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."