THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
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came in him an enslaving passion; a brilliant generalization over*
mastered him. But the world was calling for a mind like his; one who
could transform the wilderness of facts with sunlit clarity into civilized
meaning; and the service which Spencer performed for his generation
entitled him to the failings that made him human. If he has been pictured
here rather frankly, it is because we love a great man better when we
know his faults, and suspiciously dislike him when he shines in un-
mitigated perfection.
"Up to this date/ 9
been characterized as miscellaneous." 23 Seldom has a philosopher's career
shown such desultory vacillation, "About this time" (age twenty-three)
"my attention turned to the construction of watches." 2* But gradually he
found his field, and tilled it with honest husbandry. As early as 1842 he
wrote Spencer at forty, "my life might fitly have
wrote, for the Non-conformist (note the medium he chose) , some letters
on "The Proper Sphere of Government," which contained his later
laissez-faire philosophy in ovo. Six years later he dropped engineering to
edit The Economist. At the age of thirty, when he spoke disparagingly of
Jonathan Dymond's Essays on the Principles of Morality, and his father
challenged him to do as well with such a subject, he took the dare, and
wrote his Social Statics. It had only a small sale, but it won him access to
the magazines. In 1852 his essay on "The Theory of Population" (one
of the many instances of Malthus' influence on the thought of the nineteenth
century) suggested that the struggle for existence leads to a
survival of the fittest, and coined those historic phrases. In the same
year his essay on "The Development Hypothesis" met the trite objection
that the origin of new species by progressive modification of older ones
had never been seen by pointing out that the same argument told much
more strongly against the theory of the "special creation" of new species
by God; and it went on to show that the development of new species was
no more marvelous or incredible than the development of a man from
ovum and sperm, or of a plant from a seed. In 1855 his second book,
The Principles of Psychology^ undertook to trace the evolution of mind*
Then, in 1857, G3JI^ && essay on "Progress, Its Law and Cause," which
took up Von Baer*s idea of the growth of all living forms from homogeneous
beginnings to heterogeneous developments, and lifted it into a general
principle of history and progress. In short Spencer had grown with
the spirit of his age, and was ready now to become the philosopher of
universal evolution*
When, in 1858, he was revising his essays for collective publication,
he was struck by the unity and sequence of the ideas he had expressed;
and the notion came to him, like a burst of sunlight through opened doors,
that the theory of evolution might be applied in every science as well as