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]
[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."
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 (ætat. 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 ætiology 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 (§ 109-§ 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 formulæ in opposition to transcendental formulæ 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 resumé 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 Müller 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."