to show in his next work, the Principles of Psychology, life means a continuous series of adjustments of internal to external relations. Therefore the rate of multiplication must go on falling with the growth of intellectual and moral power until it only just suffices to balance the loss by death. The next step was to revive Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and to connect it through Lyell's uniformitarian geology with Lamarck's developmental biology, thereby extending the same evolutionary process through the whole history of the universe.
Nor was this all. Milne-Edwards, by another return to Aristotle, had pointed to the "physiological division of labour" as a mark of ascending organic perfection, to which Spencer adds integration of structure as its obverse side, at the same time extending the world-law, already made familiar in part through its industrial applications by Adam Smith, to all orders of social activity. Finally, differentiation and integration were stretched back from living to lifeless matter, thus bringing astronomy and geology, which had already entered into the causal series of cosmic transformations, under one common law of evolution; while at the same time, seeing it to be generally admitted that inorganic changes originated from the operation of purely mechanical forces, they suggested that mechanism, without teleology, could adequately explain organic evolution also.
Finally came the great discovery of Darwin and Wallace, with its extension of Malthus's law to the whole world of living things. Spencer had just touched, without grasping, the same idea years before. He now gladly accepted Natural Selection as supplementing without superseding Lamarck's theory of spontaneous adaptation.
To complete even in outline the vast sweep of his projected Synthetic Philosophy two steps more remained for Spencer to take. The law of evolution had to be brought under the recently-discovered law of the Conservation of Energy, or, as he called it, the Persistence of Force, and the whole of unified science had to be reconciled with religion. The first problem was solved by interpreting evolution as a redistribution of matter and motion—a process in which, of course, energy is neither lost nor gained. The second problem was solved by reducing faith and knowledge to the common denominator of Agnosticism—a method that found more favour with Positivists (in the wide sense) than with Christian believers.
Herbert Spencer was disappointed to find that people took more interest in the portico (as he called it in a letter to the present writer)—that is to say, the metaphysical introduction to his philosophical edifice—than in its interior. He probably had some suspicion that the portico was mere lath and plaster, while he felt sure that the columns and architraves behind it were of granite. The public, however, besides their perennial interest in religion, might be excused for giving more attention to even a baroque exterior with some novelty about it than to the formalised eclecticism of what stood behind it. Unfortunately, they soon found that the alleged reconciliation was a palpable sham. Religion is nothing if not a revelation, and an unknowable God is no God at all. Even the pretended proofs of that poor residual deity involved their author in the transparent self-contradiction of calling the universe the manifestation of an Unknowable Power. Then the relations between this Power (such as it was) and the Energy (or Force) whose conservation (or persistence) was the very first
of First Principles seemed hard to adjust. Either energy is created, or it is not. In the one case, what becomes of its eternity? in the other case, what need is there to assume a Power (knowable or not) behind it? Science will not shrink back before such a phantom, nor will Religion adore it.
Such faulty building in the portico prepares us for somewhat unsteady masonry within; and in fact none holds together except what has been transported bodily from other temples. In the past history of the universe, considered as a "rearrangement of matter and motion," disintegration and assimilation play quite as great a part as integration and differentiation. Such formulas have no advantage over the metaphysical systematisation of Aristotle, and they give us as little power either to predict or to direct. Will war be abolished at some future time, or property equalised or abolished, or morality exalted, or religion superseded? Spencer was ready with his answer; but the law of evolution could not prove it true. Nevertheless, his name will long be associated with evolution as a world-wide process, though neither in the way of original discovery nor of complete generalisation, and far less of successful application to modern problems; but rather of diffusion and popularisation, even as other valuable ideas have been impressed on the public mind by other philosophies at a vast expense of ingenuity, knowledge, and labour, but not at greater expense than the eventual gain has been worth.
The English Hegelians.
Hegel's philosophy first drew attention in England through its supposed connection with Strauss's mythic theory of the Gospels and Baur's theory of New