PSYCHOLOGICAL
_Evolution of Mind--Body and Mind--Experience and Intuitions--Test
of Truth_
In seeking to appreciate Spencer's contributions to Psychology, it seems
necessary to distinguish between what he tried to do and his success in
doing it. For an attempt, especially a pioneer attempt, may have great
historical importance although it is only to a limited degree
successful. The attempts to cross a continent, or to scale a mountain,
to make a flying machine, or to discover the nature of protoplasm, may
be relative failures, but even the attempts may spell progress. They may
offer clues for other attempts, or they may show that certain ways of
attacking the problem are unpromising. And so while the doctors of
philosophy differ as to the value of many of Spencer's psychological
essays, there are few who go the length of denying their historical
interest and importance.
(1) _Evolution of Mind._--In his imaginary review of his _Principles of
Psychology_, which is not without a grim humour, Spencer supposes the
critic to begin by saying: "Our attitude towards this work is something
like that of the Roman poet to whom the poetaster brought some verses
with the request that he would erase any parts he did not like, and who
replied--one erasure will suffice. We reject absolutely the entire
doctrine which the book contains; and for the sufficient reason that it
is founded on a fallacy." The fallacy was, of course, the
evolution-idea, and it was Spencer's chief contribution to Psychology
that he insisted on regarding the human mind as a product, the outlines
of whose history could be more or less clearly descried. In other words,
he attempted a genetic interpretation of our mental life in the light of
antecedent simpler expressions of mentality in the child and in the
animal world. In so doing he was a pioneer, and he doubtless made a
pioneer's mistakes. None the less he helped to effect for psychology the
transition from a static and morphological mode of interpretation to one
which is distinctively kinetic, physiological, and historical. That this
is nowadays the mood of all psychologists is well-known. Thus one of our
leading modern exponents says, "We may define psychology as the science
of the development of mind."[12]
Spencer sought to make mental processes more intelligible by disclosing
the gradualness of their evolution. "It is not more certain that, from
the simple reflex action by which the infant sucks, up to the elaborate
reasoning of the adult man, the progress is by daily infinitesimal
steps, than it is certain that between the automatic actions of the
lowest creatures and the highest conscious actions of the human race, a
series of actions displayed by the various tribes of the animal kingdom
may be so placed as to render it impossible to say of any one step in
the series, Here intelligence begins." Objectively, with data drawn
from the animal world and from child-study, he attempted to trace the
evolution of mind from reflex action through instinct to reason, memory,
feeling, and will, by the interaction of the nervous system with its
gradually widening environment. Subjectively, in his analytic task, he
endeavoured to show that all mental states are referable to primitive
elements of consciousness or units of feeling, which he called nervous
or psychical shocks.
Spencer's general position is thus summed up:--
"The Law of Evolution holds of the inner world as it does of the
outer world. On tracing up from its low and vague beginnings the
intelligence which becomes so marvellous in the highest beings, we
find that under whatever aspect contemplated, it presents a
progressive transformation of like nature with the progressive
transformation we trace in the Universe as a whole, no less than in
each of its parts. If we study the development of the nervous
system, we see it advancing in integration, in complexity, in
definiteness. If we turn to its functions, we find these similarly
show an ever-increasing inter-dependence, an augmentation in number
and heterogeneity, and a greater precision. If we examine the
relations of these functions to the actions going on in the world
around, we see that the correspondence between them progresses in
range and amount, becomes continually more complex and special, and
advances through differentiations and integrations like those
everywhere going on. And when we observe the correlative states of
consciousness, we discover that these, too, beginning as simple,
vague, and incoherent, become increasingly numerous in their kinds,
are united into aggregates which are larger, more multitudinous,
and more multiform, and eventually assume those finished shapes we
see in scientific generalisations, where definitely-quantitative
elements are co-ordinated in definitely-quantitative relations"
(_Principles of Psychology_, i. p. 627).
In Spencer's system mind is a secondary and derivative expression of
life; it emerges after corporeal evolution has made some strides; it is
always dependent on the development of the nervous system. This is an
inference from the facts of individual development and racial evolution,
which clearly show that mental life emerges from antecedent stages in
which only bodily life can be discerned. And if mental life were a
merely incidental quality, like the possession of red blood, there would
be no objection to the inference. But since mental life is almost from
the first a necessary postulate--wherever we have to deal with
behaviour--and as we are quite unable to suggest how it can arise out of
metabolism, it seems more scientific, at present, to regard the
potentiality of mind as being just as primitive as metabolism. It should
be noted that the most recent researches[13] on the behaviour of the
simplest animals disclose something more than reflex actions, namely a
pursuit of the method of trial and error, involving some of the
fundamental qualities seen in higher animals.
Just as inorganic evolution must have made many advances before
organisms became possible, so organic evolution must have made many
advances before the mental side of life could find distinct expression.
But as we cannot retranslate the daily activities of even a very simple
animal into chemico-physical language, we are forced at present to
conclude that what is called inanimate matter has somehow wrapped up
with it the potentiality of life; and as we cannot retranslate behaviour
into the metabolism of nerve-cells, we are forced at present to conclude
that life has somehow wrapped up with it the potentiality of mind. In
other words, what is called the evolution of mind is a genetic
description of the stages in its emergence from its state of universal
potentiality.
(2) _Body and Mind._--A second service Spencer rendered to Psychology
was that of linking it to Biology. He gave clear expression to the
doctrine, which many workers had been reaching towards, of the
correlation of mind and body. Although sagacious thinkers at many
different dates had pointed out that the flesh not only wars against the
spirit, but in a humiliating way conditions its activity, the
recognition of the intimate correlation of body and mind was still
requiring its advocate when Spencer wrote his _Psychology_. Ignoring
what had been clearly shown even by Descartes and the truth in Hartley's
_Observations on Man_ (1749), there was still a school who practically
dealt with the mind and its faculties on the one side, the body and its
functions on the other side, as entirely independent existences. The old
idea that character inheres in the ghost, and that the body is merely
the ghost's house, having no causal relation to it, still lingered in
more or less refined form when Spencer set himself to show "that, in
both amounts and kinds, mental manifestations are in part dependent on
bodily structures. Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a
sense, as deep as the viscera." In a detailed way, he sought to show
that "the amounts and kinds of the mental actions constituting
consciousness vary, other things equal, according to the rapidity, the
quantity, and the quality, of the blood-supply; and all these vary
according to the sizes and proportions of the sundry organs which unite
in preparing blood from food, the organs which circulate it, and the
organs which purify it from waste products." To put it concretely, he
contended that when we consider Handel, for instance, "so wonderfully
productive, so marvellous for the number and vigour of his musical
compositions," we must also remember that he had an unusually active
digestion. "And not the quantity of mind only, but the quality of mind
also, is in part determined by these psycho-physical connections. Amount
and structure of brain being the same, not only may the totality of
feelings and thoughts be greater or less according as this or that
viscus is well or ill-developed, but the feelings and thoughts may also
be favourably or unfavourably modified in their kinds." So morality, as
well as mind, is as deep as the viscera.
Here again the general truth which Spencer forcibly expounded, though it
was not of course peculiarly his, is one that has met with almost
universal recognition. As Prof. G. F. Stout says:--
"The life of the brain is part of the life of the organism as a
whole, and inasmuch as consciousness is the correlate of
brain-process, it is conditioned by organic process in general. It
is clear that the unity and connection of psychical states cannot
be clearly conceived without taking into account the unity and
connection of the processes of the organism as a whole."[14]
As Prof. James Ward says[15]:--
"Modern science is content to ascertain co-existences and
successions between facts of mind and facts of body. The relations
so determined constitute the newest of the sciences,
psychophysiology or psychophysics. From this science we learn that
there exist manifold correspondences of the most intimate and
exact kind between states and changes of consciousness on the one
hand, and states and changes of brain on the other. As respects
complexity, intensity, and time-order, the concomitance is
apparently complete. Mind and brain advance and decline _pari
passu_; the stimulants and narcotics that enliven or depress the
action of the one tell in like manner upon the other. Local lesions
that suspend or destroy, more or less completely, the functions of
the centres of sight and speech, for instance, involve an
equivalent loss, temporary or permanent, of words and ideas."
_Experience and Intuitions._--The history of psychology discloses a long
drawn-out dispute between schools of "empiricists," who said "all our
knowledge is derived from experience," and schools of "intuitionalists,"
who said, "Nay, but we have innate ideas or intuitions which transcend
experience." A parallel dispute was long continued in regard to moral
ideas. Between the disputants Spencer appeared as a peace-maker, and the
reconciliation he proposed was in terms of evolution. We can best
express it by a sentence from a letter to John Stuart Mill:--
"Just in the same way that I believe the intuition of space,
possessed by any living individual, to have arisen from organised
and consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals who
bequeathed to him their slowly-developed nervous
organisations--just as I believe that this intuition, requiring
only to be made definite and complete by personal experiences, has
practically become a form of thought, apparently quite independent
of experience; so do I believe that the experiences of utility,
organised and consolidated through all past generations of the
human race, have been producing corresponding nervous
modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation
have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition--certain
emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no
apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility."
In short, Spencer maintained that intellectual and moral intuitions had
arisen from gradually organised and inherited experience. "What the
transcendentalist called a _priori_ principles the evolutionist regards
as _a priori_ indeed to the individual, but _a posteriori_ to the race;
that is as race experiences which in the individual appear as
intuitions."[16]
This was an ingenious _eirenicon_, but it does not seem to satisfy all
the philosophers, those namely who feel that intuitions--both
intellectual and moral--have a validity, universality, and compelling
necessity which cannot be accounted for if they are simply the outcome
of race-experience. The only alternative seems to be to say that their
validity depends on the nature of mind itself, or, what comes to the
same thing, because they are in harmony with the spiritual principle in
nature.
Nor are the biologists quite satisfied with Spencer's reconciliation,
between empiricism and apriorism, for, in the form he gave it, there is
the tacit assumption that results of experience are as such
transmissible. But this is biologically a hazardous assumption. The only
alternative would be to suppose that the advance to rational intuitions
came about by the selection of variations towards that type of mental
constitution which rational and moral intuitions express--a probably
very slow process which would be sheltered by the individual moulding
himself to the social heritage in which many results of experience are
registered and entailed independently of any germ-plasm. It is possible
that there has been an underestimate of the extent to which what are
regarded as intuitions are sustained by tradition in the widest sense,
and an underestimate of the extent to which they are individually
acquired by each successive generation.
When we speak of either instincts or intuitions arising by the selection
of variations, we need not think of such wonderful results as
originating in fortuitous mental sports; we are quite entitled to think
of definiteness in mental (at the same time neural) variation as in
bodily variation; we are quite entitled to think of mental (at the same
time neural) 'mutations' as well as bodily 'mutations'; we do not
require to burden natural selection with more than the pruning off of
irrationalities, instabilities, disharmonies, and imbecilities. Thus
even biologically we may admit that the validity of intuitions depends
on the nature of mind itself, socially confirmed from age to age.
_Test of Truth._--Spencer took great stock in "intuitions," especially
in his _First Principles_, and yet he believed in their empirical
origin; and this leads us to ask what his test of truth was. It may be
summed up in the phrase "the inconceivability of the opposite." After a
curiously self-contradictory attempt to show by reasoning that "a
certainty greater than that which any reasoning can yield has to be
recognised at the outset of all reasoning," he states the "universal
postulate": "The inconceivableness of its negation is that which shows a
cognition to possess the highest rank--is the criterion by which its
insurpassable validity is known."
He admitted, however, that there were limitations to the utility of
this test of truth. "That some propositions have been wrongly
accepted as true, because their negations were supposed
inconceivable when they were not, does not disprove the validity of
the test, for these reasons: (1) That they were complex
propositions, not to be established by a test applicable only to
propositions no further decomposable; (2) that this test, in common
with any test, is liable to yield untrue results, either from
incapacity or from carelessness in those who use it." In regard to
which Prof. Sidgwick says:[17] "These two qualifications surely
reduce very much the practical value of the criterion. For how are
we to proceed if philosophers disagree about the application of the
criteria? How are we to test 'undecomposability'? For notions which
on first reflection appear to us simple are so often found on
further reflective analysis to be composite. Which conclusion,
then, are we to trust, the earlier or the later? This seems to me a
serious dilemma for Mr Spencer; whichever way he answers he is in a
difficulty."
It would seem then that Spencer did not get much further than others who
have tried to answer the question: _What is the test of truth?_ Nor for
our part can we supply the deficiency. It is probably more profitable,
as Sidgwick says, "to turn from infallible criteria to methods of
verification, from the search after an absolute test of truth to the
humbler task of devising modes of excluding error." "These verifications
are based on experience of the ways in which the human mind has actually
been convinced of error, and been led to discard it; _i.e._, three modes
of conflict, conflict between a judgment first formed, and the view of
this judgment taken by the same mind on subsequent reconsideration;
conflict between two different judgments, or the implications of two
partially different judgments formed by the same mind under different
conditions; and finally, conflict between the judgments of different
minds." In other words, what is true for us is that which survives these
conflicts, but the conflict is unceasing.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] G. F. Stout, _Analytic Psychology_, vol. i., 1896, p. 9.
[13] H. S. Jennings, "Publications of Carnegie Institute," Washington,
No. 16 (1904), pp. 1-256.
[14] _Op. cit._, p. 27.
[15] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, 1899, vol. i. p. 10.
[16] W. H. Hudson, Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
[17] _The Philosophy of Kant and other Lecturers_, 1905, p. 319
XV
SOCIOLOGICAL
_What Sociology is--Criticism of Sociology--Sociology and
History--Spencer's Sociological Data--Central Ideas of Spencer's
Sociology--The Idea of the Social Organism--Parallelisms between a
Society and an Individual Organism_
While Spencer had little agreement with Comte, he was at one with him in
regarding Sociology as a possible science and as the crowning science.
_What Sociology is._--By sociology is meant the study of the structure
and activity, development and evolution of social groups, which have
sufficient integration or unity to justify their being regarded as
"organisms," with a life--and a mind--of their own. That many
active-minded people persist in looking askance at sociology--as "a mass
of facts about society," and "no science," is not unnatural, since the
science is still very young and its definition is still elastic. At
certain points it necessarily comes in contact with biology, _e.g._ in
the study of heredity and eugenics; with psychology, _e.g._ in the study
of tradition and religion; with anthropology and history; with economics
and politics. But it has a distinctive place to fill as the study of
human integrates, of groups capable of acting, consciously or
unconsciously, as unities, as more than the sum of their parts. When it
has grown up and done more work, it will be justified, like Wisdom in
general, of its children, and any discussion of its claims to be a
"science" will be an anachronism. Meanwhile, though the youngest of the
sciences is still struggling for existence, we need not fear for its
safety--it is a Hercules in the cradle.
_Criticism of Sociology._--The distrust which many thoughtful minds have
of "Sociology" is well expressed by Prof. Henry Sidgwick in one of his
essays:--
"It is not necessary to show that if we could ascertain from the
past history of human society the fundamental laws of social
evolution as a whole, so that we could accurately forecast the main
features of the future state with which our present social world is
pregnant--it is not needful, I say, to show that the science which
gave this foresight would be of the highest value to a statesman,
and would absorb or dominate our present political economy. What
has to be proved is that this supremely important knowledge is
within our grasp; that the sociology which professes this prevision
is really an established science."[18]
He goes on to say that there are two simple tests of the
establishment of a science, recognised by Comte in his discussion
of this very subject, which can be quickly and decisively applied
to the claims of existing sociology. These tests may be
characterised as (1) Consensus or Continuity, and (2) Prevision.
The former Sedgwick explains in Comte's own words: "When we find
that recent works, instead of being the result and development of
what has gone before, have a character as personal as that of their
authors, and bring the most fundamental ideas into question--then,"
says Comte, "we may be sure we are not dealing with any doctrine
deserving the name of positive science." [The validity of Comte's
criterion seems very doubtful, but let that pass.]
"Now," Sidgwick continues, "if we compare the most elaborate and
ambitious treatises on sociology, of which there happens to be one
in each of the three leading scientific languages--Comte's
_Politique Positive_, Spencer's _Sociology_, and Schaeffle's _Bau
und Leben des socialen Koerpers_--we see at once that they exhibit
the most complete and conspicuous absence of agreement or
continuity in their treatment of the fundamental questions of
social evolution." Sidgwick illustrates this, in the first place,
by taking the exceedingly difficult question of the future of
religion, and shows easily enough how the three doctors differ.
Perhaps it would have been fairer to have selected a less difficult
problem.
It seems profitable to follow Sidgwick's contrast since it brings out
some of Spencer's characteristic doctrines.
"If we inquire after the characteristics of the religion of which
their science leads them to foresee the coming prevalence, they
give with nearly equal confidence answers as divergent as can be
conceived. Schaeffle cannot comprehend that the place of the great
Christian Churches can be taken by anything but a purified form of
Christianity; Spencer contemplates complacently the reduction of
religious thought and sentiment to a perfectly indefinite
consciousness of an Unknowable and the emotion that accompanies
this peculiar intellectual exercise; while Comte has no doubt that
the whole history of religion--which, as he says, 'should resume
the entire history of human development,' has been leading up to
the worship of the Great Being, Humanity, personified domestically
for each normal male individual by his nearest female relatives. It
would seem that the science which allows these discrepancies in its
chief expositors must be still in its infancy." "I do not doubt
that our sociologists are sincere in setting before us their
conception of the coming social state as the last term of a series
of which the law has been discovered by patient historical study;
but when we look closely into their work it becomes only too
evident that each philosopher has constructed on the basis of
personal feeling and experience his ideal future in which our
present social deficiencies are to be remedied; and that the
process by which history is arranged in steps pointing towards his
Utopia bears not the faintest resemblance to a scientific
demonstration."
The remark on the influence of "personal feeling and experience"
recalls the interesting sentence in the preface to Spencer's
_Autobiography_, "One significant truth has been made clear--that
in the genesis of a system of thought the emotional nature is a
large factor: perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual
nature." One cannot but ask if Sidgwick supposed that his own
contributions were uninfluenced by his "personal feeling and
experience." Is it not almost a truism that until science reaches
the stage of measurement or other modes of direct perceptual
verification, it must be tinctured with personal feeling?
Sidgwick goes on to point out that similar discrepancies are
evident "when we turn from religion to industry, and examine the
forecasts of industrial development offered to the statesman in the
name of scientific sociology as a substitute for the discarded
calculations of the mere economist. With equal confidence, history
is represented as leading up, now to the naive and unqualified
individualism of Spencer, now to the carefully guarded and
elaborated socialism of Schaeffle, now to Comte's dream of securing
seven-roomed houses for all working men--with other comforts to
correspond--solely by the impressive moral precepts of his
philosophic priests. Guidance, truly, is here enough and to spare:
but how is the bewildered statesman to select his guidance when his
sociological doctors exhibit this portentous disagreement?" "Nor is
it only that they adopt diametrically opposed conclusions: we find
that each adopts his conclusion with the most serene and complete
indifference to the line of historical reasoning on which his
brother sociologist relies."
Now this is wholesome criticism, but its force is due to the fact that
sociology is still very young. It would be equally easy to discredit
evolution-lore by showing the discrepancies between the aetiology of
Darwin and Wallace, or Spencer and Weismann. But it must not be imagined
that Sidgwick was opposed to Sociology or doubted its validity; he was
simply advocating caution. "There is no reason to despair of the
progress of general sociology; but I do not think that its development
can be really promoted by shutting our eyes to its present very
rudimentary condition." He evidently looked forward with hope to a time
"when the general science of society has solved the problems which it
has as yet only managed to define more or less clearly--when for
positive knowledge it can offer us something better than a mixture of
vague and variously applied physiological analogies, imperfectly
verified historical generalisations, and unwarranted political
predictions--when it has succeeded in establishing on the basis of a
really scientific induction its forecasts of social evolution." The
recently established "Sociological Society"[19] has in its first volume
of publications suggested many ways in which those interested can assist
in the development of this new science, and already as one of its
indirect fruits we can point to the establishment of well defined
courses of Sociology in the University of London.
_Sociology and History._--Something must be said in regard to Spencer's
somewhat peculiar attitude to history. "I take," he said, "but little
interest in what are called histories, but am interested only in
Sociology, which stands related to these so-called histories much as a
vast building stands related to the heaps of stones and brick around
it." He went the length of saying: "Had Greece and Rome never existed,
human life, and the right conduct of it, would have been in their
essentials exactly what they now are: survival or death, health or
disease, prosperity or adversity, happiness or misery, would have been
just in the same ways determined by the adjustment or non-adjustment of
actions to requirements." When we reflect on the complex ways in which
the influence of Greece and Rome has saturated into our life, and has
become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, in literature and art,
in philosophy and science, so that the ideas and feelings among and in
which we live and move are hardly intelligible apart from it, we can
hardly believe our ears when we listen to Spencer's sentence. It seems
to throw a weird light on his Sociology.
For lack of personal interest and in his preoccupation with general
movements, Spencer failed to do justice to what is ordinarily called
history. While we can sympathise with his recoil from historical studies
which lose the wood in the trees, which are like palaeontologies that
never disclose the ascent of life, the same limitation befalls every
kind of specialist study, and is almost a necessary evil, due as Spencer
would phrase it to "the imbecilities of our understanding."
Spencer's point of view was this:--
"To have before us, in manageable form, evidence proving the
correlations which everywhere exist between great militant activity
and the degradation of women, between a despotic form of government
and elaborate ceremonial in social intercourse, between relatively
peaceful social activities and the relaxation of coercive
institutions, promises furtherance of human welfare in a much
greater degree than does learning whether the story of Alfred and
the cakes is a fact or a myth, whether Queen Elizabeth intrigued
with Essex or not, where Prince Charles hid himself, and what were
the details of this battle or that siege--pieces of historical
gossip which cannot in the least affect men's conceptions of the
ways in which social phenomena hang together, or aid them in
shaping their public conduct."
Here, of course, Spencer was making game of what he termed "so-called
histories," for, to do them justice, they are not wholly composed of
gossip, else they would be more read, but he was scoring a definite
point that history is incomplete without sociological generalisation. He
did not seem to see that we need the most scrupulous historical
scholarship if we are to make sure of our generalisations. Nor did he
understand how essential it is to some minds to have in their vision of
the past just those personal details and picturesque touches, which he
despised as gossip.
The antithesis between the sociologist and the conventional historian is
comparable to that between the biologist and the descriptive naturalist.
The painstaking scrupulous describer, with an almost personal affection
for his subjects, the gatherer of exact data to whom nothing is common
or unclean, nothing trivial or without significance, often shrinks from
the sweeping statements and far-reaching formulae of the generaliser; his
detailed knowledge makes him a purist in science, enables him to recall
difficult exceptions, makes him distrustful of the summing-up phrases
which cover a multitude of individualised occurrences. But just as the
specialist is indispensable, so there can be no science without
interpretation.
We presume, however, that the historians agree with Spencer that their
chief aim is to give an account, as rational as is possible for them, of
the movement of human history, as Gibbon, for instance, did in his
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," but that they have a scientific
instinct of recoil from generalising formulae, and probably doubt the
validity of some of Spencer's. We presume that they admit that all
events are not equally important, and that they are laws of perspective
applicable to historical pictures, but that they doubt Spencer's
competence--especially after that sentence of his regarding Greece and
Rome--to act as judge of what is important or in proportion. Just as the
descriptive naturalist justly resents any dictation from the biologist
as to what is or is not worth observing, so the descriptive historian
resents the sociologist's interference. And it is to be feared that men,
both in history and in life, were too much mere "phenomena" to the
Synthetic Philosopher, and that his Sociology was more biological than
human.
_Spencer's Sociological Data._--Spencer may be accused of a lack of
personal interest in the details of human history, of a lack of
appreciation of what modern societies owe to the past, and of taking too
mechanical a view of social evolution, but to accuse him of _a priori_
methods is gratuitously unjust. Darwin in his theorising was no less
scrupulously careful than he was in his monographing of barnacles, and,
however we may disagree with any of Spencer's sociological
generalisations, we must remember the carefulness with which he prepared
himself for his task. From 1867 to 1874, with the help of Mr David
Duncan, Mr James Collier, and Dr Scheppig, he worked at the compilation
of sociological data, showing "in fitly classified groups and tables,
facts of all kinds, presented by numerous races, which illustrate social
evolution under its various aspects." This detailed work was begun
solely to facilitate his own generalisations; it was published "apart
from hypotheses, so as to aid all students of Social Science in testing
such conclusions as they have drawn and in drawing others."
Most admirable was the ideal which Spencer had before him in collecting
his data of Sociology.
"Indications of the climate, contour, soil, and minerals, of the
region inhabited by each society delineated, seemed to me needful.
Some accounts of the Flora and Fauna, in so far as they affected
human life, had to be given. And the characters of the surrounding
tribes or nations were factors which could not be overlooked. The
characters of the people, individually considered, had also to be
described--their physical, moral, and intellectual traits. Then,
besides the political, ecclesiastical, industrial and other
institutions of the society--besides the knowledge, beliefs, and
sentiments, the language, habits, customs, and tastes of its
members--there had to be noticed their clothing, food, and arts of
life."
_Central Ideas of Spencer's Sociology._--The central ideas of Spencer's
sociological work are thus summed up by Prof. F. H. Giddings:--
"Spencer's propositions could be arranged in the following order: (1)
Society is an organism; (2) in the struggle of social organisms for
existence and their consequent differentiation, fear of both the living
and the dead arises, and for countless ages is a controlling emotion;
(3) dominated by fear, men for ages are habitually engaged in military
activities; (4) the transition from militarism to industrialism, made
possible by the consolidation of small social groups into large ones,
which war accomplishes, to its own ultimate decline, transforms human
nature and social institutions; and this fact affords the true
interpretation of all social progress."
Spencer sought to disclose the evolution of human ideas and customs,
ceremonials and institutions. He emphasised the true idea that any
society worthy of the name is an integrate like an individual organism,
with the capacity of co-ordinated action or unified behaviour distinct
from the life of the component units, and he used other biological
concepts to render social evolution more intelligible.
He relied greatly on the influence of Fear in the early stages of social
evolution: fear of living competitors gave rise to political control--to
ceremonies and institutions; fear of the dead gave origin to religion
whose primitive expressions are seen in ancestor-worship or worship of
the dead. The conception of another life originated mainly in "such
phenomena as shadows, reflections, and echoes," and gave origin to
conceptions of gods.
Pressure of population and competitive struggle between societies have
been potent factors in evolution, promoting differentiation and
integration, and continually tending to disappear as their ends are
achieved. Morality is developed as an adaptive expedient under the
complex struggle for existence, and industrial organisation replaces
military organisation as the social integrates grow and multiply and
coalesce. As solidarity deepens with increased peaceful synergy, the
severe centralised control, necessary when militarism is dominant,
should be replaced by greater freedom of individual life, and by a
restriction of governmental function to securing justice, to maintaining
equitable relations, preventing one individual infringing on his
neighbour's liberty. The formula of absolute justice is that "every man
is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man." In militant times the individuals exist for
the state; in industrial times the state is to be maintained solely for
the benefit of the citizens, and a better than industrial freedom is to
be looked for when it is more fully realised that life is not for work
but work is for life. Spencer believed so much in the beneficence of
peace and individual liberty, that he said "there needs but a
continuance of absolute peace externally, and a vigorous insistence on
non-aggression internally, to ensure the moulding of men into a form
characterised by all the virtues"--a fine illustration of evolutionary
optimism. To him the goal of human progress was a completed
individualism, but "the ultimate individual will be one whose private
requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man
who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs
the functions of a social unit, and yet is only enabled so to fulfil his
own nature by all others doing the like."
_The Idea of the Social Organism._--Spencer has been largely
responsible for popularising the conception expressed in the phrase "The
Social Organism"--that a society or societary form is in many ways
comparable to an individual organism, _e.g._ in growing, in
differentiating, in showing increased mutual dependence of its parts,
and so on. It is true that the comparison of society to an organism is
at least as old as the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, but Spencer
was one of the first to fill in the analogy with biological details. The
idea was briefly expressed in _Social Statics_, and was elaborated in an
essay which appeared in the "Westminster Review" in January 1860. There
he likened government to the central nervous system, agriculture and
industry to the alimentary tract, transport and exchange to the vascular
system of an animal, and pointed out that like an individual organism a
society grows, becomes more complex, shows increasing inter-relations,
division of labour, and mutual dependence among its parts, and has a
life immense in length when compared with the lives of the component
units. At the same time, it should be carefully noted that it was
Spencer who introduced the term _super-organic_ as descriptive of social
phenomena, indicating thereby that the biological categories may require
considerable modification before they can be safely used in Sociology.
_Parallelisms between a Society and an Individual Organism._--Spencer
indicated four chief parallelisms between a society and an individual
organism:--
(1) Starting as small aggregates both grow in size.
(2) As they grow their initial relative simplicity is replaced by
increasing complexity of structure.
(3) With increasing differentiation there comes about an increasing
mutual dependence of the component parts, until the life and normal
functioning of each becomes dependent on the life of the whole.
(4) The life of the whole becomes independent of and far more
prolonged than the life of the component units.
It is obvious that this pleasing analogy may be pursued far. Thus a
society may be compared to an organism as regards the genetic kinship of
the component units (the cells being compared to individuals); in the
fact that continued existence depends on continued functioning; in the
power of retaining integrity or viable equilibrium in spite of ceaseless
changes both internal and external; in the internal struggle of parts
which co-exists with some measure of mutual subordination; in owing its
peculiar virtue to the subtle inter-relations between its unified
elements; in its power of coalescing with another form or of giving
birth to another form; in its power of varying as a whole; in its habit
of competing with other forms, as the result of which adaptation or
elimination may ensue; and so on. In fact the analogy is far-reaching
and persuasive and it is helped over some of its difficulties by the
consideration that just as there are many grades of social-group, from
the nomad herd to the French Republic, so there are many grades of
organism from sponge to eagle.
Schaeffle, in his famous work on the _Structure and Life of the Social
Body_ (1875), carried the metaphor of the social organism to an extreme
which has induced many to recoil from it altogether. The family is the
cell, and the body consists of simple connective tissue (expressed in
unity of speech, etc.), and of various differentiated tissues, such as
sensory and motor apparatus. The comparison is as interesting as a game,
but when we find writers speaking of the social ectoderm and endoderm,
and so forth, we cannot but feel that the metaphor is being stretched to
the breaking-point.
Spencer was himself quite conscious that the metaphor had its
limitations, for he indicates four contrasts between a society and an
individual organism.
(1) Societies have no specific external forms.
(2) The units of an organism are physically continuous, but the
units of a society are dispersed persons.
(3) The elements of an organism are mostly fixed in their relative
positions; while units of a society are capable of moving from
place to place.
(4) In the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with
feeling; in a society all the members are so endowed. The social
nervous system is happily wider than the government.
There are other limitations, _e.g._, that the social organism does not
seem to pass _necessarily_ through a curve of life ending in senility
and death; that when a particular form disappears it is usually by being
incorporated into another in whose life it shares.
As it appears to us the real analogy is between a human societary form
and an animal societary form, such as an ant-hill or a bee-hive or a
beaver-village, and not between a society and an individual organism.
Moreover, since the biologist has not yet arrived at a clear conception
of the innermost secret of the individual organism, notably the secret
of its unity, the comparison implied in the metaphor of the social
organism is an attempt to interpret _obscurum per obscurius_. The
analogy, such as it is, is probably destined to be of more use to the
biologist than to the sociologist.
In thinking of the unity of the individual organism--which remains in
great measure an enigma to Biology--we have to distinguish (_a_) _the
physical unity_, which rests on the fact that all the component units
are closely akin, being lineal descendants of the fertilised ovum, and
on the fact that they are subtly connected with each other in mutual
dependence and co-operation, whether by intercellular bridges, or by the
commonalty established by the vascular and nervous systems; and (_b_)
the correlated _psychical unity_, the _esprit de corps_, which in a
manner inconceivable to us makes the whole body one. That there are
organisms, like sponges, in which the psychical unity is quite
unverifiable is probably only a passing difficulty, greatly lessened by
our increasing knowledge of the life of the simplest unicellular
organisms whose behaviour is now seen to include trial by error and
other traits which we cannot interpret without using psychical terms.
The same is true in regard to the social organism; we have here to
distinguish (_a_) _the physical unity_ which rests on hereditary kinship
and on similar environmental conditions, and (_b_) _the psychical
unity_, the "social mind," developed with relation to certain ends--"a
unity which is the end of its parts." It seems probable that in early
days, the physical unity was more prominent than later on, when, as in
the case of mixed racial groups, the psychical bond is practically
supreme. But genetic and environmental bonds do not as physical facts
constitute a society. Until there is enough of correlated psychical
unity for the group to act, however imperfectly, as a group with a mind
of its own, controlling the egoism of the individual members, there is
no human society.
In short, if we continue to speak of a society as a social organism, we
must safeguard the analogy by remembering that the character of society
as an organism exists in the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the
component members, and that the social bonds are not those of sympathy
and synergy only, but that the rational life is intrinsically social.
As Green said, "Social life is to personality what language is to
thought."
The chief difficulty that Spencer had with his metaphor was that in the
individual organism there is a centred consciousness in the nervous
system, whereas the social group as a whole has no corporate
consciousness. Thus "while in individual bodies the welfare of all other
parts is rightly subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose
pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or ill of life; in
bodies politic the same thing does not hold, or holds only to a very
slight extent. It was well that the lives of all parts of an animal
should be merged in the life of the whole, because the whole has a
corporate consciousness capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so
with a society, since its living units do not and cannot lose individual
consciousness, and since the community as a whole has no corporate
consciousness. And this is an everlasting reason why the welfare of
citizens cannot rightly be sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the
State: but why, on the other hand, the State is to be maintained solely
for the benefit of citizens. The corporate life must here be subservient
to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being
subservient to the corporate life" ("The Social Organism," _Essays_,
vol. i.). In other words, Spencer found the metaphor useful even when it
broke down, for it enabled him to corroborate his doctrine of
individualism. If he had pursued the analogy between the human social
group and the animal social group, such as that of bees or beavers, the
corroboration would not have been so easy, though Spencer would
doubtless have arrived at the same result.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] "The Scope and Method of Economic Science," _Miscellaneous Essays
and Addresses_, 1904, p. 193.
[19] For a discussion of the validity and scope of Sociology we may
refer to the following papers: "On the Origin and Use of the word
Sociology," "Note on the History of Sociology," by Mr Victor V.
Branford; "The Relation of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to
Philosophy," two papers by Prof. E. Durkheim and Mr Branford; "Sociology
and the Social Sciences," by Prof. Durkheim and M. E. Fauconnet;--all
published in "Sociological Papers," the first volume of the Sociological
Society's Proceedings.