Spencer's Philosophy of Science

Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See http://www.archive.org/details/spencersphilosop00morgrich

Transcriber's note:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).

Text enclosed by curly brackets is subscripted (example: H{2}O) unless preceded by a carat character, in which case it is superscripted (example: ^{2}).

SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at the Museum 7 November, 1913

by

C. LLOYD MORGAN, F.R.S.

Price Two Shillings net

Oxford At the Clarendon Press MCMXIII

Oxford University Press London Edinburgh Glasgow New York Toronto Melbourne Bombay Humphrey Milford M.A. Publisher to the University

SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Towards the close of 1870, while I was still in my teens, my youthful enthusiasm was fired by reading Tyndall's Discourse on The Scientific Use of the Imagination. The vision of the conquest of nature by physical science--a vision which had but lately begun to open up to my wondering gaze--was rendered clearer and more extensive. Of the theory of evolution I knew but little; but I none the less felt assured that it had come to stay and to prevail. Was it not accepted by all of us--the enlightened and emancipated men of science whose ranks I had joined as a raw recruit? Believing that I was independently breaking free of all authority, to the authority that appealed to my fancy, and to a new loyalty, I was a willing slave. And here in one glowing sentence the inner core of evolution lay revealed.

'Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular and animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and the lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself--emotion, intellect and all their phenomena--were once latent in a fiery cloud.'[1]

With sparkling eyes I quoted these brave words to a friend of my father's, whose comments were often as caustic as his sympathy in my interests was kindly. With a grave smile he asked whether the notion was not perhaps stripped too naked to preserve the decencies of modest thought; he inquired whether I had not learnt from Sartor Resartus that the philosophy of nature is a Philosophy of Clothes; and he bade me devote a little time to quiet and careful consideration of what Tyndall really meant--meant in terms of the exact science he professed--by the phrase 'latent in a fiery cloud'. I dimly suspected that the old gentleman--old in the sense of being my father's contemporary--was ignorant of those recent developments of modern science with which I had been acquainted for weeks, nay more for months. Perhaps he had never even heard of the nebular hypothesis! But I felt that I had done him an injustice when, next morning, he sent round a volume of the Westminster Review with a slip of paper indicating an article on 'Progress: its Law and Cause'.

Such was my introduction to Herbert Spencer, some of whose works I read with admiration during the next few years.

I have no very distinct recollection of the impression produced on my mind by the germinal essay of 1857, save that it served to quicken that craving, which is, I suppose, characteristic of those who have some natural bent towards philosophy--the imperative craving to seek and, if it may be, to find the one in the many. In any case Tyndall's suggestive sentence was here amplified and the underlying law was disclosed.

'Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufacture, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, the same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.'[2]