Herbert Spencer

by J. Arthur Thomson

(e) With the development of tool-using and sentence-making, with recognition of the seasons as a fundamental illustration of the uniformity of nature, with the gaining of a firmer foothold in the struggle for existence, with slowly increasing altruism and sociality, and with the occasional emergence of the genius, there might gradually arise—in permanent products, in symbols and songs, in traditions and customs—an external heritage, which, it appears to us, has been the most potent factor in securing and furthering human evolution.

Ignorant as we are as to the factors in human evolution, there is a convergence of various lines of evidence towards the conclusion that man must have come of a social stock. It is difficult to conceive of his survival on any other supposition. In a deeper sense, perhaps, than Rousseau thought of, it seems true that Man did not make Society, Society (pre-human) made Man.

By some means or other, probably along various paths—through kinship-sympathies, through linguistic bonds, for economic or life-and-death reasons, man became definitely social, and a new order of things began, which Spencer has pictured with great skill. Just as it was a new event in the history of Hymenopterous insects when ants made an ant-hill, or bees a natural hive, so it was a new event in the history of Man when unified societary groups came into being.

Now all this is vague, and, it may be, unconvincing; but we are not aware that Spencer had any further light to throw on the problem—a problem so difficult that Alfred Russel Wallace, the Nestor among living evolutionists, has declared his conviction that the development of man's higher qualities cannot be conceived without postulating "spiritual influx." Our point at present is that the difficulties are greater than Spencer publicly recognised, and that his formula of evolution is not only too remotely abstract to be relevant, but that it is in its mechanical phrasing quite inapplicable.

The Scientific Position.—The idea of organic evolution suggests—that the forms of life have had a natural history, that they have descended from a far-distant relatively simple ancestry, that they have risen from level to level throughout many millions of years just as individual animals in their development rise from level to level in a few days or months or years. It is the only scientific conception we have of the Becoming of the world of life.

The theory of organic evolution raises this modal interpretation into a causal interpretation by disclosing the factors—such as Variation and Selection—in the long process. To some minds, the known factors appear inadequate to describe the process, especially in relation to the emergence of mental life and the ascent of man. Thus an attempt is often made to sit on both sides of the fence, accepting scientific factors for what they are worth, but eking them out by postulating "ultra-scientific" causes. This procedure, however, lands in mental confusion; it is like trying to speak two languages at once. It is also very premature.

When we extend the concept of evolution to the inorganic world, we find that it applies there also, that it enables us to resume the history of the solar system as a whole, and of the earth in particular in a convenient formula. Here again we are aware of factors of evolution, which enable us to give a causal interpretation of how the inanimate world came to be as it is. The factors are not the same as those verifiable in organic evolution; they are in terms of the laws of motion and other physical concepts.

Again the idea of evolution may be applied to the forms of mental life and to the forms of social life, and in these realms the factors are not the same as those used in interpreting the history of organisms (objectively considered) or the history of inanimate systems.