what
we are led to expect by the belief that organisms have arisen by
progression."
IV. Arguments from Distribution.--"Given that pressure which species
exercise on one another, in consequence of the universal overfilling of
their respective habitats--given the resulting tendency to thrust
themselves into one another's areas, and media, and modes of life, along
such lines of least resistance as from time to time are found--given
besides the changes in modes of life, hence arising, those other changes
which physical alterations of habitats necessitate--given the structural
modifications directly or indirectly produced in organisms by modified
conditions; and the facts of distribution in space and time are
accounted for. That divergence and re-divergence of organic forms, which
we saw to be shadowed forth by the truths of classification and the
truths of embryology, we see to be also shadowed forth by the truths of
distribution. If that aptitude to multiply, to spread, to separate, and
to differentiate, which the human races have in all times shown, be a
tendency common to races in general, as we have ample reason to assume;
then there will result those kinds of spacial relations and
chronological relations among the species, and genera, and orders,
peopling the Earth's surface, which we find exist. The remarkable
identities of type discovered between organisms inhabitating one medium,
and strangely modified organisms inhabiting another medium, are at the
same time rendered comprehensible. And the appearances and
disappearances of species which the geological record shows us, as well
as the connections between successive groups of species from early eras
down to our own, cease to be inexplicable" (_Principles of Biology_, i.
p. 489).
"Thus," Spencer concludes, "of these four groups each furnished several
arguments which point to the same conclusion; and the conclusion pointed
to by the arguments of any one group, is that pointed to by the
arguments of every other group. This coincidence of coincidences would
give to the induction a very high degree of probability, even were it
not enforced by deduction. But the conclusion deductively reached is in
harmony with the inductive conclusion."
FOOTNOTES:
[9] See J. Arthur Thomson, _The Science of Life_ (1899), chapter xvi.,
"Evolution of Evolution Theory"; and _The Study of Animal Life_ (1892),
chapter xviii., "The Evolution of Evolution Theories."