THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
taken for granted that heterogeneity makes for instability, and that the
fusion of immigrant stocks into one national type would strengthen a
society. Tarde thinks that civilization results from an increase of similarity
among the members of a group through generations of mutual imitation;
here the movement of evolution is conceived as a progress towards homogeneity.
Gothic architecture is surely more complex than that of the
Greeks; but not necessarily a higher stage of artistic evolution. Spencer
was too quick to assume that what was earlier in time was simpler in
structure; he underrated the complexity of protoplasm, and the intelligence
of 111
primitive man. Finally, the definition fails to mention the very
item which in most minds today is inalienably associated with the idea of
evolution namely, natural selection. would be)
Perhaps (imperfect though this too
a description of history as a struggle for existence and a survival
of the fittest of the fittest organisms, the fittest societies, the fittest
moralities, the fittest languages, ideas, philosophies would be more illu-
of homo- and
minating than the formula of incoherence and coherence,
heterogeneity, of dissipation and integration?
"I am a bad observer of humanity in the concrete," says Spencer, "being
too much given to wandering into the abstract." 112 This is dangerous
honesty. Spencer's method, of course, was too deductive and