Francis - Herbert Spencer Legacies (2014)

Herbert Spencer
also by mark francis

Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Acumen)
herbert spencer
Legacies
Edited by
Mark Francis
and
Michael W. Taylor
First published 2015
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contents
Contributors vii
1. Introduction 1
Mark Francis
2. The method of nature: Herbert Spencer and the

education of the adaptive mind 16
Stephen Tomlinson
3. Herbert Spencer: nineteenth-century politics and

twentieth-century individualism 40
Michael W. Taylor
4. Herbert Spencer’s sociological legacy 60

Jonathan H. Turner
5. containing multitudes: Herbert Spencer, organisms social

and orders of individuality 89
James Elwick
6. Herbert Spencer, biology, and the social sciences in britain 111

Chris Renwick
7. Spencer and the moral philosophers: Mill, Sidgwick, Moore 133
John Skorupski
8. The problem with star dust: Spencer’s psychology and

William James 154
Mark Francis
v
contents
9. Spencer, cognition, fiction 184

Vanessa L. Ryan
10. Herbert Spencer and Lamarckism 203

Peter J. Bowler
11. Spencer’s british disciples 222

Bernard Lightman
Bibliography 245
Index 267
vi
contributors
Peter J. Bowler is professor emeritus of the history of science at Queen’s

University, belfast. He is a Fellow of the british Academy and former presi-
dent of the british Society for the History of Science. He has published sev-
eral books on the history of evolutionism, the most recent of which, Darwin
Deleted (2013), argues that evolutionary theories could have developed in
the late nineteenth century without the idea of natural selection.
James Elwick is Assistant professor in the Science and Studies Department

and in the Division of natural Science at York University in toronto, canada.
In addition to working on Herbert Spencer, he studies the history of science
education – particularly examinations – as well as the history of biology. He
also coordinates the John tyndall correspondence project, which is publish-
ing the collected letters of this nineteenth-century physicist (who was one of
Spencer’s fellow X-club members).
Mark Francis is professor of political Science at the University of canterbury,

christchurch, new Zealand. He has been Fowler Hamilton Senior research
Fellow at christ church, Oxford and rutherford Scholar at trinity college,
cambridge. His publications include Herbert Spencer and The Invention of
Modern Life (Acumen, 2008) and “Herbert Spencer” in The Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Major Social Theorists (2011).
Bernard Lightman is professor of Humanities at York University, toronto,

canada, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and technology
Studies. He is also editor of the History of Science Society’s journal,
Isis. His most recent publications include Science in the Marketplace (co-
edited with Aileen Fyfe, 2007), Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) and
Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain (2009). He is currently working
vii
c o n t ri bu to r s
on a biography of John tyndall and is one of the editors of the John tyndall
correspondence project.
Chris Renwick is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York,

UK. He works on the history of the biological and social sciences in britain
since the mid-nineteenth century, in particular debates about the relation-
ship between the two fields and their implications for politics and social
policy. He has published widely on these topics, including British Sociology’s
Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (2012).
Vanessa L. Ryan is Assistant professor of english at brown University,

USA, specializing in nineteenth-century british literature and culture, with
research interests in the history of the novel and science and literature. She
is the author of Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (2012).
John Skorupski studied philosophy and economics at the University of

cambridge, UK. After lecturing at the University of Glasgow he moved to
the chair of philosophy at Sheffield University in 1984, and to the chair of
Moral philosophy at Saint Andrews in 1990. His books include John Stuart
Mill (1989), English-Language Philosophy 1750–1945 (1993) and The Domain
of Reasons (2010).
Michael W. Taylor has had a varied career as a central banker, a journal-

ist and an academic. He has worked in London, bahrain, basel and Hong
Kong. In addition to publishing on banking regulation, he has written several
works on the history of ideas and philosophy including Herbert Spencer and
the Limits of the State (1996) and The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (2007).
Stephen Tomlinson is professor of education at the University of Alabama,

USA. His research comprises work in the history and philosophy of edu-
cational thought, with a particular focus on the influence of psychological
theory. He is the author of Head Masters (2005), an exploration of how phre-
nology underwrote nineteenth-century efforts to establish a public system of
secular schooling and promote child-centred pedagogic practices.
Jonathan H. Turner is Distinguished professor of Sociology at the University

of california at riverside, USA, and University professor of the University of
california. He is primarily a general theorist but has a number of substan-
tive interests in addition to his desire to restore Herbert Spencer’s legacy to
its proper place in sociological theory. He is the author of thirty-nine books
and several hundred research papers, and editor of seven additional books.
viii
1
introduction
Mark Francis
The Spencerian legacy consists of the predisposition to assess both the evolu-
tionary past and future of humanity as progressive. Where this predisposition
takes on a scientific guise, it has competed with Darwinian and Lamarckian
theories by offering a naturalistic explanation of the development of psycho-
logical, biological and sociological mechanisms without reference to natural
selection or to an organism’s intention to change. When the Spencerian leg-
acy is non-scientific, it holds a position between the utopian and conservative
views of the world. Instead of directing humanity towards an ideal future,
Spencerianism emphasized that growth was slow, and constrained by past
social and political developments. While this sounds like conservatism, it is
not: the Spencerian notion of tradition contains no wisdom and offers no
guidance; it is simply a set of naturally formed practices and rules. In both its
scientific and non-scientific forms, the Spencerian legacy offers hope for the
future while denying that there is any way of forcing the direction or rate of
change. This Spencerian legacy differs from Spencer’s own writings in being
more optimistic, and less cluttered with echoes from competing doctrines.
That is, Spencer himself was as concerned with dissolution and death as he
was with evolution and life, and he was occasionally capable, depending on
circumstances, of offering Darwinian or Lamarckian arguments as additions,
or substitutes, to his own thought. In general, the Spencerian legacy was a
purer doctrine than one to which Spencer himself would have adhered.
There are two key questions to ask when reflecting on Spencer’s legacy.
First, did Spencer propagate one organic law of evolution that governed not
only his biological theories but also his views on social evolution and the
development of the mind? Or would it be preferable to regard Spencer’s
evolution as a cluster of complementary and competing theories? Second,
if Spencer’s evolutionary theory was primarily an organic one, should it be
grouped with either Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution, or does it occupy
1
m a rk f r a n c i s
its own independent space? The various contributions to the volume answer
these questions, but not in the same way. This is not just a matter of polite
scholarly disagreement; essays on Spencer and his successors sometimes
relate to issues that are still current in debates about evolution and compara-
tive social and natural development. It is still possible to defend more than
one view on such subjects. The editors do not hope to resolve these matters,
but only to stimulate a better informed debate on how we came to theorize
in the way we do.
In addition to warning the reader that there are some unavoidable disa-
greements in answering questions about Spencerian evolution, there is an
important observation to make about Spencer’s legacies. Spencer was not
only a philosopher of science, a psychologist and a sociologist, but also the
author of popular works. by this I do not refer to the fact that his Study of
Sociology was a popular variant of The Principles of Sociology, but wish to
emphasize that a number of Spencer’s influential works were not part of his
scholarly and scientific endeavours; they were pieces of advocacy by a liberal
reformer. These writings mattered in the past and a Spencerian might have
been someone who was not necessarily a fan of Spencer’s philosophy or his
views of evolution, but of his Social Statics, Education or The Man “Versus”
the State. Spencer’s popular works focused on radical politics, individual
development or individualism, and, while they were liberal and progressive,
they were not scientific or philosophical. A reader of these works might have
been a Spencerian who had little interest in evolution.
Who should count as a Spencerian? This question is hard to answer for
two reasons. First, since Spencer had a huge readership during the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, there is an initial temptation to include
as Spencerian everyone who admired Spencer, and, subsequently, a desire
to add everyone who speculated on evolution or individual development or
who had disagreed with Spencer. Then one could extend this generalized
Spencerianism to later generations who had read authors who may have
been Spencerian in tone. Obviously, this kind of taxonomy is too inclusive
because it applies to writers in the past and present who may have cited
Spencer, but who had, or have, independent interests in evolutionary biol-
ogy, social evolution or developmental psychology. Second, Spencerians
are difficult to identify because Spencer himself has became a figure in the
dramatic genre of popular history. He is often listed as a stock figure in a
moral narrative that brought forth the birth of a discipline in the sciences
or social sciences. Like the polar opposites of an old mystery play on cain
and Abel or Abraham and Isaac, or the antinomian pair of punch and Judy,
Spencer is a protagonist in the birth of an academic discourse. He is yoked
to another as one of a pair: Darwin and Spencer, comte and Spencer, Mill
and Spencer, Marx and Spencer, or Weber and Spencer. The descendants of
2
i n t ro du c t i o n
these thinkers are imagined to be equally dichotomous and so, for example,
to be either Darwinian or Spencerian. One of the dual figures is imagined
to be decent and hard-working in pursuit of genuine knowledge, while the
other – usually Spencer – is mischievous. The latter acquires only superfi-
cial knowledge by the use of a synthetic machine: a system of knowledge
that produces results without labour, that is, without experimental effort,
real scientific work or archival investigation. Since morality tales deal with
caricatures and ignore biographies, there is little difficulty in avoiding any
material that does not fit the story. In such fictions, it is a simple matter to
assign the Spencerian part to someone who loosely speculates about evolu-
tion and who is unscientific.
When identifying Spencerians one should avoid both perils: that of over-
inclusiveness and that of searching for Spencerians who fulfil an ideal role in
a morality tale. The historic reality was that Spencerians often employed ideas
from both Spencer and his putative antagonists, such as John Stuart Mill and
charles Darwin. Often the best one can do in recognizing a Spencerian is to
rely on their self-identification. With this in method it is relatively easy to
distinguish a Spencerian from a non-Spencerian. For example, one should
reject a suggestion that G. Stanley Hall, the founder of American develop-
mental psychology and the author of the bizarre and racialized Adolescence:
Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex,
Crime and Religion (1905), was a Spencerian. While Hall viewed Spencer as
a worthy Victorian, he thought his value was only as the author of classical
evolutionary works that should be taught to undergraduates. The only idea
that Hall adopts from Spencer is the famous, but peculiar, notion that cere-
bral women were less fertile. This was silly when first enunciated by Spencer,
and it was not improved by Hall’s attempted verification that showed low
birth rates for women college graduates (Hall 1905: vol. 2, 602). As an exper-
imental psychologist, Hall was a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt, who disap-
proved of Spencer and of evolutionary theory in general. On the other hand,
it is clear that ethnographers such as John Wesley powell (Hinsley Jr 1981:
125–43) and sociologists such as Lester F. Ward (Ward 1919: vol. 1, 139,
180, 244; [1883, 1892] 1923: vol. 1, 150–51, 154–5, 166–8 ) were Spencerian.
Unlike Hall, they overtly described themselves as Spencerian, although they
adopted this label chiefly because they shared Spencer’s belief in the impor-
tance of empirical – rather than abstract – data when interpreting cultural
evolution.
While the accurate identification of Spencerians was relatively sim-
ple before the First World War, afterwards it became more difficult.
Increasingly, Spencerian evolutionary theories had become part of a gen-
eral language of social change. The author of the language did not matter.
When a significant evolutionary theorist such as Leslie A. White insisted
3
on honouring “classical” evolutionary writers such as Spencer, Lewis Henry

Morgan and e. b. tylor, the point was not to protect the legacy of Spencer
or another nineteenth-century evolutionist, but to criticize contemporary
“neo-evolutionists” for using a neologism to describe themselves. White’s
argument was that all social evolutionists from Spencer to himself were fol-
lowing the same theory, but the fact that he had to make this criticism sug-
gests that “neo-evolutionists” were ignorant of their traditions and of their
debt to Spencer. It would seem that Spencer’s legacy had vanished before
the mid-twentieth century, as Jonathan H. turner suggests in this volume.
What still survives from Spencer’s sociology is as non-specific as his legacies
in psychology, metaphysics, biology and ethics. This qualification aside, it
would seem that Spencer’s various evolutionary and developmental theories
still provide an impulse to speculation about social progress and about the
place of the human mind in the universe and its progressive future.
This impulse is not accompanied by any of the philosophical sophisti-
cation that can be found in Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy. An
enthusiasm for evolution is still present, but there is little sign of the schol-
arship and sophistication that accompanied the origins of evolutionary the-
ory. On the contrary, evolutionary theorizing is often cruder than in the
past. present-day speculation on the noble standing of human beings and
their destiny would not be out of place in the works of a nineteenth-century
author, but there is less finesse. There is a déjà vu sound to recent work when
it proclaims that “by any conceivable standard, humanity is far and away
life’s greatest achievement. We are the mind of the biosphere, the solar sys-
tem, and – who can say? – perhaps the galaxy?” (Wilson 2012: 288). If our
far-reaching minds did not promise excitement enough, then others offer
hope that our dark side, our propensity to violence, is disappearing (e.g.
pinker 2011). The future will be even more peaceful as we emerge from our
murderous past, where our development was controlled by natural selection
and exaptation, into an era where we shall control our future evolution (see
tattersall 2012). Although he would have been mystified by the concepts of
biosphere and exaptation, Spencer would have felt comforted by these aspi-
rations because they were the same as his. Of course, e. O. Wilson, Steven
pinker and Ian tattersall may not be conscious of the Spencerian founda-
tions of their ideas; possibly they have adopted a Spencerian stance simply
because they were considering the same problems as Spencer.
both the ebullience and the naivety of recent evolutionary speculation
are daunting: that is, the presence of so much faith in the human condi-
tion and its future is humbling. to raise sceptical objections to it would
be equivalent to preaching atheism to a religious audience who might be
happier facing the world with their beliefs intact. It is also a little depress-
ing to critique recent evolutionary speculation because, if its authors could
4
understand such comment, they would have equipped themselves better

philosophically to begin with. However, on the basis that everyone is teach-
able, it seems worthwhile to alert evolutionary writers to Spencer’s works
in an effort to sustain their thinking when they venture on to metaphysics
and ontology. evolutionary writers should be Spencerian because they think
like him, but with less philosophical acumen. If they insist on writing about
non-scientific matters in social organization and ethics, then they might
gain a competitive advantage by adapting Spencerianism evolutionary phi-
losophy. Spencerianism is likely to do them more good than reading the
works of scientists such as Darwin and Alfred russel Wallace, because what
is needed is not an account of how a nineteenth-century scientist made a
discovery, but a sophisticated way of discussing theories of the development
of human society and of the mind.
What happened to Spencer’s ideas – once they passed from his hands
into those of his followers, enemies and disinterested bystanders – is a
complex set of stories, each of which requires a discrete narrative. It was
usually not his system of philosophy that was adhered to, rejected or casu-
ally plundered. rather, it was Spencer’s individual works such as his Social
Statics, Education, The Principles of Psychology, First Principles, The Study
of Sociology and The Man “Versus” The State. These texts were appropriated
for use in a variety of sometimes contradictory discourses. This is not to
say that contradictions found in Spencer’s philosophical system were played
out in the writings of his imitators or critics – although this could hap-
pen – but to remark that it was often the case that sympathy for, or reac-
tion against, Spencer’s ideas depended on the use of a single text, not of
his whole system. For example, Spencer’s Education, which was the most
widely reprinted and translated of his works, could be read as a progressive
tract that attacked rote learning and the use of classics in education. As a
critic of repetition and the replication of dated information about history
and science, Spencer pleaded for kindness and the avoidance of cruelty in
the classroom. ethics was important to Spencer; without it there would be
neither individuation of immature minds nor any personal development.
education was not about evolutionary science or progressive citizenship.
Another “Spencerian” work, Social Statics, with its radical egalitarianism
and its land nationalization, was read as a socialist tract, while his The Man
“Versus” The State gave comfort to libertarians. politics was not the only
source of dissonance for Spencerians: even from within Spencer’s “System”,
his legacy differed depending on which work was the subject of analysis.
The Principles of Biology and The Principles of Sociology, which were mas-
sive compilations of empirical data, lent themselves to a secular view of the
world. The Principles of Psychology and First Principles, which were conven-
tionally philosophical in method, gave comfort to the spiritually inclined.
5
While it would have been possible for readers to discover a common philo-
sophical or progressive thread that tied Spencer’s various works together,
in practice this search was not carried out. It was more convenient, when
appropriating a text, to ignore any of Spencer’s works that conflicted with
the one that had been chosen. For example, Ward, a founding father of
American sociology, ignored the individualism in The Man “Versus” The
State and, instead, advocated a Spencerian-inspired socialism because he felt
that the evolutionary thrust of the institutional sections of The Principles of
Sociology allowed for further growth in state institutions.
to reiterate, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spencer’s
legacies were often dependent on single texts that his imitator or critic took
as standing for any developmental or evolutionary trend in philosophy or
politics that was wished for by its reader. Since Spencer was known as a
systemizer, it seemed a plausible assumption to his interpreters that each
fragment of his thought could stand for the whole because it was somehow
consistent with it. even well-informed Spencer interpreters, such as William
James, who were aware that some of Spencer’s ideas were the result of induc-
tion and relied on different sets of data, still treated Spencerian evolution as
a source of deductive principles that were analogous to scientific laws that
could be tested. The focus in single texts led to variations in Spencerianism:
scholarly practice emphasized the gaps and problems that already existed
in Spencer’s system. This point is worth making because it is necessary to
correct the assumption that Spencer’s philosophical difficulties were caused
by his argumentation being “home-spun”. That is, modifications to Spencer’s
philosophy were not carried because it was somehow out of step with con-
temporary philosophy: as John Skorupski shows in this volume, much of
Spencer’s logic and style of argumentation was quite conventional for its
period and, on fundamental questions, his general position was similar to
that of his critics such as Henry Sidgwick.
The mention of James and Sidgwick focuses attention on the Anglo Saxon
world, but similar difficulties arise in the interpretation of Spencer’s legacy
outside this linguistic sphere. beyond the english-speaking world there was
an appropriation of Spencer’s ideas that varied both in terms of intensity and
longevity. In France and Italy, his impact was greater than it was in britain
and almost as pervasive as it was in the United States, although French and
Italian readings of Spencer dwelt on the secular qualities of his scientific
philosophy with as much excitement as his American readers felt when
sensing hidden connotations in Spencer’s metaphysics and philosophy of
mind (see Govini forthcoming; richard forthcoming).
6
Distant legacies and positivism
beyond europe and the United States, Spencer’s influence was significant
but tended to be of shorter duration, as it was in Japan. From further away,
Spencerianism was also regarded as a current in the general tide of scientific
culture. From a distant perspective he seemed little different from Auguste
comte, Darwin and Mill. That is, in the Arab world (see elshakry forth-
coming) as in South America and in parts of Asia, Spencerianism was just a
brand of liberal and secular positivism that was replacing knowledge based
on religious or traditional authority. The specific ways in which Spencer’s
ideas differed from those of comte, Darwin and Mill seemed to be small
matters in comparison to the great need to establish knowledge on a mod-
ern foundation.
Despite a global tendency to abolish distinctions between nineteenth-
century, modernizing, scientific publicists such as Spencer, comte, Darwin
and Mill, it is unsatisfactory to call them all positivists because that would
be to overemphasize the importance of comte’s philosophy of science in the
late-nineteenth-century world. This is not just a matter of scholarly appor-
tionment as it would be if one were, for example, attempting to give due
credit to Spencer versus Darwin. comte was running in a different race;
he was not like an evolutionary thinker in his treatment of science. comte
left no direct legacy in evolutionary psychology or in evolution in general;
he was not located in the evolutionary discourses that unseated reason and
emphasized biological processes. His philosophy of science is best described
as a delayed moment in the eighteenth-century enlightenment. That is,
comte should be regarded as an anticlerical rationalist whose system of
“positive science” left no place for the development of the species, brains
or cultures. The ways in which Spencer and Darwin naturalized the human
mind and humanity in general, as products of historical change, was anath-
ema to comteans. This was a contentious matter in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury; so much so that when G. H. Lewes, comte’s spokesman in england,
attempted to incorporate evolutionary psychology into “positive science”
he was expelled from the positivist movement by comte himself (Francis
2014). Mill, himself a renegade comtean, was responsible for tutoring Lewes
and Alexander bain so that they would construct a scientific psychology,
free from comte’s rationalist imperative. Indirectly, through Lewes, Mill was
also responsible for encouraging Spencer to reconceptualize psychology so
that it would be as free from comte’s positivism as it was from orthodox
christianity.
classifying Spencer with comte under the heading of positivism is par-
ticularly deceptive when one is considering France or South American
countries that relied on French translations and commentaries. A recent
7
paper by nathalie richard (forthcoming) on the use of Spencer in the Third

republic generated the suggestion that Spencerianism was so ubiquitous in
France that there must have been a “French Spencer” as well as an english
one. Although this comment was meant to be jocular, it accidentally pro-
vided a correction to French historiography in so far as that deals with the
history of science. The problem is a matter of discipline or subject perspec-
tive. If a history of French intellectual culture is seen as rooted in subjects
such as mathematics and astronomy, and omits the philosophy of mind and
psychology, then this pushes the positivism of comte into a prominence
that echoed comte’s own view of the structure of knowledge. (comte’s views
of philosophy are adopted by robert Fox [2012].) If, however, one refers to
the philosophical work of comte’s contemporaries such as Victor cousin,
pierre-paul royer-collard, Théodore Simon Jouffroy and, possibly, Maine
de biran, then one discovers a context that conforms to Spencer’s ideas more
easily than to comte’s. It is even possible to conclude that Spencer was more
closely aligned to French philosophy of the early nineteenth century than
he was to english thought. Like the French, Spencer was constructing a
philosophical realism based on the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish
philosopher Thomas reid, which attempted to demonstrate why the mind
and consciousness were not isolated from external events or from the body.
by the 1850s, when Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology appeared, French
psychology was already prepared for its acceptance. Spencer’s blend of reid’s
realism and scientific data from the emerging discipline of neurophysiol-
ogy seemed French in style. When psychologists such as Theodulé-Armand
ribot adopted and propagated Spencer’s ideas in France it was not with a
sense that they were disseminating a foreign evolutionary philosophy, but
with a comfortable sensation that they were simply following a line of sci-
entific thought that was already French, and which had the additional value
of being modern and post-enlightenment in a way that comte’s rationalism
was not. It was not just comte’s belated evocation of the religion of human-
ity that made him archaic; it was his disinclination to unseat the mind from
an isolated sanctorum that was separated from the body. comte’s rational-
ism would have been unsustainable if the mind were only an evolved and
transitory organ.
For Spencer, as for many nineteenth-century modernizing philosophers,
the mind was embedded in the body, and subject to evolutionary change
as well as to individual development. What was true in France was also the
case in english-speaking countries. Spencer’s legacy, at least with regard to
his philosophy and metaphysics, was not a positivist one because that would
have conjured up a memory of a belated enlightenment rationalist who had
accepted a mind–body dualism. Such a dualism would have suggested that
the essence of humanity, the mind, was separate from, and, possibly above,
8
the material world. This would have been a comforting thought compared
to Spencer’s rather bleak portrayal of our thoughts, and the mental equip-
ment that produced them, as merely accumulated responses to the environ-
ment. Spencer’s uncomfortable legacy was a post-enlightenment one that
placed little faith in reason, and which considered the mind simply as the
brain, a specialized organ that had evolved in the same way as any other
part of the body. While Spencer always attempted to placate the spiritu-
ally minded by saying that there was an “Unknown”, this was no real solace
because he did not encourage the worshipping of this divine substitute. This
lack of faith unsettled many of his contemporaries: close readers of Spencer
such as James found Spencer’s philosophy more troubling than Darwinism.
The latter could be read as a progressive doctrine leading to greater choice
and improved science, while the former seemed to regard choices as deter-
ministic and knowledge as an accidental product.
Darwinism
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Spencer’s evolutionary the-

ories are difficult to grasp because of our habit of referring to most social
evolutionary theory as Darwinist. This habit is, however, a recent phenom-
enon, and, despite the confusion caused by richard Hofstadter in his much
reprinted work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944),
it is now clear that neither Spencer nor Spencerians were “social Darwinists”,
and that they did not believe that social evolution or progress was caused by
struggle for survival. It is also apparent that Spencer’s well-known antisocial-
ist views did not cause him to give excessive praise to industry and capitalist
competition. The term “social Darwinism” was only rarely applied to Spencer
before 1944: Thomas Leonard reports that it only happened twice. Leonard
also notes that references to Spencer as a prophet of laissez-faire capital-
ism were also very scarce before the second half of the twentieth century
(Leonard 2009: 40).
In human biology and in social policy, Spencer’s evolutionary theories
supported reform and progressive politics, but not harshly competitive indi-
vidualism (taylor 2007: 5). rather than foreseeing the advent of more per-
fect social adaptation through the natural elimination of less competitive
types, Spencer feared that portions of humanity – especially the poor and
indigenous peoples in colonies – were too well adapted to their conditions,
and, therefore, would not evolve (Gondermann 2007: 34). This outcome was
not an occasion for rejoicing over the benign effects of evolutionary adapta-
tion; it was depressing. It also suggests that Spencer had no policy solution
to the problem of unplanned negative outcomes. He could only appeal to
9
moral grounds when attempting to prohibit powerful european states from

justifying their occupation of weaker countries by referring to their tuto-
rial role (Francis 2007: 287). rather than civilizing savages by forcing less
advanced nations to adopt modern institutions, Spencer recommended that
advanced countries simply abandon the ideal that imperial governance was
a boon for the backward subjects of the empire. Spencer’s moralism had
its followers: it is significant that the greatest edwardian critic of empire, J.
A. Hobson, was a Spencerian. In general, Spencerians believed that impe-
rial conquest might have been a natural phenomenon when employed by
ancient states, but was an archaic activity in modern times so should be
prohibited as immoral.
Spencerians attempted to avoid careless uses of “natural” in theories
of natural selection or evolutionary progress. They asked their readers to
regard evolution as a form of development that was characterized by the
emergence of non-selfish feelings and behaviour. Since Spencerian politics
was progressive, it was important to them that the aggressive behaviour of
earlier generations was not replicated in the future. Spencerian ideas could
also lead to progressive social and economic policies, such as the establish-
ment of cooperatives or even birth control through the use of contraceptives.
This last suggestion severed the old Malthusian link between pleasure and
procreation by rejecting the notion that constraints on population expan-
sion were artificial: a civilized society would possess a different set of natural
evolutionary mechanisms than an uncivilized one (renwick 2009: 52–3).
The substitution of Lamarckianism for Darwinism
While the careless use of the terms “social Darwinism” and “Darwinism”
has largely been confined to writers who wish to castigate Spencer for being
responsible for laissez-faire capitalism, more sophisticated commentators
on Spencer often label him as Lamarckian. However, this interpretation is
scarcely less accurate, and causes Spencer to be dragged into a debate about
the origin of species where he does not belong.1 A claim that Spencer was
Lamarckian does not help explain the workings of Spencer’s theories of social
1. The argument here runs counter, or at cross purposes, to the views of peter bowler
in this volume, chapter 10. Different definitions of Lamarckianism are in play here.
part of this disagreement stems from the fact that bowler is attempting to clarify
biological discussions, not to remedy confusions in social evolution, although this
does not explain all of the disagreement. It is my belief that differing opinions of
Spencer are to be encouraged on the grounds that I, like Spencer, am a liberal and see
debate as both healthy and possibly contributing to the advancement of knowledge.
10
evolution, and encourages social scientists to rely on a crude reading of the

impact of biology on social development. Social scientists tend to adopt a
simple reading of Darwinian natural selection that assigns the causes of
social change to aggressive and competitive behaviour. While it is impor-
tant to emphasize that Spencer’s theories of social evolution were primarily
rooted in biology, they were neither Darwinian nor hostile to it. This should
be a simple matter to explain, but social scientists – who often lack a detailed
grasp of the history of science – mistakenly assume that all evolutionary
theories were dichotomous and either Darwinian or anti-Darwinian. If they
were the latter, the term Lamarckian is adopted (G. M. Hodgson 2001). Any
hint of biological causation that does not employ a Darwinian genetic lan-
guage is placed in a Lamarckian category. Thus, Spencer is described as a
Lamarckian on the ground that he is not an exponent of Darwinian nat-
ural selection. Such explanations ignore the fact that Darwin’s arguments
were more complex than this account would imply, and that Jean-baptiste
Lamarck’s ideas were not adequately represented by the criticisms levelled at
him by Darwin and other mid-nineteenth-century scientists.
There is no good reason to claim that Spencer, in his theorizing about
social theory or psychology, was Lamarckian, especially when this means
that Lamarck is thereby scripted as a thinker who believed that perma-
nent biological change could be caused by individual numbers of a spe-
cies passing somatic changes on to their descendents by willing these to
happen. Following this caricature, Spencer is believed to have propagated
Lamarckian evolution as a form of development guided by intuition. by
extension, Spencer is said to have a theory of “imminent” change because a
development was supposed to have existed in embryonic form before it was
called forth by the will, or was stimulated by the forces of natural selection.
Ultimately, another piece of theoretical apparatus is added to Spencer’s sup-
posed Lamarckianism: this happens when Spencer’s theories are referred
to as teleological in the sense that they promote the idea that change is
directed towards a goal (see Kuklick 1991: 81). For this to occur, a life form
or a social organism would have had to have been conscious of an evolu-
tionary process and be capable of directing it. From the perspective of the
social sciences, this damages Spencer’s credibility. essentially the charge that
Spencer’s evolutionary theory was Lamarckian in a teleological sense under-
mines his credibility because it groups him with early christian writers who,
instead of regarding change as development from a primitive beginning, saw
it as directed by God towards a future end. Many sociological accounts of
Spencer are accompanied by abbreviated theoretical statements of the above
kind to the effect that Spencer portrayed change as teleologically progres-
sive, that he saw change as resulting from “imminent” forces and that he was
Lamarckian. A prime example of this sort of proposition is robert perrin’s
11
(2000: 509) statement that secondary literature on Spencer should be rep-

resented by the assumption that social change comes about through the
working of some inherent process built into society. However, despite this
being representative of commentators on Spencer, it is mistaken to assume
that a theory of inherent processes (as in imminent change) is a core feature
of Spencer’s philosophy of biology as that applied to his sociological theo-
ries. Such an interpretation ignores the fact that Spencer was an empirically
minded opponent of the idea that biological change was an unfolding of
inherent possibilities. This was why he was hostile to the writings of Goethe
and to the platonism underlying the scientific work of richard Owen. For
Spencer, as for his friend t. H. Huxley, biological evolution was not a mat-
ter of directed growth, but a blind materialistic progression that had started
with earlier forms of life. The empirical qualities of Spencer’s philosophy
were noted by contemporaries, and it is not accidental that one of his first
european critics was the platonist philosopher terenzio Mamiani (beck
2004: 43).
Although Valerie Haines (1988) is hostile to many of perrin’s views on
Spencer’s sociology, she agrees with his characterization of social change.
In her support she also cites J. D. Y. peel’s (1971) argument that Spencer’s
theory was one of imminent change because its mechanism was a meta-
physical principle based on the persistence of force (Haines 1988: 1201).
However, while peel might have overestimated the importance of physics
in Spencer’s theories, he did not argue that this was anchored in a theory of
imminent change in physics. What peel actually claimed was that Spencer
combined a notion of imminence with a sense of future direction. He did
this by emphasizing a remark in Spencer’s Principles of Biology to the effect
that civilization no longer seemed to be unfolding according to a specific
plan, but was rather a development of man’s latent capabilities under the
action of favourable circumstances (peel 1971: 135). peel wrongly saw this
as teleological; that would have implied growth towards a goal, which is an
implication that is missing from the statement peel cited, and which would
have worked against the usual tenor of Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy.
Like the claim that Spencer’s evolutionary theory was teleological,
Spencer’s imaginary social Lamarckianism is so well entrenched that it is a
commonplace for historians of social science to reissue it even when this is
not easily “visible” in Spencer’s work (see Offer 2010: 186) or when this serves
no useful function in their argument. For example, Thomas Gondermann,
who wants to establish the point that Spencer was not a progressive evo-
lutionary theorist because he often focused on regression, accepts the idea
that Spencer’s theories were “Lamarckian” even though this runs counter
to his thesis (Gondermann 2007: 24). Some of Gondermann’s evidence for
Spencer’s use of “Lamarckian mechanisms” refers to parts of organs being
12
strengthened by frequent and constant use. However, this sort of example

was a medical commonplace during the mid-nineteenth century, and has to
do with developments such as increased bone thickness in patients who had
suffered from rickets. These were not Lamarckian mechanisms because they
did not refer to transmission of acquired characteristics to the next genera-
tion. Gondermann’s discussion of Spencer’s supposed Lamarckianism pri-
marily rests on the casual asides that Spencer made during the 1850s before
he had developed his philosophy of biology. perrin, who had a more conven-
tional analysis of Spencer, argued that while spontaneous variation aspects
of Spencer’s biological evolution were borrowed from Darwin, they were
applied in conjunction with Lamarckian “direct adaptation” or “use inherit-
ance” (perrin 2000: 523). These “Lamarckian” analyses are unhelpful because
they blur the already confusing meanings of a theory that is often used merely
as a crude antonym of the word “genetic”. When the term “Lamarckian” is
applied to social change, it should mean that a change was caused by the
social organism, or one of its constituent parts, intending that the next gen-
eration adapt itself in a preferred direction. If this is an adequate descrip-
tion of Lamarckianism, then it would apply to a number of enlightenment
rationalists, but not to Spencer. peel could have done a critique of himself
here because he has observed that Spencer’s deprecation of reason meant
that he did not consider that men’s ideas and theories possessed significant
force as causative factors in social change. This was why Spencer argued that
the future was foreseen only when the basic forces of evolutionary adaption
were on the point of bringing it to pass (see peel 1971: 244).
to regard Spencer as a social Lamarckian is mistaken as that would indi-
cate he believed in directed social evolution whereas the opposite was the
case: he believed that this was not possible. compared to his contemporaries
such as Durkheim, Spencer’s functionalist theory was distinguished by not
being directed. Whereas Durkheim believed that social change was directed
by an integrative function – which was the moral good of society – Spencer’s
functionalism had no future good in mind (turner 1985: 51). In any case,
Spencer’s social evolution could not have had a moral good in view, because
his theory of social change operated on a different level than his moral the-
ory. The latter he saw as part of psychological evolution, not of social change.
Finally, it could not have been the case that Spencer’s social evolution was a
directed process, because, strictly speaking, that would imply that his social
evolution was linear and unidirectional instead of complex and re-divergent.
As he reminded the readers of his Principles of Sociology near the end of his
life, “Like other kinds of progress, social progress is not linear, but divergent
and re-divergent” (Spencer 1874–96: vol. 3, 325).
All in all, Lamarckianism is so unpromising a line of investigation for
Spencer’s scholarship or for social evolution in general that one sympathizes
13
with David L. Hull’s assertion that social evolution could not be Lamarckian
even in a metaphorical sense (cited in Hodgson 2001: 105–9). It is a sad and
ironic commentary on the state of social science theory that Hull’s rhetorical
flourish has been taken as a serious request to provide a metaphorical mean-
ing for Lamarckianism. The underlying impetus behind such a wooden
response is not a literary desire to explore imaginative analogies and tropes
in evolutionary theory, but an insistence that all theories of social evolution
must be interpreted as one of two types of explanation of biological change:
no other processes are possible (Laurent & nightingale 2001: 8). Strong
theories are taken to be Darwinian while weak ones are Lamarckian: the
latter could also be taken as incomplete explanations of Darwinianism (G.
M. Hodgson 2001: 114). This implies that while these two theories exhaust
all evolutionary possibilities, they are not mutually exclusive. However, the
argument whether or not they are exclusive is vacuous. to view the mean-
ing of social evolution as necessarily Darwinian and/or Lamarckian is an
eccentric scholarly exercise: it is to imagine that Lamarckianism refers to
organisms developing characteristics best suited to their environment, while
Darwinism argues that organisms mutate for reasons independent of their
environment (Laurent & nightingale 2001: 8). Since these views make lit-
tle sense as statements in the history of biology, they can only be expressive
of their authors’ arbitrary desire to limit enquiries on social evolution to
two varieties: one of which is change caused exclusively by the environ-
ment and the other somatic change in which the environment has no effect.
The result of trapping social evolution into the twin procrustean beds of
Lamarck and Darwin is to eliminate Spencerian evolution by focusing solely
on the origins of change, rather than on its processes. to say that social
change is entirely a response to environmental factors would ignore the
fact that Spencer was well aware that human beings transform and interact
with their environment, while to say that social change is independent of
the environment would rely on a strict metaphor between a social organism
and a biological one that had no basis in Victorian sociology. Since Spencer’s
theories of social evolution are neither strictly environmental nor genetic,
they do not deserve to be bedded down in this way. to do so is to give pri-
ority to an odd reading of biological explanation and then claim that all
theories of social evolution must be interpreted in its light.
The view that biological explanation restricts social evolution is also
adopted by Haines when she limits change to the options (a) of the unfold-
ing of pre-existing potentials where the environment plays a minor role or
(b) the process where new potentialities can be created either through the
inheritance of environmentally induced modifications or by environmen-
tally selected random varieties (Haines 1988: 1201). Haines’s first option
seems to be Lamarckian while the second alternates between Lamarckian
14
and Darwinian. both options suggest to Haines that she should restrict
her explanations of Spencer’s social change so that it is consistent with the
forms of nineteenth-century biological reasoning. For her this procedure
implies that evolution should be reduced to either Karl ernst von baer’s
theory of epigenesist or Lamarck’s “imminence” theory. Haines also holds
that she is rescuing Spencer from critics such as peel who credit Spencer’s
evolution theory with imminence (see Offer 2010: 156). Haines believes
that these biological theories were the substructure of Spencer’s sociology,
which is why she insists that Spencer’s classification of militant versus indus-
trial societies – a distinction that dominated The Principles of Sociology – is
Lamarckian (Haines 1988: 124). This crude form of reductionism avoids
any reference to aspects of Spencer’s works, such as his heavy reliance on
organizational theory, which did not relate to the classification and origins
of biological change.
The biological features of Spencer’s evolutionary theories have always
fascinated sociologists, sometimes excessively so, but a balanced under-
standing of his social evolution should focus on how his biological theo-
ries supported and conflicted with factors that were less biological and how
they interacted with his metaphysical theories. Spencer himself could limit
a social enquiry to strictly biological matters (for example when he focused
on the way a straightforward biological force such as population pressure
caused social change), but for him this did not imply that human beings
would become more aggressive or less competitive.
15
2
the method of nature
Herbert Spencer and the
education of the adaptive mind
Stephen Tomlinson
A hundred years after his death, historians have discovered Herbert Spencer,
and with him a truly rich intellectual challenge. How is it that a man once
revered as the Victorian Aristotle – whose writings were instrumental to
the emergence of psychology, sociology and political theory – should have
fallen into such a state of anonymity? even more remarkable is the neglect of
Spencer’s place in the history of education. For if Lawrence cremin (1961)
and, more recently, Kieran egan (2002) are to be believed, he was the foun-
tainhead of the whole progressive education movement. certainly Spencer’s
Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical ([1861] 1963) was an instant suc-
cess, with enormous popular sales and strong reviews from prominent crit-
ics.1 Universally recognized for its forceful defence of scientific knowledge
and developmentally informed instruction, by 1900 it was the century’s
top-selling book on education, a staple text for teacher-training courses in
britain and America.2 However, as Spencer’s political and scientific works
came under increasing attack, educationists sought a more secure, experi-
mental foundation for the curriculum and pedagogy of progressive school-
ing. Josiah royce’s assessment was shared by many. He read Education in
much the same way his friend William James read Spencer’s The Principles
of Psychology: as pre-scientific reflections “without care for the harder com-
1. University of Michigan professor W. H. payne claimed that “the most useful and pro-

found book which has been written on education since the Emile of J.-J. rousseau is
certainly Herbert Spencer’s essay” (quoted in compayré 1907: 3), while the eminent
French historian Gabriel compayré named Spencer the foremost english educator
since Locke (ibid.).
2. Josiah royce identified Spencer’s four essays as “the best known general guides
which our more progressive American school teachers and writers on the art of
teaching have been disposed to consult and discuss” (1904: 128).
16
t h e m et h o d o f nat u re
plications of educational theory” (royce 1904: 148). With the publication of

Spencer’s An Autobiography (1904), royce was able to see these simple ideas
as nothing more than generalizations derived from the teaching methods of
Spencer’s father, a private tutor employed by the leading families of Derby.
Having rejected Spencer to affirm their own scientific standing, educators
have shown little interest in the details of his thought. no historian since
Andreas Kazamias (1966) has discussed Education in any detail. This lacuna
has to be addressed by reading Spencer against the educational problems of
his own day, rather than the concerns of his critics. Far from the idiosyn-
cratic reflections suggested by royce, from this perspective Spencer’s work
comes into focus as a theoretically informed response to politically charged
debates on the nature and purpose of schooling. certainly, he drew from
his own experiences, and indeed the ideas of his father, but his thoughts are
structured throughout by the central arguments of secularism and volun-
taryism, the principal movements that contested the provision of education
in the middle third of the nineteenth century. no doubt this background
has been obscured because so many readers have approached Education
through the lens of Spencer’s subsequent evolutionary synthesis. but a little
archaeology soon reveals an earlier architecture, throwing into relief con-
ceptual assumptions and practical insights that permeated the educational
arguments of his youth.
two seemingly unbridgeable points of principle divided popular thought
on education during this period: the place of religion and the role of the
state. Following the teachings of the Scottish phrenologist George combe,
the secularists argued for a government system of non-sectarian schooling
that would train the moral and intellectual powers and furnish the child
with useful, scientific knowledge.3 Denominational instruction would be
left to parents and the ministers of their chosen faith. For most advocates of
national education, such “indifferentism” diluted christianity into a bland
moralism: religion had to be the basis of all schooling. This doctrine became
a central pillar of the committee on education set up by the government in
1839 to distribute grants to the leading educational agencies: the Anglican
national Society and the nonconformist british and Foreign Schools Society.
Voluntaryists were also committed to the centrality of religious instruc-
tion but rejected any and all forms of government involvement. Led by
edward baines Jr, editor of the Leeds Mercury, and edward Miall, editor of
the Nonconformist, this extreme position emerged from dissenting opposi-
tion to John Graham’s 1843 Factory bill, and its proposal that the church
assume responsibility for the schooling of working children. Already
3. On the life and teachings of George combe see Stack (2008).
17
s t e ph e n to m l i n s o n
concerned that the lion’s share of awards were flowing towards the national
Society, nonconformists met further efforts to extend government control
of schooling with strident demands for civil liberty and religious freedom.
baines, in particular, was tireless in explaining the sufficiency of the volun-
tary principle and relentlessly attacked the dangers of state despotism, the
rise of government bureaucracy and the use of taxation to support of the
dissemination of religious creeds.
The uncompromising and often vituperative exchanges that marked this
fiery contest reveal incommensurable commitments that frustrated even
the most modest reforms. Spencer offered a unique alternative, albeit for
the children of the middle classes. Fusing the phrenological arguments of
secularists with the political tenets of voluntaryists, he fashioned a defence
of personal and social progress through the unfettered operation of natural
laws, divinely ordained to perfect the mind’s faculties. by the mid-1850s
he had replaced this static organology with sensory-motor reflex physiol-
ogy and the logic of evolutionary associationism. Although it offered little
that was new on the subject of schooling, Education became a bridge to the
progressive era for theorists on both sides of the Atlantic, making Spencer
a principal advocate of secular instruction and a psychologically grounded
science of education.
Voluntaryism and secularism in Spencer’s theory of education
Spencer’s phrenological voluntaryism is clearly evident in his earliest politi-

cal writings. First in a series of letters to the Nonconformist, published as a
pamphlet the following year as The Proper Sphere of Government ([1842–43]
1982), then in Social Statics ([1851] 1970), he argues that individuals can
achieve happiness only through the full exercise of their faculties, and that
government, which has no competence in regulating social institutions, must
be limited to the negative function of maintaining each person’s equal free-
dom to achieve their desired ends. Applied to the sphere of education, the
arguments of the voluntaryist platform flowed effortlessly from his pen, with
one key exception. Surprisingly, for a time deadlocked by the “religious ques-
tion”, Spencer avoided discussion of faith-based education. His focus was
the psychological development of the child’s mind and character. even so,
he happily joined with the congregational board of education to publish in
pamphlet form a chapter from Social Statics opposing state education.
While Spencer’s defence of voluntaryism stands in stark contrast to
combe’s interventionist state, their thoughts on the aims, methods and
content of schooling are closely aligned. Indeed, as several authors have
recognized, the best way to understand Spencer’s thought is through a
18
comparison of Social Statics with the most famous phrenological text of

the day, combe’s The Constitution of Man ([1828] 1841). both present a
deistic vision of nature in which personal and social progress are fuelled
by the gradual improvement of the faculties. They also share a commit-
ment to the physiological basis of thought. phrenologists rejected the sen-
sationalist epistemology underlying associationism; the mind, they argued,
was not constructed from experience, but innately fashioned by God with a
complex architecture of faculties. This funded an approach to learning that
stressed the strengthening of pre-existing mental organs through exercise.
Such assumptions are at the core of Spencer’s pre-evolutionary writings and
pre-date his efforts to explain inherited powers through the logic of sen-
sory motor associations. Where he differs from combe is on the political
means to this moral end. nowhere is this more evident than in the cause of
education.
The Constitution of Man opens with the assertion that the world has been
adapted to virtue. every object is crafted with a precise set of powers that
cause events to follow independent, universal and invariant laws. Obedience
to these laws is “attended with its own reward, disobedience with its own
punishment” (combe [1828] 1841: 8). Most important of all are those gov-
erning the brain. combe described how the economy of cerebral organs,
comprising some thirty-five different propensities, sentiments, knowing and
rational faculties, determines all thoughts and feelings in accord with the
principles of physiology. Largely determined by heredity, size was an index
of strength. each faculty was excited into action by its natural object, and
such exercise caused growth. Most sensationally, phrenologists believed that
the underlying form of the brain could be measured through the contours
of the cranium, revealing a person’s talents and character. Human beings,
combe concluded, were thus “under God’s government, in the same sense
as we are under the government of civil magistrates” (ibid.: 4). Those who
obey this divine ordinance “enjoy the intense internal delights that spring
from the active moral faculties … while those that disobey that law are
tormented with insatiable desires, which, from the nature of things cannot
be gratified” (ibid.: 9). The problem was that society constantly disregarded
this providential order. The upper classes had become indolent, slaves to
the organ of Approbation, while the masses, forced to labour “in habitual
infringement of the important laws of their nature” had become “organized
machines” rather than “moral, religious, and intellectual beings” (combe
1839: 26). progress, combe insisted, required a scientifically informed leg-
islature and a population educated about the physical, intellectual and moral
principles that supervened their nature.
Of fundamental concern were the laws governing the original structure
and subsequent development of the human organism. to fulfil God’s design,
19
the germ from which men and women spring had to be “complete in all its
parts, and sound in its whole constitution” (ibid.: 77):
The feeble, the sickly, the exhausted with age, and the incom-
pletely developed, through extreme youth, marry, and, without
the least compunction regarding the organization which they
shall transmit to their offspring, send into the world the miser-
able beings, the very rudiments of whose existence are tainted
with disease. (Ibid.: 79)
Death was surely one of God’s mercies, preventing needless suffering and
“protecting the race” by “cutting short … the transmission of its imperfec-
tions to posterity” (ibid.). Yet combe was optimistic. Uniting Lamarckian
use-inheritance and the physiological law of exercise, he saw the gradual
improvement of the race under the wise stewardship of physiologically
informed leaders. Although the relative power of the faculties was deter-
mined at birth, with correct training the higher intellectual and moral organs
could be taught to control the instinctive propensities, and this improved
organization could be passed on to future generations.
combe closed The Constitution of Man with the claim that his work
was best understood as “an introduction to an essay on education” ([1828]
1841: 390). phrenology, after all, was a theoretical guide to the develop-
ment of character. His own experience of classical learning under the cruel
discipline of edinburgh High School stood as a bitter lesson for all that
was wrong with traditional instruction. closer to the laws of mind was the
child-centred pedagogy developed by robert Owen at new Lanark, and
advanced by combe’s elder brother Abram in the Owenite community at
Orbiston. but combe was no socialist. Given the present state of human
nature, achieving perfection would take many generations under God’s laws.
even so, he was determined to put principle into practice and in 1829 joined
with Samuel Wilderspin (following Owen, the nation’s leading proponent
of early education) to open a model infant school in edinburgh.4 He also
took his message of scientifically informed social progress to the country,
lecturing middle- and working-class audiences on the benefits of his moral
philosophy. but with the growing notoriety of his “Secular bible”, combe
was forced to work behind the scenes, most notably by supporting the cam-
paign for a national system of schooling spearheaded by Thomas Wyse and
James Simpson (a co-founder with combe of the edinburgh phrenological
Society).
4. On the influence of Owen and Wilderspin, see tomlinson (2005: 115–82).
20
A Copernican revolution in pedagogy
The intimate link between epistemology and pedagogy was clearly appreci-
ated by enlightenment philosophers who saw the political potential of edu-
cational practices fashioned in accord with the laws governing the human
mind. In this sense at least the origins of modern progressivism can be traced
back to the Scientific revolution and the repositioning of the knowing sub-
ject at the centre of the epistemic world. nobody articulated this project more
compellingly than John Locke. Focusing on the education of a future gentle-
man, he explained how learning grounded in sense experience could lead to
an understanding of nature and the principles of moral conduct. psychology
was the key. rejecting the external discipline of traditional schooling (textual
memorization and corporal punishment) he turned to the inner order of
motives, demonstrating how instruction could draw on children’s interests
and behaviour shaped through the use of praise and shame. Most famously,
in Some Thoughts Concerning Education he also asserted that “of all the Men
we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or
not, by their education” ([1693] 2009: 9). Accordingly, while teachers of
the middle class looked to Locke for guidance in developing a wise and
virtuous individual, others found a justification for schooling the poor to
participate in a stable social order. particularly influential in this vein were
the writings of Étienne bonnot de condillac and claude Adrien Helvétius.
replacing Locke’s innate faculties with learned associations, their sensation-
ism reduced morality and reason to products of experience. The power of
education seemed limitless. With the judicious management of pleasure and
pain, the mind could be led from the simple and concrete to the complex
and abstract. by the time of the French revolution, numerous blueprints had
been issued with rational plans for the creation of a meritocratic secular state
based on this “Science of Man.” In Great britain a similar line of thought can
be traced from David Hartley to the writings of Jeremy bentham and James
Mill. For the philosophic radicals who followed bentham and Mill’s legis-
lative agenda, their synthesis of utilitarianism, associationism and laissez-
faire economics presented a powerful justification for government control
of schooling in a time of rapid social change.
This growing attention to the needs of the state sat somewhat uncom-
fortably alongside the other line of educational thought emanating from
Locke. Inspired most profoundly by Jean-Jacques rousseau’s Émile, or On
Education, child-centred pedagogues sought to protect the elite student
from the corrupting influences of society. They pictured a leisurely pastoral
education free from the vice and error, in which children would explore
nature, developing their own independent and scientifically grounded
understanding of the world. As paul elliott (2009) explains, this tradition,
21
evident in the writings of richard edgeworth, Thomas Day and erasmus

Darwin, informed the philosophy and teaching practices of Spencer’s father.
elliot and Stephen Daniels (2006) also detail the complementary influence
of Johann Heinrich pestalozzi on George Spencer, both through popular
commentaries and the instructional methods pioneered for middle-class
students at b. r. F. Heldenmaier’s academy in nearby Worksop.5
naturally, many sought to fuse the two strands. pestalozzi, in particu-
lar, showed europe that child-centred teaching could be used to prepare
the working classes for the future duties of life. The phrenologists offered
a similar vision. tempering the optimistic environmentalism of the sensa-
tionists with a physiological account of inherited characteristics, they pro-
moted class-based schooling in which each child would be prepared for
their future social role according to their distinct moral and intellectual
capacities. Simpson’s Necessity of Popular Education as a National Object
(1834) spelled out the process. Utilizing the practices of moral suasion
developed by Wilderspin and the object lesson of pestalozzi, he showed
how developmentally appropriate instruction could train the faculties and
provide scientific knowledge of nature and society necessary for informed
conduct. religious issues aside, this politically moderate and socially pro-
gressive model was embraced by leading Whigs and radicals who sought
rational change in the years following the reform of parliament.
Spencer, an ardent if heterodox convert to phrenology during the 1840s,
accepted this psychological explanation as the theoretical basis for the kind
of child-centred instruction practised by his father. Indeed, Spencer’s essays
on education, written a decade later, differ little from the curricula and ped-
agogic proposals of combe and Simpson. What Spencer ([1842–43] 1982)
could not accommodate was the incursion of government in the control
of schooling. The state had absolutely no competence in regulating social
institutions. Like rousseau’s tutor, its role was mostly negative. From com-
merce to welfare to education, progress depended on personal effort. The
government’s duty was “simply to defend the natural rights of man – to pro-
tect person and property – to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon
the weak – in a word, to administer justice” (ibid.: 187). A clear precursor
of the pedagogic progressives, Spencer thus stands totally opposed to the
more influential administrative progressives, who combined psychological
theories of learning, development and intelligence with the techniques of
scientific management to organize and control mass schooling for the voca-
tional and political needs of the twentieth-century state.
5. Spencer reports in An Autobiography that he and his father considered opening a

similar school near bath, “not, indeed, to carry out the principles of pestalozzi in
particular, but to initiate an advanced form of education” (1904: vol. 1, 322–3).
22
born from his provincial, middle-class and nonconformist roots,

Spencer’s political individualism meshed seamlessly with the phrenologi-
cal view of mind to justify a divine law of progress inherent in the very
action of the brain’s organs. Happiness resulted from the exercise of facul-
ties adapted to the world, evil from “a want of congruity between the fac-
ulties and their spheres of action” (Spencer [1851] 1970: 54–5). Given the
universal law of life – that exercise strengthens faculties and disuse weak-
ens them – Spencer outlined the gradual development of reason and vir-
tue. Faculties that were too strong would diminish with inactivity; faculties
that were too weak would grow with use. Such adjustments would con-
tinue through history until men and women achieved a state of harmony.
“progress”, he concluded, “was not an accident but a necessity” (ibid.: 60).
Any interruption of this law would retard development and necessitate
the miseries of adaptation. “The only cure for imprudence is the suffering
which imprudence entails. nothing but bringing him face to face with stern
necessity and letting him feel how unbending, how unpitying, are her laws
can improve the man of ill-governed desires” (ibid.: 316). Indeed, the unin-
tended consequence of government involvement in schooling was the inevi-
table “uneducating” of the population. As Spencer explained in his attack
on Joseph Hume’s bill for a national system of schooling, such artificial
schemes overlooked the essential driving force of voluntaryism, the “love
of offspring” (1843b: 537). God had implanted powerful paternal affections
in every man and woman to ensure the welfare of children and “elevate
each generation to as great or grander height as its predecessors”. It was this
“beautifully constructed mechanism for the mental and physical develop-
ment of every human being”, not some “state machine”, that would ensure
progress (ibid.). John Stuart Mill objected to such voluntaryist logic on the
grounds that the working classes were too ignorant of their own interests
to value education, but Spencer was confident that common sense, experi-
ence and the free market would indicate the merits of schooling. The most
important thing was to ensure parents and teachers understood the histori-
cally situated nature of the mind and the psychological principles governing
its adaptation. behaviour was determined by the operation of underlying
faculties, not the memorization of catechisms and moral codes. “Only by
repeatedly awakening the appropriate emotions can character be changed”
(Spencer [1851] 1970: 314). rather than:
making a child understand that this thing is right and the other
wrong, you make it feel that they are so – if you make virtue loved
and vice loathed – if you arouse a noble desire and make torpid
an inferior one – if you bring into life a previously dormant senti-
ment – if you cause a sympathetic impulse to get the better of one
23
that is selfish – if in short, you produce a state of mind to which

proper behavior is natural, spontaneous, instinctive, you do some
good. (Ibid.)
In 1848 Spencer accepted the position of subeditor at the Economist.

Moving to London brought him into contact with thinkers sympathetic
to phrenology and its implications for social policy. Marian evans, in par-
ticular, was enamoured with combe, and even presented Spencer with an
unpublished copy of his On the Relation Between Religion and Science.6 but
Spencer also met sceptical men such as Thomas Huxley and George Henry
Lewes, who encouraged him to pursue a more scientifically grounded
understanding of life and mind. to this end he read deeply in natural his-
tory and philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge. As Mark
Francis (2007) shows, Thomas reid, William Whewell and John Stuart Mill
now became his intellectual touchstones. William carpenter’s Principles of
General and Comparative Physiology (1838) also proved pivotal, providing
the formula for Spencer’s future understanding of the evolutionary process.
carpenter was a leading critic of phrenology, and his authoritative account
of the reflex arc and its increasing complexity in the animal nervous system
also included a description of Karl ernst von baer’s theory of embryonic
development. This truly was “an incident of moment” for Spencer (1904: vol.
1, 384). After 1852 his arguments are underwritten by the assumption that
all phenomena, organic and social, are evolving from simple and homoge-
neous to complex and heterogeneous forms. naturally, this had important
implications for the understanding of mind and, by extension, the nature
and purpose of education. He quickly published a number of papers laying
the foundations for what he believed would become his masterwork, The
Principles of Psychology (1855). The result was a revolutionary new episte-
mology that reconceptualized empiricism and rationalism within an evolu-
tionary framework. rejecting his “early impressed belief in the increase of
faculty by exercise”, Spencer reconceptualized the process of adaptation as
the “increasing adjustment of inner subjective relations to outer objective
relations” (1904: vol. 2, 12). Mental powers arose from the moving equilib-
rium between the organism and its environment. Starting with the basic
reflex actions of the simplest creatures, he explained how external changes
gradually produced the highly differentiated and integrated neural net-
works. Acquired behaviours were passed on as hereditable tendencies to
offspring. Over generations habits became instincts, and instincts developed
6. On combe, evans and the chapman circle see Stack (2008: 203–16) and taylor
(2007: 13–19).
24
into the cerebral plexuses that constitute memory, reason and will. While
knowledge came from experience, the mind was not a blank slate: children
were born with innately adapted faculties formed in the evolutionary history
of the species. As robert M. Young ([1970] 1990), robert boakes (1984),
and robert J. richards (1987) all explain, this naturalistic synthesis became
the seminal text of the new psychology, providing the central physiological
concepts that would guide leading accounts of mind and behaviour – and
the search for a science of education – in the first decades of the twentieth
century.
Essays on education
establishing a science of education was one of Spencer’s first goals as he

explored the power of his maturing insights on mental development. The
result was a series of four articles published between 1854 and 1859, later
combined as the book Education ([1861] 1963). Viewed abstractly, he
explained in An Autobiography, “education may be considered as a process
of perfecting the structure of the organism, and making it fit for the business
of life” (1904: vol. 1, 436):
every lesson learnt, every fact picked up, every observation made,
implies some molecular re-arrangement in certain nervous cen-
tres. So that not only that effect of exercise by which the faculties
are fitted for their functions in life, but also the acquirement of
knowledge serving for guidance, is, from the biological point of
view, an adjustment of structure to function. (Ibid.: 437)
With this in mind, teachers had to follow the same law that governed the
development of all other phenomena and organize learning in accord with
the evolution of simple to complex forms.
readers who approach Education through Spencer’s mature thought can
be forgiven for thinking these essays are born from the marriage of the
evolutionary hypothesis and his father’s innovative pedagogy. but Spencer’s
autobiographical reflections hide a debt to the past. Viewed from the per-
spective of Social Statics, his work comes into focus as an elaboration of
the instructional methods and curricula content advanced by the phrenolo-
gists. He advocates developmentally appropriate moral management and the
strengthening of physical and mental powers through exercise. He insists
that all learning must be pleasurable and guided by the spontaneous inter-
ests and natural appetites of the student. Moreover, following the arguments
of the secularists, he extols the virtues of science, both as a source of useful
25
knowledge and for its superior power to discipline the faculties. He even
defends a natural theology close to that of combe and, in the years prior to
the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, affirms the existence
of self-adjusting, divinely ordered economy of rewards and punishments.
These vestiges of phrenological theory are readily apparent in “Intellectual
education”, chapter II of Education. beginning with the observation from
Social Statics that the ascendant faculties of an era give form to all thought
and feeling, he asks us to consider the little community of the school. “Along
with political despotism, stern in its commands, ruling by force of terror …
there necessarily grew up an academic discipline similarly harsh … a dis-
cipline of unlimited autocracy upheld by rods, and ferules, and the black-
hole” ([1861] 1963: 97–8). but the growth of political liberty has brought
the milder culture of moral suasion. With the discovery that inner laws of
self-regulation are guiding society forwards, so psychology “discloses to us a
law of supply and demand” (ibid.: 99). This was the basis of a new pedagogy.
For fifty years, diverse practices had proliferated. It was now time to distil
common truths from these experiments and establish the foundations for a
science of education.
First and foremost, Spencer found that new approaches to schooling
were taking into account the human animal, most significantly through
knowledge of the brain and the process of mental growth. This conform-
ity to nature revealed the wisdom of knowing “how wisely to lose time”
(ibid.: 103). rather than forcing students to memorize verbal signs under
the threat of punishment, modern pedagogues were working with children’s
natural interests in order to develop their understanding. He explained that
there “is a certain sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop,
and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its develop-
ment … [and that] it is for us to ascertain this sequence and supply this
knowledge” (ibid.: 110). At present he could offer only a few governing
principles of this science. Informed by von baer’s law, instruction had to
progress from the simple, concrete and empirical to the complex, abstract
and rational. It should follow the same course as the development of knowl-
edge in history and, keyed to the natural activities of the faculties, it should
be intrinsically pleasurable to the student. Learning was most meaningful
when children were permitted to construct ideas for themselves. to this end
he outlined the use of the object lesson in a manner similar to that described
by Simpson. In the case of the middle-class child, this was best achieved
while at play in the countryside. exploring nature stimulated the observing
and knowing powers; experimentation taught the physical properties nec-
essary for reflective thought. Above all, Spencer emphasized the guidance
of psychological theory, and railed against teachers who blindly followed
pestalozzian manuals as if such scripted lessons provided a logical form
26
to be impressed upon a blank mind. He admitted that aligning instruction

with natural desires might not produce the most efficient course of study,
especially for those concerned to fit children for the tasks of life. but he was
adamant that understanding the lawful order of nature was the basis of all
arts, and thus far more valuable than narrow utilitarian schemes. equally
important, the challenge of self-discovery provided better training for the
faculties and promoted cognitive virtues central to science and the lifelong
love of learning.
Spencer’s thoughts on moral education have proved puzzling to sub-
sequent critics precisely because their grounding in phrenology has been
overlooked. He opens with the same argument combe used to close The
Constitution of Man. Given that schooling is a preparation for life, and given
that no office is more important or demanding than the care and upbring-
ing of children, the best means by which to cultivate the physical, moral and
intellectual powers “should occupy the highest and last place in the course
of instruction passed though by each man and woman” (ibid.: 162). What
use are classical studies for this near universal responsibility? “The subject
which involves all other subjects, and therefore the subject in which the educa-
tion of everyone should culminate, is the Theory and Practice of Education”
(ibid.: 163).
Surveying current views on the subject, Spencer catalogues a plethora
of contradictory philosophies, most of which derive from folk wisdom or
the fanciful schemes of utopians. In their place he turns to psychology and
the moral order of nature. repeating the central argument of Social Statics,
he establishes the “Method of nature” on the fundamental truth that every
right action is rewarded with pleasure, every wrong action punished with
pain. These universal and unbending laws, not the artificial lessons of par-
ents, are the true teachers of mankind. can nothing be more simple and
obvious than to ensure children are raised under this benevolent discipline,
“to see that children habitually experience the true consequences of their
conduct – the natural reactions: neither warding them off, nor intensifying
them, nor putting artificial consequences in place of them”? (ibid.: 178).
From the outset he cautions realism; most children inherit vices no
amount of training can eradicate. but the problem is even more complex,
for Spencer also factors in the perverse nature of the parent. Moral educa-
tion cannot start with the ideal; it must begin with the state of men, women
and children as they are found in society. The key to this understanding,
he now explains, is the evolutionary history of the race. “As the child’s fea-
tures … resemble for a time those of the savage, so, too, do his instincts”
(ibid.: 206). Witness for example, “the tendencies to cruelty, to thieving,
to lying, so general among children – tendencies which, even without the
aid of discipline, will become more or less modified just as the features do”
27
(ibid.). children may be born innocent as regards knowledge, but hardly

so as regards “evil impulses” (ibid.). As such, he opposes all efforts to force
children into moral behaviours in advance of their natural readiness. Aware
that “higher morality, like a higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow
growth”, he cautioned patience and abandonment of unwarranted expecta-
tions (ibid.: 207). Only the method of natural discipline would steer the
child between stultifying effects of despotism and the antagonistic conse-
quences of inflated independence. It would also guide the parent’s temper,
avoiding the effusions of passion that youthful offences excite. Whenever
possible, he recommended, avoid commands and the exercise of arbitrary
authority; stress implicit consequences and the promotion of well-being
as a motive to action. When rules must be enforced, become as universal
and unbending as the laws of nature. but keep in mind the goal of auton-
omy. In childrearing, as in society, absolutism should evolve naturally into
self-government.
Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of
our political rule: at the outset, autocratic control, where control is
really needful; by-and-by an incipient constitutionalism, in which
the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; succes-
sive extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in
parental abdication. (Ibid.: 214)
executing this divinely appointed task not only served to elevate the
child, as argued in his earlier writings, but also fostered the moral improve-
ment of the parent. Unveiling God’s plan, Spencer offered a final phreno-
logical sermon.
Intellectually you must cultivate to good purpose that most com-

plex of subjects – human nature and its laws, as exhibited in your
children, in yourself, and in the world. Morally, you must keep
in constant exercise your higher feelings, and restrain your lower.
It is a truth yet remaining to be recognised, that the last stage in
the mental development of each man and woman is to be reached
only through the proper discharge of the parental duties. And
when this truth is recognised, it will be seen how admirable is
the ordination in virtue of which human beings are led by their
strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline which
they would else elude. (Ibid.: 216–17)
turning to physical well-being, Spencer found more interest in the con-

dition of livestock than the health of children. content to follow popular
28
beliefs about diet, exercise and clothing, most parents and teachers were
ignorant of the laws governing the human constitution. The implications
for the individual and for society were enormous. Utilizing the latest texts
on physiology, including Andrew combe’s (1854) authoritative treatise on
the moral management of infancy, he hammered home the fundamental
message: trust in nature.7 parents who ignored the child’s appetite, forcing
them to clean the plate or adhere to a vegetarian diet, had little or no knowl-
edge about the digestive process or the body’s need for energy. Appropriate
clothing should also follow the dictates of the senses. “The common notion
about ‘hardening’ is a grievous delusion”, indeed “children are not unfre-
quently ‘hardened’ out of the world; and those who survive, permanently
suffer either in growth or constitution” (Spencer [1861] 1963: 245). Quoting
combe he recommends “clothing in kind and quantity sufficient in the indi-
vidual case to protect the body effectively from an abiding sensation of cold,
however slight” (ibid.: 249).
As for exercise, Spencer favoured spontaneous play. Gymnastics was bet-
ter than the sedentary life typical of most children. What raised his ire was
the prohibition of healthy games for girls on the assumption that physical
activity would make them unladylike. The need for exercise does not differ
between the sexes. “For girls, as well as boys, the sportive activities to which
the instincts impel, are essential to bodily welfare. Whoever forbids them,
forbids the divinely appointed means to physical development” (ibid.: 258).
perhaps the most interesting section of the essay dealt with the surpris-
ing but well-documented fact that modern men and women are physically
inferior to their predecessors. While much of this degeneration may be
accounted for in terms of diet, dress and exercise, Spencer finds a more
potent cause at work in contemporary life: “excess of mental application”
(ibid.: 260). This was a favourite topic in the phrenological literature after
Amariah brigham’s (1835) attack on “hothouse” infant schools and the inap-
propriate stimulation of immature organs in the name of accelerated mental
development. Spencer sought to extend this argument, first to youth then
to adult life. “nature is a strict accountant; and if you demand of her in one
direction more than she is prepared to lay out, she balances the account by
making a deduction elsewhere” (ibid.: 268). The physiological economy was
no exception. Mark the consequences of over-taxation. excessive expendi-
ture of vital energy to strengthen growth in one sphere only served to under-
fund development in another. Witness how prolonged mental exertion leads
to a feeble and sickly constitution. cramming is particularly harmful. not
7. Like his older brother George, Andrew combe was a staunch phrenologist. See Stack
(2008).
29
only does it force the mind to assimilate that for which it has no appetite,
but by focusing on the growth of knowledge it neglects structure. The result
is the development of “intellectual fat” rather than “intellectual muscle”
(ibid.: 276). but the damage is even more serious, for cramming uses up
“animal vigour”, yielding a torpid man of letters rather than a spirited man
of action. Over-education, he concludes, is vicious in every way:
Vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious,

as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious, as neglecting
that organization of knowledge which is more important than
its acquisition; vicious, as weakening or destroying that energy,
without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious, as entailing
that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and
which makes failure doubly bitter. (Ibid.: 278)
Forget common sense. On matters of intellectual, moral and physical educa-

tion, nature is the only reliable guide.
So it was that Spencer’s final essay served up a forceful defence of scien-
tific knowledge in education. Whether playfully or spitefully, he compared
the ornamental dress of native peoples to the showy learning of the classi-
cal scholar, and repeated the telling observation, voiced by George combe
and Simpson, that Latin and Greek had little value for modern life and no
special power in developing the mind. Their main function, it seemed, was
as instruments of ostentation by which people of privilege could display
their power to subjugate lower members of the social order. but this appeal
to spectacle and reverence was gradually giving way to the development of
useful arts. The question of the day, subsequently the central question of
curriculum theory, was thus “What knowledge is of most worth?”
Most educationists of the 1850s would certainly have responded with
“religious instruction”. but Spencer, aligning himself with the secularists,
saw “complete living” as the central purpose of education, and for this,
he insisted, nothing was more valuable than science. It would unlock the
secrets of nature necessary to improve all practical arts; it would train the
faculties; and by revealing the divine laws of providence it would point to
the majesty of God’s creation.
education for complete living had to start with the most essential activi-
ties of life. to this end Spencer identified a course of study ministering in
turn to the preservation and well-being of the self, the family and the state.
Attention was given to each in proportion to their utility. physiology pro-
vided invaluable information about health, diet and exercise that improved
the quality and extended the duration of life, while mathematics, phys-
ics, chemistry and biology taught the knowledge necessary for future
30
occupations. The instrumental skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were

also invaluable to daily affairs.
britain’s wealth, and the prosperity of its citizens, rested on the intelli-
gent control of nature through the manipulation of scientific laws. Yet such
knowledge was hardly mentioned in the nation’s schools. even more aston-
ishing was the complete lack of attention to the demands of parenthood.
He found it “monstrous” that the well-being of “a new generation should
be left to the chances of unreasoning custom” (ibid.: 55). All arts demand
knowledge of their materials; the culture of the mind was no exception.
teaching parents the Method of nature did not seem unreasonable, Spencer
observed, especially given the ocean of useless facts that are typically stuffed
into the curriculum.
When it came to preparation for citizenship, schools commonly invoked
the lessons of history as a guide to social and political duties. but what use
was the catalogue of kings and conquests that filled most textbooks? Like
Simpson, he called for a descriptive sociology that would explain the struc-
ture and development of institutions, ultimately in terms reducible to the
laws of human nature: a real basis for understanding social events and fos-
tering progressive change.
Finally, and most sensationally, Spencer rounded out his curriculum with
studies that would prepare students to make the most of their leisure time
through a scientifically informed appreciation of the arts. This may seem a
strange argument to the modern reader, but the phrenological journals of
the day were full of articles explaining how poetry, music, literature, sculp-
ture and painting could be improved with knowledge of the faculties. This,
indeed, this was a special interest of combe’s (see Stack 2008: 97–110).
Spencer was clearly sympathetic. not only must the artist “understand the
laws of the phenomena he represents … he must also understand how the
minds of spectators or listeners will be affected by the several peculiarities
of his work – a question in psychology” (Spencer [1861] 1963: 79). Artistic
genius could not be created, but it could be married to science in order to
enhance expression. Likewise, Spencer maintained, the appreciation of any
aesthetic experience is rendered vastly more pleasurable by a critical under-
standing of how a work engages the emotions.
Spencer also attacked the traditionally voiced argument that the classics
are the most effective way to discipline the mind. As his many references
to exercising reason demonstrate, he did not oppose mental gymnastics.
rather, citing the “beautiful economy of nature”, he argued that the facts
most useful for regulating conduct also provide the “mental exercise best
fitted for strengthening the faculties” (ibid.: 84). Language improves mem-
ory, but so does science. Moreover, in contrast to the arbitrary associa-
tions between names and objects, the ideas it forms comprehend the causal
31
relations of nature, thus improving in one stroke memory, understanding

and judgement. Science was also superior for moral discipline. Language-
learning teaches submission to authority; science develops the cognitive vir-
tues of authoritative reason. Finally, Spencer hailed science over “ordinary
education, because of the religious culture it gives” (ibid.: 90). “true science
and true religion”, he quotes Huxley, “are twin-sisters” that should never be
separated (Ibid.). Like combe he saw science as a form of “tacit worship”,
teaching “faith in … those uniform laws which underlie all things” (ibid.:
92). Here, in the end, was the natural theology of the secularist.
by accumulated expenses the man of science acquires a thor-

ough belief in the unchanging relations of phenomena – in the
invariable connexion of cause and consequence – in the necessity
of good or evil results. Instead of the rewards and punishments
of traditional belief, which men vaguely hope they may gain or
escape, spite of their disobedience; he finds that there are rewards
and punishments in the ordained constitution of things, and that
the evil results of disobedience are inevitable. He sees that the
laws to which we must submit are not only inexorable but benefi-
cent. He sees that in virtue of these laws, the process of things is
ever towards a greater perfection and a higher happiness. … And
thus does he, by asserting the eternal principles of things and the
necessity of conforming to them, prove himself intrinsically reli-
gious. (Ibid.)
Spencer’s legacy in education
educational historians, Harold Silver (1983: 92) argues, have always “cooked
the books”. The Victorians were no exception. “They massively … inflated
some and diminished others” (ibid.). nobody has been more poorly served
than George combe. “by the 1870s the Victorians were not just forgetting
him, they were deleting him from history” (ibid.). Fifty years later Herbert
Spencer suffered the same fate: “a towering figure” who also became “incon-
venient to history” (ibid.: 93). “His contributions to social and educational
thought have been bowdlerized and trivialized” (ibid.). The result, Silver
concludes, is that Spencer now occupies “a marginal and rather bizarre place
in a disembodied history of educational ideas” (ibid.).
In Getting it Wrong from the Beginning (2002), Kieran egan attempts
to redress this misrepresentation by demonstrating Spencer’s pivotal role
as the architect of the whole progressive education movement. citing the
enormous sales of Education, he explains how Spencer’s curricula and
32
pedagogic arguments seeped into the common sense of late-nineteenth-

century thought. However, with the declining scientific credibility of
Spencer’s system, the increasing hostility to his supposed social Darwinism,
the inconvenience of his opposition to state education and his support of
unrestrained capitalism it became “increasingly convenient to cite home-
grown American authorities who expressed his ideas without reference to
him” (egan 2002: 29). More contentious is egan’s companion thesis: that
Spencer should shoulder the blame for the faults of progressivism. Having
introduced erroneous dogmas about learning and development that sent
educators down the wrong track for more than 150 years, Spencer’s legacy
is the “catastrophe” of the modern American school (ibid.: 148).
Aside from the irony of castigating Spencer for the failings of state school-
ing, an institution he vehemently opposed, egan’s argument faces a number
of historical problems. two confusions stand out most prominently. First,
egan misrepresents Spencer’s understanding of the mind, criticizing him for
views he explicitly and repeatedly rejected. Second, egan’s account presents
progressivism too narrowly as a single set of doctrines. Thinkers within
this movement incorporated a wide variety of different assumptions about
human nature and the social good that undermine claims that Spencer’s
educational principles were simply “echoed” by modern theorists. Indeed,
both John Dewey and Jean piaget, the central characters in egan’s account,
formulated their ideas within philosophical systems constructed in opposi-
tion to Spencer’s evolutionary synthesis. egan is right to recognize Spencer’s
influence, but he too sadly “cooks the books” by putting him on trial for the
errors of progressive education. Such anachronistic judgements have always
obscured the historical Spencer. but given the paucity of current scholar-
ship and the power of egan’s authoritative voice, Getting it Wrong from the
Beginning has proved particularly destructive for a grounded understanding
of Spencer’s place in the history of education.
egan (2002: 15) accuses Spencer of propagating the myth of a general
intelligence that can effortlessly construct knowledge when the world is
experienced, as it is in “the home, street, and the field”, in simple, concrete
and familiar forms. “Spencer’s homogeneous to heterogeneous law”, he
explains, “requires that human beings start life outside the womb with vir-
tually nothing in the way of mind and then gradually learn from the envi-
ronment’s tutelage the array of knowledge of the typical adult” (ibid.: 54).
And again:
nature’s plan, as Spencer outlines it, is to deliver a baby with just

a few basic reflexes but with a power of learning that “lies latent
in the brain of the infant” … created and furnished by the long
process of evolution. The simplest actions of the infant impinge
33
on the environment, and from the reaction of the environment,

the child begins to construct an understanding of the world.
(Ibid.: 40–41)
In contrast, egan invokes the modularity thesis (sometimes characterized

as the “new phrenology”) to explain that many mental abilities are “evolu-
tionarily shaped to solve very precise and constrained problems, and conse-
quently do not provide good models for general domain-unspecific learning”
(ibid.: 55). but this argument is completely at odds with Spencer’s evolu-
tionary associationism. Spencer recognizes that “at birth the organization
of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for
twenty or thirty years afterwards”([1855] 1897: I, 469). but he insists that “the
gradually increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood and youth,
is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization, than to
the individual experiences” (ibid.). Indeed, in the very paragraph quoted by
egan, Spencer explains that:
there are established in the structure of the nervous system

absolute internal relations – relations that are potentially present
before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections; that are
antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences; and
that they are automatically disclosed along with the first cogni-
tions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental
relations which are thus pre-determined; but also hosts of other
relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally
represented by more or less complete nervous connections.
(Ibid.: 470)
It is this species inheritance that Spencer refers to when he talks of the

“high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant”, an intelligence
that “the infant in after life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further
complicates – and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future gen-
erations” (ibid.: 471). Shorn of its Lamarckianism, Spencer’s commitment to
biologically evolved innate faculties clearly anticipates the modularity thesis
and stands, contrary to egan, against the environmentalism of the standard
social science model so roundly criticized by contemporary evolutionary
psychologists.
The companion concept of development is identified as the second major
failing of progressivism. responsibility for this doctrine is also laid at the
feet of Spencer, who egan (2002: 123) claims, drew on the law of recapitu-
lation to argue that learning should start with “the unfocused perceptions
and earliest experiments of ‘savages’ and follow their gradual systemization
34
to modern times” (ibid.: 126). “Focusing on the knowledge that the race and
the child acquired”, he continues:
does not allow us to design a sensible curriculum for modern

students … the cognitive universe of the modern child is quite
unlike that of Spencer’s “savages” … One cannot sensibly teach
about the stars, for example, by beginning with the “simple” views
of “savages” and gradually elaborating them in the direction of
modern cosmology. (Ibid.)
Quite so, but this is not Spencer’s argument; nor was it the practice of his
father. Following comte, Spencer does assert that “the genesis of knowledge
in the individual must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in
the race”, but as a corollary of biologically unfolding powers, not the logical
order of subject matter (Spencer [1861] 1963: 122). nowhere does he sug-
gest cultural epoch theory, the teaching of mythic thought, or re-enacting the
concrete logic of the pre-scientific mind. rather, as illustrated by the object
lesson, it is the historical transition from art to science that is matched in
Spencer’s psychologically based progression (by the sensing, knowing and
rational faculties) of observation, experimentation and theory.
even more problematic, Spencer is accused of anti-intellectualism, of
rendering schools agencies of socialization, even of social control. by purg-
ing subjects like history for social studies he supposedly ensured the “the
curriculum of the early years [would] become largely one of ‘sensible expe-
rience’ and devoid of academic content, of abstraction, of complexity, and
of rational activity” (ibid.: 123). but this hardly characterizes the scientific
study of society suggested by Spencer, or his extreme antipathy towards
any government effort to fit individuals for social life. recall his warnings
against the “state machine” and the use of public schooling “to grind a popu-
lation of well-trained men and women who shall be ‘useful members of the
community!’” (Spencer [1851] 1970: 299). egan’s critique could be targeted
at administrative progressives such as David Snedden and charles prosser,
who were largely responsible for shaping the American curriculum in
accord with the ethos of social efficiency.8 but their ideals of standardization
8. The most explicit application of Spencer’s views to the curriculum can be found
in the influential cardinal principles report of 1918, in which clarence Kingsley
attempted to shape the American high school with activities and knowledge that
would best prepare children to meet the needs of modern society. The seven cat-
egories he identified (health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home
membership, vocation, civic education, worthy use of leisure and ethical character)
were drawn directly from Spencer. but even within this template the content and
35
and centralized control, of schooling for social service and the economic
needs of the society, could not be further from the values Spencer espoused.
The central plank in the argument of Getting it Wrong is that Spencer
influenced Dewey, piaget and the other progressives who have “trivial-
ized” American education. Sidestepping the questionable assumption that
Dewey’s thought had any significant impact on the actual practice of school-
ing in America, his debt to Spencer is far more subtle than the unconscious
assimilation of ideas suggested by egan. to begin with, Dewey (1896)
rejected Spencer’s mechanistic account of neural reflexes for a deliberative
model of thought that incorporated reflective experimentation. For exam-
ple, in an illustration stretching back to Descartes, he shows that reaching
for a candle is not a response caused by the stimulus of light, but a coordi-
nated act in which the hand and the eye cooperate in the conscious control
of events. Such transactions were the basis of all knowledge. Furthermore,
where Spencer held to a vision of incremental progress under the stern les-
sons of life, Dewey offered an optimistic view of the mind’s adaptive pow-
ers and embraced a near utopian hope for social reconstruction through
education. by teaching the experimental method of science and the practi-
cal skills of democratic cooperation, he sought to prepare future citizens
with the social intelligence necessary to participate in the joint resolution
of problems. to this end, he organized schooling around occupations and
the immediate social interests of children. Like Spencer, Dewey looked to
the principle of recapitulation, but chiefly for the pedagogic reason that less
complicated historical situations revealed the nature of knowledge and com-
munity more readily than the complex conditions of modern life. They also
demonstrated our indebtedness to the past. And while in his early, more
Hegelian writings, Dewey pictured the development of the child (from the
physical to the social to the intellectual) and society (from the savage to the
barbaric to the civilized) through a series of increasingly expansive stages,
this was not a story of innately adapted faculties. rather, Dewey offered
a social psychology based on the formation of habits. Whatever impulses
a person was born with would gain form as functional behaviours within
their culture. rejecting Spencer’s anthropology, Dewey (1902: 229) insisted
that intelligence must be understood not as a physiological property but as
a social skill realized in the “problematic, doubtful, [and] precarious” situ-
ations of life. The:
methods of instruction bore little relation to Spencer’s programme. Far more influ-
ential was the philosophy of social efficiency, with its impulse to standardization,
routine, measurement and centralized control, all of which, it should be observed,
were an anathema to Spencer. See Kliebard (1995).
36
further problem of genetic psychology is then to show how the

purely immediate personal adjustment of habit to direct satisfac-
tion, in the savage, became transformed through the introduction
of impersonal, generalized objective instrumentalities and ends;
how it ceased to be immediate and became loaded and surcharged
with a content which forced personal want, initiative, effort and
satisfaction further and further apart, putting all kinds of social
divisions of labor, intermediate agencies and objective contents
between them. (Ibid.: 230)
What better way was there to educate a child into the complexities of civiliza-
tion than through the historical experience of such expanding complexities?
Dewey’s (1904: 162–3) own words are illuminating. He is sharply criti-
cal of the man and his upbringing, in particular his personal, intellectual
and political individualism. He notes the absence “of the social element” in
Spencer’s schooling, his “predilection for non-institutionalized instruction”,
and his “lack of knowledge of ancient languages and comparative ignorance
of modern languages and literature”. He further criticizes Spencer’s failure to
engage in the struggle of ideas with other thinkers and those “complications
of life which force a man to re-think, re-feel, and re-choose” (ibid.: 163). “It
would be hard”, he asserts, “to find another intellect of first class rank so
devoid of historical sense and interest as was Spencer’s” (ibid.). turning to
Spencer’s writings, he credits Social Statics with the transformation of british
liberalism from an individualistic ethical theory into an organic property
that ensures social progress through the laws of nature. With a very different
origin to Darwin’s theory, Spencer’s evolution emerged as a complete system
with Laplacian finality. Yet, Dewey observes, evolution undermines any and
all fixity. but here at least he offers positive words to recognize Spencer’s
place in history. For the “transfer from the world of set external facts and
of fixed ideal values to the world of free, mobile, self-developing, and self-
organizing reality would be un-thinkable and impossible were it not for the
work of Spencer” (ibid.: 175).
egan’s discussion of piaget’s debt to Spencer is far more convincing. both
were committed to an evolutionary theory in which the equilibration of
internal and external forces led organic, psychological and sociological sys-
tems towards a perfect state of balance. both saw learning as the movement
from the undifferentiated and concrete to the differentiated and abstract
and both drew on the principle of recapitulation to present intellectual and
moral development as a kind of “mental embryology”. piaget even describes
his objective as formulating “a study similar to that of Spencer, but without
its empiricist perspective and in line with our present knowledge in epis-
temology and biology” (1965: 8). This project was born out of the French
37
reaction to Spencer’s synthetic philosophy. After reading the works of Félix

Le Dantac, Théodule ribot, pierre Janet, Émile Durkheim, Henri bergson
and other contemporary theorists influenced by Spencer, piaget proposed
a single solution to fractious debates on the nature of species, mind and
society. His idea involved reconceptualizing the dynamic relationships
between parts and whole within compensating systems. postulating a uni-
versal logic of organization, he explained how increasingly complex forms
are constructed to ensure greater degrees of adaptation within the envi-
ronment. not only did this offer a middle path between Lamarckianism
and Darwinism, empiricism and rationalism, and individualism and col-
lectivism, it sustained piaget’s lifelong research programme in genetic epis-
temology: the psychological investigation of children’s reason in order to
inform the history of thought. but this was not “the simplistic idea of a
necessary parallelism between the development of the race and that of the
individual, a parallelism which biologists have shown to be equivocal and
conjectural” (piaget 1925, quoted in Kitchener 1985: 6). rather, piaget’s goal
was to gain insights into the construction of concepts that would help phi-
losophers establish a rational justification for the objectivity of scientific
knowledge. naturally, educators have been more concerned with the practi-
cal applications of piaget’s psychological findings than the subtleties of his
epistemological argument. Here again, piaget’s recommendations seem to
mirror Spencer’s Method of nature. He advocates learning activities keyed
to the child’s developing powers and intrinsic interests, and supports a con-
structivist pedagogy comprising exploration, experimentation and reflec-
tion. Yet beneath these and other similarities sit very distinct views of mind.
rejecting Spencer’s “biologism”, piaget argues that the infant’s hereditary
endowment is limited to sensorimotor reflexes. Mental representations,
intentional thought and the beginnings of intelligence emerge only with
the reorganization of structures during the first year of life. Further, where
Spencer points to innate diversity in the moral and intellectual faculties,
piaget pictures cognitive continuity in a totalizing stage theory that charts
the necessary steps a generalized epistemic subject takes on the path to adult
thought. As for the ends of schooling, piaget’s brief and esoteric comments
reveal a fundamental sympathy with Dewey’s social vision. Understanding
the mind in terms of functional adaptations that mediate subjective needs
and external constraints, he advocates forms of collaborative learning that
engage children’s interests in socially meaningful work. Like Dewey, the
overarching goal is to decentre thought, teach discursive reflection and
build a sense of social solidarity, the key skills of autonomous citizenship in
a democratic state. In short, if Spencer’s system was a point of departure (if
not inspiration) for piaget, his formative ideas about the nature of life and
mind led to a very different view of learning.
38
egan’s ultimate target is the biological model of mind. This, he claims,

is the root cause of the knowledge-as-food, learning-as-growth metaphors
that permeate progressive education, distorting the social nature of expe-
rience and suggesting a fixed path of development. In its place he draws
on Lev Vygotsky to advance an understanding of language and thought
through the concept of knowledge as a “cognitive tool”. In this endeavour
egan comes close to Dewey’s instrumentalism, but fails to recognize the
parallel understanding of mind and culture implicit in his notion of habits.
Focusing instead on common terms drawn from the educational lexicon,
he abstracts parts from wholes, and violates the essential meanings that
animate Spencer, piaget and Dewey’s disparate philosophies of education.
History is ignored, Spencer’s key ideas are confused, and piaget and Dewey’s
complex and nuanced reconstructions of epistemology are overlooked. It is
not that egan fails to offer trenchant criticisms of the progressive education
movement, most especially the notion that mind can be separated from
culture and studied psychologically in order to form a science of education.
The problem resides with his effort to lay responsibility for this misguided
quest at the feet of Herbert Spencer.
In this chapter I have attempted to show the meaning of Spencer’s writ-
ings in relation to early-Victorian debates on education. transforming the
doctrines of phrenology, his evolutionary arguments for child-centred
instruction and a useful, scientifically informed curriculum gained wide
attention. Abstracted from its original context, Education stood as natural-
istic manifesto for the development of psychological knowledge necessary
to turn education into a science and tailor learning to the needs of life. A
similar imperative also animated progressive era reformers as they faced
the challenges of an urban and industrial world. but as the examples of
Dewey and piaget show, Spencer’s ideas were not passed on unconsciously
or uncritically; they underwent radical reconstruction in the light of very
different visions of mind and society. Ignoring this complexity, egan’s pic-
ture of the nineteenth century’s most influential theorist is distorted and
Spencer’s legacy rendered little more than a subject for scorn.
39
3
herbert spencer
nineteenth-century politics and
twentieth-century individualism
Michael W. Taylor
Spencer’s legacy in many of the scientific disciplines to which he contributed

may have been complex and multifaceted but the general assumption has
been that his legacy as a political thinker points in only one direction. His
lasting reputation in political theory has been based on the view that he was
a fierce proponent of the rights of the individual against the state, a dogged
defender of laissez-faire long after the doctrine had ceased to be fashionable
and, in his darker moments, a social Darwinist proponent of the necessity of
allowing the weak to go to the wall. Although recent scholarship has exposed
Spencer’s alleged social Darwinism as a caricature that can be traced to the
work of richard Hofstadter (1944), most historians of political thought have
tended to agree that Spencer’s legacy was to inspire radical anti-statist theo-
rists, ranging from his immediate followers among the Victorian individual-
ists (taylor 1992) to contemporary libertarians.
While there is no denying that this has been Spencer’s primary legacy,
nevertheless, during his lifetime and soon afterwards, he inspired thinkers
of different political persuasions. His work was, for example, influential with
the socialist-anarchist peter Kropotkin and with late-nineteenth-century
nationalist thinkers in china and Japan who sought to construct strong
nation-states to compete with Western imperialism. During the closing
decades of the nineteenth century, thinkers in continental europe consid-
ered him a man of the Left, to the extent that a French commentator had to
explain to his readers that Spencer was not a socialist (comprayre 1907).
Spencer was committed to progressive positions on topics as varied as anti-
imperialism, women’s rights and child-centred education that led to him
being embraced by the political Left. even in the english-speaking world,
Spencer’s work appealed to the socialist pioneers of the Labour movement;
the early Fabians, for example, owed more to Spencer than to Marx. Despite
his appropriation by later thinkers who enlisted his support for positions
40
h e rb e rt spe n c e r
that became identified with social and political conservatism, Spencer’s leg-
acy in political thought was just as complex and multifaceted as it was in the
other disciplines to which he contributed.
This essay takes as its starting-point Spencer’s individualist legacy, which
was his critique of an over-mighty state and his defence of the belief that
its sphere of action should shrink to the night-watchman minimum. It
traces the lines of continuity of Spencer’s critique with those developed by
twentieth-century opponents of an extended sphere of state action, of which
the most recent manifestation has been libertarianism. At the same time,
this simplified – if not simplistic – account of Spencer’s legacy needs to be
supplemented by recognition of his influence on other traditions of political
thought, socialism and nationalism among them. Whereas his Individualist
successors placed greatest emphasis on his defence of the concept of natu-
ral rights, his concepts of individual and social evolution were capable of
providing the theoretical underpinning to very different visions of the role
and functions of the state. It is this aspect of his thought that is frequently
overlooked by the received wisdom concerning his legacy.
Individualism
Individualism is a term that has multiple meanings (Lukes 1973), but in the
late Victorian period it referred to a specific political position of opposi-
tion to an extended role for the state. In effect, the Individualists wished to
preserve the minimalist state that had been constructed by mid-Victorian
Liberalism against the attempts to expand its functions that were becom-
ing increasingly part of the political agenda in the 1880s. This position was
given its strongest and clearest articulation in Spencer’s book, The Man
“Versus” the State ([1884] 1982), which started out as a series of four arti-
cles published in the quarterly periodical Contemporary Review. Although
mid-twentieth-century scholars have dismissed the book as the isolated
protest of a thinker whose ideas had already been discredited, more recent
scholarship has restored it to a leading place in the late Victorian politi-
cal debate (taylor 1992). A Whig interpretation, which presented the end
of the nineteenth century as marking the inevitable death of the night-
watchman state, has been superseded by a more nuanced understanding of
the late Victorian era; in particular, of the strength and depth of opposition
to an expanded role of state activity has come to be more clearly appreci-
ated by historians of political thought. rather than being a voice crying in
the wilderness, Spencer was a leading representative of a powerful current
of opinion with which many Liberals and Liberal-sympathizers could iden-
tify. Thus, a proper understanding of The Man “Versus” the State requires
41
m i c ha e l w. tay l o r
the work to be placed in the context of the late Victorian political debate to
which it was a contribution.
The Liberal administration led by W. e. Gladstone that came into office
in 1880 appeared, to a significant proportion of its supporters, to mark a
turning point in british political practice. The Ground Game Act 1880, the
employers’ Liability Act 1880 and, especially, the Land Law (Ireland) Act
1881 had as their common feature interference with the freedom of contract
and the rights of property. The Irish Land Act, for example, established a
Land court, which had powers to rewrite contracts between Irish landlords
and their tenants with the aim of rebalancing the bargaining power of the
contracting parties. This marked a significant departure from the traditional
Liberal defence of freedom of contract and the rights of an individual “to
do what he will with his own” in favour of the role of the state being the
promotion of the welfare of the majority. This new view of the function of
the state was enthusiastically embraced by the radical wing of the Liberal
party led by two members of Gladstone’s cabinet, Joseph chamberlain and
Sir charles Dilke. chamberlain attempted to apply at a national level the
schemes of “municipal socialism” he had developed as a reforming mayor
of birmingham, which had included the provision of water and light-
ing through publicly owned utilities. The 1885 radical programme, with
which he was closely identified, proposed free primary education, land
reform, powers of compulsory purchase for local authorities for the crea-
tion of smallholdings, a moderate graduated income tax and a levy on the
“unearned” increment in land values.
Despite the horror with which these policies were received by many tra-
ditionalists in the Liberal party, it is important not to overstate the extent to
which the 1880 Gladstone administration marked a break with past Liberal
practice. Although Liberals were always suspicious of an overextended
sphere of state action, the prevalent attitude was one of wariness of govern-
ment overreach rather than outright opposition to a positive role for the
state. both classical political economy and utilitarianism accepted a role for
the state in the provision of public goods and as a provider of education;
Henry Sidgwick, Spencer’s near contemporary and the last great representa-
tive of both of these intellectual traditions, expounded in minute detail the
scope of state action that was justified on grounds of economic efficiency
and ethical theory. He then found little difficulty in expanding the state’s
legitimate functions beyond what he termed the “Individualist Minimum”
(Sidgwick 1891). Legitimate state functions could include, for example, set-
ting basic standards for industrial safety, prohibiting gambling houses and
opium dens, and providing the modest level of welfare as typified by the
english poor Law system. Seen from this perspective, the measures enacted
by the second Gladstone administration could be presented as an extension
42
of an essentially pragmatic view of government powers (even if the ambi-

tions of the radical programme seemed another matter entirely to the cau-
tious and conservative Sidgwick).
nonetheless, the important factor in understanding the late Victorian
debate on the role and limits of the state is that many Liberal traditional-
ists did perceive that a line had been crossed, resulting in a fundamental
break with the party’s historic mission. The measures adopted by a nomi-
nally Liberal administration appeared to a significant body of its support-
ers to be a betrayal of principle of the first order. G. J. Goschen, who was to
break with the Liberal party in 1886 over Irish Home rule and who later
became chancellor of the exchequer in a conservative ministry, remarked
in 1885 that “we seem almost to have arrived at this formula – little freedom
in making contracts, much freedom in breaking them” (Goschen 1885). As
another writer of the period observed, the traditional Liberal view of the
state as being to “protect people in their liberty and property … so long
as they do not interfere with or injure other people” was being supplanted
by the view “that it is a great machine” for producing “a greater amount of
material enjoyment and happiness for the bulk of the people” (pleydell-
bouverie 1884: 10).
A further worry for the traditionalists was that the new concept of state
function was not the exclusive preserve of a faction within the Liberal party.
practical politicians were supported by a growing chorus of political writ-
ers and pamphleteers, including those associated with the newly estab-
lished Fabian Society, who attempted to sway public opinion in favour of an
extended role for the state to combat what was euphemistically referred to as
the “Social problem”: that is, the poverty, unemployment, poor housing and
insanitary living conditions endured by a large proportion of the population.
When even the conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, could write an article
proposing that the government should provide loans to build working-class
housing (cecil 1883), Spencer concluded that the spectre of socialism was
stalking both major political parties; he felt duty bound to rush into print
in an attempt (as he saw it) to return the Liberals to their senses and their
party to its historic mission.
Spencer wrote The Man “Versus” the State with this avowedly polemical
purpose. He raided his multi-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy (which
he had begun to publish in 1862 but was not to complete until 1893) for
arguments to deploy against the advocates of an activist state. Among the
claims he advanced were: that governments did not create rights, but merely
existed to give effect to pre-existing rights, chief among which were those to
liberty and to property; that socialism marked a regression to a more primi-
tive condition of society in which relations had been based on coercion
rather than voluntary agreement; that an extensive sphere of state action
43
would sap the moral “character” of the populace, breaking the essential rela-
tionship between conduct and consequence which was the foundation of
all progress, and leading to a decline in self-reliance and incentives for self-
improvement; and that administration by the state would be bureaucratic
and inefficient. Many of these arguments drew on theoretical positions that
he developed in the System of Synthetic Philosophy, but some were simply
part of the common coin of political discourse during the period. Spencer
did not put these ideas into circulation; rather, he attempted to stamp them
with the authority he derived from his scientific investigations. These argu-
ments were then pressed into the service of a concept of the state with which
many Liberal traditionalists could identify:
What, then, do they want a government for? not to regulate com-

merce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to
administer charity; not to make roads or railways; but simply to
defend the natural rights of man – to protect person and prop-
erty-to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak –
in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original,
office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not
to be allowed to do more. (Spencer [1842–3] 1982: 187)
This concept of the state was at the core of the “Individualism” embraced
by the significant body of thinkers, writers and pamphleteers who took
their lead from Spencer; although he himself did not use the label, the term
“Individualist” provided his followers with a sense of identity with which to
combat their “collectivist” or “socialist” opponents. The Individualists fell
into two broad camps: there were practical politicians who adopted a prag-
matic approach to resisting the growth of the state whenever and wherever
they could, for whom Spencer’s ideas and arguments added mood music to
their anti-statist rhetoric, and a group of radical anti-statist theorists who
drew directly on Spencer’s philosophy to promote the completion of what
they saw as the unfinished agenda of mid-century Liberalism – to draw
an even narrower sphere of state action than had already been established.
Among the former were politicians like Goschen, Lord pembroke and Lord
Wemyss, the founder of the Liberty and property Defence League (bristow
1975). Among the latter were men like M. D. O’brien, J. H. Levy, Wordsworth
Donisthorpe, Auberon Herbert and Thomas Mackay, several of whom con-
tributed to an edited volume entitled A Plea For Liberty (Mackay 1892), a
late attempt to shore up the Individualist case. Despite their important dif-
ferences, both camps shared common goals and ideals and at a minimum
could agree on a defensive, conservative creed that aimed to resist any fur-
ther encroachment of the state on individual rights to liberty and property.
44
Ultimately, of course, Individualism was unsuccessful in its defence of

the nightwatchman state. The Liberty and property Defence League faded
into obscurity. Spencer’s followers remained marginal figures who failed to
bend the arc of late Victorian debate in their direction. by the edwardian era
the transformation of the british Liberal party was complete: David Lloyd
George’s 1909 “people’s budget” represented the triumph of the aims of the
previous generation of radical politicians while realizing the deepest fears
of their Individualist critics. Although some Individualist politicians – like
Goschen – migrated to the conservative party, that party provided them
with cold comfort. tariff reform and imperialism (both championed by
chamberlain who had also switched parties over Irish Home rule) became
the predominant focus of edwardian conservatism; both pointed to an
activist role for the state. The outbreak of the First World War put the seal
on the transformation of the british state; mobilization for total war was
absolutely incompatible with Spencer’s concept of limited state function
(Green 1995.)
The new settlement of the mixed economy and welfare state that emerged
from the interwar and the immediate post-war period did not lack crit-
ics. Spencer’s dire warnings about the perils of an expanded sphere of state
activity in The Man “Versus” the State continued to resonate with these crit-
ics, earning the book the status of a living fossil: it and Education became
the only works in Spencer’s extensive oeuvre, including the monumental
System of Synthetic Philosophy, to continue to be widely read for decades
after his death. The Man “Versus” the State itself remained in print, included
as number 78 in the series of Watt’s Thinkers Library in 1940. chief among
those who still invoked Spencer’s name during the interwar period was the
publisher Sir ernest benn. In his 1925 book Confessions of a Capitalist (benn
1925), benn quoted extensively from “The coming Slavery”, one of the four
essays that constitute The Man “Versus” the State, before commenting:
It is to the causes so accurately diagnosed by Herbert Spencer

that we must attribute the existence to-day of such useless insti-
tutions as the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of transport,
the Department of Overseas trade, the Mines Department, the
petroleum Department, to mention only those the abolition of
which was definitely recommended by the Geddes report less
than three years ago. (Ibid.: 190)
benn may have been a politically marginal figure but in W. H. Greenleaf ’s

view he was an important spokesman for the complex of ideas that he
termed “libertarian-conservatism” (Greenleaf 1983). Greenleaf argued that
british conservatism had a twin inheritance, involving both a libertarian
45
and a paternalist strand that accepted the case for a broad sphere of state
action. Although the latter was dominant through much of the interwar
period and the first three decades of the post-war world, as evidenced by
the conservative party’s acceptance of the mixed economy and welfare state,
the libertarian strand survived as an almost subterranean influence, prima-
rily in the rhetoric of a group of backbench members of parliament, until
breaking out with renewed vigour against the backdrop of economic break-
down in the mid-1970s. Greenleaf ’s analysis was written shortly after the
first administration of Margaret Thatcher had been formed in 1979 and he
interpreted her worldview as a reaffirmation of libertarian-conservatism.
In this analysis there was a direct line of descent from Spencer’s The Man
“Versus” the State, via interwar writers and thinkers like benn, to the radical
anti-state agenda being pursued by the Thatcher government. Spencer had
provided the founding document for the libertarian-conservative creed and
in this sense was the intellectual godfather of the ideology that came to be
known as Thatcherism (Gamble 1988).
Unfortunately for Greenleaf ’s theoretical construct of libertarian-
conservatism, there is in fact little evidence of a direct line of descent from
The Man “Versus” the State to the “new right” of the late twentieth cen-
tury: what I have termed an “apostolic succession” of anti-statist theorists
(taylor 1992). by the time a scholarly edition of Spencer’s book appeared
in 1969 – edited by Donald Macrae for penguin – it seemed like a period
piece, without contemporary resonance, and of historical interest only.
Only a few years later the economic crisis of the mid-1970s returned ideas
for a radical shrinkage of the welfare state and a thoroughgoing agenda of
deregulation to the political mainstream, but this revival drew on a body of
ideas that in reality owed almost nothing to Spencer. championed by think
tanks such as the Institute of economic Affairs (founded in 1955 by Antony
Fisher) and the centre for policy Studies (co-founded in 1974 by Keith
Joseph, Margaret Thatcher and Alfred Sherman), this new political thrust
drew its primary inspiration from free-market economics, rather than the
psychological, sociological and ethical basis of opposition to an extended
role for the state that Spencer had articulated. The work of the Austrian
economist F. A. Hayek was particularly influential among those who set
out to roll back the frontiers of the state and his Road to Serfdom (Hayek
1944) superseded The Man “Versus” the State as the chief text warning of
the perils of an over-mighty state. It was, for example, a reading of Hayek,
not of Spencer, that inspired Fisher to create the Institute of economic
Affairs (cockett 1995). As Alberto Mingardi has observed, the founders
of the institute “never dug deep enough into the british liberal tradition to
discover Spencer’s name (Mingardi 2011: 150). Importantly, many of the
most influential late-twentieth-century arguments for reducing the role of
46
the state were derived from economics, a subject on which Spencer himself
never wrote.
Spencer’s legacy was stronger in the United States, where The Man
“Versus” the State was invoked well into the mid-twentieth century by crit-
ics of Franklin D. roosevelt’s new Deal. The extension of the powers of the
federal government in the 1930s paralleled the expansion of the british state
that had occurred a generation earlier, and Spencer’s warnings about gov-
ernment interference found a ready audience in the new Deal’s opponents.
Thus, for example, the political commentator Albert Jay nock introduced a
1939 edition of the The Man “Versus” the State by remarking that the work
“sums up with remarkable completeness the political history of the United
States during the last six years … Thus closely has the course of American
Statism, from 1932 to 1939, followed the course of british Statism from 1860
to 1884” (nock [1939] 1982: xxviii).
It was also in the United States that Spencer’s name became inextrica-
bly linked with “social Darwinism”, a term put into widespread circulation
by the historian richard Hofstadter to describe the theories that provided
a biological justification for free-market capitalism, especially those that
invoked “Darwinian” notions of the survival of the fittest (Hofstadter 1944).
The Man “Versus” the State contributed to the perception of Spencer as a
“social Darwinian”, in particular on the strength of several selective quota-
tions from the book that Hofstadter cited as evidence of Spencer’s commit-
ment to the notion that social existence involved an unrelenting struggle
for survival in which the richest were the most successful and the poor
should go to the wall. That Spencer never held this proposition is now
widely accepted by Spencer specialists, although the trope continues to be
widely repeated in the works of non-specialists who rely on the secondary
literature of an earlier generation (see e.g. Hrdy 1999). There is now general
agreement, for example, that the primary mechanism of species change in
Spencer’s system was Lamarckian rather than Darwinian, and that Spencer
anticipated that the forces of evolution would result in individual humans
becoming progressively more adapted to the conditions of living in soci-
ety and therefore inclined to become less competitive in their behaviour.
Moreover, as several scholars have pointed out, the intellectual construction
of “social Darwinism” is itself problematic (bannister [1979] 1988), and fails
to reflect the role that biological thought played in both conservative and
progressive opinion in early-twentieth-century United States. As one recent
scholar has concluded of the Hofstadter interpretation:
Hofstadter put Spencer and Sumner in the dock less for their
putative use of Darwinian ideas than for their defense of eco-
nomic competition and individualism. As much as Hofstadter
47
rejected biological ideas in social thought, his primary quarrel

was with competitive individualism, a position he never aban-
doned, however much his views of progressivism darkened over
time. Like the progressives who had vilified Spencer and Sumner,
Hofstadter judged the American Gilded Age economic order a
jungle and therefore judged any defense of it as “Darwinist,” what-
ever its particulars. (Leonard 2009: 41)
Social Statics
Despite its longevity, The Man “Versus” the State is not the only one of
Spencer’s works to have contributed to his legacy in political thought. Of
almost equal importance has been his first published work, Social Statics
(1851), which has spawned an army of admirers that has included not only
many modern-day libertarians, but also anarchists and others of a more col-
lectivist persuasion. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dissenting judgement
in Lochner v. New York (1905), that “the fourteenth amendment does not
enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics”, was proof that the book could be
co-opted by the same forces of conservatism that found inspiration in The
Man “Versus” the State. nonetheless, Spencer’s optimistic view of human
evolution in the Social Statics gave his first major publication a very differ-
ent quality to that of his declining years. Those who failed to see beyond
the book’s anti-statist message to its positive message of a coming utopia
missed an important dimension of its argument (even if this was a dimen-
sion that Spencer himself subsequently attempted to excise in his “abridged
and revised” edition of 1892). In effect, Social Statics did not point exclusively
to one conclusion: several different roads flowed from it, some of them in
surprising directions.
The multiple legacies of Social Statics are less surprising once the book is
located in the milieu in which it was written. As J. D. Y. peel demonstrated
in Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (1971), Spencer’s social and
political thought was rooted in the radicalism of early-nineteenth-century
provincial england. This radical tradition was hostile to state interference,
largely because it regarded the state as merely the instrument of the ruling
class. State activities were associated with the interests of the aristocracy,
whether through the enforcement of monopolies, the protection of land-
owners’ interests at the expense of tenant rights, or the imposition of the
creed of the church of england on dissenters. In place of an overweening
state pursuing the class interests of the aristocracy, the radicals stressed the
benefits of voluntary cooperation and free exchange. However, this did not
necessarily translate to an ideal based on individualistic competition. State
48
interference would be replaced by self-governing communities and asso-

ciations, with social pressure rather than legal instruments ensuring that
the public interest would be protected. As such, the ideal was not one of
individualism but of communal action that relied on self-organizing groups
rather than on the coercive powers of the state. It would be anachronistic to
attempt to categorize this constellation of political ideas using the twentieth-
century dichotomy between “left” and “right”, if this is seen as primarily a
matter of statism versus individualism. Spencer’s hostility to the state still
left room for an extensive sphere of social cooperation, and potentially of
social control, albeit organized through voluntary associations.
In Social Statics, Spencer articulated a fundamental ethical principle
to justify the radicals’ antipathy to the state. The Law of equal Freedom
equated justice with the mutual limitation of each individual’s natural right
to freedom, a concept that had deep roots in the european liberal tradition
of which Spencer was probably only vaguely aware: “every man has freedom
to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any
other man” (1892–93: vol. 2, 46).
The Law of equal Freedom remained central to Spencer’s ethics, being
restated verbatim in The Principles of Ethics, the concluding volumes of the
System of Synthetic Philosophy, almost forty years later. Spencer noted that
this formula of justice contained both positive and negative elements. It
was positive to the extent that each individual must be allowed to act and
“to receive the good and suffer the evil results of his conduct” (ibid.: vol. 2,
196). It was negative to the extent that individuals were allowed to act only
to the extent that they observed the restraints imposed by others having a
similar claim to act. The Law of equal Freedom implied a strictly limited
role for the state: the state’s one legitimate function was protection – the
administration of justice. It was a “joint-stock company for mutual assur-
ance” which overstepped its permissible role if it engaged in any activity
that was not “negatively regulative” ([1871] 1874: 419), that is, which acted
to prevent individuals impinging on each other’s right to liberty. Spencer
strongly repudiated the “laissez-faire” label as a description of his politi-
cal ideal, because a negatively regulative state would need to exercise sig-
nificant powers to ensure the enforcement of contracts. While these powers
were necessary for the functioning of a market economy, they were to be
distinguished from “positive regulation” that required individuals to act in
the collective interest. The latter was not within the legitimate sphere of
state action.
However, Social Statics fused the anti-statist implications of the Law of
equal Freedom with an evolutionary account of human development in
which the state was destined to be replaced by self-governing voluntary
associations. Although Spencer was later to revise his estimate of the pace
49
at which human evolution would occur, in his first book he believed that
humanity was, in John burrow’s phrase, “on the verge of opening the last
envelope” (1966: 227). The constraints on human behaviour imposed by
the state were only necessary to the extent that individuals were incapable
of exercising self-restraint to take into account the rights and interests of
others. Their failure to do so in current conditions was a consequence of
the fact that they were still not fully adapted to the demands of living in
society. However, once they were freed of the artificial restraints imposed
by the aristocratic class-state, human beings would quickly bring the proc-
ess of adaptation its natural conclusion. each person would instinctively
act in accordance with the Law of equal Freedom; respecting the liberty or
property of others would become (literally) second nature; the only form of
association would be in self-governing voluntary groups; a spirit of coopera-
tion would replace individual competition; and the state would wither away.
Many of Spencer’s followers shared his enthusiasm for a state that per-
formed only “negatively regulative” tasks but neglected the evolutionary
process of human adaptation that formed its counterpart. This interpreta-
tion of Social Statics informed both Holmes’s famous comment about the
fourteenth amendment of the US constitution and the views of several
of Spencer’s late Victorian followers, who made common cause with the
Liberty and property Defence League. The conservative reading of Social
Statics assumed that Spencer’s political ideal could be realized by men as
they are, rather than as they might be, and therefore failed to grasp the
extent to which a reformed humanity and the lessening of competitive pres-
sures in social life also formed part of his vision. Social Statics was seized
on as essentially a text articulating a natural rights defence of liberty and
property; an interpretation that ignored the evolutionary dimension of
Spencer’s theory allowed rights to be exercised by individuals who had
reached a higher ethical standard than contemporary humanity. A lead-
ing example of this perspective was Auberon Herbert, a scion of the british
aristocracy who, in the words of beatrice Webb, left “the real battle of life
to fight a strange ogre of his own imagination – an always immoral state
interference” ([1926] 1950: 189). Through numerous pamphlets and a news-
paper, Free Life, Herbert devoted himself to advocacy of a libertarian creed
that verged on anarchism: in the words of one critic he “out Herberts Mr.
Herbert Spencer in his advocacy of laissez faire” (ritchie 1891: 57 n.1). In
the first edition of Social Statics, Spencer had argued for a “right to ignore
the state”, that is, to opt out of its protection; Herbert carried this notion
to its extreme even after his master had repudiated the radicalism of his
youth in the later “abridged and revised” edition. Herbert’s distinctive con-
tribution to the late Victorian debate on the role and limits of the state was
his advocacy of a scheme of “voluntary taxation”. The state being merely
50
an association for the protection of rights, there could be no compulsory

obligation to contribute to its maintenance and it had no right coercively
to deprive an individual of his property, even for the purposes of sustain-
ing its legitimate activities. For Herbert, as for Spencer’s other Individualist
followers, including O’brien and Levy, the right to liberty was profoundly
associated with the right to property. As Levy wrote: “rights of property
are the outcome of rights of person. A violation of proprietary rights is an
indirect violation of personal rights and, so far as it goes, a reduction of the
individual to a state of bondage” (1904: 97).
One of the legacies of Social Statics was, therefore, to give expression to
a natural rights defence of liberty and private property, at a time when the
language of natural rights had otherwise largely ceased to form part of main-
stream political discourse. by the closing decades of the century, utilitarian-
ism and idealism provided the dominant vocabularies of moral and political
philosophy and both of them could be used to justify state action that went
well beyond the “Individualist Minimum.” Thus, as John Morley remarked in
1888, a reference to natural rights in a piece of platform oratory “gave me as
much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium
shambling down parliament Street” (Morley 1907: 174–5). The tendency of
some of Spencer’s followers to rely exclusively on the eighteenth-century lan-
guage of natural rights to justify their anti-statist politics appeared oddly
archaic, if not quixotic, at the end of the Victorian age, and this impres-
sion was only strengthened by their failure to refer to, let alone to build on,
Spencer’s own attempt to offer a scientifically grounded justification for the
Law of equal Freedom. In contrast to Spencer’s appeal to science, many of his
Individualist followers simply asserted the existence of natural rights to lib-
erty and property that sharply circumscribed the legitimate functions of the
state. As a consequence, their defence of a limited state relied on moral intui-
tion rather than on the naturalistic arguments that Spencer himself deployed.
The revival of natural rights discourse in the final quarter of the twentieth
century that followed the publication of robert nozick’s Anarchy, State and
Utopia (1974) similarly relied on moral intuitions rather than naturalistic
arguments. nozick’s work made no pretence to “ground” the concept of a
natural right to liberty in any scientific or naturalistic theory; like Spencer’s
immediate followers, nozick simply started with the assumption of a natu-
ral right to liberty and then traced its consequences for the legitimacy and
role of the state. nonetheless, nozick’s revival of the concept of natural right
helped to feed the growth of a form of anti-state theory that had much in
common with the ideas of Spencer’s followers, such as Herbert, O’brien and
Levy, in its emphasis on intuitively obvious nature of rights to liberty and
property. Known as “libertarianism” this revival of anti-statism is predicated
on a conception of the legitimate limits of coercive authority as limited as
51
Spencer had ever envisaged. Social relations should be predominately the

result of freely contracted bargains between individuals, with the state’s role
being limited to ensuring that these bargains were honoured. nozick’s dis-
tinctive contribution was to demonstrate how, within a framework of a nat-
ural right to liberty and freely contracted bargains, an apparatus of coercive
enforcement could emerge.
The revival of natural rights discourse following the publication of
nozick’s book led some libertarian thinkers to go in search of their ancestry,
and their exploration of family history soon unearthed Spencer’s name. In
an essay entitled “Herbert Spencer: Libertarian prophet”, roderick t. Long
claimed Spencer as an intellectual forebear:”Spencer proceeded to deduce,
from the Law of equal Freedom, the existence of rights to freedom of speech,
press, and religion; bodily integrity; private property; and commercial
exchange – virtually the entire policy menu of today’s libertarians” (2004).
Libertarians have also frequently been at the forefront of those who have
tried to rescue Spencer’s reputation from the charge of “social Darwinism.”
Having reviewed Spencer’s own statements on those subjects that are alleged
to have displayed his social Darwinist credentials, peter richards concluded:
“The real Spencer often expressed views quite similar to modern-day lib-
ertarians, and indeed his long-term optimism for the future of the world
based on voluntary cooperation justifies his epithet of ‘libertarian prophet’”
(2008: 6).
Yet libertarianism is only one stem that grows from the root of Social
Statics. even abstracting from its evolutionary vision of human beings who
had become perfectly adapted to the needs of an associated state, Social
Statics could pose a problem for those of Spencer’s followers who wished to
defend the existing distribution of power and property. In the 1851 edition,
Spencer had advocated land nationalization, which meant expropriating the
holdings of aristocratic landlords and transferring them to state ownership
for them to be leased to the highest bidder. Under such a scheme freehold
in land would disappear and would be replaced with leasehold tenure with
the ownership reverting back to the state at some pre-established future
time. The purpose of this arrangement was to prevent the permanent appro-
priation of the surface of the earth by any individual or group of individu-
als. Since access to land was essential to life but fixed in supply, permanent
individual appropriation amounted to denying the natural rights to life and
liberty of those who were left landless.
by the 1880s, Spencer was backtracking from his earlier views on land
nationalization, a response to his own growing social respectability and to his
awareness of how his arguments could be appropriated by socialist agitators.
In a letter to the Times newspaper in november 1889, he formally renounced
his commitment to the cause, and in his Principles of Ethics, published three
52
years later, he explained that although land nationalization remained logi-

cally implied by his principles, this deduction belonged to “absolute” ethics,
which could not be realized at the current phase of evolution. In the world
of “relative” ethics within which we must currently operate, it was also nec-
essary to balance the justice of the cause with the injustice that expropria-
tion of existing landowners would entail. Justice required landowners to be
compensated for their losses, and the level of compensation would need to
be determined not on the basis of land in its natural, unimproved state, but
on its current condition, taking into account the improvements made by
generations of previous landlords. The resulting compensation costs would
make the land nationalization scheme impractical and it was dropped from
the abridged and revised edition of Social Statics.
not all of Spencer’s followers joined him in repudiating land nationali-
zation. Alfred russel Wallace, co-discoverer with charles Darwin of natu-
ral selection, remained a strong advocate of land nationalization in terms
that were derived from Spencer. Another perspective was offered by Henry
George, who, rather than advocating nationalization of the land, proposed
instead a “single tax” scheme that would replace all existing taxes with a tax
on incremental land values, that is, the rent that accrued to landlords owing
to the increased value of land due to increased population or improvements
in infrastructure. Although this scheme was far removed from anything
Spencer himself had proposed, George invoked the spirit of Social Statics in
support of his scheme. When Spencer published the abridged and revised
edition in 1892, George pilloried the changes: the book, he complained, had
been “disembowelled, stuffed and mummified” so that it could be viewed
with perfect lack of concern by “Sir John and his Grace”, Spencer’s earlier
personification of the landowning interest (George 1892: 90).
The science of society
The intellectual odyssey that carried Spencer from Social Statics to his System
of Synthetic Philosophy has been thoroughly examined by several authors
(peel 1971; Francis 2007). However, at the core of Spencer’s quest was the
attempt to demonstrate that the same fundamental evolutionary process was
at work in the disparate fields of biology, psychology and sociology. Spencer
argued that the essence of evolution was the transition from the simple to
the complex, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated and from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous. This process he found to be at work
across all the different disciplines he surveyed. The end point of this process
would be the vision first articulated in Social Statics of “the perfect man in a
perfect society”. evolution would ensure that human beings became perfectly
53
adapted to the needs of living in society and that they would develop the
psychological faculties necessary for harmonious coexistence. With the
emergence of these faculties, individuals would spontaneously behave in an
ethical manner, that is, in conformity to the law of equal freedom while also
showing beneficence towards others. corresponding to the change in indi-
vidual psychology, increased adaptation to the requirements of living in an
associated state would lead to changes in the nature of society itself.
Spencer’s analysis of society had both static and dynamic aspects. The
static aspect was expressed by his concept of the “social organism”, which is
discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this volume. In essence, this concept
drew a wide range of parallels between the structure of an individual organ-
ism and the structure of a society, with the important exception that a society
would never possess a central directing intelligence. emphasizing that prim-
itive, rather than advanced, organisms provided the appropriate parallelism
for social aggregates, he believed that it was essential to avoid identifying the
social organism with the notion of a hierarchically organized society with
strong central direction. His notion of social organism also served his politi-
cal challenge to the idea that the public good and the social interest were
somehow separate from the interests of individual members of a society.
However, it was in the dynamic aspect of Spencer’s science of society – the
direction of social evolution – that his political agenda emerged most clearly.
Spencer’s social scientific investigations were designed to justify the
political ideal he had set forth in Social Statics. His social theory envisaged
a progression from militancy, a custom-bound, aggressive, hierarchical type
of social organization based on relations of command and obedience, to
industrialism, the open, free, progressive and democratic society of classical
liberalism with its voluntarily assumed contractual social relations. not sur-
prisingly, Spencer’s philosophy has appealed to some libertarian thinkers as
representing an allegedly “scientific” foundation for their political theory. For
example, tibor r. Machan argues: “What Spencer did for libertarianism is
what Marx did for communism – provide it with what was to be a full-blown
scientific justification, on the model of proper science prominent in his day”
(1978: 6). nonetheless, the science of society that Spencer formulated on the
basis of his fundamental principle of evolution was capable of multiple inter-
pretations, leading to diametrically opposite political conclusions. Whatever
Spencer himself may have thought about evolution leading inexorably to a
limited state, his analysis was equally capable of supporting the complete
absence of any coercive power (anarchism) or an extensive sphere of state
action to manage the complexity of industrial society (socialism).
In Spencer’s sociology the militant social type was created by the need for
mutual protection in a world of unsocialized and warlike individuals. At the
beginning of history, human beings lacked the psychological traits needed
54
for peaceful social cooperation, thus the social order must have been the
product of force and coercion. Since each militant society was surrounded
by similar social types, which are bent on aggression and conquest, each
must have been constantly prepared for war; in Spencer’s phrase “society
is the quiescent army and the army the mobilized society” (1884: 114). The
social organization of militant society is fundamentally very simple: the only
clear distinction is between rulers and ruled, between those who give orders
and those who are obliged to obey them, if necessary by force. The state
dominates every aspect of the individual’s existence, including the forms
of religious worship that may be practised. The rights of the individual are
not recognized, the economic system is dominated by the ruling elite, and
property is held in common by the community.
The industrial social type was made possible by the gradual improvement
in individual moral character brought about by the forces of evolution. As
individuals become more socialized, and their “higher” moral sentiments
develop, so the social order comes to be produced spontaneously by their
voluntary contractual agreements. In contrast to the simple, homogeneous
social structure characteristic of militancy, industrial society is complex,
reflecting the greater heterogeneity and diversity permitted by “spontane-
ous” social organization. Moreover, individual rights, including those to pri-
vate property, become widely recognized and the government increasingly
takes on the specialized function of protecting individuals in the exercise
of those rights. Vast areas of social life would become self-regulating, the
preserve of voluntary associations rather than coercive power.
The idea that social evolution exhibits development from militancy to
industrialism had been at the heart of Spencer’s case against the extension
of state function in The Man “Versus” the State. “Socialistic” schemes for a
larger role for the state were a regression to a more primitive social type,
since they involved coercive rather than voluntary arrangements. According
to this account of social evolution, the increased role that the state assumed
during the closing decades of the nineteenth century was literally a rever-
sion to the past. However, Spencer’s scheme of a transition from militancy
to industrialism could be made to support political conclusions that were
at odds with those he drew himself. The prediction that individuals would
eventually become fully adapted to the requirements of living in society
could be interpreted as pointing to anarchism rather than a limited state.
Individual moral development would reach a point at which everyone
spontaneously acted to respect the rights of others without the need for the
intervention of an external force. It was, therefore, possible to envisage a
society in which cooperation had replaced individual competition, a social
ideal very different from those of Spencer’s followers whom history branded
“social Darwinists”.
55
Among those who drew this conclusion from Spencer’s writings was
Kropotkin, the russian anarchist. He argued that the most powerful sur-
vival mechanism in evolution was not individual competition but involved
cooperation between individuals in freely associated societies and groups,
without central control, authority or compulsion. In his 1887 article for the
Nineteenth Century entitled “The Scientific bases of Anarchy”, Kropotkin
stressed the Spencerian origins of his anarchism. Spencer, he wrote:
studies society and tries to discover its tendencies, past and

present, its growing needs, intellectual and economical; and in
his ideal he merely points out in which direction evolution goes.
He distinguishes between the real wants and tendencies of human
aggregations and the accidents (want of knowledge, migrations,
wars, conquests) which prevented these tendencies from being
satisfied, or temporarily paralysed them. And he concludes that
the two most prominent, although often unconscious, tendencies
through our history were: a tendency towards integrating our
labour for the production of all riches in common, so as finally to
render it impossible to discriminate the part of the common pro-
duction due to the separate individual; and a tendency towards
the fullest freedom of the individual for the prosecution of all
aims, beneficial both for himself and for society at large. The ideal
of the anarchist is thus a mere summing-up of what he considers
to be the next phase of evolution. It is no longer a matter of faith;
it is a matter for scientific discussion. (Kropotkin 1887: 239)
In this sense, Kropotkin’s work might be said to be closer to the original spirit
of Social Statics than were the conservative thinkers who found in the work
only a natural rights defence of liberty and property. It is a moot point how
far Spencer in his mature years would have shared Kropotkin’s vision, but the
parallels with that of Spencer’s youth are too close to be neglected entirely.
At no stage of his life would Spencer have been in sympathy with the
political thinkers who adapted the militancy–industrialism dichotomy
towards collectivist political ends. Among these were Sidney Webb, whose
ideas owed little either to Marxian socialism or to the influential idealist phi-
losophers who provided a large measure of the justification for an expanded
role for the state in the late Victorian and edwardian periods. Instead,
Webb took Spencer’s scheme of social evolution and turned it on its head.
According to Webb, the growing complexity of social relations predicted
by Spencer’s evolutionary theory positively enjoined the need for a more
extensive sphere of state activity. The very complexity that Spencer identi-
fied with the higher stages of evolution was incompatible with the forces of
56
“spontaneous” social organization, and a deliberate, planned approach to

society, using the powers of the state, was essential to the well-being of the
social organism. Socialism, he wrote, was not “a faith in an artificial Utopia”
but a “rapidly spreading conviction” that:
the lesson of evolution in social development is the substitution

of consciously regulated coordination among the units of each
organism for their internecine competition; that the production
and distribution of wealth, like any other public function, cannot
be safely entrusted to the unfettered freedom of individuals, but
needs to be organised and controlled for the benefit of the whole
community … and that the best government is accordingly that
which can safely and successfully administer most.
(S. Webb 1896: 5)
Another respect in which the militancy–industrialism dichotomy could

be employed to give support to the case for a strong centralized state was
provided by thinkers whose nations were threatened by the rise of aggres-
sive imperialist powers. rather than believing that the age of militancy was
over, these thinkers could be forgiven for interpreting the relations between
nation-states as still being founded on war and aggression and as involv-
ing competition between social organisms. consequently, the primary aim
of national policy should be to develop the nation-state as a military and
industrial power that was capable of withstanding the aggression of imperi-
alist powers. Spencer’s theories were thus capable of inspiring nationalistic
conservatives in Meiji restoration Japan, even while their liberal opponents
drew on his theories of free competition and representative government
(nagai 1954). Similarly, the chinese national strengthening movement
shared with the Meiji restoration the policy aim of constructing a strong,
modern nation-state that had the military and industrial capability to resist
imperialist encroachments. Yen Fu, who translated Spencer’s The Study of
Sociology and Principles of Sociology into chinese (along with the writings
of t. H. Huxley and John Stuart Mill), believed he had found support for
the policy of “national strengthening” in Spencer’s account of social evolu-
tion (Schwartz 1964). Without a strong and effective state, china would be
incapable of progressing to the next evolutionary stage.
This was not an interpretation of imperialism that Spencer himself would
have endorsed. He viewed britain’s development as an aggressive imperial
power with dismay and was a persistent critic of the brutal transitions that
led from “missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed
forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-
called ‘pacification’” (1874–96: vol. 1, 603). In his final years he courted
57
unpopularity by arguing that the boers were right to resist british rule
since they were merely invoking the right to self-defence. Imperialism, in
Spencer’s view, was rooted in the revival of a “predatory spirit” that belonged
to the age of militancy. This motivation reflected a deep-seated human drive
that derived from a desire to exercise power over others, a desire supported
by humanity’s long period of barbarism, and which the evolutionary process
was yet to eliminate completely even though it had long outlived its useful-
ness. It had been put into abeyance during the rise of industrialism during
the first half of the nineteenth century, but had lived on among the landed
classes, with their public-school educations that lauded the martial spirit of
ancient Greece and rome, and who still played a powerful role in the army
and in parliament.
Spencer’s anti-imperialism underlines how far removed his thinking was
from the “social Darwinist” concept that the motor of history – and progress
– was the struggle for survival among social organisms. While he considered
the state to be the outcome of the incessant warfare that had characterized
relations between primitive groups of largely unsocialized individuals, these
conditions were destined to disappear, in part owing to the habituation of
people to social life under the coercive tutelage of the state. Moreover, it
did not follow from this analysis that competition between social organ-
isms, whether nation-states or great empires, still remained one of the
motive forces of human progress in the conditions of the late nineteenth
century. by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, whatever posi-
tive aspects there had been to warfare between states had long since been
superseded. Far from armed conflict being a motor of human progress, the
militant aspects of state activity were a break on evolution. His analysis of
imperialism thus saw the development of empires in the second half of the
nineteenth century as simply another aspect of the regression to militancy
that he decried in The Man “Versus” the State. However, in this instance, his
sociological analysis of imperialism did not lend support to conservatism,
but instead directly influenced the work of J. A. Hobson and thus indirectly
the critique of imperialism developed by V. I. Lenin (Semmel 1993).
Conclusion
We have reviewed Spencer’s legacy in political thought from several differ-

ent angles, but they clearly show that his legacy was complex and multifac-
eted. Although the discussion has focused on political theorists who drew
inspiration from his writings, a similarly complex picture would emerge if
we also examined those practical politicians who expressed admiration for
his thought or who drew on his ideas to help articulate their own positions.
58
It is striking how many figures of a socialist persuasion found inspiration in

Spencer’s work, especially in continental europe, where he became identified
with the cause of secularism and progressive education. Similarly, in many
colonies or imperial possessions his anti-imperialism was an inspiration to
a generation of indigenous intellectuals.
There can be no denying that the major part of Spencer’s legacy in politi-
cal thought has been as an inspiration to conservative thinkers who have
articulated a robust critique of an over-mighty state and have sought to
reduce its role to the nightwatchman minimum. but even within this frame
of reference, it is a clear distortion of Spencer’s own views to attribute to him
anything like the “social Darwinist” caricature propagated by the work of
Hofstadter. Spencer believed that an extensive sphere of state action would
produce many negative consequences, ranging from bureaucratic ineffi-
ciency to a decline in individual “character” as moral fibre was sapped by
dependency on the state. Yet nowhere in Spencer’s writings did he suggest
that the weak must be made to go to the wall, or that the rich and successful
enjoyed their status owing to their inherent biological superiority.
Spencer’s legacy in political thought becomes even more nuanced once
we take into account the wide range of writers who drew inspiration from
his thought. The defence of the nightwatchman state was only one part of
his legacy. A thinker whose work was capable of being appropriated to pro-
vide theoretical justification for positions as different as socialistic anar-
chism and the chinese “national strengthening” movement clearly had
articulated a much more complex constellation of ideas than he is usually
given credit for. His legacy was multidimensional and cannot be reduced to
the simple formula of laissez-faire, a term that even Spencer himself explic-
itly repudiated. From the point of view of his lasting reputation, Spencer’s
political writings played a useful role in keeping his name alive during the
long period of neglect that followed his death in 1903. but the writings that
typically survived did little justice to the complex legacy that, as John Fiske
once wrote, runs through the warp and weft of Victorian intellectual life.
59
4
herbert spencer’s
sociological legacy
Jonathan H. Turner
Herbert Spencer is now a forgotten figure in the academic discipline where

he made his greatest contribution to science. In a field like sociology, which
still worships its founding masters (such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max
Weber) and even non-sociologists (such as George Herbert Mead), virtu-
ally no attention is now paid to Spencer’s work. His legacy is not completely
lost in contemporary sociology because so many of his ideas are central to
present-day theorizing in sociology, but most sociologists have little aware-
ness about where these ideas originated. In other cases, Spencer’s ideas have
had to be rediscovered because sociologists do not read Spencer any more,
which is a huge waste of intellectual energy that has hindered cumulation
of knowledge in scientific sociology. As I hope to document in this chapter,
Spencer’s legacy is still with sociology but, more importantly, much of this
legacy has yet to be fully mined by contemporary scholars who continue
to poor over the works of other classical figures with little new to show for
their efforts, whereas if they shifted their attention to Spencer, they would
discover what can only be described as a hidden legacy, or hidden treasure
of useful ideas.
Spencer’s synthetic philosophy
Herbert Spencer burst onto the intellectual scene in europe and eventually
America with Social Statics (1851). The subtitle gives an indication of what
the book is about: “The conditions essential to Human Happiness Specified,
and the First of Them Developed”. Here Spencer laid out his philosophy
of morals and ethics, which today in sociology is often used to condemn
Spencer as “right wing” because, in part, it advocated that individuals should
be free of external constraints from government to pursue their interests and
60
h e rb e rt spe n c e r ’ s s o c i o l o g i c a l l e g ac y
pleasures, as long as they did not impede the ability of others to have the same
rights: an idea that sounds attractive in principle but that inevitably leads to
conflicts of interests. Spencer complained that this book had typecast him for
his whole career, but we should not feel too badly for Spencer on this score
because his last work is the two-volume The Principles of Ethics (1892–93),
in which he presented much the same argument, although in a much more
nuanced and sophisticated form.
Thus, Spencer’s more academic works stand between two intellectual
bookends on ethics. These works on ethics were part of what Spencer
termed his System of Synthetic philosophy, to which he sought subscribers,
who would often get works in serial form that were later bound as books.
Spencer visualized all domains of the universe from the human perspective
– that is, ethics, physics, biology, psychology, and sociology – as subject to
the dynamics of a “law of evolution”. Spencer was, then, the “first general
systems theorists” of the modern era because he sought to derive from gen-
eral principles of evolution more specific principles governing the operation
of each domain in the universe. In First Principles (1862), Spencer outlined
a series of principles about evolution of the universe, in which there is an
“aggregation of matter” in solar systems, in biotic and organismic systems,
in psychological systems, in superorganisms composed of relations among
organisms, and in ethical systems. As matter is aggregated, the “retained
energy” that started the aggregation process drives both the differentiation
of a system and the integration of differentiated matter in this system. Thus,
for Spencer, evolution is “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipa-
tion of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoher-
ent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity; and during which the
retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation” (Spencer 1862: 343).
The imagery that Spencer sought to communicate is that evolution is a proc-
ess that is driven by energy, but the nature of the energy varies depending
on the domain of the universe that is evolving. This energy assembles the
matter or basic building blocks of the universe, thus making the systems
in a domain of the universe larger; and once the mass of “matter” is larger,
it must differentiate a more complex structure to support the large mass;
and with differentiation must come integration of matter so as to consti-
tute a “coherent” system. The “force” driving the phases differentiation and
integration is the “retained” energy that began the process of evolution in
the first place. For example, if conquest through warfare of one society by
another is the energy driving the formation of a larger society, the retained
energy – that is, the energy inhering in the mobilization of coercive force
and power-use more generally – also works to differentiate the new consoli-
dated society and to integrate the new forms of differentiation (by culture,
region, ethnicity, class, etc.) with new types of political formations. Or, to
61
j o nat ha n h . t u rn e r
take another example, gravity is one of the forces or sources of energy driv-
ing the formation of celestial bodies as matter is aggregated and differenti-
ated into planets and stars by the retained energy of gravity; similarly, as
stars and planets integrate into solar systems and galaxies, it is the “retained
energy” of gravity that does so. In reading Spencer, one can sense Spencer’s
excitement in perceiving that all realms of the universe could be explained,
ultimately, by one law of evolution and a series of corollaries spelled out in
First Principles.
While he had published The Principles of Psychology (1855) in book form
prior to this more general statement, he clearly wanted to emphasize that
ethics and psychology are domains of the entire universe to be explained
by a general law of evolution. These principles of evolution enumerated in
First Principles are, of course, so general and imprecise as to be more met-
aphoric than explanatory. They nonetheless lay out the essential topic of
evolutionary analysis when applied to sociological phenomena: the move-
ment of societies from simple, segmented or” homogeneous” forms of social
structure and culture toward more differentiated or “heterogeneous” forms.
This basic idea undergirds much sociology.
compared to early european sociologists, virtually all the early founders
of American sociology adopted Spencer’s vision of evolution, and today the
essential theoretical argument persists in a variety of literature, including
the analysis of organizations as they grow and differentiate (e.g. blau & Scott
2003), communities as they differentiate into sectors and neighbourhoods
(e.g. Hawley 1981, 1986), and macro-level theories of societal evolution (e.g.
turner 2003, 2010). Whether or not the dynamics of differentiation occur
in societies and their subunits, such as organizations and communities, they
represent a manifestation of Spencer’s general principles about growth, dif-
ferentiation and integration of the matter constituting superorganisms, or
systems organizing organic bodies.
Societies and their constituent subunits were, as noted above, viewed by
Spencer as superorganisms. They are built from the motion of energy inher-
ing in behaviours causing the aggregation of organic bodies and, then, their
differentiation and integration into social systems. Sociology was thus the
science of superorganisms, from human societies at one end of the contin-
uum to colonies of insects at the other end, and all patterns in the organiza-
tion of organic bodies between these two extremes.
The Principles of Sociology was published in serial form from 1874 to
1896, but the volumes that constitute the core of that work were preceded in
1873 by another, much shorter, volume with the title The Study of Sociology.
This earlier book is an epistemological statement about the nature of theory
as an explanatory tool of science. For Spencer, the subject matter of sociol-
ogy is inherent in people thinking about their social world, and as the social
62
world changes in dramatic ways, as with industrialization and urbanization,

this thought become systematic and eventually scientific. This book lays out
the epistemology of science, in general, as seeking explanatory principles,
and the goals of social science, in particular, as a similar search for the laws
or principles of human social organization. The main body of the book,
however, is a review of the sources of potential bias in humans studying
their own creations – societies – and the ways of overcoming these biases
to make sociology a more value-neutral and objective science. compared
to, for example, Durkheim’s The Rules of the Sociological Method ([1895]
1996) or Weber’s (1968) review of the problems facing a science of sociol-
ogy, Spencer’s treatment is not only more detailed, but also more sophisti-
cated and worthy of serious attention today in debates over the prospects
for a science of society.
The Principles of Sociology1 is a long work because it is filled with data
gathered from ethnographic accounts from preliterate populations through
histories of literate societies to contemporary societies of Spencer’s time.
These data are used to buttress abstract theoretical principles articulated by
Spencer in The Principles of Sociology, one of the most important sociological
treatises ever written. The theoretical principles come from Spencer’s gen-
ius for abstract thinking, whereas the data come from the project initiated
before The Study of Sociology (1873). This project was termed Descriptive
Sociology, and in it Spencer employed academics to assemble data on diverse
types of societies at various stages of societal evolution in terms of a clas-
sification system he had developed (see turner & Maryanski [1988], for an
analysis of the logic of Spencer’s approach). Thus, professional scholars were
cataloguing data for Spencer during the last thirty years of his life, and they
continued to do so for several decades after his death (from monies left to
the project in his will). So, while Spencer was an “armchair” theorist in one
sense, he put together in the sixteen volumes of Descriptive Sociology an
enormous amount of data or, in his view, “facts” about societies.2
1. The 1888 D. Appleton edition of The Principles of Sociology is the most available of
the early editions, and the 2002 four-volume transaction edition has a long intro-
duction by me.
2. The full title of the work reads Descriptive Sociology, or Groups of Sociological Facts
and it comprises the following volumes: (1) English (1873); (2) Ancient Mexicans,
Central Americans, Chibchans, Ancient Peruvians (1874); (3) Types of Lowest
Races, Negritto, and Malayo-Polynesian Races (1874); (4) African Races (1875);
(5) Asiatic Races (1876); (6) North and South American Races (1878); (7) Hebrews
and Phoenicians (1880); (8) French (1881); (9) Chinese (1910); (10) Hellenic Greeks
(1928); (11) Mesopotamia (1929); (12) African Races (1930 revision of vol. 4); and
(13) Ancient Romans (1934). A revised edition of volume 3 was published in 1925;
a second edition of volume 6 appeared in 1885; volume 14 is a reworking of volume
63
The early influence of Spencer’s sociology
Spencer’s general view of the universe as divided into distinctive realms

gained much favour in the United States. The first generations of American
sociologists adopted Auguste comte’s view that sociology could be a natu-
ral science, but since comte did not provide much substance or explana-
tory theory in his multivolume treatise, Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology
became a mantra for legitimizing sociology within academia, and without.
Spencer’s works were enormously popular among the literate lay public and
his major works were reprinted by American publishers; some, including The
Study of Sociology, were originally published in the United States. Spencer’s
ideas reached their peak in the United States at the turn of the twentieth
century, at about the time that his star was fading in europe. Yet, Spencer’s
argument about the relationship among population size, growth and differ-
entiation was echoed in Durkheim’s more enduring analysis in The Division
of Labor in Society ([1893] 1947); and while Durkheim is highly critical of
Spencer’s individualism and utilitarianism throughout the many footnotes
to Spencer in The Division of Labor in Society, he was generous in his praise
of Spencer in many essays because he recognized that Spencer’s sociology
had an enormous influence on his own intellectual agenda. Within academia,
especially in the United States, the volumes of The Principles of Sociology
were cited as examples of what a science of sociology could accomplish, and
virtually all of the founding generation of American sociologists signed on
to the notion that societies evolve by growing in size and then differentiating
into ever more complex forms. Moreover, many of the founders of American
sociology also adopted Spencer’s notion that the evolution of society is an
outcome of prior evolution in (a) the organic realm and, then, in (b) the
psychological realm. From (a) and (b) evolved human capacities for think-
ing and culture-use.
Most early American sociologists were not, however, trained in science.
They had a distinctly ameliorative and moral orientation in the aftermath
of the American civil War and with the all too many problems associated
with mass immigration and rapid urbanization in the United States. Yet,
despite this “social problems” orientation, Spencer’s epistemology and sub-
stantive principles were used as a legitimizing mantra by early founders try-
ing to make sociology respectable inside academia as it fought for a place
in the rapidly expanding number of colleges and universities, dramatically
stimulated by federal legislation creating, in the mid-nineteenth century,
4. In addition to these volumes, which are folio in size, two unnumbered works
appeared: The Sociology of Islam, 2 vols (1931–33) and The Heritage of Solomon: An
Historical Introduction to the Sociology of Ancient Palestine (1934).
64
the land-grant college system. This same ameliorative orientation still exists
in American sociology in the form of Marxist theory and other forms of
critical thought as well as various forms of sociological practice and public
sociology but, unlike the ameliorative thrust of early sociology in America,
contemporary approaches are dismissive of Spencer’s and comte’s views
that the use of scientific principles is the means for making “a better soci-
ety”. Indeed, Spencer’s ideas are seen as too “conservative” in a left-leaning
discipline like sociology today. but during the last three decades of the nine-
teenth century, sociologists embraced the scientism of comte and Spencer,
as well as their organicism (i.e. social phenomena are superorganisms) and
evolutionism (i.e. societies are getting larger and more complex).
Since most were not scientists by training or even inclination, this legiti-
mizing mantra would be vulnerable once sociology was more securely insti-
tutionalized into American academia. even though sociology in europe
faced similar challenges, early european sociologists were more split on
whether or not sociology could be a true natural science. perhaps this is
why the first department of sociology was created in the United States at
the University of chicago, several years ahead of the first departments in
France, Germany and england, where sociology began. but much of the
epistemological unity among American sociologists in the later nineteenth
century was at the surface and somewhat illusory, although their surface
unity allowed sociology to become institutionalized in American academia
within the first decades of the twentieth century (turner & turner 1990).
We can appreciate Spencer’s influence in the US by seeing how the only
scientifically trained founding sociologist in the United States, Lester Ward,
used Spencer’s ideas. Ward’s great American treatise, Dynamic Sociology
([1882, 1883] 1923), opens with a review of comte and Spencer, and then
turns to Spencer’s law of evolution and first examines “primary” aggrega-
tion of matter in celestial bodies and chemical structures. Then Ward turns
to “secondary” aggregations generating life, organisms, humans and, most
importantly, mind. Finally, Ward argues that from secondary aggregations
emerge social relations mediated by minds capable of language and culture
that, in turn, lead to the evolution of societies. This analysis of Spencer and
comte in volume 1 of Dynamic Sociology is over 700 pages long and, after
this not-so-short “introduction”, volume 2 turns to the substance of sociol-
ogy proper. Thus, in volume 1, Ward had reproduced much of what Spencer
had sought to do with his entire System of Synthetic Philosophy: trace the
evolution of different domains of the universe with an eye to how earlier
evolution aggregated and integrated various types of matter to produce a
species in the organic realm capable of creating societies on a human scale in
the super-organic realm. In the second volume, the Spencerian imagery per-
sists, but Ward introduces the notion of synergy, whereby the compounding
65
of mind and social relations leads to the aggregation of social matter into
institutional systems (e.g. economy, polity, religions, etc.) that organize
individuals’ activities while, at the same time, allowing for the expression
of ideas, feelings and emotions. The evolution of the mind thus creates a
“dynamo” for social activity, and this force drives the formation of superor-
ganisms into ever more complex societal formations. He goes on to empha-
size that this dynamo allows for “telesis”, or the use of disciplined intellect
to use the energy undergirding institutions for creative and well understood
ends: an idea very reminiscent of comte’s advocacy for positivism.
even as Spencer’s ideas penetrated early sociology, sociological the-
ory in both europe and the United States was developing into three basic
approaches. One was the macro-institutional approach of Spencer. Another
was a more mentalistic approach emphasizing human sympathy at the micro,
interpersonal level, as was typified by the works of charles Horton cooley
(1902) and George Herbert Mead (1934) in the US, or Weber’s (1968) turn
to “verstehn analysis” in Germany and later in the rise of German phenom-
enology. A third, more intermediate approach accepted both the macro-
sociology of Spencer and the more micro emphasis of cooley’s and Mead’s
sociology, while gravitating toward this more middle ground, as is evident
in early German institutional analysis, in Durkheim’s ([1912] 1984) and
other French sociologists’ late turn to the psychology of social life as this
affects, and is affected by, macrostructures and culture, and in the sociology
of such rising American stars as Franklin Giddings, who proposed a highly
mentalistic analysis of institutions in Readings in Descriptive and Historical
Sociology (1906).
What emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century, then, was
an uneasy glossing over the differences in macro- and micro-level theoriz-
ing, even as most agreed that sociology can and should be a science. On
the macro side was William Graham Sumner’s and Albert Galloway Keller’s
The Science of Society (1927), which Sumner had begun in 1899. Owing to
declining health, he was forced to take on his former student, Keller, as a co-
author; at the same time, he decided to publish his famous Folkways (1906),
which was originally to be a part of The Science of Society, as a separate,
single-authored book. The Science of Society represents the culmination of
the Spencerian tradition in several senses: it was long (four volumes); it was
filled with ethnographic and historical data, some of which were taken from
Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology; and it followed the movement of societies
from simple to complex forms as a process of successive increases in social
differentiation. even at publication in 1927, the four-volumes of The Science
of Society were considered “old fashioned” by most sociologists (turner &
turner 1990). Sociology had moved on, and increasingly become more ori-
ented to statistical analysis of data. Indeed, Giddings increasingly became
66
the main advocate and prime mover for a sociology that conceptualized the
social universe in terms of “variables” that could be measured and examined
quantitatively. This advocacy, at best, pushed sociology to meso-level analy-
sis, but it also made sociology more micro because sampling and survey
research increasingly became the main tools of sociological analysis of the
empirical world. Increasingly forgotten was the grand scheme of Spencer,
as well as others such as russian immigrant pitirim Sorokin, who tried
unsuccessfully to sustain a macro-level grand theory. Only with the emer-
gence in the 1950s of an American sociologist with graduate training in
Germany, talcott parsons at Harvard, as the leading theorist did the spirit
of Spencerian sociology re-emerge, and while this re-emergence was filled
with ideas from Spencer, few, including parsons himself, seemed to recog-
nize Spencer as the originator of so much functionalist and evolutionary
theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century.
A more methodological legacy from Spencer has also been lost in the
twentieth century. This is the legacy of Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology. Like
so much of Spencer’s work, the inspiration for what eventually became
known as the Human relations Area Files (HrAF) has been lost. As a young
graduate student working with Keller at Yale in 1925, George p. Murdock
clearly had learned about Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology from his mentors
at Yale, and he may even have helped fill The Science of Society with data
from Descriptive Sociology and elsewhere. Murdock clearly understood the
logic of Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology: record data on societies, especially
rapidly vanishing preliterate societies, in terms of a common set of catego-
ries, which in turn would allow for comparative analysis across types of
societies and the use of more statistical analysis of data as “variables”. In
the late 1920s, then, Murdock began to develop the idea for what became
known as the HrAF, which would allow for statistical comparisons among
societies with respect to fundamental properties of their organization. The
early publications on the basic ideas for the files began to come out in the
1930s. The Institute of Human relations had sponsored the HrAF’s prede-
cessor, Murdock’s cross-cultural Survey (see ember 1997 for a history), and
eventually the HrAF was incorporated. by 1949, a consortium of universi-
ties committed to expanding the files on a continuous basis. For many years,
the files were on microfilm, while also appearing in various books written by
Murdock and co-authors. today, the files can be accessed by computers in
over 300 research libraries around the world (see e.g. Murdock et al. 2006).
Had Murdock failed to recognize the significance of what Spencer was
trying to accomplish in the volumes of Descriptive Sociology, this incred-
ibly valuable dataset would never have been created. Yet, like so much of
Spencer’s work, the early influence of Spencer on social science methodol-
ogy has been lost, whether for HrAF or for present-day discussions on the
67
epistemology of science outlined in The Study of Sociology. Still, Spencer’s

legacy lives on in HrAF and, currently, it is his most widely used contribu-
tion to social science, even if virtually all social sciences have no clue of their
ultimate origins in Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology.
The theoretical legacy today from The Principles of Sociology
now, let me turn to the legacy of Spencer’s more substantive theoretical work
where, once again, his ideas remain unknown among most sociologists, even
though they were the original inspiration for scholars working in the present
day. Thus, much like HrAF, Spencer’s theoretical contributions are still part
of sociology, even if others do not recognize their origins.
A great deal of theorizing in sociology simply does not recognize that
the origins of some of sociology’s most fundamental theoretical principles
come from Spencer. Moreover, many of Spencer’s ideas have had be “redis-
covered” decades, even a century, after their original formulation: a rather
dramatic waste of intellectual effort that tells us how fragile is the process
of knowledge accumulation in sociology. When Spencer is read today, it is
more in the history of ideas than for the power of his theoretical principles
to explain the operation of the social universe. For the remainder of this
chapter, then, I shall outline in broad strokes for a more general audience
the key ideas in Spencer’s sociology that are still relevant for explaining the
operative dynamics of the social universe. Indeed, compared to other can-
onized figures in sociology – whether St Marx, St Weber, St Durkheim, St
Mead or a number of others – Spencer’s sociology was not fully mined by
early sociologists such as Ward, Sumner, Keller, Giddings and many oth-
ers who had at least read Spencer. Of course, in a contemporary academic
world, virtually no sociologists still read Spencer, so have literally “missed
out” on a goldmine of theoretical ideas and abstract principles waiting to be
rediscovered and used in developing theoretical explanations on the opera-
tive dynamics of societies.
Population growth and differentiation
As noted earlier, the most basic law in Spencer’s sociology is the relationship
between size of social systems and their level of differentiation. borrowing
from Thomas Malthus’s (1798) famous essay on population as well as Auguste
comte’s sociology (1830–42), Spencer argued that as populations grow in
size, there are selection pressures for them to differentiate into ever more
structural units and the attending culture of these units, and to then integrate
68
these units into a more “coherent” social whole during differentiation and
integration to a new level of complexity. He used an idea best developed in
his The Principles of Biology (1864–67): the larger the “social mass” of an
organism becomes, the more it must be supported by an increasingly com-
plex skeleton, which, when applied to superorganisms, is conceptualized as
the social structure. Moreover, as populations differentiate, they do so along
four axes,3 which Spencer saw as fundamental needs for adequate levels of
(1) production, (2) reproduction, (3) regulation and (4) distribution. Looked
at from a functionalist theoretical perspective, these are the requisites that
all social systems or superorganisms must meet in order to survive, repro-
duce and remain viable in their environments. These are defined in table
4.1. From a more evolutionary perspective, these axes can be seen as focus
points of “selection pressures” on a population, which is more in tune with
Spencer’s intent. That is, as populations grow, these four basic needs generate
selection pressures and put increasing pressure on members of a population
and the social units organizing this population to develop:
– new means for producing necessary materials for human and social-
unit survival (production);
– new means for training incumbents in the more complex social
order and for assuring that social units themselves can be sustained
(reproduction);
– new means for distributing information, people and resources among
members of the population and the social units organizing their activi-
ties (distribution); and
– new modes of regulation through the consolidation and use of power
as well as legitimizing symbol systems or ideologies for controlling and
coordinating individuals and corporate actors (regulation).
If these selection pressures are not adequately addressed, then the disinte-
gration or dissolution of the population is likely or, in its weakened state,
conquest of a society by a larger and better organized society becomes ever
more likely.
As individuals and collective actors respond to selection pressures,
societal evolution goes through a series of stages from leaderless nomadic
hunter-gatherers through hunter-gatherers with a leader (sometimes called
3. Spencer tended to collapse production and reproduction into what he variously

called “the sustaining system” or the “operative system”. Hence, there were only three
axes of differentiation: operation, regulation and distribution. I have broken the
sustaining or operative system out into separate axes – thus making four – because
Spencer tended to talk about them separately.
69
Table 4.1 The four sources of selection pressures for societal differentiation.
1. production revolving around the gathering of resources and their conversion
into usable resources for sustaining a population (operation).
2. reproduction Structures for creating new members of the population and for
sustaining as well as creating the social structures and cultures
organizing their activities (operation).
3. regulation The consolidation of power and authority as well as cultural
symbols (e.g. ideologies and beliefs) to control and coordinate
individual and corporate-units activities.
4. Distribution (a) The development of infrastructures for moving persons,
information and resources in geographical space.
(b) The development of mechanisms for exchanges of resources
among individuals and corporate units in a population.
“big Man” systems in anthropology), and then on to compound (horti-

culture), double-compound (agrarian), and treble-compound (industrial)
societal formations. presumably, if Spencer lived today he would have pos-
ited yet another compounding for a post-industrial stage. Thus, evolution is
growth in the size and degree of differentiation between structures and their
cultures devoted to production, reproduction, distribution and regulation
as well as internal differentiation along these axes. For example, as societies
grow and differentiate, they expand their distributive infrastructures and
markets to increase the circulation of ever more diverse types of informa-
tion, persons and social units, and resources. Or, as the size of the popula-
tion increases and as it differentiates, production must also increase with
new technologies and capital formations (both physical and human capital)
to provide the goods and services, increasingly delivered through markets
and distributive infrastructures, to the more diverse population and units
organizing members of this population. And, most importantly, as popula-
tions grow, the regulation or coordinating and controlling members of this
population and the units in which these diverse members are organized
force the consolidation of power into larger, more complex political forma-
tions, although Spencer also argued that these formations should not be
allowed to become so powerful that they destroy the dynamism of markets
and the innovations that free markets inevitably encourage.
The basic principle, then, underlying all of Spencer’s sociological theoriz-
ing can be stated simply: differentiation of a population is a positive func-
tion of population size and rate of growth. As populations differentiate, they
respond to selection pressures along the four axes of differentiation: produc-
tion, reproduction, distribution and regulation. each stage of evolution can
be typified by its pattern of integration of institutional systems along the
four axes of societal differentiation defined in table 4.1.
70
The dynamics of power
Most sociologists fail to recognize that Spencer was as much a theorist of

power as anything else. contemporary sociologists tend to focus on the sim-
plicity of the organismic analogy (a mere fourteen pages in a 2000-plus-pages
set of volumes) in which Spencer outlined the points of similarity and diver-
gence between organisms and superorganisms. They argue that Spencer, in
using this analogy, became a naive functionalist seeing social structures as
essential to the survival of societies, thereby making him an implicit advo-
cate of the status quo and, hence, a political conservative. And they will cite
Spencer’s work on ethics as “proof ” of this right-wing conservatism. If this is
not enough to stigmatize Spencer, they will also emphasize that he analysed
only evolutionary rather than revolutionary change, and conveniently ignore
the many hundreds of pages in The Principles of Sociology analysing inequal-
ity, power and conflict. All this comes from the simple fact that sociologists
do not actually read Spencer’s sociology but, instead, continue to pass on past
criticisms of Spencer in an oral tradition worthy of preliterate peoples who
have no written texts to guide them.
In fact, as much as Spencer was critical of power in the modern world,
his entire corpus of work places power at the centre of all societal dynam-
ics. For example, Spencer’s most famous phrase, and one of the most famous
phrases of all time, the “survival of the fittest”, is used in his sociology as a
means for addressing the evolution of societies through successive waves
of conquest and empire formation. Spencer argued that larger, more inte-
grated, more productive and more politically organized societies will gen-
erally win wars against those societies that are not as large, productive or
politically organized.
As the winners use their power to control conquered peoples or to incor-
porate them into their institutional systems, power continues to be mobi-
lized (as retained energy from conquest) to regulate or integrate the new
and now larger, more diverse society. And, if there are differences that mark
cleavages in the social order or inequalities among subpopulations or classes
in a society, these must be managed by the further consolidation and cen-
tralization of power. Thus, the long-term evolution of societies from simple
to complex forms is only possible with a dramatic expansion of regulatory
functions revolving around the mobilization of power, with successive con-
quests by more powerful societies ratcheting up the complexity of human
societies from hunting and gathering to the industrial systems of Spencer’s
time; and “the retained motion” of the energy inherent in mobilization for
conquest is then used to build up systems of power that also operate as a
mechanism of societal integration that gives the social mass “coherence”
even as it becomes larger and more complex.
71
It is not difficult to find what seem to be anti-power and anti-governmental

statements in Spencer, but these must be placed in context. Spencer was very
much against british colonialism because he felt that it encouraged the over-
mobilization of the coercive and administrative bases of power. And, once
mobilized, power of a colonial hegemon will increasingly be used in poten-
tially harmful ways. First, power is used to usurp resources and thereby
increase inequalities and the level of internal threats (from protests if not
revolutionary potential) arising from the increased stratification, which
in turn causes the further centralization of power to repress these threats.
power can thereby be set on a self-escalating and self-destructive course
revolving around (a) consolidation of power, (b) use of power to usurp
resources, (c) growing inequality and internal and external threats, and (d)
mobilization of even more power to control threats, ironically (e) generat-
ing a new level of inequality that only intensifies threats. Once this ever
escalating pattern of power-threat-more power is set, the collapse of a politi-
cal regime is virtually assured in the long run. Second, centralized power
biases political decision-making towards coercive strategies in geopolitics
and in domestic politics. The result is that alternatives to coercion, such
as co-optation, bargaining, incentivizing and other non-coercive means for
regulating a population are not used. In many ways, Spencer’s arguments
against the evils of colonialism anticipate similar arguments used against
the “military–industrial complex” in contemporary societies and their bias-
ing effects on geopolitical decisions away from bargaining and compromise
towards warfare.
Moreover, and this is Spencer’s third concern about colonialism, con-
centrated power will, over time, decrease the capital available to the private
economy because coercion and its administration are expensive and simply
consume capital that could be made available for innovation and creativ-
ity in a market-driven economy, an argument that is as relevant today as
it was in the 1950s when president Dwight e. eisenhower first floated the
concept of “military–industrial complex”. Thus, much as was the case with
the Soviet Union and eastern bloc societies during the cold War, a coercive
state engaged in over-administrating economic activities destroys incentives
for innovations while over-regulating markets to the point where the state
determines supply (almost without much consideration of demand). In the
end, such political systems stagnate the economy and increase discontent
and internal threats that, together, lead to more use of coercive and adminis-
trative power, up to the point where, as was evident with the Soviet empire,
the society and its empire proved unviable, especially in competition with
the more productive western alliance.
There are many more faces of power in the pages of The Principles of
Sociology, and so I should distinguish among them in a more systematic
72
way. Let me begin with Spencer’s view of power dynamics during societal
evolution and then return to supplement the brief review above on Spencer’s
analysis of geopolitics, his model of political dialectics and, finally, his model
of power and stratification.
Power and evolution
power evolves along the axes of regulation as societies move from simple to
more complex forms. Spencer’s model is represented in Figure 4.1. population
growth starts the process of differentiation because growth generates selec-
tion pressures along all fronts: production, reproduction, distribution and
regulation (see table 4.1). If a population cannot respond to these pressures,
the level of disintegrative potential increases; and Spencer correctly empha-
sized that disintegration of a society is as likely as evolution to new levels of
complexity. Of particular importance in Spencer’s analysis are the selection
pressures generated by regulation as a force in societies. If a population can-
not successively consolidate bases of power to regulate the larger population
and to coordinate its differentiated activities, disintegration from within and/
or conquest from without become ever more likely. Thus, inherent in the
evolution from simple to more complex forms of sociocultural organization
is the evolution of power that is eventually institutionalized in a state as socie-
ties move through the agrarian phase of evolution. Without this institution-
alization, societies cannot grow or become very complex because they lack
the regulatory capacity of polity and associated institutional systems like law.
power is not “bad” per se, but instead essential to viable societies. Still, some
forms of power consolidation are more adaptive than others.
Spencer appears to have argued that mobilization of coercive and admin-
istrative power are essential during early phases of evolution when socie-
ties are competing with each other for resources. but as new distributive
systems emerge – technologies, infrastructures and markets – for moving
resources, information and people about societies and between societies,
an alternative mechanism for regulation is created. Indeed, markets tend
to institutionalize competition within and between societies, often by the
use of law, thereby decreasing the need to rely on coercive force to regulate
social relations.
Spencer did not go as far as Adam Smith and posit an “invisible hand
of order” but he recognized that dynamic markets – both domestic and
global – cannot operate effectively with a heavy hand of state coercion and
administration; so the more distributive infrastructures develop (especially
with advances in communications and transportation infrastructures) and
the more markets become somewhat autonomous from detailed regulation
73
population
growth
Differentiation
of social
structure and allows
culture for
further
problems of
integration
increases
potential for
disintegration
Selection
pressures to
failure find solutions success
collapse/ concentration of
conquestion by power: structural
other socieites interdependencies
destroys
coherence/
adaptation
Figure 4.1 Spencer’s general model of evolution.
by the state, the more the state itself must be transformed from a coercive–
administrative base of organization towards one based on the use of market
incentives, co-optive strategies, positivistic law and other less direct mecha-
nisms for coordination and control. Spencer did not use this vocabulary
but it is clearly what he had in mind. Thus, as societies became highly com-
plex with industrialization, using markets and distributive infrastructures
to move materials, resources, information and people about territories, the
state needs to develop policies that encourage this kind of distributive activ-
ity. In so doing, polity can more effectively and flexibly regulate relations in
highly differentiated populations, thereby making societies more integrated
74
and “coherent”. to the degree that the most advanced society in the world
during Spencer’s time – england – was relying on coercive and adminis-
trative power, Spencer felt that colonialism was working against long-term
adaptation to the changing world environment.
Spencer probably overemphasized the amount of coercion and admin-
istrative control of colonies by england because a great deal of co-optation
was involved; and, as was evident all too soon, england did not have suffi-
cient coercive power to put down movements for independence once it had
to fight on multiple fronts across the british empire. england’s population
was not big enough to impose its coercive will across the globe for long;
it simply could not put enough coercive power in the field when the field
consisted of far-flung colonial holdings where, in the end, “boots on the
ground” are critical for holding territories. but Spencer’s more theoretical
and general points remain true: the institutionalization of power is essential
to societal growth and complexity, and with high levels of complexity, older
patterns of state formation revolving around coercion and high levels of
administrative control must give way to more open and democratic politi-
cal formations relying on market incentives, law and symbolic means for
regulating social relations.
Geopolitics and power
As noted above, Spencer argued that once a coercive base of power is built
up, it will be overused in both domestic and geopolitical activities. The mobi-
lization of coercive power is expensive, and thus forces polity to tax and oth-
erwise usurp resource from its general population or conquered territories
to finance the coercive arm of government and the inevitable large admin-
istrative bureaucracy that comes with consolidation of the coercive base of
power. The result is an increase in inequalities, generating internal threats
and, if the resources of conquered people have been usurped, external threats
that force even more consolidation of coercion and administration. This
cycle can ratcheted up to the point where societies face fiscal crises, coupled
with intensified threats from inside and/or outside their home bases, thereby
hastening their internal disintegration and/or conquest by a more powerful
society or empire.
Moreover, once in place, a coercive force will be used in external engage-
ments since actors in the coercive branch of government gain prestige,
potential wealth, promotions and other rewards by being successful in
conquests. Hence, they are likely to lobby political decision-makers to use
coercion in external engagements in their geopolitical environment and,
if successful in these initial engagements, they now have a convincing
75
argument for further engagements. but, as power is used in the geopoliti-

cal arena, a number of forces are quietly working to erode this geopolitical
power. In Spencer’s view, the size and scale of the territories that now needed
to be regulated have increased. Hence, the logistical loads on polity and its
coercive-administrative base of power have also increased dramatically. At
some point, these loads will exceed the regulatory capacity of a hegemon.
Second, the diversity of the populations to be regulated increases with con-
quests; and this diversity by culture, traditions, religion, ethnicity, class and
other dimensions of difference will eventually exceed the regulatory capac-
ity of the hegemon. Third, to finance social control, usurption of resources
within a hegemon’s home base and conquered territories increases inequali-
ties and resentments of populations to the point of, once again, exceeding
the control capacity of the state. Fourth, as states build empires outwards
from their home base, the logistical lines of communication and transpor-
tation are taxed to the point of reducing regulatory control. Fifth, just as
the state moves out beyond its capacities for social control, it often comes
into contact with another advancing empire, thereby setting into motion a
destructive “showdown” war between two empires. And if the war is lost,
the empire implodes back towards its home base, and with this implosion
comes political instability as the legitimacy of the state is rapidly eroded.
For Spencer, then, there is a cyclical and rhythmic nature to conquest:
size and complexity of the population to be regulated are built up by con-
quest, but at some point logistical loads are exceeded, with the result that
the larger sociocultural formation collapses or is conquered (in Spencerian
terms, the “retained energy” is insufficient to create or sustain “coherence”
of the “social mass”). Still, long-term societal evolution has been driven by
these geopolitical dynamics in several senses. If one geopolitical formation
is weakened and conquered by another advancing empire, the scale and
complexity of societies continues to increase. And, even it both societies
collapse from such geopolitical activities, knowledge about how to control
larger territories and their populations has been gained, and it will be used
in later geopolitical activities by a society or other societies – thereby keep-
ing constant pressure on human populations to grow and increase their
complexity. So evolution of human populations – with evolution being
defined as movement from small, homogeneous to larger, more complex
formations – is driven by geopolitics, at least up to industrial capitalism.
With treble compounding or industrialism, Spencer hoped that free mar-
kets, democratic government and positivistic law could substitute for over-
use of coercive power and geopolitical conquest. Much like Marx, Spencer
saw capitalism as ushering in new potential for human societies, not so much
by the revolutionary potential inhering in capitalism but by its evolutionary
potential to reduce coercive and administrative bases of power in the state
76
that, in turn, would free up markets to generate wealth and encourage further
technological innovations. For Marx, capitalism allowed for sufficient pro-
ductivity to meet human needs but its demise by revolution would require a
temporary “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the post-revolutionary phase,
whereas, for Spencer, capitalism would evolve into a more democratic state
relying on the capital and wealth created by markets. both were probably
wrong in many details, but my sense is that Spencer’s prognosis for industrial
(and post-industrial) capitalism was closer to what actually transpired. The
transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Marx’s evolutionary scheme
became a dictatorship of state bureaucrats and new communist party elites,
but the rigidity of the system led it to its collapse as productivity stagnated
and resentments built up. In fact, only when the door was opened for invest-
ments, free markets and technologies from the West did the system become
more dynamic. Spencer would have predicted this course of events because
of what he saw as the inherently dialectical character of power.
The dialectics of power
Spencer also had a dialectical view of power as moving between centralized

and less centralized profiles. power centralizes in order to regulate a popu-
lation by providing a new base of integration through the administration of
power and production of conservative ideologies but, over time, centralized
power generates resentments over taxation and over-control of individual
and corporate-unit activities. pressures for deregulation begin to build up,
and whether through protests or more democratic means, power is decen-
tralized; and once decentralized, differentiation and diversification of social
units can increase. but differentiation and diversification create integrative
problems; and as differentiation continues, pressures from regulation as a
selection force increase because social relations become too chaotic and
because existing integrative mechanisms are increasingly ineffective. The
result is a movement towards more centralization of power and tighter politi-
cal control of activities in a society, which will eventually set into motion
pressures to decentralize power. Spencer saw the history of societies as mov-
ing back and forth between relatively centralized and decentralized profiles,
in a constant dialectic inhering in the very nature of power as a regulatory
force. He thus anticipated Vilfredo pareto’s ([1901] 1968) analysis of shifts in
types of political elites by at least a decade, although his scheme did not fully
realize the importance of phases in this cycle in which beliefs and politics
evidence somewhat different phases in the movement from centralized to
decentralized power. Spencer’s dialectical model of the movement of power
from centralized to more decentralized profiles is outlined in Figure 4.2.
77
problems
of societal
integration
pressures for
Differentiation/
consolidation and
diversification
regulation of diverse
of social units
social units
Decentralization of centralization of
power and authority power and authority
(industrial) (militant)
High levels of regulation

pressures for
of productive,
deregulation
reproductive and
distributive processes
problems of
stagnation and
resentment by virtue
of over-regulation
Figure 4.2 cycle phases of political centralization and decentralization.
It is in this context that I should introduce Spencer’s often-cited distinc-

tion between “militant” and “industrial” societies, which some commenta-
tors mistake as an evolutionary sequence (presumably because they have
not read Spencer carefully). For Spencer, the distinction refers to the move-
ment between centralized and decentralized power, which can occur at any
stage of societal evolution after leaderless hunting and gathering. table 4.2
summarizes Spencer’s intent by outlining the profile of centralized (militant)
and decentralized (industrial) societies with reference to the axes of dif-
ferentiation in evolving societies. Militant societies are always centralized
because they must deal with conflict and war, whereas industrial or, what
he really meant, “industrious societies” are not centralized and allow indi-
viduals and corporate units considerable freedom of activity. Thus, at any
stage of societal evolution, societies can be militant or industrial, depending
78
Table 4.2 Spencer’s typology of militant and industrial societies.

basic system processes Militant Industrial
1. regulatory processes
a. Societal goals Defence and war Internal productivity and
provision of services
b. political organization centralized, authoritarian Less centralized; less direct
authority over system units
2. Operative processes (production/distribution)
a. Individuals High degrees of control Freedom from extensive
by state; high levels of controls by state; less
stratification stratification
b. Social structures coordinated to meet coordinated to facilitate each
politically established goals structure’s expansion and
of war and defence growth
3. Distributive processes
a. Flow of materials From organizations to state; From organizations to other
from state to individuals and units and individuals
other social units
b. Flow of information From state to individuals both individuals to state and
state to individuals
on the dialectics of power and the conditions in their environments. These

determine whether a horticultural, agrarian or industrial society will evi-
dence a militant or industrial profile; and while he hoped that industrial
capitalist societies would be “industrial” in the sense portrayed in table
4.2, he worried about the effects of warfare or threats of warfare that would
come with colonialism on the conversion of industrial england to a more
militant political profile. The basic generalization in his analysis was articu-
lated by Georg Simmel, and it still rings true: the degree of threat perceived
to exist within a society or externally in the environment of a society gener-
ates pressures for centralization of power into a more “militaristic” profile –
whatever its state of complexity – and the tighter control of activities within
the society. At some point, this centralized profile kicks off the dialectics of
power, as pressures built up for less control and regulation.
The legacy of biological reasoning in Spencer’s sociology
For over a hundred years, sociologists have been suspicious of any intel-
lectual activity that makes reference to biology. Such references are seen
as reductionistic and scare sociologists into believing that their field will
79
be subsumed under biology. These fears are only intensified with extreme
arguments in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that have proposed
such a programme – primarily by the arrogance of their framers, who have
hardly read any sociology (e.g. Wilson 1978, 1978, 1980; barkow et al.
1992). but, such efforts intimidate sociologists who generally know little
about evolutionary theory in biology. It is perhaps somewhat ironic that
Spencer’s use of organicism and biological thinking (of his time) actually
provides sociology with a sound defence of sociologistic thinking while at
the same time offering sociologists a means for engaging evolutionary theo-
rizing in biology.
When Spencer employed the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his soci-
ology, he tended to use this phrase in the context of geopolitics, especially
when societies are in conflict. true, he also used it in other ways to mean
“selecting out” individuals, but less so in his sociology than in other places.
What he was denoting by this idea is a selectionist argument; that is, com-
petition among social units for resources and selection among these units in
terms of their relative success in securing resources are fundamental process
of the not only the biotic universe, and but also the super-organic universe.
Superorganisms are thus part of a universe where the laws of evolution can-
not be obviated. Thus, social units – from groups and organizations to whole
societies – are often in competition for resources; and the more organized
and productive is a social unit, the more likely will it be able to sustain
itself in its environment. Those that cannot survive competition either die
or move to a new environment where they can secure resources. Such is the
basic argument of all ecological theories in sociology; and Spencer antici-
pated these lines of theorizing by thirty years. So as long as it is recognized
that competition and selection are not the only dynamics governing the
operation of superorganisms, it is quite appropriate to have a sociology that
pays attention to selection processes. This is where biology and sociology
meet most comfortably and appropriately.
A second line of argument has been controversial in biology, although
more recently even such staunch advocates as e. O. Wilson (2012) have
come around to, in essence, Herbert Spencer’s position. For Spencer, selec-
tion occurs not so much among individual organisms (although he did not
rule this out), but among superorganisms, which is another way of seeing
the units of selection as corporate units that are organized in some fash-
ion. This is a view of what is termed “group selection” in biology has been
resisted but, increasingly, many evolutionary theorists are coming round to
the more sociological point: the organization of organisms is, just like the
body is for the genome, a “survivor machine” that also sustains the genome
of a species – often much more effectively than can the body, which is
highly vulnerable to injury, death and extinction. Society as a whole and its
80
institutional systems are survivor machines, and are subject to selection vis-
à-vis other societies or the physical–biotic environments. bodies are housed
in groups, and groups are embedded inside organizations that are located
in communities, and each type of corporate unit – that is, groups, organi-
zations, communities – are survivor machines, as is the outcome of their
being embedded in each other. Thus, corporate units are embedded in even
larger survivor machines such as basic institutional systems – for example,
economy, polity, kinship – that are lodged inside societies and even inter-
societal systems as yet a another level of survivor machine. This is true not
only for human organisms but also any organism that is organized; it is
thus the organization of organisms, or superorganisms, that is often the unit
of selection, as much as the body of individual organisms. bodies exist in
groups, which exist in organizations, which exist in communities, which
exist inside institutions, which exist inside societies, which exist inside inter-
societal systems; so there are many layers of survival machines protecting
the genome. The body is just the first level; sociology is about all the other
levels – an insight Spencer had over a hundred years ago.
When societies go to war, for example, it is the organization and culture
of the societies that is at stake and subject to selection from warfare, which
is simply another form of competition in the universe of superorganisms.
The same is true of ant colonies that fight it out for supremacy in a given
territory; and after a hundred years of rejecting “group selectionist” argu-
ments, biology is coming round to recognizing that such is often the nature
of selection in the biotic world. It is almost always the nature of selection in
the sociocultural world because humans are typified by their embeddedness
in layers of sociocutlural survivor machines. Thus a biology like sociobiol-
ogy, or even evolutionary psychology, that still views selection as working
on individuals or just kin relations rather than ever larger collective units of
organization, is not only outmoded in the social sciences but is becoming
outmoded even in bio-ecology, where the conceptual tide is turning on the
question of group versus individual selection.
So, just as Spencer was not afraid of bringing biology into sociology, so
other more contemporary sociologists should not be fearful. Indeed, soci-
ology has a lot to contribute to biology because the dynamics of superor-
ganisms – whether ant colonies, flocks, prides, troops, pods or societies of
humans – are different from the dynamics outlined by Darwin and carried
forth by dogma within biology. The distribution of genes among a species
often reflects selection on collective units, as much as individual members of
a species. Selection is a fundamental process that was once given some cre-
dence in early American sociology textbooks around the turn of the twenti-
eth century, but sociology lost sight of this force in the social universe, even
as it became the centrepiece of new ecological approaches in urban ecology
81
(e.g. Hawley 1981) and later organizational ecology (Hannan & Freeman
1989) in sociology. Spencer’s ideas lead the way, I think, back to a more bio-
logically informed sociology, which it is hoped will no longer be so insecure
about its place at the table of science.
The legacy of Spencer’s analysis of institutional systems
A majority of the pages in The Principles of Sociology are devoted to the

analysis of institutions – kinship, religion, economy and polity – as the core
structures of ever differentiating societies. Sociology has tended to lose sight
of a simple fact: institutions are emergent social structures, with distinctive
cultures, that order social relations among all other types of social units and
the individuals in these units. Institutions are major integrative mechanisms,
as well as being nodes of sociocultural differentiation among social units. In
recent decades sociology has been biased towards the analysis of organiza-
tions. Some have termed this shift “the new institutionalism” but the analy-
sis is really not very institutional but instead a middle-range empirical and
theoretical approach that describes organizations in “their environments”,
which consist of other organizations. Lost in all this meso-level analysis is
a sense for how institutional systems are integrated by structural relations
among their constituent corporate units and their unique systems of culture.
A reading of Spencer will, I think, quickly bring sociology back to its senses.
Institutions are real; they are emergent; and they are not just a pile of
organizations. They are systems that organize corporate units for dealing
with particular adaptive problems, as Spencer so clearly recognized (see
Abrutyn & turner [2011] for more details on the need to revive institu-
tional analysis so evident in Spencer’s work). And hence, they must be ana-
lysed separately from constituent corporate units because their emergent
properties become the environments to which all other types of social units
must adapt.
Ceremonial institutions
Spencer’s theorizing was decidedly macro-level but, in his analysis of insti-

tutions, he emphasized that there is a more micro-basis of the institutional
order. Macro-institutional systems, he appeared to argue, are founded on
“pre-institutional” ceremonial behaviours revolving around (a) forms of
address and talk, (b) deference, (c) demeanour, (d) ritualized exchanges of
greetings, (e) badges of honour and dishonour, (f) fashion and dress, (g)
titles, and other means for ordering interactions. Individuals “present them-
82
selves” through their demeanour, deference, fashion, forms of talk, badges,

titles and rituals; and, in so doing, they seek to maintain a status order and to
establish expectations for how others behave. Without this control of social
relations through ceremonial actions and symbols, larger institutional forms
cannot be sustained. These ideas are, of course, very contemporary and antic-
ipate by almost a century much micro-sociology today (e.g. r. collins 2004),
and perhaps not so surprisingly given the contemporary avoidance Spencer’s
works, citations to Spencer will be sparse and almost nonexistent in these
theories on micro-processes. Indeed, I cannot recall that I have ever seen one
citation in micro-sociology to Spencer’s discussion of deference and demean-
our rituals, despite the fact that these are central to present-day sociological
analyses of face-to-face interaction.
Spencer was particularly interested in the effects of inequalities on cer-
emonial processes, especially inequalities generated by the centralization
of power. And he developed a number of useful generalization from this
analysis, including:
1. The greater the centralization of power in a society, the greater will be

the level of inequalities, and, hence, the more will people at the micro-
level of interaction be concerned with symbols and ceremonial markers
and actions signalling differences in social rank.
2. The greater the concern over rank, the more will people at differ-
ent ranks possess distinctive objects and titles to mark their respec-
tive ranks, and the more will interactions among people of different
rank be ritualized by standardized forms of address as well as highly
scripted and stereotypical patters of deference and demeanour
behaviours.
3. And conversely, the less the degree of political centralization and
the greater the level of equality in a society, the less will individuals
be concerned about the symbols and ceremonies demarking rank,
and the less will such symbols and ceremonies regulate face-to-face
interactions.
These are generalizations that were rediscovered by scholars such as erving

Goffman (1967) and randall collins (1975, 2004) in the twentieth century,
but they were available to sociologists before Émile Durkheim published The
Division of Labor in 1892.
83
Domestic Institutions (kinship)
From the data in Descriptive Sociology (see note 2), Spencer recognized that
institutional activities were embedded within the kinship systems of prelit-
erate populations. Much of the subsequent evolution of humans societies,
then, involved the differentiation out of kinship (a reproductive structure) of
the new institutional orders that would meet selection pressures for produc-
tion, distribution, and regulation as societies grew. Still, kinship remained
a key regulatory and productive structure through horticulture since eco-
nomic and political actions often occurred with the structure of kinship.
For its time, Spencer’s analysis of kinship is extremely sophisticated, eas-
ily rivalling that of some of the major early kinship theorists in anthropol-
ogy. Among the interesting generalizations that he articulated are: (a) in the
absence of alternative ways of organizing a population, kinship will become
the principle mechanisms of social integration; (b) the larger the population
in which the conditions in (a) prevail, the more elaborate will the kinship
system become and, hence, the more will this system reveal explicit rules of
descent, marriage, endogamy and exogamy; and (c), societies engaged in
perpetual conflict will tend to create a patrilineal descent system and patriar-
chal authority and, as a consequence, such societies will reveal more inequal-
ity between the sexes and will be more likely to define and treat women as
property. (This last generalization holds more for land-based populations
than island-based societies engaged in long-distance warfare across water,
but the generalization shows Spencer’s concern with how conflict, power
and inequality pervades his analysis of institutional systems, including his
analysis of ceremonial institutions outlined above.)
Political institutions
As might be expected of a scholar concerned with power, Spencer’s analy-

sis of polity is rather extensive and contributes to the generalizations that
I attributed to Spencer earlier. In Spencer’s view, unbridled self-interest
within societies and hostility with neighbouring societies have been the
prime forces behind the formation and elaboration of governmental struc-
tures. All such governmental structures evidence common features, includ-
ing: (a) paramount leaders; (b) clusters of sub-leaders and administrators;
(c) large masses of followers who subordinate some of their interests to the
dictates of leaders; and (d) legitimizing beliefs and values that give leaders
“the right” to regulate others. Once governmental structures exist, they are
self-perpetuating and will expand unless they collapse internally for lack
of legitimacy or are destroyed by conquest from without by other societies.
84
War and threats of war centralize government around the use of force
to conquer additional territories, to defend the homeland, and to regulate
productive and reproductive processes within a territory. As government
expands under threats, even manufactured threats by political leaders,
inequality within a society will inevitably increase, thereby creating class
divisions that political leaders often exploit for their own self-interested pur-
poses. Among the many interesting generalizations produced in his analysis
of governmental institutions, let me just summarize three:
– The larger a population becomes and the greater the volume of inter-
nal transactions among individuals and the units organizing individu-
als, the more intense will be the selection pressures for governmental
regulation and the larger will be the size of government and the more
internally differentiated will government become.
– The greater the potential for conflict with other societies or for conflict
among classes and other nodes of differentiation within a society, the
more centralized will government become, and the more will govern-
ment rely on expanded coercive and administrative capacities.
– The greater the centralization of government, the more visible and antag-
onistic will class division become, and the more likely are these divisions
to generate high potential or actual internal conflict within a society.
Religious or ecclesiastical institutions
Spencer wrote extensively on religion, not only at the beginning of The

Principles of Sociology but also in later parts devoted to institutional analy-
sis. He emphasized that all religions reveal certain common elements: (a)
beliefs about supernatural forces and beings inhabiting a supernatural realm;
(b) organized communities of worshippers who share these beliefs; and (c)
ritual activities devoted to summoning intervention by the beings and forces
of the supernatural realm in worldly affairs. religious institutional systems
exist in all societies because they reinforce cultural values and beliefs through
the presumed monitoring of human activities by supernatural forces and
the sanctioning power of these forces; and, moreover, religion strengthens
the structural relations regulated by these beliefs, particularly those rela-
tions revolving around power and inequality, by making them seem to be
natural and to be sanctioned by the forces and beings of the supernatural
realm. Spencer saw religion as evolving out of ancestor worship (a view that
is no longer accepted, though still provocative) into an ever larger system of
bureaucratic structures interwoven with the structures of polity; and this line
of emphasis led him to posit the following generalizations:
85
– The greater the level of warfare and conquest by a society, the more
complex become the religious beliefs of the diverse religions in a terri-
tory, and the more likely is a priestly class within ecclesiastical bureauc-
racies to emerge to reconcile religious beliefs and practices, thereby
creating polytheistic religious formations in larger societies built by
conquest.
– The more centralized is government in such societies and the greater
the level of inequalities evident in a society, the more will this priestly
class be used to create a coherent pantheon of ranked deities.
– The more government relies on this priestly class to provide legitimi-
zation through complex systems of religious beliefs and symbols, the
more able is this class to extract wealth and privilege from political
leaders and the general population, thereby consolidating their dis-
tinctive class position and creating an elaborate bureaucratic structure
organizing religious activity.
– The more centralized are governmental structures and the more polity
relies on religious legitimization of its rights to power, the more prob-
able is a religious revolt against the state religion, and the more likely
is this revolt to seek to create a simplified and monotheistic religion.
Economic institutions
The evolution of economic institutional systems for Spencer revolves

around: (a) the expansion technologies or knowledge about how to manip-
ulate the environment; (b) production and distribution of goods and serv-
ices; (c) the accumulation of greater amounts of capital or the tools of
production; and (d) the expansion of the labour force and the structures
organizing labour or human capital. These elements are critical to human
adaptation to their environments, so it is not surprising that there are con-
stant selection pressures from production and distribution as a population
continues to grow. Ironically, even as warfare generates selection pressures
for increases in military technologies and hardware, war and the centraliza-
tion of power slow the rate and degree of economic evolution because eco-
nomic goals revolve around military production, with the consequence that
economic output must be often kept secret and/or destroyed in conflict with
other societies. The result is that war depletes the amount of capital avail-
able for domestic production and innovation, suppresses people’s needs and
wants (hence domestic market demand), and mobilizes labour for military
production while killing off much of the productive labour force in war-
fare. Only in times of relative peace, Spencer argued, will economic growth
increase.
86
While these argument have a modern flavour in critiques of the mili-

tary–industrial complex, they are not well developed in Spencer’s rather
weak analysis of the economy. clearly, he felt more comfortable when
writing about power and inequality and how these affect institutions at
all levels, from the micro-level ceremonies sustaining institutions to the
structure and culture of macro-level institutions. We can see this in his
rather detailed analysis of kinship, polity and religion, but for some rea-
son near the end of The Principles of Sociology, Spencer appeared to pull
back and not develop any new or even particularly interesting generaliza-
tion beyond those already enumerated in this section and other sections of
this chapter. I suspect that he had, by this time, moved on to the beginning
volume of his The Principles of Ethics, pushing hard to complete the execu-
tion of his System of Synthetic Philosophy. He had finished the project half
a decade before his death in 1903, and he had left funds to continue the
volumes of Descriptive Sociology. Indeed, the first parts of The Principles of
Ethics were published as a separate book, titled The Data of Ethics, just to
emphasize the continuity of his analysis of ethics with volumes on science
in his System of Synthetic Philosophy, where these early section on “the data
of ” are actually a conceptualization about the fundamental properties of
the universe being theorized, whether ethnical, psychological, biological or
sociological.
Conclusion
Like most sociologists, I had many prejudices against Spencer’s work before
I sat down to read his sociology. I was a relatively young scholar at the time,
and after reading The Study of Sociology and The Principles of Sociology, I
was so enraged by the mistreatment of this early figure that I wrote a short
book (turner 1985) trying to convince my fellow sociologists or anyone who
would listen that the folk image of Spencer is not only unfair but completely
wrong. I have summarized many of Spencer’s ideas as abstract generaliza-
tions and statements because Spencer took seriously the titles of his books
in the System of Synthetic Philosophy, where the phrase “the principles of –”
appears. Spencer was a theorist, not in the often sloppy and vague social the-
ory sense, but in the hard-science view of theory as a series of abstract laws
that explain the operation of some portion of the universe. As much as any
sociologist of the founding generation of sociologists working between 1830
to 1930, Spencer’s ideas are profound, clearly stated and copiously illustrated
with data from Descriptive Sociology. Many of his ideas have endured but, as
I have emphasized, most people do not know that they come from Spencer,
so ingrained is the avoidance of anything Spencerian.
87
At a time when sociologists continue to worship the sacred texts of Marx,

Weber, Durkheim and Mead, and even lesser saints such a Simmel, sociolo-
gists fail to even dabble in Spencer’s work. We have, as a discipline, studied
to death Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead and Simmel, but few have opened
the three volumes of The Principles of Sociology and begun to read. This is not
only unfair; it is also a great intellectual tragedy because Spencer offers so
much more new information compared to the ritualized readings of the more
canonized founders of sociology. We must remember that, with perhaps the
exception of Marx, Spencer was far more read than probably all of the found-
ing generation of sociologists combined at the time of Spencer’s death. He
was as big an academic type as one can become (even though he never was
in academia), yet, by the end of his life, his star had begun to fade, perhaps
because he did not have students and academic followers to keep his ideas
alive. As I discussed briefly in the early legacy of Spencer, some scholars in
America, such as Sumner and Keller (1927) at Yale University continued to
teach and write about Spencer into the second decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, and Keller’s soon-to-be-famous student George p. Murdock got the idea
for the HrAF by reading Spencer under Keller’s guidance. This was Spencer’s
last moment in the sun because Spencer is now a dead intellectual figure to
most sociologists. Following the historian crane brinton and sociologist
talcott parsons (1937), if we ask “Who now reads Spencer?”, the answer today
is about what it was in the third decade of the twentieth century: very few, and
most of those who do read Spencer today are probably not sociologists, even
though it is in this discipline of sociology more than any other that Spencer
made his most valuable contribution.
I can only hope that I have raised the reader’s curiosity about Spencer and
that you no longer hold the blatantly unfair characterization of Spencer as
a failed sociologist. There are many more interesting and new ideas to be
found in Spencer’s sociology than in the over analysed works of Marx, Weber,
Durkheim, Mead and Simmel. Sociology has mined all veins of genius in the
classical period of its canonized figures so there are only dusty rocks left, but
in Spencer there is still gold, if one is willing to go prospecting. Used copies of
The Principles of Sociology are readily available because so many were printed
in 1898, but the reason I participated in the 2002 reprint was to make sure that
copies would still be available, just in case someone would be willing to read
Spencer’s sociology. Indeed, this reprint was offset from my own virgin copy
of The Principles of Sociology published by Appleton in 1898, which cracked
when opened, not so much from age, I suspect, but because no one had ever
opened it in the previous hundred years. So Spencer’s ideas have been sitting
in the pages of The Principles of Sociology for several generations, awaiting
their rediscovery and use in developing contemporary sociological theory.
88
5
containing multitudes
Herbert Spencer, organisms social
and orders of individuality
James Elwick
It is well known that Herbert Spencer likened societies to organisms, claim-

ing that the different parts of a community were structured, functioned and
developed in ways that resembled an organism. What is less appreciated
is that Spencer trafficked in the other direction. Just as there was a “social
organism”, so too was there what I will call an “organism social”. Organisms
were like societies, with body parts retaining degrees of autonomy. Since
“an ordinary living organism may be regarded as a nation of units that live
individually, and have many of them considerable degrees of independence,
we shall perceive how truly a nation of human beings may be regarded as an
organism” (Spencer 1877: 473). The implication of the organism social was
that just as biologists could reveal facts about society, in turn “sociologists
can help biologists”, as shouted the Scottish anatomist Arthur Keith in a
retrospective on Spencer’s social organism (1924: 5).1
With its vision of quasi-independent parts, the organism social made
problematic any easy definition of a biological individual. Spencer sought
to answer this point by defining an individual as any organized unit that
persistently distinguished itself from its surrounding environment. Such
a definition made it possible for an individual to be a part of a larger
organization-individual, while at the same time itself being constituted
of smaller part-individuals. What was their relationship to one another?
Spencer envisaged a hierarchy of first-order, second-order and third-order
individuals: orders of individuality. This vision was shared by contemporar-
ies and by Spencer’s followers, and orders of individuality led to conceptions
such as the “superorganism” and a brief flurry of what came to be called
“organicism” in late-nineteenth-century sociology.
1. I am grateful to Howard Hill for providing me with this rare publication.
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ja m e s e lw i c k
Spencer’s meditations on orders of individuality tend to be overlooked

because he is famous as an “individualist”: a champion of the self-reliant
individual. Yet orders of individuality challenged a person’s autonomy both
from without and from within. From the outside, a person could be seen as
a member of a larger individual: a part of a social organism, a constituent
element of a superorganism. Yet that person could also be seen as a micro-
cosm of smaller individual-parts, her conduct as an individual the aggregate
of all of the parts’ relationships and interactions. In Spencerian thought, a
person could be sociologized from the inside.
In setting out the Spencerian organism social in this essay, I shall empha-
size that Spencer was not simply a philosopher of evolution as he is best
known today, but also a philosopher of organization. This essay then becomes
a chronological account of how his perspective emerged. On the one hand,
he was familiar with religious and political organizations arranged by local
groups forming still larger groups, which in turn made up still larger ones:
aggregates of first, second and third orders. An advantage of this organiza-
tional model was to allow both unity of purpose and sublevel autonomy.
On the other hand, Spencer became familiar with the research method of
analysis, which worked by disintegrating large and complicated entities into
their simplest possible elements. His early writings to 1857 combined both
analysis and nested orders.
I then move on to 1857, to the eve of Spencer’s System of Synthetic
Philosophy. At this point, I discuss how Spencer made the definition of an
“individual” – be it a cell, a ganglion, a psychological “net-work”, a per-
son – far more abstract. An individual was any unit capable of maintain-
ing a “dynamic equilibrium” between its internal and external environment.
His definition also became more relativistic: what counted as an individual
depended on the observer’s perspective. Spencer began to set out individu-
als in different orders, with individuals constituting larger individuals in
what, to us, might best be described as a formation of russian dolls. Such
a vision of nested orders in turn went on to influence not only sociolo-
gists, but also biologists and sociologists. I finish the essay by considering
Spencer’s legacy, if the subsequent repudiation of many overt Spencerian
details, while retaining his underlying organizational model of individuals
within individuals, can really be considered a legacy.
Spencer’s organism social
perhaps Spencer’s most vivid image was the “social organism”, which likened
a society to a biological entity; the term first appeared in his The Proper
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c o n ta i n i n g m u lt i t u d e s
Sphere of Government (1843a: 17).2 It is helpful to quickly recount some of

the reasons why this image of a social organism was so useful to him. First, it
allowed him to depict the division of labour in both societies and organisms.
More complex social organisms displayed greater amounts of internal eco-
nomic and social differentiation: just as plants and animals showed greater
levels of internal physiological specialization (i.e. dedicating a specific organ
or system to a physiological function, such as lungs to respiration), so too
would there emerge individual citizens or industries that specialized in a
particular social or economic function. And just as a highly specialized organ
was kept alive by the work of other specialized organs – the work of the lungs
supported the heart and vice versa – each specialized citizen did not have to
fulfil every one of his needs for survival, since he could depend on contribu-
tions made by citizens working in other realms. Second, the social organism
enabled him to depict “evolution” in both the individual and the collective,
in biological systems and social systems: evolution was the progressive spe-
cialization of the division of labour. embryos, new societies, species and so
on developed in the same way: starting out simple and unspecialized, but
becoming a bundle of complex and specialized – yet integrated – systems.
evolution, both biological and social, was a process of internal specializa-
tion, a transition from the “homogeneous” to the “heterogeneous”, as shown
by the embryologist Karl ernst von baer. Von baer had proposed this in
1828, but only to explain the development of biological organisms (von baer
1828, 1853). but Spencer made no distinction between living organisms and
societies.
Indeed, if the notion of a “social organism” first appeared in Spencer’s
work in 1843, and if Spencer only came across von baer in 1851 (Spencer
1904: vol. 1, 384), then it is reasonable to infer that Spencer had non-
evolutionary reasons for initially invoking the “social organism”. One rea-
son for this is because in 1843 he was writing for the dissenting audience of
the Nonconformist, who were quite familiar with such organicizing images
(more on this below). Spencer would then later transform this into a com-
mon idiom in which to express the relationship between a person and her
society. In Western history, society has been likened to an organism since
2. Spencer later claimed that he did not know of comte at this time (“he was to me
but a name”; 1904: vol. 1, 255–6), let alone comte’s prior use of the term “social
organism”. This is quite likely, given Spencer’s haphazard reading habits. Indeed,
any claims of priority to the term “social organism” are problematic given the long
history of drawing analogies between societies and organisms in Western political
thought, at least since plato and Livy (see note 3). Another possible inspiration for
Spencer was the “religious organic” language appearing in The Nonconformist imme-
diately before Spencer’s own use of the phrase; this is discussed in the next section.
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as early as plato; in england, Thomas Hobbes’s polity of the Leviathan was

depicted as an artificial man. Spencer would later explicitly distinguish him-
self from such predecessors3 by likening society not to a human but to a sim-
ple marine invertebrate (Spencer 1860: 94–5). This was partly to undermine
the authoritarian implication of using humans as models: since higher ver-
tebrates tended to be more unitary and obvious individuals under a central
control, such an image could be used to support dirigiste and authoritar-
ian governments, an assumption held by t. H. Huxley, which led to a later
disagreement between the two friends (elwick 2003). Hence the life sci-
ences and its images gave Spencer some organizational models with which
to explain how society worked.
As Keith noted, however, Spencer believed that sociology could also help
biology. He spoke of modes of social development being “paralleled” in
an individual organism and its constituent units; social structures gave us
“hints” at understanding the makeup of “individual organisms” (Spencer
1864–67: vol. 1, 376, 373, 162–4). In other words, Spencer believed that the
different parts of an organism tended to work as a kind of community, with
each part retaining some autonomy. Thus, while marine invertebrates and
other simple organisms better illustrated this disunity, it was still the case
that “every organism of appreciable size is a society” (Spencer 1877: 480).
The parts of an individual organism had “special” and not always harmo-
nized “interests”. Organs “competed” with one another for blood. A cell in
a simpler animal was free to “follow its own interests” and pursue its “indi-
vidual” life without direction from a nervous centre. everything from the
internal organs to the cells of higher vertebrates were relatively autonomous.
White-blood-cell activity resembled free-moving amoebae; and anyone
believing in top-down control of the body would be quickly disabused of
this notion by consciously “ordering” their heart to stop pumping (Spencer
1871: 631, 640–42; 1877: 472).
The notion of organisms with quasi-autonomous body parts may seem
odd to us now, but this was not Spencer being idiosyncratic or projecting
his mistaken political and social views onto the more objective and empiri-
cal life sciences. In the century before Spencer, physiology was often called
the study of the “animal oeconomy” (cross 1981: 64–5, 74–5; canguilhem
1988: 87–8). For eminent researchers such as John Hunter, body parts such
as the heart and the lungs “sympathize[d]” with one another (Hunter 1786:
116–17; Hunter & Owen 1861: 371); the term “sympathy” would carry on
into the nineteenth century to describe different body parts agreeing with
3. His original anonymous review article “The Social Organism” set out to review new
editions of plato and Hobbes.
92
one another (Winter 1998: 308). During Spencer’s life the notion of a com-
munity of body parts was bandied about by elite european biologists as
well (nyhart & Lidgard 2011: 378–81). After 1859, Darwinism may have
shifted the perception of how these parts interacted – away from sympathy
and towards competition – but body parts were still seen as acting autono-
mously. We shall see how ernst Haeckel would contact Spencer in 1868
because he saw commonalities between Spencer’s notion of aggregates of
first, second and third orders of individuals, and his own “tectology”, which
also proposed levels of individuality. One of Haeckel’s students, the prussian
zoologist Wilhelm roux, began his career by extending Darwinian natural
selection to the inside of the body, a view of “struggle” succinctly captured
by the title of his first book, Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus (1881). This
work inspired August Weismann to write about “germinal selection”: an
internal Darwinian process occurring “in every kind of units [sic] within the
organism, – not only in cells and tissues, but also in the smallest conceivable
living particles, which I have called ‘biophors’” (Weismann 1894: 12–13;
c. Weissman 2011: 60–61). Weismann is an especially interesting figure to
link with Spencer, since modern histories of biology usually only discuss
their debate over the existence of a Lamarckian mechanism of selection.
Seen through the lenses of evolution and heredity, Weismann and Spencer
are depicted as natural opponents. Yet when seen as bio-philosophers of
organization, both Spencer and Weismann share a common perspective,
each taking for granted the relative autonomy, the independent “interests”,
of even the simplest body parts.
Spencer was also perceived to be expounding on the organism social. In
the 1880s one physiologist read Spencer as stating that “the great physiologi-
cal problem of the living body is really one of Sociology”: any body was a
community of cells, each one a living individual serving its own interests
first, yet dependent on the activity of its neighbour-cells (Sewall 1886: 2).
And we have seen how in 1924 Keith noted Spencer’s vision that the the
“living body, be it of man or of beast, is in reality an assemblage of micro-
scopic units knit together so as to form a society or commonwealth” (Keith
1924: 3). both commentators saw Spencer as depicting organisms as soci-
eties composed of smaller, relatively autonomous entities. The interesting
story is how we came to forget this.
Spencer’s organism social to 1858
From a relatively young age, Spencer was habituated to two views that led to
the organism social. First, he became familiar with an organizational model
in which units compounded together in a way that preserved some autonomy
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of each unit. Second, he learned about a disintegrating technique called anal-

ysis, a method used in many sciences either orthodox or heterodox. Spencer
would apply both compounding and analysis to orders of individuality and
superorganisms.
Nested orders
Over his long writing career, Spencer was never terminologically consistent
when denoting an organizational model in which simpler entities at a lower
order combine to make more complex entities at the next higher order, which
in turn combine to make entities at the next higher order. Sometimes he
referred to “corporate bodies” (1851: 17); to “composite states” or “compound
states” (1855: 589, 590); to an “aggregation of units into organized groups”
(1860: 280), or to compositions of “the first, second, third, or fourth order”
(1864–67: vol. 2, 5). Despite these different identifiers, I believe this organi-
zational model to be of central importance in Spencerian philosophy, so to
reconcile the reader’s need for consistency while also trying to stay true to
Spencer I shall use the phrase “nested orders.”
Interestingly, Spencer seems to have first learned about nested orders not
from science, but from religion: specifically, the way in which certain reli-
gious groups were organized. Such dissenting religious groups were inhab-
ited by various members of Spencer’s family. The system originating in the
late eighteenth century saw Wesleyan Methodists worshipping together in
local class-meetings, with twenty members in each. When it was time to
send a delegate to a more general district meeting, each class-meeting would
select a single delegate out of the twenty members. At this local district
meeting, one delegate would again be elected and sent to go up to a still
more general district meeting. This process continued all the way to the
selection of delegates to attend the national Wesleyan conference (Spencer
1904: vol. 1, 20–21, 41, 82–3; Watts 1995: 30–31).
This Wesleyan form of organization was a new innovation that was sub-
sequently imitated by english political reform movements (perkin 1969:
358–9). One reason for the success of nested orders was that it ensured that
the entire national group of Wesleyans followed common principles while
at the same time allowing some autonomy for each local class-meeting.
When a class-meeting felt overly restricted by the larger conference, it
might secede and set up its own dissenting religious splinter group. John
Spencer, one of Spencer’s lesser-known uncles, did just this in 1831 by lead-
ing the secession of his own local class-meeting, a secession that led to a
fairly short-lived group known formally as the Arminian Methodists and
informally as the Derby Faith Folk (brigden 1899: 124; Spencer 1904: vol.
94
1, 24–5; elwick 2003: 42–3). Spencer was eleven years old at the time of
the secession. by age twenty, he would participate in a democratic reform
movement organized in exactly the same way as the Wesleyan Methodists.
This complete Suffrage Union was led by Spencer’s energetic uncle Thomas,
who got Spencer to serve as the group’s Derby Secretary. Indeed, it was
Spencer’s participation in the union which prompted his first publications:
in letters to editors he defended that group and began to advance a “volun-
tarist” approach to politics (that the state should not interfere in social, reli-
gious and economic matters) (Spencer 1904: vol.1, 251; Duncan 1908: 35).
Spencer sent these letters to edward Miall’s The Nonconformist in 1842,
as common interests were shared by Spencer’s political radicals and Miall’s
religious dissenters. Fascinatingly, anonymous writers in that journal – pos-
sibly Miall himself – used organic imagery in various polemics. Thus the
journal’s statement of principles, appearing on the very first page of the
inaugural 1841 Nonconformist, spoke of Acts of parliament being detri-
mental to freedom because they “pinioned” “every limb of the nation” and
prevented “spontaneous growth”. An 1842 editorial argued for the rights of
religious minorities, because majorities could turn into mobs, and every-
one knew that a mob acted as a “single body – a distinct individuality – a
unit; and when possessed of supreme power is as very a despot as any one
man who has ever held in his hands the reins of dominion”. Still another
Nonconformist article noted how religious groups (seceding religious
groups, perhaps) reproduced themselves like plant seeds: “germs of future
societies” spread in all directions and ripened, or stunted by, external cir-
cumstances (Anon. 1841: 1; 1842a: 762; 1842b: 448). While Spencer did not
write these articles, each image can be found in his later works: the “exoge-
neous” mechanical and artificial device unjustly restricting “endogeneous”
organic development; the imaginative jumping of orders of individuality
from a group of people to an individual body; the emphasis on the “fissipa-
rous reproduction” (i.e. budding) of simple social groups. It is telling that
while the phrase “social organism” cannot be found in Spencer’s 1842 letters
to the Nonconformist, it does appear in his first book, The Proper Sphere of
Government, which reprinted twelve of those letters (1843a: 17).
Analysis and compounding
As a young man Spencer also learned about the research technique of analy-
sis. This method worked by dividing up complex entities into simpler parts,
and those simpler parts into still simpler ones, until one could divide no
further. What remained were “elements”. The exemplary use of this tech-
nique was in chemistry. Until the eighteenth century, air had been deemed
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indivisible, making it one of the four Aristotelian “elements”; then it was

shown to be divisible into simpler gases, and then into still simpler chemi-
cal elements such as oxygen. What this meant was that many complex and
apparently simple chemicals were actually compounds of simpler elements.
Spencer practised chemical analysis with his father, William George, at the
Derby Literary and philosophical Society, for instance pouring acid on to
iron filings in order to produce hydrogen and sulphate of iron (Spencer 1904:
vol. 1, 86; elliott 2003: 15).
Meanwhile the young Spencer used analysis to communicate. The sys-
tem of “lucid shorthand” of his father, William George, worked to “analyze
words, and, as it were, to decompose them into their primitive elements”.
Just as oxygen and hydrogen combined to form water, language elements
such as simple vowels or suffixes could be combined with each other, form-
ing double and triple vowel combinations or “affixes of the second order”:
these “compound sounds” could be represented by shorthand signs “being
formed by the union of the signs of the simple ones”. between the ages of
thirteen and twenty, Spencer used “lucid shorthand” to record his uncle
Thomas’s sermons and to correspond with uncle and father. by 1843, aged
twenty-three, he was still writing correspondence and taking dictation with
this system (W. G. Spencer 1894: 9, 14–15, 20–21, 24–5, 30), indicating how
familiar he must have become with this idiosyncratic reading and writing
system.
Spencer also used analysis in geometry. Most dreaded the common study
of euclid, but Spencer’s father was a Derby teacher who actually instilled a
love of geometry in his students. His unusual pedagogical methods were
compiled and published as Inventional Geometry (1860). It is clear that
his son also loved geometry: after getting a job as a railway engineer and
moving to London, he resisted that city’s temptations after work by solving
problems in Chamber’s Euclid (bell 1837; see Spencer 1904: vol. 1, 134, 149;
Duncan [1908] 1911: 25–6). If we look at this book, we see it explaining
geometry as partly working through analysis: where “synthetic” geometry
combined simple axioms into new truths; the reverse process of “analytical”
geometry clarified complex specimens of geometrical reasoning by dissolv-
ing them into their simple constituent axioms (bell 1837: ii–v). Spencer
would carry this idiom of geometry into his later work,4 as well as the
method of analysis, where we see the words “compound” and “element”
and “synthesis” as well.
4. compare, for instance, the phrase appearing in Social Statics, “Things which are
equal to the same thing are equal to one another” (1851: 31), a definition matching
one in Chambers’s Euclid word for word (bell 1837: 5–6).
96
Spencer’s combination of analysis and orders of organization
Writings that followed Spencer’s The Proper Sphere of Government combined

analysis with nested orders. He came to see organizations both biological and
social as compounded of elements within elements, all possessing various
degrees of autonomy. Spencer’s phrenologizing of the early 1840s followed
the principle that the mind was a “plurality of faculties” (Spurzheim 1834:
10), and he argued that phrenologists used analysis in the style of chemists.
Just as chemists disintegrated air into simpler elements, so too should the
phrenologist analyse apparently simple mental faculties into simpler ones
(Spencer 1844: 316).5
between 1842 and 1858, Spencer learned about analysis and nested
orders in more orthodox sciences. One was physiology, where the econo-
mists’ notion of the division of labour had been profitably applied by the
Anglo-belgian zoologist Henri Milne-edwards. In 1827 he claimed that
an individual organism could be seen as made of individual “elements”
(élémens), each of which acted as a workshop (atelier) contributing to the
“animal economy” (l’économie animale). The more specialized each work-
shop, the more “life” that would be produced by the organism in total;
more complex animals were “higher” because they possessed more spe-
cialized workshops to produce this additional life (Milne-edwards 1827:
340–41). What became known as the “physiological division of labour”
was discussed by Milne-edwards in english publications (1836a: 172–3;
1836b: 753, 762–3) as well as Bridgewater Treatises (roget 1834: vol. 2, 105;
Limoges 1994: 318). William benjamin carpenter, a physiologist using this
concept in his well-regarded textbooks (carpenter 1839: 391–3) became
one of Spencer’s key biological informants. Yet Spencer was already well
prepared to use this conception, having first heard about the division of
labour at age fifteen, after reading Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of
Political Economy (1834; Spencer 1904: vol. 1, 159–60).6 It was thus quite
5. It is important to note here that despite likening the method of phrenology to chem-
istry, Spencer was not trying to “reduce” mental functions to non-living chemical
operations. Analysis took two forms: one was reduction, the other was localiza-
tion. reduction took living things or processes and expressed them in terms of the
non-living and physical, ultimately making sociology into physics and matter in
motion. but localization preserved the agency of the elements. Indeed, critics held
localization to be unscientific because it did not reduce; phrenology didn’t explain
the brain but simply redescribed it, “breaking up the brain into twenty-seven small
brains”, complained neuroscientist pierre Flourens (1842: 20, 26).
6. Interestingly, there are some proto-evolutionary notions in one of Martineau’s sto-
ries. Her first tale, “Life in the Wilds”, features a group of british emigrants to Africa
who after an attack are reduced “from a state of advanced civilization to a primitive
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easy for Spencer to extend the principle and describe development, or

“evolution”, in terms of the progressive specialization of an organism’s
internal division of labour.
Interestingly, Milne-edwards’s own conception of the physiological divi-
sion of labour emerged out of the belief that the individual organism was
itself compounded out of part-elements. Milne-edwards had taken a prin-
ciple used to explain the economic operations of a society, occupied by
numerous individual people, and then scaled it down into a microcosm.
Something used to explain a community could also be used to explain the
inner workings of an individual animal. It was this imaginative shifting up
and down of orders that I think Spencer found attractive, because he was
already doing this in phrenology. Spencer’s earliest writings are just as much
phrenological treatises as they are political tracts: one part of The Proper
Sphere of Government depicts each person as a bundle of “moral and intel-
lectual faculties”, with happiness requiring each faculty to be exercised and
freed from restraint. Another part claims that a just society had all of its
“elements in equilibrium” (Spencer 1843a: 34–5, 5–6). In the first sentence,
one could substitute “person” for “faculty” and retain the sense of the pas-
sage; in the second, one could read “element” as denoting either a mental
faculty or a person.
With 1851’s Social Statics, Spencer’s phrenological language was leav-
ened by more orthodox physiological principles. each person was a
“congeries of faculties” and a “commonwealth of monads” (i.e. cells); to
understand humanity one had to “analyze that humanity in its elementary
form – for the explanation of the compound, to refer back to the simple”.
primitive social organisms, meanwhile, were compounded out of repetitive
element-individuals akin to simple polyps, which lacked any specialized
physiological systems (Spencer 1851: 451–3, 280, 16). The shifting back
and forth between the social and the organic here is obvious (La Vergata
1995: 209); what also merits attention is Spencer’s continuous jumping
up and down nested orders, as he had already done with phrenology. A
society is a bundle of simpler element-people, with each element-person
being himself a bundle of simpler element-faculties. Milne-edwards had
already shown that such order-jumping might lead to interesting new spec-
ulations, and we also see this tactic used even in On the Origin of Species,
where charles Darwin compared the diversification of plants and animals
in a single geographic area to Milne-edwards’s notion of specialized and
diversified organs in a single body (Darwin [1859] 1964: 115–16). Darwin
condition of society”. The settlers rebuild the colony by using the division of labour
(Martineau 1834: vol. 1, 22, 28).
98
was struggling to articulate what would later become known as ecological

“niches”.
by September 1852, Spencer had contacted Huxley regarding “the pro-
duction of composite animals by the union of simpler ones” (Spencer
1852b). Appearing that month was Spencer’s paper “A Theory of population”,
which discussed how some marine invertebrates merged “many incipient
minor individualities into one large individuality” (Spencer 1852d: 483,
485). This paper also discussed the relatively new “cell theory” of botanist
Matthias Schleiden and belgian zoologist Theodor Schwann, which inspired
Spencer’s remark about bodies being a “commonwealth of monads”. The
cell theory analysed the organism into elements called “cells” that worked
harmoniously as part of a larger organism. It also considered those cells to
be distinct, elementary individuals (Schwann 1839: 2). cells combined into
nested orders, making tissues; tissues made organs; organs combined into
physiological systems. Spencer’s “A Theory of population” merged cell the-
ory with the division of labour: unspecialized cells in the simplest organisms
had the power to secede and live independently; specialized cells in more
complex organisms would soon die on gaining independence (Spencer
1852d: 486), perhaps akin to a certain uncle’s Derby Faith Folk.
by 1855 Spencer was writing about analysis in the neurosciences. The
previous twenty-five years had seen neuroanatomists disintegrating the
nervous system into its two simplest elements: the grey ganglia, which gen-
erated nervous force (energy), and the white nerve fibre, which transmitted
that force. taken together, a single ganglion-fibre set acted autonomously in
the simplest animals. comparative anatomists had shown that nervous sys-
tems from the human to the lowest invertebrate were simply compounds of
these two elements; all that distinguished the human nervous system from
others was that humans possessed more ganglia-fibre compounds, laid out
in a more concentrated way. Meanwhile, neurophysiologists had shown
that complex nervous activities, such as instincts, were compounded out
of simple reflexes (carpenter 1846: 519; Jacyna 1984: 78; elwick 2007: 47).
Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology related the autonomy of these ganglia
(1855: 492–4) and also embraced the analytical method in psychology: one
started with the most complex phenomenon (human consciousness) then,
with “successive decompositions”, one would “descend step by step to the
simpler”: consciousness was composed out of cognitions, cognition out of
instincts, instinct out of reflex elements. even the ego was not unitary but
was instead a “composite state of consciousness”: the “entire group of psy-
chical states” that we mistakenly supposed constituted our “psychical self ”
(ibid.: 71, 479, 539, 617–18). Thus human consciousness was composed of
potentially autonomous reflex-elements, making consciousness itself a kind
of organism social.
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Spencer’s organism social after 1858:

relativistic individuals in a “magnificent hierarchy”
Thus by the late 1850s Spencer was faced with various kinds of independently
acting element entities: the reflex, the ganglion, the cell, the phrenological
faculty, the physiological atelier, even the individual person. All elements
could compound into larger units, which could themselves compound into
still larger ones. What, then, could be considered an individual? Spencer
came to define an individual as dependent on the observer’s perspective. He
quoted the botanist who had himself wondered if the cell was an individual
or member of something larger:
[Matthias] Schleiden says – “now the individual is no concep-

tion, but the mere subjective comprehension of an actual object,
presented to us under some given specific conception, and on
this latter it alone depends whether the object is or is not an indi-
vidual. Under the specific conception of the solar system, ours is
an individual: in relation to the specific conception of a planetary
body, it is an aggregate of many individuals.”
(Spencer 1864–67: vol. 1, 202)
Spencer, then, defined an individual in relative terms: whether as small as

a cell, or as large as a solar system, both could be individuals against a par-
ticular backdrop.7
Spencer also generalized his definition of an individual: any organized
unit capable of continuously maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between
its inside and outside “environment”. Snait Gissis has rightly called this equi-
librium between an organism and its environment the “basic methodologi-
cal unit” of Spencer’s system (Gissis 2011: 91–2), and we can build on her
point by saying that any individual was the analytic localization of this equi-
librium: the equilibrium element, so to speak. If all of this equilibrium-
language is becoming a little too cosmic for the reader, Joseph needham
offers help. pointing out that Spencer had argued in 1857 that the higher
an organism was, the more it showed “greater unlikeness to its environ-
ment” (Spencer 1857b: 339–42), needham suggested that this dynamic
equilibrium was akin to – and may have pre-dated – the homeostasis of
claude bernard, in which organisms maintain a milieu intérieur unlike their
exterior surroundings (needham 1937: 23–4), such as a constant internal
7. This point complements christopher Herbert’s argument that relativity was central
to Spencer’s philosophy (Herbert 2001: 51).
100
body temperature. In other words, it may be useful to reconceive “dynamic

equilibrium” as “homeostasis”.8 Seen in this way, the more individuals an
organization had integrated within itself, the more unlike its environment
it became. A cell by itself was only one “individual” and thus did not have
much power to differentiate itself from its surrounding medium. but a
human, as a compound of integrated cells, did. This equilibrium homeosta-
sis could be psychological, social, physical and so on.
After 1857, a ganglion element, a person element and a cell element were
depicted by Spencer as individuals that could maintain a dynamic equilibrium
on their own or in a compound. His Principles of Biology (1864–67) defined a
biological individual accordingly, and included polyps and plant buds (ibid.:
vol. 1, 207). The second edition of Spencer’s Principles of Psychology ([1855]
1870), rewritten in accordance with his new vision, defined a psychologi-
cal individual as a “net-work” of gray nervous cells and white transmitting
fibres, in which each network acted as an “independent agent”. Humans were
composed, therefore, of multiple kinds of individuals: our spinal cords, for
instance, were made up of multiple psychological net-works each possessing
a “certain degree of individuality”, yet at the same time they combined their
activities so that we acted as a larger whole (ibid.: vol. 1, 25–7, 38).
Spencer also situated individuals in a hierarchy, making them first-, sec-
ond- or third-order individuals. The discussion is clearest in The Principles
of Biology. Morphologically, an organism could be seen as compounded out
of elementary structural elements, added separately as first-order individu-
als; added in groups as second-order individuals; or added in groups of
groups as third-order individuals. Thus any annelid (worm), with its mul-
tiple repeating segments, was a third-order individual: morphologically
it was divisible into these segments. In turn these segments were second-
order individuals, themselves further divisible into cells. Accordingly,
these cells were first-order individuals (Spencer 1864–67: vol. 2, 4–5, 102).
physiologically, all organisms could be seen as aggregates of “highly plas-
tic” physiological elements, each of which independently formed a dynamic
equilibrium between inside and environment (ibid.: vol. 1, 287–8). A cell
was a first-order physiological individual, or perhaps a second-order one
made out of hypothetical “physiological units”. And genealogically, evolu-
tion denoted a process where lower-order individuals merged into colonies
that then integrated and specialized, becoming higher-order individuals.
Over enough time “it would be impossible to say where the lower indi-
vidualities ceased, and the higher individualities commenced”. Spencer thus
speculated that many second- and third-order individuals were composed
8. Historically this is cheating, because the word appeared in english only in 1926.
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of originally independent units: for instance, the segments of the worms

noted above might have been “independent individualities” themselves
(ibid.: vol. 2, 204, 102).
In november 1868 Spencer received a letter, in German, from the
prussian morphologist ernst Haeckel. Alerted by Huxley, Haeckel had
read both Spencer’s First Principles (1862) and Principles of Biology with
great interest. Haeckel offered to send Spencer a copy of his own near-
contemporaneous Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), and sug-
gested he would especially find interesting chapters five, nine and ten of its
first volume, which discussed “tectology”, Haeckel’s new science of biological
individuality (Haeckel 1868). Thus chapter five of Generelle Morphologie der
Organismen discussed individuality in organic and inorganic forms, while
chapters nine and ten, respectively, examined morphological and physiolog-
ical individuality. Haeckel’s tectology proposed six different orders of indi-
viduality. They ranged from the simplest “first-order” individual (cells, for
instance) to the most complex “sixth-order” individual, a “stock” or “corm”,
the colonial organism (such as a strawberry plant or portuguese man-of-
war). Higher-order individuals were themselves composed of individuals
of simpler orders (Haeckel 1866: 269–331, 332–363; r. J. richards 2008:
128–35): nested orders, in other words.
It is not known whether Spencer ever took up Haeckel’s offer. Indeed,
given Spencer’s desultory reading habits – not to mention his lack of German
– even if he had requested a copy it is unlikely that he would have read the
densely argued Generelle Morphologie. but it seems likely that Haeckel was
prompted to send his letter to Spencer after reading Spencer’s discussion
of orders of individuality. Haeckel’s own musings on individuality followed
the work of physiologist Johannes Müller as well as Schleiden. Haeckel also
probably appreciated Spencer’s quotation from Schleiden that what counted
as a biological individual depended on the observer’s perspective: in higher-
order individuals, lower-order individuals became organs. Moreover, for
Haeckel, Lynn nyhart succinctly notes that “’Individual’ and ‘organ’ were
not absolute concepts but relative ones” (nyhart 1995a: 136).
Although Spencer proposed only three orders of individuals against
Haeckel’s six, the underlying principle was the same: lower-order individu-
als compounded into higher-order ones. Yet there was one important dis-
tinction between Spencer’s vision of biological individuality and Haeckel’s.
Haeckel was interested in the degree to which the constituent units were
subordinated to a larger entity, acting in the “interest” of the larger indi-
vidual. Spencer was interested in the degree to which the constituent units
retained autonomy within that larger entity, following their own “inter-
ests”. This emphasis on lower-order units’ autonomy made it easy for him
to switch back and forth between the life sciences and the social sciences
102
while still retaining a liberal outlook. to repeat, Spencer had as his organ-
ism model the lower invertebrates, yet most people assumed his organism
model to be higher and intuitively individual vertebrates. As a result they
would find in his view contradictory “implications”.
Spencer’s oblique legacy
In 1911 the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler would group

together Spencer, Haeckel, Weismann and others such as Gustav Fechner as
envisaging a universe of nested orders of individuals. All had constructed an
“elaborate hierarchy of organisms” from the most simple (the physiological
unit or biophor), which aggregated into cells, which formed more complex
aggregates from Haeckelian “persons” or “metameres”, to “colonies” or “coe-
nobioses”. Fechner had the cosmically grandest view of nested orders, think-
ing that not only was the earth itself “a great organism, but that all planetary
systems were in turn colonies of earths and suns”, making the universe itself
a single organism. “Thus, starting with the biophore [sic] as the smallest and
ending with the universe as the most comprehensive, we have a sufficiently
magnificent hierarchy of organisms to satisfy even the most zealous panpsy-
chist” (Wheeler 1911: 308–9).
In Spencer’s case, individuality of the second order became “symbiosis”,
appearing in biology; individuality of the third order became the “superor-
ganism”, used mainly in ecology and sociology.9
Individuality of the second order: symbiosis
Spencer’s “compound animal” became a symbiont; compounding became

known as “symbiosis”. The Principles of Biology’s suggestion about how
annelids may have emerged (1864–67: vol. 2, 204, 102) fascinated Alfred
russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection; in an
1872 speech to the entomological Society, Wallace suggested that insects,
like worms, might also be third-order individuals built out of second-order
segments (Wallace 1872). The russian anarchist geographer peter Kropotkin
would later mention the “grand idea of Herbert Spencer, so brilliantly devel-
oped in perrier’s Les Colonies Animales” that colonies were “at the very ori-
gin of evolution in the animal kingdom” (Kropotkin 1902: 53). “perrier”
9. Individuality of the first order, with cells being compounded out of subunits, came
to be known as “endosymbiosis”. That topic is not discussed here, but good places
to start are Sapp (1994) or Gilbert et al. (2012).
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referred to edmond perrier, the French zoologist who in 1881 discussed

how colonies of separate individuals of lower orders integrated over time to
form individuals of higher orders, showing the division of labour. Despite
Kropotkin’s linking of perrier to Spencer, Spencer goes entirely unmentioned
in Les Colonies Animales et la Formation des Organismes. It is unclear why;
perrier repeatedly mentioned Milne-edwards and Haeckel, and cited numer-
ous sources in French, english and German. Following Wallace, he even
suggested that insects, which had numerous “individual” segments, formed
out of the fusion of those segments (perrier 1881: 532–5, 723). In a later
book, perrier discussed Haeckel’s tectology (1888: 146–8) yet only briefly
mentioned Spencer, and only because Spencer had discussed evolution seven
years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared. It is almost as if
perrier deliberately avoided any mention of Spencer.
In britain, the biologist patrick Geddes used Spencerian views to for-
mulate the notion of the “reciprocal accommodation” of two independent
parts within an individual. He focused on unusual cases to illustrate “sym-
biosis” (mutualism, to be specific): a planarian flatworm with chlorophyll-
bearing algae living inside it was a clear case of evolution through mutual
adjustment and mutual benefit. The flatworm received nutrients while the
algae lived in a stable environment; each organism contributed to the com-
pound unit through specialization, a clear case of the division of labour.
Similarly, lichen was the mutualistic association of fungus and algae (Sapp
1994: 11–12; renwick 2009: 43–5, 47). In an 1899 edition of The Principles of
Biology, Spencer retained the old language of analysis to discuss such mutu-
alistic symbioses: the green flatworm showed the “cooperation between veg-
etal elements and animal elements forming parts of the same organism”,
while lichens were “compound growths” (Spencer [1864–67, 1899] 1900:
399–400). This new edition also saw Spencer extending his views to a near-
Fechnerian scale. A new chapter called “The Integration of the Organic
World” argued that all living things on earth showed increasing integration
and mutual dependence (Sapp 1994: 25–6; Spencer [1864–67, 1899] 1900:
vol. 2, 397; tansley 1896). In writing this chapter Spencer was aided by the
botanist Arthur tansley, who will be discussed below.
by 1924 Keith pointed out new findings that in his mind showed Spencer
to be right. A discovery made soon after Spencer’s death established the
existence of a second, more primitive, form of bodily control in addition
to the nervous system: the “government of hormones”. Where the nervous
system was like a telegraph system, the hormones were analogous to a postal
system, with a hormone representing a compulsory summons that a cell
had no choice but to obey. In other words, there was a slower yet alternative
internal communication system that evolutionarily preceded nerves; evolu-
tion was the accumulation of different forms of biological communication.
104
Keith noted that the person continuing Spencer’s analogy was the short-story
writer and amateur biologist Morley roberts (Keith 1924: 5–9). roberts had
proposed a new theory of evolution: the “hostile symbiotic view”, in which
all life and growth is the forcing of symbiosis between two bodies and their
opposed energies, which stimulated the “conjoint individual”. For instance
he proposed that multicellular organisms had pathological origins – a kind
of Siamese twin that occurred by incomplete fission; cancer, meanwhile, was
also pathological, which made it a source of evolutionary novelty (roberts
1920: 141, 272, 84–5; Hayward, 2001: 264).
Individuality of the third order: superorganisms
The states and entities variously named the social organism, the aggre-
gate of the third order, and the third-order individual became known as a
“superorganism”.
In sociology, the Spencerian superorganism was especially appreciated in
France. Sociologist Alfred espinas thought that organisms were collections
of smaller individuals, and waded through examples of marine invertebrates
and the cell theory in support. He then quoted Spencer and his consid-
erations on individuality (espinas 1878: 218–26). When Émile Durkheim’s
De la division du travail social mentioned primitive “segmented” societies,
then, it was explicitly following perrier, likening such societies to coalesc-
ing annelid segments. Durkheim was wrestling with the premises of the
Spencerian social organism, citing Spencer more than any other author in
this work (Durkheim 1893: 208–10, 216; perrin 1995: 798). réné Worms’s
Organisme et société also extensively considered Spencer and defended the
notion of the social organism, although noting that Auguste comte talked
about the social organism before Spencer (1895: 9, 405–6). When Worms
founded the Institut International de Sociologie in 1894, he invited Spencer
to become its first president, which Spencer turned down owing to ill health
(barberis 2003: 55). The various efforts linking societies to organisms came
to be known as organicism, which had a French heyday in the 1880s and
1890s. Daniela barberis has argued that organicism helped establish sociol-
ogy as a field by establishing the reality of an entity called “society”, as real
as the internal coherence of an organism (ibid.: 52). The Spencerian “super-
organism”, then, was seen not as an analogy by its followers, but as real.
In the english-speaking world, superorganisms were discussed in zool-
ogy and ecology. At Harvard, Wheeler sometimes considered himself to be
a sociologist of ants, while at the same time seeing an ant colony as a super-
organism in which each ant became a constituent part. He argued that it was
possible to learn about societies and individual bodies by experimenting on
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social insect colonies – substituting parts, dividing them and so on – to a

far greater extent than one would on individual bodies. Since a social insect
colony was far less integrated than a single individual body, it could survive
far more radical changes (Wheeler 1926: 435). Meanwhile, Wheeler mused
about whether an ant colony – with only a single queen being responsible
for its reproduction – could thereby be considered an individual organism.
Wheeler saw entities such as ant colonies as “wholes comparable with but of
a higher order than the individual organism, which is known to be a colony
of cells” (1928: 304). He looked back at the history of biology to others who
had wondered about superorganisms and individuality, and he situated him-
self in a long line of people including espinas, Haeckel and Worms, as well as
paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques novicow, emile Waxweiler and paul barth. At
the beginning of this line, Wheeler put Herbert Spencer.
One of Wheeler’s graduate students went on to become a professor him-
self, and one of his students was the entomologist e. O. Wilson, making
Wilson (according to philosopher of biology Michael ruse) Wheeler’s “direct
intellectual grandson” (ruse 2011). In the 1970s, Wilson made his name by
discovering that ants communicated through pheromones, prompting from
him similar questions as those asked by Wheeler, Haeckel and Spencer. “At
what point does a society become so well integrated that it is no longer a
society? On what basis do we distinguish the extremely modified zooid of
an invertebrate colony from the organs of a metazoan [multicellular] ani-
mal?” (Wilson 1980: 54). Wilson sanctified such questions with a framed
picture of Spencer hung on the wall of his laboratory, next to a picture of
Darwin. ruse seems to have been surprised by this decoration when he
first saw it on a visit in the 1970s: “‘My God, professor Wilson,’ I gasped,
‘Herbert Spencer! Herbert Spencer!’ ‘Great man, Mike.’ He replied. ‘Great
man’” (ruse 2011). Does this lineage make Spencer into Wheeler’s great-
grandfather? Wilson has certainly honoured his ancestors by returning to
thoughts about superorganisms (Hölldobler and Wilson, 2008), which is
credited to Wilson’s love of Spencer (Gibson, 2012, 5-8).
Meanwhile, in england, tansley, who helped Spencer to revise the 1899
edition of The Principles of Biology, moved into the then new field of ecol-
ogy. He flirted with the view that certain stable vegetational groups such as
forests were actually superorganisms. It was obvious that some such groups
possessed an “individuality of their own”, and tansley followed Milne-
edwards, Darwin and Spencer by using the division of labour to jump up
and down between nested orders. Thus the specialization of functions in
a plant grouping was analogous to the various specialized systems in an
individual organism; competition between plants led to the division of
labour, differentiating species from one another, yet integrating the unit as
a whole (tansley 1920: 123). plant groupings were not “superorganisms”,
106
but a long-term and relatively unchanging plant group tansley described

as a “mature quasi-organism … the highest expression of organisation to be
found among plant communities … they are the most unmistakable vegeta-
tional units we find in nature”. tansley did not explicitly call certain forests
“individual”, for it was only an analogy, with many differences: a forest’s
development in no way resembled the ontogeny of a “true organism”, for
example (ibid.: 120–23, 146, 131).
Yet the analogy was taken by others to be real: certain forests were indi-
viduals. Others disagreed. by 1935 the dispute over the reality of ecologi-
cal “superorganisms” came to a head. responding to a set of three papers
on why plant–animal groupings were really individual superorganisms,
tansley wrote a famous treatise arguing that superorganicists had gone too
far. While one could consider mature plant communities, human socie-
ties and ant colonies “quasi-organisms”, they were not single individuals or
superorganisms, for these terms led to confusion. tansley thus suggested a
new term to describe plant–animal groupings: the “ecosystem”, laden with
far less ontological baggage (tansley 1935: 289–91, 297–9).
Conclusion
Although this essay is a contribution to a collection determining Spencer’s

legacy and influence, it is difficult to establish his influence in such fields as
ecology or biology. This is partly because others articulated similar concepts
before or around the same time as him, whether remembered in our own
day (comte), barely remembered (Milne-edwards) or utterly forgotten (reli-
gious dissenters). Meanwhile, other Spencerian principles worked so well
they quickly became self-evident, as barberis shows with the influence of
organicism on French sociology. Any slight difference with Spencer’s views
often led to an explicit repudiation of him.
Thus although Durkheim took up the division of labour, he consid-
ered himself to have surpassed Spencer by proposing phenomena such as
organic and mechanical solidarity, also using other sources such as perrier
(Durkheim 1893: ix, 208–10, 195; perrin 1995: 801; taylor 2007: 96–8).
to repeat, perrier never acknowledged any debt to Spencer. nor would
roberts, who noted that Spencer’s biological knowledge was deficient even
for its own time. besides, roberts, said, much of his Warfare in the Human
Body (1920) had been written before he encountered Spencer’s social biol-
ogy, and nowhere therein could he find any mention of how sociology might
help biology (ibid.: 5-6). The latter claim is false. The former claim is – to
put it mildly – improbable. roberts’s own friend Arthur Keith mentioned
that roberts was continuing Spencer’s work (Keith 1924: 5-6), and there
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are hints that roberts himself plagiarized the French organicist sociologist
Jean Izoulet.10 In turn Izoulet’s own La Cité Moderne extensively discusses
the Spencerian hyper-organisme (Izoulet 1895: vii, 105–7, 111, 557, 603, 620,
622, 624), but mainly to quarrel with its problematic “implications” rather
than acknowledge any debt.
Indeed, a major reason why so many sought to reject the Spencerian
social organism was because of its apparent political contradictions. Despite
Spencer’s insistence that the social organism complemented a liberal vision
of autonomous cell citizens, Izoulet drew the opposite view: biology showed
sociology that hierarchy was natural. The division of labour meant that some
citizens were analogous to nerve cells, and thus had the power to order about
the rest of the citizen cells (ibid.: xxiv–xxv). roberts agreed with this view.
Keith in turn thought that hormones’ ability to compel cells to act meant
that the “society represented by the animal body is in reality a slave state”
(1924: 12). Meanwhile, as noted above, Huxley thought that the analogy
legitimized authoritarian rule (1871: 535), while Durkheim retreated from
an early embrace of organicism partly owing to similar critiques by sociolo-
gists such as Gabriel tarde (barberis 2003: 63, 52; Gissis 2011: 93). Across
the Atlantic, the American palaeobotanist-turned-sociologist Lester Frank
Ward excerpted five-and-a-half pages from Spencer’s “The Social Organism”
(1860), calling it “masterly”, but then attacking it for ignoring the statist
and dirigiste implications of biology (Ward 1898: 50–58). One reason why
Spencer’s insistence on lower-order unit autonomy came to be interpreted
as a contradiction was because critics returned to their intuitive understand-
ings of individuality conferred by their greater familiarity with vertebrates
(elwick 2003). Does such explicit rejection of surface details while following
underlying organic Spencerian principles and language constitute a “legacy”
and, if so, what kind?
More subtly, Spencer came to be ignored or repudiated because of his
transdisciplinarity. He and his superorganism stood canute-like against
a rapidly specializing world of scientific research. Then, as now, everyone
spoke in favour of broad learning, complaining that research was following a
remorseless von baerian logic by splitting up into various disciplines and sub-
disciplines. Yet in practice, matters were different. For instance, espinas – a
would-be sociologist with a dissertation whose sources referred mainly to the
works of naturalists – faced a dilemma about the particular faculty in which
he should defend his thesis: science or letters? As John I. brooks mordantly
10. roberts was the model for Dyce Lashmar, who, in George Gissing’s novel Our Friend
the Charlatan, creates the field of “biosociology”. At the end of the story, however,
Lashmar is revealed to have plagiarized biosociology from Izoulet (Gissing 1901: i;
Hayward, 2001: 257).
108
notes, “If espinas was interested purely in academic advancement, he could

hardly have chosen a worse topic or a worse approach than Animal Societies”
(cited in D’Hombres & Mehdaoui 2012: 33–4). When tansley argued that
since the phenomena were the same, on “logical” grounds it was more appro-
priate to call the study of vegetation “plant-sociology” rather than “plant-
ecology” (1920: 118), it is easy to guess the fate of this proposal. nor did ants
come to be studied by Wheelerian “ant-sociologists” either. Something simi-
lar happened to the study of symbiosis. rather than being investigated as a
phenomenon in its own right, over the next century it would be restricted to
specialized fields: zoologists ignoring chloroplasts and bacteria, for instance
(Sapp 1994: 208). As specialization continued – as the walls of the disciplinary
silos became stronger in the first half of the twentieth century – it became
more and more difficult for life researchers in different fields to range widely
across disciplines, much less embrace a synthetic philosopher.
Another reason why Spencer’s insights about nested orders came to be
forgotten is because historians of biology have generally been uninter-
ested in biological individuality. Although this topic fascinated many of the
most important european life scientists between 1850 and 1915 (nyhart &
Lidgard 2011: 374–5; elwick 2007), evolution tends to interest far more his-
torians of biology, for its obvious cultural appeal. As a result, their agenda
has been shaped by the modern “neo-Darwinian” evolutionary synthesis of
1942, whose focus was the population of sexually breeding animals. That is,
it studies groups of intuitively clear individual organisms: the gene pools of
fruit flies, or the evolutionary adaptations of finches, rather than the quasi-
individuality of slime moulds or the division of labour in Volvox algae cells.
The result is to make nineteenth-century questions about individuality seem
alien or idiosyncratic, allowing them to be passed over or dismissed. Thus
the leading biography of Haeckel gives a very nice summary of tectology and
its influences, but ultimately concludes that the several hundred (!) pages of
Generelle Morphologie der Organismen devoted to orders of individuality
were ultimately not very productive. psychological motives are instead given.
tectology revealed Haeckel’s “mania for puzzle-solving”, and it is implied that
individuality was a technically forbidding yet sterile subject into which he
could escape to stave off personal heartache (r. J. richards 2008: 128–34).
Then again, biological individuality was a technically forbidding topic.
Was it also sterile? between 1850 and 1915, a number of highly regarded
zoologists, including Haeckel, may have thought so; they started their
careers working on biological individuality, but then went on to drop it.11
11. I can immediately think of six, although all dealing with multicellular animals,
which betrays my own regrettable metazoan bias. First, roux, already mentioned
for Kampf der Teile im Organismus, moved into experimental embryology. Second,
109
ja m e s e lw i c k
It is an interesting historical question as to why. I wonder if this repeated

failure to fit biological individuality into research programmes contributed
to the decline of Spencer’s reputation, leading to the rejection of his insist-
ence that we see individuals as microcosms. If that is the case, then current
research on individuality in immunology, genetics, evolution, development,
anatomy and physiology – all indicating that “we have never been individu-
als” (Gilbert et al. 2012) – may mean that Spencer’s star will rise again. It
is easy to laugh at Grant Allen’s claim that the “twenty-fifth century will
do him full justice” (Allen 1904: 629), but perhaps by then the life sciences
will have confirmed one of Spencer’s legacies: that we do indeed contain
multitudes.
Haeckel, disappointed by the reception of Generelle Morphologie der Organismen

(Gould 1977) moved to become a Darwinian controversialist. Third, although
Huxley’s first big London public event was entitled “On Animal Individuality” (t. H.
Huxley 1852), he ultimately thought such questions meaningless. Fourth, Huxley’s
grandson Julian’s first book was The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (1912), but
he does not seem to have continued such work afterwards. Fifth, Huxley’s protégé
e. ray Lankester wrote on individuality in lower annelids (1870) but then criti-
cized Wallace’s proposal of Spencerian evolutionary integration of insects (Lankester
1872). Sixth, Lankester’s fellow “merist” (Jeffs & Keyes 1990: 84) William bateson
– known now for rediscovering Mendel’s law in the early twentieth century and his
contributions to genetics – considered the recurring yet ultimately “barren” idea
that metamerism (repeating segments) arose from a “series of individuals which
have not detatched themselves from each other”, and that perhaps all Metazoa were
“colonies” of protozoa (1894: 34). In many cases the loss of interest in biology may
have been caused by a shift of research focus away from invertebrates to vertebrates.
A separate yet related cause may be a pragmatic focus on career options; in 1854
Huxley moved from invertebrate work into vertebrate paleontology partly because
this was the only job he could get at that time (at the School of Mines).
110
6
herbert spencer, biology,
and the social sciences in britain
Chris Renwick
In 1906, J. Arthur Thomson, the Scottish biologist and regius professor of

natural History at the University of Aberdeen, published a short book on
Herbert Spencer’s life and biological ideas. According to Thomson, there
was one term that summed up Spencer more than any other: “arch-heretic”.
The reason was that there were so many things Spencer was against, includ-
ing theology, metaphysics, monarchy, “molly-coddling legislation”, classical
education, socialism, war and the German biologist August Weismann. Thus,
“it was not to be wondered at”, Thomson explained, that “we find extraor-
dinary difference of opinion as to the value of the great Dissenter’s deliver-
ances”. Moreover, it was not surprising that scientists were among the biggest
doubters, telling “us that Spencer may have been a great philosopher, but
that he was too much of an a priori thinker to be of great account to science”
(Thomson 1906: vii–viii). In Thomson’s opinion, though, those scientists
were wrong:
In an age of specialism [Spencer] held up the banner of the Unity

of Science, and he actually completed, so far as he could com-
plete, the great task of his life – greater than most men have even
dreamed of – that of applying the evolution-formula to every-
thing knowable. He influenced thought so largely, he inspired so
many disciples, he left so many enduring works – enduring as
seed-plots, if not also as achievements – that his death, writ large,
was immortality. (Ibid.: ix)1
1. For more on Thomson see bowler (2005, 2009a).
111
c h ri s re n w i c k
Thomson’s assessment of Spencer is important because it contains a

number of the ideas that people, including historians of science, have held
to be true of Spencer, in some cases since he started writing about evolu-
tion in the mid-nineteenth century but, more commonly, since his death
in 1903. At the most fundamental level, and most simply put, people do
not see Spencer as mattering that much to science. This is particularly true
of biology and the social sciences, in particular the areas in which the two
intersect, where Spencer has been seen as a persona non grata for over a
century now. On the one hand, he is frequently seen as someone who played
no real role in the shaping of biology as it has been handed down to the
present. As the biologist ernst Mayr famously put it when explaining why
his 1,000-page book The Growth of Biological Thought included just three
paragraphs on Spencer, it is “quite justifiable to ignore Spencer totally in
a history of biological ideas because his positive contributions were nil”
(1982: 386). On the other hand, Spencer is viewed as the pantomime vil-
lain of late-nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking: the man who coined
the phrase “survival of the fittest” and therefore opened the floodgates for
misinterpretations of Darwin’s meaning for human society (see e.g. Gould
2000: 251–68). Intellectually speaking, Spencer seems to have embodied all
the bad aspects of the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for evolution: a
kind of embarrassing relative at the Darwinian party.
Spencer’s alleged irrelevance to serious biology and social science seemed
even more obvious as historians turned their attention away from a con-
ception of science-as-ideas and towards a conception of science-as-practice
from the 1970s onwards. In this new historiographic landscape, late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century science was identified with pro-
fessionalization, laboratories, experiment and measurement – all things that
seem antithetical to Spencer’s project – rather than high-level theorizing
and battles of ideas. As a consequence, historians saw him as mattering even
less to biological and social science than they had done in the preceding
seventy years. nevertheless, Spencer’s reputation has undergone something
of a restoration in recent years through more sympathetic readings of his
work and greater open mindedness towards his relationship with scientific
practice (r. J. richards 1987; Young [1970] 1990; radick 2007; Dixon 2008;
renwick 2009, 2012). In this respect, while the historiographic tide has cer-
tainly turned away from the caricatures of old, there is a great deal of work
still to be done when it comes to understanding why he was among the most
widely read writers on evolution during the late nineteenth century.
This chapter tackles that problem by reconnecting with Spencer’s role as
a serious intellectual force in the entwined histories of biological and social
science: someone whose ideas were immensely important contributions to
the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates that shaped the
112
spe n c e r , b i o l o g y, a n d t h e s o c ia l s c i e n c e s i n b ri ta i n
identity, language and content of those fields. Spencer was important in

these respects throughout the industrialized world, with significant numbers
of influential Spencerians in the USA, Italy and France, to name the best-
known examples.2 However, in the interests of focus, this essay will con-
centrate on a specific and highly important series of impacts that Spencer
had on biology and social science in britain. beginning with the biological
sciences, we shall trace how Spencer’s commitment to scientific naturalism
and evolution made him one of the influential gentlemen amateurs among
the UK’s scientific reformers, whom we usually associate with profession-
alization. As a key member of those circles, Spencer not only helped people
understand what biology was, but also shaped its language and concepts, the
most famous example of which is the word “evolution” itself. Moving on to
the social sciences, we shall then take in two of Spencer’s most important
impacts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first
concerns his role when it came to figuring out how biology and the newly
substantiated concept of evolution related to social phenomena. The second
is the inspiration his writings gave to people working at the intersection of
biological and social science, which left a visible but frequently unnoticed
imprint on the language and reasoning of a number of disciplines.
As we weave in and out of the different fields that were brought together
by the Victorian debates about evolution, there will be one theme that links
them together and helps us to understand Spencer’s impact on them. The
theme is this: Victorian britain was a place where big ideas mattered and
Spencer was the big-picture thinker par excellence. His contribution to the
biological and social sciences was to help people think about what those
fields really were and how evolution functioned within and between them.
to be sure, Spencer was not the only thinker who participated in the debates
about those subjects. Indeed, in terms of the biology and social science we
now have, historians might argue that he was not the most significant par-
ticipant. Yet Spencer was among the first and most important contribu-
tors to those debates and he helped set them on the path that leads to the
present, even if his role is now overlooked. As we shall now see, nowhere is
this clearer than in the emergence of “biology” in Victorian britain.
2. Indeed, understanding Spencer’s impact in transnational perspective is an issue to

which scholars, including bernard Lightman, are currently turning their attention.
113
“Standing on Spencer’s shoulders”:

biology after the System of Synthetic Philosophy
The very existence of a science called “biology” is something we can eas-

ily take for granted. However, the word and the field that now goes by that
name are fairly recent inventions. Although the word was used during the
late eighteenth century, “biology” is most frequently traced back to Jean-
baptiste Lamarck’s 1802 book Hydrogéikigue, where he used “biologie” to
denote a new study of living things that was separate from natural history:
a field that encompassed the aspects of the natural world that had yet to be
brought under the experimental and quantitative methods of the physical
sciences.3 Michel Foucault ([1970] 2000) made much of this development, of
course, when he argued that an epistemic shift created the modern concept
of life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, as
Joseph A. caron (1988) has argued, Foucault’s argument requires qualifica-
tion if it is to capture the wider developments that led to biology being firmly
established in intellectual and institutional life. More specifically, Foucault’s
argument does not explain why it was not until the middle decades of the
century, and most notably in britain, that biology stopped being a curious
neologism that symbolized ideas about new ways of studying the natural
world and instead became the subject of debate, especially among those
working in fields such as physiology, who wondered about its implications
for their own work.
As the new science of life, and one that stood apart from the older tradi-
tion of natural history, biology was associated with scientific naturalism in
britain and the goal of overthrowing natural theology. After 1859 that aim
was inextricably linked with the theory of descent with modification but,
as the intellectual journey taken by “Darwin’s bulldog” t. H. Huxley shows,
biology initially entailed a more general commitment to explaining organic
life in naturalistic terms (Desmond 1997; White 2003). In this respect, biol-
ogy was a product of the socially and culturally radical forces that historians
have described in connection with fields such as phrenology during the early
1800s and then the debate about science and religion later in the century
(Shapin 1975; Desmond 1989; F. M. turner [1978] 1993; Secord 2000; Van
Whye 2003). At the heart of those debates during the mid- and late nine-
teenth century was the famed X-club, whose members included Huxley,
Darwin, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock, Francis Galton, John tyndall, and, of
course, Spencer (barton 1998).4 Although he disagreed with specific aims
3. As robert J. richards (2003: 16–17) points out, “biology” was actually used in a
number of similar contexts at the same time as Lamarck first used it.
4. For an overview of these issues see Desmond (2001).
114
promoted by particular individuals, such as Huxley’s campaigns for greater

state support for science, Spencer was no outlier in that group. A product
of the Midlands’ dissenting culture and a religious sceptic who developed
a radical liberal political philosophy, Spencer’s early interests and intellec-
tual commitments, which included phrenology and a theory of social and
organic change, meant he shared a great deal of common ground with the
other X-club members, especially when it came to the question of religious
constraints on scientific explanation (peel 1971: chs 2–4; Jones 2004; Francis
2007: chs 15– 16; elliot 2009).5
It was through these interests and associations that Spencer came to be
among the first people to think through the wide-ranging consequences of
the kinds of science the new generation of men of science were promoting.
In the process, he became one of the first champions of biology. Writing
in his Autobiography, he claimed that in 1864, when he published the first
volume of The Principles of Biology, the second instalment of his System of
Synthetic Philosophy, “not one educated person in ten or more knew the
meaning of the word biology; and among those who knew it, whether critics
or general readers, few cared to know about the subject” (1904: vol. 2, 105).
even when taking into account Spencer’s high regard for his own reputation
and importance, that statement’s general claim should not be dismissed too
quickly. This much can be seen by the fact that Huxley was giving lectures
and writing essays in which he addressed the issue of biology’s identity as
late as 1876. “In respect to what biology is”, he told an audience at the South
Kensington Museum:
there are, I believe, some persons who imagine that the term
“biology” is simply a new-fangled denomination, a neologism
in short, for what used to be known under the title of “natural
History”; but I shall try to show you, on the contrary, that the
word is the expression of the growth of science during the last
200 years, and into existence half a century ago.
(t. H. Huxley [1876] 1893: 263)
It is in this respect that The Principles of Biology, which was among the
first systematic texts – perhaps even the first systematic text – on biology,
was a hugely significant book (caron 1988: 264–5, n. 143). to be sure, that
significance has subsequently become difficult to grasp, partly because the
book’s intended audience and aims do not fit easily with our received catego-
ries. A typical Spencerian work of synthesis that qualified as neither popular
5. For Spencer’s early political views see Spencer (1851, [1857a] 1901).
115
nor experimental science, The Principles of Biology brought together the lat-
est scientific thinking on organic life to illustrate the general scheme of evo-
lutionary development he had outlined two years earlier in First Principles.
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, it is difficult to appre-
ciate how and why a work of systematization, written from the comfort of an
armchair, could have an impact on serious scientific thinking and practice.
However, as Thomson explained:
much that is in The Principles of Biology has now become common

biological property; much has been absorbed or independently
reached by others; consciously or unconsciously we are now, as it
were, standing on Spencer’s shoulders, but this should not blind
us to the magnitude of Spencer’s achievement. The book was more
than a careful balance-sheet of the facts of life at a time when
that was much needed, it meant orientation and systematisation;
it was the introduction of order, clearness, and breadth of view.
It gave biology a fresh start by displaying the facts of life and the
inductions from these for the first time clearly in the light of evo-
lution. For if the evolution idea is an adequate modal formula of
the great process of becoming, then we need to think of growth,
development, differentiation, integration, reproduction, hered-
ity, death – all the big facts – in light of this. And this is what the
Principles of Biology helped us to do. (1906: 93–4)
However, when it comes to thinking about Spencer’s importance as a

theorizer in these senses, it is crucial to recognize that he was seen in his
own lifetime as standing for a distinctive set of biological ideas. Most impor-
tantly, and despite his reputation as the nineteenth-century’s leading social
Darwinist, Spencer was known for his confidence in Lamarckian mecha-
nisms of evolutionary change, which he first learned about from charles
Lyell’s critical account in his Principles of Geology (1830–33: vol. 2, chs 1–2),
even after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Although
Spencer incorporated natural selection, or “survival of the fittest” as he
renamed it, into his writings from The Principles of Biology onwards, he disa-
greed with Darwin over the mechanism’s power.6 For Spencer, natural selec-
tion was a negative and limited, rather than creative and extensive, process;
it was capable only of eliminating unfit traits, not generating complex adap-
tation, which, following the logic of his general evolutionary account, he
6. For a study of the differences between Darwin and Spencer’s ideas about evolution
see r. J. richards (2004).
116
believed was a product of equilibration between organisms and environ-

ments, with offspring inheriting the traits organisms developed during that
process (Spencer 1864–67: vol. 1, 433–63 [§§164–8]; 1887). In fact, Spencer
became notorious for clashing with neo-Darwinists, including Alfred russel
Wallace, who tried to establish the primacy of natural selection during the
closing decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the most famous of
those disputes, with Weismann in the early 1890s, Spencer declared that
“either there has been inheritance of acquired characteristics, or there has
been no evolution” (1893a: 446; see also Spencer 1893b; Weismann 1893b;
Gould 2002: 197–208).
In this respect, Spencer was a grand systematizer who occupied a partic-
ular niche in the nineteenth-century debates about evolution. Yet while his
ideas owed great debts to thinkers such as Lamarck, Spencer took them in
new directions that had significant, although frequently unacknowledged,
impacts on biology. As trevor pearce (2010) has shown, one such impact
was the emerging concept of a singular organism interacting with a singular
environment, which was virtually unknown before the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury but received a great deal of attention from Spencer in his explanations
of evolutionary change. Another was “heredity”: then a new word, derived
from the French “hérédité”, which was used to describe the developing idea
that all physical and sometimes intellectual endowments were the result
of a coherent natural process (radick 2010; López-beltrán 1994, 2004).
Moreover, Spencer also popularized and promoted some of the language we
now read back into mid-nineteenth-century debates. For instance, although
we associate “evolution” with Darwin, it was a word he initially tried hard to
avoid because few people understood it to mean the general development
of life on earth or the emergence of one species from another. It was in fact
Spencer who made “evolution” common linguistic currency when he opted
to use it instead of “progress”, which he believed was too anthropomorphic
(bowler 1975; see also Gould 1977).7
In addition to these specific contributions, it is also important to recog-
nize that the impact of Spencer’s armchair theorizing went on for longer
and went far deeper than historians of science have traditionally assumed
possible. As Thomson explained, part of the power of Spencer’s work was
the way it inspired men of science to investigate whether his ideas could
be isolated and demonstrated in the natural world. For that reason, there
7. On evolution and progress in Spencer’s work see ruse (1996: ch. 5) and r. J. richards
(1992, 2004). Although, as bowler (1975) notes, even in the late nineteenth century,
“evolution” was understood as a general system of development rather than the nar-
rower process of one species descending from another, which it came to designate
in the late twentieth century.
117
was no sharp distinction between theorizing and practice, especially as the

transition between old and new ways of studying the natural world, includ-
ing the advent of laboratories and experimentation, was far from linear
(nyhart 1995b). Historians are still very much in the process of fleshing
out this point. However, from the work that has been done so far, we have a
clear sense of Spencer influencing biological thought and practice from the
mid- and late-nineteenth-century work of the likes of cambridge physiolo-
gist Michael Foster and Scottish biologist patrick Geddes through to the
twentieth-century modern evolutionary synthesis and the American biolo-
gist Sewall Wright’s “Shifting balance Theory” (ruse 2004; see also Hodge
2011).
notwithstanding these impacts, it would be wrong to suggest that
Spencer’s status as an armchair philosopher was unproblematic, even dur-
ing the heyday of his influence. Despite proofreading drafts of the Principles
of Biology and helping to provide important pieces of information for its
arguments, Huxley, in particular, was prone to mocking Spencer for being
what Huxley, borrowing a phrase from Galileo, disparagingly referred to as
a “paper-philosopher” (t. H. Huxley [1876] 1893: 278 n., 282). Although
Spencer was not alone among the X-club generation in failing to hold a uni-
versity post – Galton, for example, lived off inherited wealth, while William
Spottiswoode’s family were the printers to british royalty – he was somewhat
distinct in refusing all professional honours, including membership of the
royal Society, and eschewing any effort to verify his theories with first-hand
observations. In this respect, one of the most frequently repeated stories
involving Spencer, both during his own lifetime and since, is the one with
the punchline, most frequently delivered by Huxley, about the tragedy of “a
beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact”.8
While Huxley’s quip was misleading when it comes to understanding
Spencer’s relationship with the biological sciences, it does tell us something
important about how Spencer went so quickly from being a much-valued
theorizer of new concepts to an intellectual pariah. Specifically, the quip
leads us to the fact that Spencer’s influence on biology was always dependent
on the extent to which his key ideas – the ones that made him an intellectual
entity distinct from Darwin – were considered plausible by biologists. We
shall return to this issue later. In the meantime, however, it is crucial to rec-
ognize that the main reason Spencer’s relationship with biology, vis-à-vis his
status as an armchair theorizer, mattered so much is that nineteenth-century
8. This story, most frequently set at the Athenaeum club in London and involving
Huxley delivering the put-down, appears in numerous late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century sources. See for example Galton (1930: 627), which also appeared
in Duncan (1908: 502).
118
discussions about the relative merits of natural selection and the inheritance
of acquired characteristics as motors of evolutionary change were not sim-
ply about biology. evolution, in its new Spencer-influenced meaning, was
understood as having implications for both the natural and social worlds.
For this reason, there was a great deal of traffic between the biological and
social sciences and few people did more to wave that traffic through, or
depended as much on its successful passage, as Spencer.
“The law of all progress”: Spencer, biology and society
Although all sciences are nominally equal, the reality in the field of history
of science is that some sciences are more equal than others. While it is not
unknown for large-scale history of science projects to overlook whole swathes
of social science, historians of science tend to see the lines of communication
between the natural and social sciences as flowing almost entirely from the
former to the latter (Shapin 2009, 2011). As a consequence, our picture of
the nineteenth-century debate about evolution and society is skewed towards
post-On the Origin of Species developments and a view of political and social
science thinkers as constantly raiding the biological sciences for ideas to
legitimize their activities and wider programmes. to be sure, thinkers from
almost every field and of almost every political creed sought to reconcile
their ideas with organic evolution after 1859 but, as the inspiration Darwin
took from Thomas Malthus’s population principle should indicate, the intel-
lectual traffic went both ways over the course of the nineteenth century. Since
the early twentieth century, though, and in particular since the Second World
War, there has been a profound effort to keep biology and society separate.
Spencer, one of the grand unifiers of biological and social thought during
the nineteenth century, has been a high-profile casualty of that process (r.
J. richards 1987).
It is possible to view this unofficial separation of the natural and social
sciences as one of the final remnants of the problems the Marxist historian
robert M. Young (1985) identified during the late 1960s and early 1970s in
his writings about Darwin, Malthus and the “common context”. Young took
aim at historians he saw as making unjustifiable distinctions between sci-
ence and its social, cultural, and economic contexts. The clearest manifesta-
tion of that approach, he argued, were false assumptions about what counted
as science, which could be seen clearly in work that categorized Malthus
as a non-scientific influence on Darwin’s thought. As Young pointed out,
Malthus’s famous population principle – the idea that human populations,
when left to their own devices, increase geometrically, while food supplies
can only ever increase arithmetically – was a clear example of thinking in
119
which there was no obvious distinction between social and natural issues.
What Malthus did in the six editions of his An Essay on Population, pub-
lished between 1798 and 1826, was relate human ambitions and natural
constraints as part of an attack on the utopian schemes developed by late
enlightenment thinkers, in particular William Godwin and the Marquis de
condorcet, who saw humans as capable of almost limitless improvement.
In so doing, Malthus helped shape a debate in which natural laws were seen
as obviously relevant to social order and policy.
As Young pointed out, the sheer pervasiveness of Malthusianism in early-
nineteenth-century britain is evidence of the extent to which what we would
now see as separate biological, social and political spheres were then part
of a common context. Since Young first made those arguments, historians
of science have moved decisively in the directions he suggested and, in the
process, away from the kinds of “internal” and “external” distinctions that
had motivated the “common context” argument. Indeed, scholars have sub-
sequently taken that spirit in all manner of new directions and endeavoured
to collapse a whole range of what had previously seemed to be impervious
boundaries, including most recently the division between popular and elite
science (see e.g. cantor & Shuttleworth 2004). Spencer is a thinker who has
benefited from those moves on a number of occasions, with scholars includ-
ing r. J. richards and ruse, not to mention Young himself, taking Spencer
and his work seriously. However, the free and multi-directional flow of ideas
between natural and social science – one of the most important contributing
factors in Spencer’s success – is one set of nineteenth-century exchanges that
has yet to be fully captured by historians of science.
crucial to understanding those exchanges is the fact that, from the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scientific revolution onwards, social
science was a frequently radical pursuit because it, like biology in the nine-
teenth century, stood for a naturalistic approach: one in which the world
inhabited by humans was regulated by laws rather than God. That radical-
ism can be seen in any number of works, from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
to Auguste comte’s positive philosophy.9 In britain, social science’s radical
credentials were often best represented by the tradition of political economy
beginning with David Hume and Adam Smith in enlightenment edinburgh
and running through to John Stuart Mill, via David ricardo, in the nine-
teenth century, when utilitarian liberals, including Jeremy bentham and
James Mill, had made the field central to their plans for rationalizing society
and government (backhouse 2002: chs 6–7; Schabas 2005: chs 5–6; Smith
1997: ch. 8, esp. 316–18; Hilton 1991: ch. 2). Like other social scientists,
9. For an overview of these developments see Smith (1997).
120
political economists were in the business of not just describing a specific

type of phenomena but also arguing for reforms that would encourage activ-
ities and behaviours associated with it.
A political radical who believed that individuals should be free from
interference from government institutions, Spencer was cut from the same
intellectual cloth as political economists such as ricardo, whose work
Spencer was more than familiar with from his early years among Derby’s
philosophical radicals and then his time as a subeditor at The Economist.10
Indeed, as ricardo’s membership of the Geological Society of London
shows and James Secord’s (2000) work on robert chambers’s Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation (1844) has demonstrated so effectively, Spencer’s
other early and wide-ranging interests in fields such as phrenology and geol-
ogy were a common feature of his political culture, which was saturated
by discussions about chartism and free trade.11 beginning with an article
entitled “The Development Hypothesis”, which was published in The Leader
in March 1852, Spencer’s interest in evolution therefore stood for a shared
desire to bring together a wide range of interests under a new framework
that stood apart from the ideas held by the elite and establishment (Spencer
[1852a] 1901).
As he explained in an essay entitled “progress: Its Law and cause”, which
appeared in April 1857 in the Westminster Review, which had been founded
as a benthamite periodical during the 1820s, Spencer operated with a con-
cept of evolution that included but went far beyond questions about the
origins of species. In this nineteenth-century context, evolution was to be
understood as a universal process in which the homogenous was trans-
formed into the heterogeneous: an idea that was known to both Spencer
and his audience in connection with the work of the German physiologist
Karl von baer. The journey from simple to complex was:
the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the

earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the develop-
ment of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of commerce,
of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the
simple into the complex, through successive differentiations,
holds throughout. ([1857a] 1901: 10)
10. On Spencer’s early radical politics see elliot (2009); peel (1971: chs 2–4); Francis
(2007: chs 15–16). On Spencer’s later political views see taylor (1992).
11. On the intersection between early-nineteenth-century political economy and natu-
ral science see Schabas (2005).
121
While this idea was exciting in the context of the radical politics of the
1850s, it was given a further twist by the publication of On the Origin of
Species in 1859, which effectively ended the debate about the viability of the
transmutation hypothesis. The rising generation of men of science who were
looking to establish a new science of life called biology seized on organic
evolution. However, the relationship between biology and other fields, as
seen through the prism of evolution, was complex, as thinkers endeavoured
to make sense of what the emerging intellectual landscape might look like.
The hopes for and ambiguity surrounding the relationship between biol-
ogy, evolution and society after 1859 were embodied by Huxley. Although
he is now best known for the position he set out in “evolution and ethics”,
his lecture and essay of 1893 in which he argued that human society and
the natural world should be considered separate, Huxley’s earlier stance was
somewhat different (t. H. Huxley 1894b,c).12 This point was made clear in
his 1876 lecture “On the Study of biology”, in which Huxley suggested that
man’s social activity might form part of the new science’s remit. biology was
the study of living things, Huxley argued, and that meant:
we should find that psychology, politics, and political economy

would be absorbed into the province of biology. In fact, civil his-
tory would be merged in natural history. In strict logic it may be
hard to object to this course, because no one can doubt that the
rudiments and outlines of our own mental phenomena are trace-
able among the lower animals. They have their economy and their
polity, and if, as is always admitted, the polity of bees and the
commonwealth of wolves fall within the purview of the biologist
proper, it becomes hard to say why we should not include therein
human affairs, which, in so many cases, resemble those of the
bees in zealous getting, and are not without a certain parity in the
proceedings of the wolves. ([1876] 1893: 270)
Yet, Huxley explained, biologists were too busy establishing their new sci-
ence’s claim to study the natural world to deal properly with human social
life, which meant it was being voluntarily surrendered, for the time being at
least, to other fields, including the emerging “sociology”.
With respect to this interest in the relationship between biology and
other fields of knowledge, Spencer was leading the way in his five-part
12. Indeed, while Huxley and Spencer had a famous falling out over these issues,
Huxley’s grandson, Julian, took him to task during the mid-twentieth century for
what he saw as logical inconsistency in the position he staked out in “evolution and
ethics”. See t. H. Huxley (1894a); J. Huxley (1947).
122
System of Synthetic Philosophy, which began with First Principles in 1862

and then moved through volumes on biology, psychology, sociology and
ethics over the course of forty-four years, during which time he constantly
revised his system in light of new findings, although he would seldom admit
to doing so. Spencer’s central aim was to show how the transformation of
the simple into the complex came about because of a dynamic balance of
conflicting forces, called evolution and dissolution, both within individual
things and the systems of which they are a part. These forces were both
unstable enough to drive change forwards and stable enough at any given
point to produce the phenomena we see. Through that process, individuals
became increasingly more complex and, logically, more specialized, which
meant that the parts making up systems become more interdependent. As
numerous scholars have shown, this interdependence not only underpinned
Spencer’s politics but also led him to emphasize the importance of a whole
range of feelings, actions and values that have traditionally been seen as
quite un-Spencerian, including altruism and cooperation, a point that was
underscored by the importance he attached to the subject matter of the
planned final volume of the System of Synthetic Philosophy, The Principles
of Ethics (1892–93; Dixon 2004, 2008; renwick 2009). Altruism and coop-
eration were necessary and inevitable, he argued, if social systems were to
function properly and grow.
The key point about Spencer’s commitment to these values was that they
ignored any perceived distinction between the natural and social worlds.
everything was subject to the forces he described, which meant there was
no need to change either the terms of reference or principles of explana-
tion when moving from one subject to another. Indeed, in one of his most
famous analogies, Spencer described societies as being “social organisms”:
entities that exhibit the same attributes and relations as a living body ([1860]
1901; [1874–96] 1877: vol. 1, pt 2, ch. 2). There were, of course, complica-
tions when it came to thinking in this way, especially when it came to rec-
onciling it with his political principles. This problem was made clear by his
dispute with Huxley about how to understand the relationship between the
different parts of a body and the brain, which was rooted in the politically
resonant question of whether the body cooperated with or was ruled by
the brain (elwick 2003). However, and notwithstanding these difficulties,
Spencer was adamant that social and natural evolution were two sides of
the same coin and that they were both part of a singular process driven by
the same principles.
It was this approach that chimed with reformers and radicals in both the
natural and social sciences and made the System of Synthetic Philosophy part
of their conversations. Spencer’s role in those discussions was important
because it meant he had an audience across a number of different fields at
123
a moment when disciplinary identities and boundaries were being created.

Indeed, in a period when the dividing lines between the natural and social
sciences were yet to be put in the places we now know, Spencer’s efforts to
bring different fields together under a single explanatory framework were
seen as particularly important. Social science thinkers looked to him as a
way of making sense of developments in the biological sciences and a source
of inspiration when it came to connecting those developments to their own
pursuits. In the process, Spencer’s work became a great catalyst for intellec-
tual innovation at the point where the social and biological sciences inter-
sect. However, as we shall see, having spurred those thinkers on, Spencer
was often discarded for the very same reasons that had made him appealing
in the first place.
Dynamic equilibriums, structures and functions:

Spencer, biology and the social sciences
Although they have much in common, Spencer’s relationship with the social
sciences is different from his relationship with biology. While Spencer does
not feature in the history that biologists tell about themselves or, indeed, that
many historians of science have told, he does play a role in histories of the
social sciences. Sociologists, in particular, see Spencer, along with comte, as
one of the “founding fathers” of their field. to be sure, few practising sociolo-
gists actually read Spencer’s work. He therefore has a very different status to
other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thinkers, such as Karl Marx,
Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, who are still staples of undergraduate
curriculums and niche scholarship. In this respect, sociologists do not see
Spencer as one of the great founders of their field whose ideas have stood
the test of time. Instead, sociologists see Spencer as a slightly embarrass-
ing part of the enthusiasm for biology and evolution that accompanied the
“Darwinian revolution”, which can be dismissed as a passing fashion pre-
dating the pursuit of serious social science. While it is, therefore, significant
that Spencer has not been airbrushed completely from the historical picture
in the social sciences, it is often difficult to appreciate fully the nature of his
impact on them. As he did in biology, though, Spencer helped articulate
and popularize new ideas, words and concepts in social science, as well as
define problems for social scientists to solve.13 Indeed, it was because social
13. It is for this reason that some contemporary social scientists suggest Spencer should
be seen as a biological false start to nineteenth-century social science, rather than
a genuinely social scientific thinker. See Fuller (2006: 35).
124
scientists maintained a strong interest in biology into the twentieth century

that Spencer was so important.
The history shared by the natural and social sciences during the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries was not just intellectual; it involved
similar experiences relating to practices and institutions too. new disci-
plines emerged from old, often radical, fields, as was the case with psychol-
ogy, sociology and economics. Furthermore, as those new fields started to
take their modern institutional shape, there were debates about methods
and practices that cut to the heart of what it meant to be scientific about
social and economic phenomena. While in disciplines such as anthropol-
ogy these debates focused on the perceived battle between old-fashioned,
amateur armchair theorizers and the new professional field observers, oth-
ers, including economics and psychology, took in questions about the role
of quantification and statistics, as well as the relative merits of historical and
deductive methods.14 Across the social sciences, new professional and intel-
lectual identities were carved out, often with a sharper division of labour
between different disciplines and a fresh sense of the methods appropriate
to each field.
Spencer had a significant role to play when it came to the emerging lan-
guage of these fields. perhaps the most famous but under-reported of these
cases is Spencer’s part in making the term “sociology” common linguistic
currency in britain and english-language audiences more generally. The
French positivist philosopher August comte coined the word “sociology”
in the 1830s after the belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet used the term
“social physics”, which comte had wanted as the name for the science at the
top of his hierarchy of sciences. Yet after comte’s writings about the poten-
tial for a “religion of humanity”, which Huxley once famously described as
“catholicism minus christianity” ([1869] 1871: 152–3, original emphasis),
sociology was identified with profoundly radical implications for social and
political order. consequently, few outside comte’s loyal group of follow-
ers were prepared to openly identify themselves with the idea in britain.
beginning with his contribution to the International Scientific Series The
Study of Sociology, which was the first systematic english-language text on
the subject, Spencer changed that state of affairs by popularizing the term,
purging it of its most radical connotations, and connecting it with scientific
naturalism and progressive culture.15
Understanding Spencer’s relationship with the social sciences beyond
that groundbreaking contribution can often be difficult. In essence, his work
14. For an overview of these developments see porter & ross (2008).
15. On the International Scientific Series see MacLeod (1980); Howsam (2000).
125
had a significant impact on an emerging language and style of social science

thinking that was in dialogue with debates about evolution. Yet the most
obvious cases that can be made in support of this claim, while convincing
for those predisposed to accept them, are frequently impressionistic. For
example, we can point to how one of Spencer’s core ideas, the dynamic equi-
librium, in which a balance between a set of forces can produce both stabil-
ity at any given point and change over time, became a staple part of social
science theorizing during the twentieth century. Yet proving the Spencerian
credentials of those twentieth-century ideas in a way that satisfies most his-
torians has traditionally proved more difficult. Work on key figures from
the history of the sciences of man, society and wealth, however, has gone a
great distance towards making those connections more comprehensible. In
the process, that work has helped us to understand more about the relation-
ship between Spencer and social science, as well as biosocial science more
generally, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Some of the oldest efforts to answer these questions have been made by
historians of anthropology. As George Stocking (1987: chs 4–6) and oth-
ers have documented extensively, sociocultural evolutionary thinking was
part of anthropology’s identity throughout the nineteenth century. Spencer
was, therefore, an obvious point of reference when it came to thinking
about the emergence of Western societies, their customs, laws and tradi-
tions, not to mention the controversial question of where Western and non-
Western peoples stood in relation to each other. nevertheless, historians
have seldom got to grips fully with Spencer’s role in anthropology through-
out the nineteenth century. An important reason is the distinction that is
often made between anthropology before and after Darwin, which often
makes it difficult to appreciate how developments that might appear to be
Darwinian were in fact products of an engagement with Spencer’s work.
Although he was not an anthropologist, Spencer’s evolutionary ideas, par-
ticularly those associated with his descriptive sociology and social organi-
cism, inspired anthropologists throughout the nineteenth century and, in
the process, helped shape their emerging intellectual toolkit. For instance,
leading british social anthropologists such as James G. Frazer and A. r.
radcliffe-brown, whose careers began after Darwin, admitted they owed
profound intellectual debts to Spencer, with brown going as far as to say
that he had “all his life accepted the hypothesis of social evolution as for-
mulated by [Herbert] Spencer as a useful working hypothesis” (radcliffe-
brown 1958: 189; Kuklick 1991: 13–15; Stocking 1995: 305–6). Indeed, one
can see Spencer’s obvious imprint on radcliffe-brown’s structural function-
alism (radcliffe-brown 1958; Stocking 1995: 306 n.).
Spencer’s importance was rooted in the fact that his account of evolution
was not merely sociocultural and therefore potentially vague, but included
126
hereditable components, driven on by Lamarckian mechanisms, which

gave his theories significant intellectual and physical purchase. His account
offered a clear way to join cultural development and biological processes,
which was a particularly important issue for anthropologists after 1859
when they were faced with the question of how to assimilate organic evolu-
tion into their pre-existing frameworks of explanation (Stocking 1987: chs
4–6). Indeed, Spencer’s ideas were a profound influence on two of the most
important figures in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century british
anthropology: W. H. r. rivers, who spent a portion of his early career
under the Spencerian neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, and Alfred cort
Haddon, who trained under the Spencerian physiologist Michael Foster.
While both rivers and Haddon drew explicitly on Spencer’s view of evolu-
tion as composed of a shifting balance of forces when explaining cultural
development, they also led the 1898 expedition to the torres Strait, which is
generally seen as the moment when the modern concept of fieldwork took
centre stage in anthropology.16 In fact, in what was one of the first appli-
cations of the new experimental psychology’s methods outside the labo-
ratory, rivers and others tested Spencer’s psychological ideas, which used
Lamarckian mechanisms to join culture and matter, in order to compare
them with competing theories that borrowed from the likes of Weismann’s
neo-Darwinism (G. richards 1998). It was the failure of Spencer’s psycho-
logical ideas to pass those tests that was a key reason behind their decline
in anthropology.
This theme of Spencer’s influence fading around 1900 is usually also
taken to be true of british sociology, which philip Abrams (1968: 67) once
famously described having been founded as a defence against Spencer. In
a fairly limited sense, Abrams’s evaluation was accurate. From the social
surveyors, such as charles booth and Seebohm rowntree, whom we usu-
ally associate with british sociology, to the eugenicist Francis Galton, the
biologist turned town planner patrick Geddes, and the UK’s first professor
of sociology L. t. Hobhouse, who all helped establish the field’s intellec-
tual identity during the first decade of the twentieth century, british soci-
ologists were defined and unified by their interest in social action as well
as social theory and knowledge (renwick 2012). consequently, Spencer’s
commitment to individualism, although radical in the early-nineteenth-
century political context in which it had been forged, did not strike the
16. On rivers, see G. richards (1998); Kuklick (1998: 167, 171–2); radick (2007: 165–
3). On Jackson, see radick (2007: 78–80). On Foster, see Geison (1978: 353 n.);
Kuklick (1998: 167). On Haddon, see Stocking (1995: 98–104); Kuklick (1998);
radick (2007: 162–6); Haddon (1895). On the expedition to the torres Strait, see
Herle & rouse (1998); Kuklick (1994).
127
right notes for british sociologists at the beginning of the twentieth century.
nevertheless, as the careers of Geddes and Hobhouse, the two thinkers who
were in direct competition for the UK’s first chair of sociology, show, a scep-
tical attitude to Spencer’s politics did not mean his ideas about evolution
were not important to the field (ibid.: chs 5–6).
A career-long collaborator of Thomson’s, Geddes is now best known as
a sociologist and town planner whose ideas about urban development still
inspire interest today (Studholme 2007, 2008). However, Geddes began
his career as biologist who studied under both Huxley and, like his friend
Haddon, Foster. Despite enjoying Huxley’s patronage at a time when his
attitude to the relationship between biology and society was hardening,
Geddes enthusiastically embraced Spencer’s vision of evolution as an all-
encompassing and progressive balance of forces. Geddes initially applied
that Spencerian vision to his work in biology but, as his career branched
out into new directions from the early 1880s onwards, he developed a com-
pletely unified account of natural and social evolution that was anchored
in the System of Synthetic Philosophy. One need only glance casually at
how Geddes put together differentiation in biological processes, gender
and birth-control policy in his first book, The Evolution of Sex (1889), co-
authored with Thomson, or how he depicted modern civilization as being
underpinned by two forces, one constructive, the other destructive, in his
most famous book, Cities in Evolution (1915), to see Spencer’s influence at
work (renwick 2009, 2012; radick & Gooday 2004).
nevertheless, and despite the concerted efforts of his supporters, Geddes
lost out to Hobhouse in the competition for the UK’s first chair of sociology,
which was established at the London School of economics (LSe) in 1907.
Despite his rejection of a straightforward connection between biology and
society, Hobhouse was as much of a Spencer devotee as Geddes, sharing his
enthusiasm for Spencer’s writings about evolution as a progressive and all
embracing force. Indeed, after a period spent exploring biology and chem-
istry under J. S. Haldane in the Museum Laboratory at Oxford, Hobhouse
produced a series of books that formed a coherent project mirroring the
development and trajectory of the System of Synthetic Philosophy. beginning
in 1896 with Theory of Knowledge, his own intellectual ground-clearing
exercise on a par with First Principles, Hobhouse’s project culminated with
the two-volume Morals in Evolution, which covered the same ground as
Principles of Ethics and Principles of Sociology (collini 1979; radick 2007:
211–15; renwick 2012: ch. 4). partly through his supporter and successor at
the LSe, Morris Ginsberg, a founding president of the british Sociological
Association and co-author of the famous 1950 UneScO statement “The
race Question”, and partly because the discipline failed to make significant
institutional inroads elsewhere in britain until after the Second World War,
128
Hobhouse’s Spencerian vision dominated british sociology during the early

twentieth century.
perhaps surprisingly, what is true of Spencer and british sociology is also
partly true of british economics of the period. The relationship between
economics and biology since the mid-nineteenth century is a relatively
underexplored area but, as the work that has been done makes clear, the
connections between the two fields tend to be of two different but some-
times overlapping types. On the one hand, there are substantive, often tool-
based, connections where economists and biologists have shared a specific
set of resources, such as game theory since the 1930s. On the other hand,
and much more frequently, economists and biologists have shared more
qualitative connections, usually via evolutionary analogies and ideas, which
have continued to inspire economic thought right through to the present
(see e.g. Hodgson 1993a; Loasby 1999). Unsurprisingly, social Darwinism
has been an important topic in this area, with the impact of Darwinism on
ideas about competition in both American and british economics a par-
ticular focus (Morgan 1993). Yet, as Darwin’s use of Malthus’s population
principle shows, the intellectual exchange between economics and biology
predates On the Origin of Species and involves a long and complex history
(Schabas 2005; see also collard 2009).
Spencer’s part in those developments was initially most important with
respect to psychology, which was the subject of much, but fairly short-lived,
discussion among british political economists during the third quarter of
the nineteenth century (Schabas 1997). However, the most informative
and best-documented example of Spencer’s relationship comes via the
cambridge economist, Alfred Marshall, who is frequently seen as the first
professional academic economist and, via his multi-edition Principles of
Economics, a thinker who did more than any other in britain to shape the
understanding of the content, scope and aims of economic science dur-
ing the early twentieth century (Groenewegen 1995: ch. 12; backhouse
2006). As historians of economics have frequently noted, Marshall was a
great enthusiast for what he called “economic biology”, which was never
realized but what he famously described as “Mecca” for economists (1908:
viii). The importance Marshall attached to the concept was shown by the
frequency with which he deployed biological analogies and images in his
work, most notably in his account of organization in book four of Principles
of Economics.17 crucially, though, and despite carrying the same epigraph as
On the Origin of Species, “natura non facit saltum,” Principles of Economics
17. For more on Marshall’s use of biological images see Limoges & Ménard (1994);
Schabas (1994). See also Laurent (2004).
129
owed a distinctly Spencerian debt, demonstrated by Marshall’s use of the

terms “differentiation” and “integration” to describe the main processes
driving evolution (G. M. Hodgson 1993b). In this respect, as Simon cook
has shown, it should be no surprise that the most read of Spencer’s works
in Marshall’s possession was his copy of the essay “The Social Organism”, in
which Marshall noted that “capital and blood have strong analogies” (cook
2009: 197).
Yet what was equally important about Marshall’s engagement with
Spencer was its trajectory over time, which can be followed through the
eight different editions of Principles of Economics. In the first chapter on
industrial organization in the first edition, Marshall had deployed the exam-
ple of the giraffe and its long neck to illustrate Lamarckian inheritance in
action (1890: bk 4, 307–8). However, in the third edition, after following
the debate between Spencer and Weismann and consulting the cambridge
geneticist William bateson, whom he thanked in the preface, Marshall
eliminated that example ([1890] 1895: viii, bk 4, 328).18 Acting on bateson’s
advice, Marshall had decided that the inheritance of acquired characteris-
tics was no longer an acceptable way to think about organic evolution and
therefore severed a crucial link between his work and Spencer.
Conclusion
Marshall’s decision to expunge the inheritance of acquired characteristics

from Principles of Economics in 1895 is a moment of great significance when
it comes to understanding Spencer’s relationship with the biological sciences,
the social sciences and the areas where the two intersect. Far from being
a one-off, Marshall’s decision to rewrite the details of a theory that bor-
rowed from biology, rather than rethink the transaction entirely, in light
of changing specialist opinions was repeated frequently around 1900. to
name but one of many other examples, the biosocial thinker and writer
benjamin Kidd, author of the first entry on sociology for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, also saw a fork in the road when it came to debates about evo-
lutionary mechanisms in the 1890s. Like Marshall, Kidd’s departure from
Lamarckian and Spencerian ideas, which was expressed in his wildly popular
book of 1894, Social Evolution, also came after an encounter with Weismann’s
neo-Darwinism (elwick 2011: 217–18).19 Marshall’s decision was therefore a
18. On Marshall’s correspondence with bateson, see Groenewegen (1995: 483–5).

19. For more on Kidd see crook (1984). My thanks to James elwick for bringing this
example to my attention.
130
barometer of the changes that were taking place in the intellectual climate of
the early twentieth century and a useful indicator of the developments that
have shaped our own understanding of Spencer’s influence.
Most significantly, Marshall’s decision, as well as others like him, to drop
Spencerian Lamarckism tells us what lay behind Spencer’s fairly rapid fall
from intellectual and scientific grace. Simply put, biologists were becoming
less and less convinced that the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the
cornerstone of Spencer’s system, was a plausible mechanism for evolution-
ary change. Although Weismann’s experiments with mice were far from the
decisive moment that textbook histories often present them as, the emer-
gence of genetic science during the first decade of the twentieth century
did indicate that the tide was turning against Lamarckism. If organisms
did not pass on the improvements they made during their own lifetime
then Spencer’s system did not work. This was disastrous not just because
Spencer’s main scientific credentials were revoked, meaning the social scien-
tists who had looked to the System of Synthetic Philosophy as a way of squar-
ing biology with their social explanations were forced to look elsewhere, but
also because it undermined the Victorian social philosophy of self-help that
those credentials had endorsed. even if he was the kind of person who could
admit that he was wrong, and he was certainly not one of those people, this
change happened too late in Spencer’s life for him to do anything about it.
His ideas were set by 1900, three years before his death, and they stood as a
testament to what was once believed about evolution.
This shift is important because neither the biological doctrine of evolu-
tion nor the belief that it could be used to interpret social processes went
away. While british biology moved into a period dominated by the biom-
etrician and Mendelian debates, and in so doing decisively away from the
field of natural history, which was still open to the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, biosocial thinking was frequently captured by eugenicists,
who had no patience with Lamarckism, whatever their political persuasion.
Spencer did not make sense in that scientific, intellectual and socioeco-
nomic environment.20 His apparent faults and idiosyncrasies could be easily
overlooked when his writing was underpinned by an idea that most people
could accept as either true or plausible. When those changes had effectively
been completed and the idea knocked back, though, the fundamental differ-
ences between Spencer’s identity and the rest of science could not be.
recognizing that fundamental and rapid shift is important because it
enables us to look past them and focus on Spencer’s impact on the very
processes that would appear to be antithetical to his reputation, as a number
20. For an overview of these developments see bowler (2009a: chs 7–8).
131
of historians have been doing recently. However, recognizing that shift is

also important because going beyond it is a crucial part of entering a world
in which the challenges were in some ways different and in other ways the
same as the ones that came after. In both cases, though, Spencer was key.
He was a grand theorist and those types of thinker were hugely significant
during the nineteenth century because massive changes were taking place
across the board. In the midst of those changes, people wanted to make
sense of what was happening and where it might lead. nowhere was this
truer than in biology and sciences with connections to it, where new ideas,
fields, and practices were emerging and specialists and non-specialists alike
wanted to know how they all fitted together. Spencer helped those people
make sense of those changes and move forwards, even if, ultimately, it was
not always in a direction that Spencer himself would have approved.21
21. My thanks go to Gregory radick and James elwick for their helpful discussions
during the writing of this chapter and Mark Francis for valuable comments on an
earlier draft.
132
7
spencer and the moral philosophers
Mill, Sidgwick, Moore
John Skorupski
Introduction: Spencer as philosopher
At the end of the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer’s public reputation

stood extraordinarily high. today he remains an important figure for intel-
lectual historians, and to some extent for political theorists (Weinstein 1998;
Offer 2000, 2010; Francis 2007), but no longer has the reputation, which he
certainly had in his time (see e.g. Dixon 2008: 180–89), of being one of the
century’s “big thinkers”.
nor has his reputation survived within philosophy as a “philosophers’
philosopher”. The generation after his produced at least two figures of that
kind: Gottlob Frege among today’s logicians, Henry Sidgwick among today’s
moral philosophers. tellingly, both are associated with a new level of spe-
cialism and precision in their respective subjects and, in particular, with an
emphasis on the aprioricity and autonomy of logic and ethics: their inde-
pendence from psychology. In the early twentieth century this became a
basic tenet of the “analytic school” in philosophy. considered as an exhorta-
tion to get down to pure, rigorous philosophy it produced great results. but it
could hardly help Spencer’s reputation among philosophers, given his claim
to base metaphysics and ethics on psychology and evolutionary theory.
However, for quite some time now this anti-psychologistic turn, despite the
great ideas that came with it, has seemed to many philosophers exaggerated
and narrow. In one of those sweeping changes of mood that periodically affect
philosophical thinking, “naturalism” has come to dominate. The constant
invocation of that idea in current philosophy, and what is supposed to hang
on it (other than a simple reaction against the heroic age of analysis), will pose
a major interpretative question for future historians of philosophy. Still, one
good effect of today’s naturalistic mood is that it makes it easier to assess the
philosophical ideas and arguments of earlier nineteenth-century philosophy,
133
j o h n sko ru p sk i
before the “Frege/Sidgwick” generation: in particular what might be called the

psychologistic stance in epistemology that is found both in Scottish common-
sense philosophy and in John Stuart Mill.1
It is to this earlier period that Spencer belongs, and it is in this context that
he should be understood. That being granted, the question becomes, what
distinctive contribution did he make to it? The answer will have to focus on
his progressivist evolutionism, and whether he was right in his estimate of its
philosophical significance in epistemology, ethics and political philosophy.
At this point I must limit the aims of this essay. Spencer’s “total evolu-
tionism” is a subject in its own right. (This is how Maurice Mandelbaum
[1971] characterizes Spencer’s vision, in his classic study of nineteenth-
century thought.2) Another topic in its own right is Spencer’s liberalism.
David Weinstein (1998, 2012) has argued that Spencer should be seen as a
distinctive figure in an important movement of the time – “liberal utilitari-
anism”. Indeed a liberalism based on teleological ethical foundations (ideal-
ist and perfectionist as well as utilitarian) was the most influential current of
anglophone liberalism in the late nineteenth century. It comprised a series
of distinct movements, all of which had important political effects beyond
philosophy, and all of which stand in distinct contrast to the philosophy
of liberalism in the past fifty years. teleological forms of liberalism (which
argue from “the good” rather than “the right”) have for some time lost influ-
ence in philosophy, even if, as I suspect, they retain considerable, albeit inar-
ticulate, intellectual influence in practical politics. In political philosophy,
however, the more recently dominant forms of liberalism have either been
explicitly rights-based or, in the case of John rawls’s exceptionally influ-
ential “political liberalism”, have eschewed ethical foundations altogether,
appealing instead to the alleged overlapping consensus of outlooks in actu-
ally existing liberal democracies.
Understandably, this has produced something of a reaction: there is a
move to find ways forward for the philosophy of liberalism, ways forward
(as some would say) that avoid the roadblock to liberal philosophy that
rawlsian “political liberalism” has become. no doubt partly for this reason
1. “psychologistic”, I stress, in epistemology. It is not that any of these philosophers

reduced logic, metaphysics or ethics to psychology. They did not commit Moore’s
naturalistic fallacy – a point we shall come back to. nor is it correct to impute psy-
chologism about logic to Mill (see Skorupski 1989: 164–6). What they did all assume
was that the “test”, that is, epistemic criterion, of a priori philosophical claims could
be found only in a careful critical sifting of human dispositions that are “natural”,
“instinctive”, “original”, and so on. As we shall see in the next section, Mill and
Spencer agreed about that.
2. See Mandelbaum (1971: 90), for what he means by “total evolutionism”.
134
spe n c e r a n d t h e mo r a l ph i l o s o ph e r s
– and partly because appeal to an alleged “overlapping consensus” seems

particularly unsuited to recent times – there has been a revival of interest,
at least among theorists of liberalism, in the political philosophy of two
thoroughly comprehensive teleological liberals, John Stuart Mill and t. H.
Green. So here we find an interpretative context for reassessing Spencer.
As with Mill and Green his liberalism is built on a progressivist conception
of human nature and society; what he brings to this progressivism is his
distinctive evolutionary perspective in biology, psychology and sociology.
This interaction of “total evolutionism” and “liberal utilitarianism”, and
their respective plausibility, is the larger backdrop for reassessing Spencer’s
significance as a philosopher. but what I shall focus on here is a narrower
Spencerian project that is still relevant to those larger issues. It is his attempt
to show how his evolutionism provides a way of reconciling the radical
empiricism and utilitarianism of philosophical radicals on the one hand
with, on the other, something like the intuitionism in epistemology and eth-
ics of Scottish common sense. Spencer’s reconciliationist aim is not, as we
shall see, as concessive to a priori theorists as it might initially seem and as
he himself perhaps thinks. but is sets the characteristic, sometimes confus-
ing, tone and mood of his philosophy.
not surprisingly, Spencer’s project attracted the attention of other phi-
losophers, who criticized it in relevant ways. I shall approach it by review-
ing the responses of three successive philosophical contemporaries of
Spencer: Mill (1806–73), Sidgwick (1838–1900) and Moore (1873–1958).
Their responses have been fundamental in shaping Spencer’s reputation as
a moral philosopher.
by far the most extended published response to Spencer is provided by
Sidgwick. As well as some discussion in The Methods of Ethics, there are
papers in Mind (Sidgwick 1876, 1880, 1892; see also Sidgwick 1900), while
in his posthumously published Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr.
Herbert Spencer and J. Martineau ([1902] 2005), the longest series of lec-
tures is on Spencer (177 pages compared with 131 on Green and 62 on
Martineau). Moore’s treatment in Principia Ethica (1903: 45–58) is briefer
and in significant respects follows Sidgwick’s. briefer still – in terms of pub-
lication – is Mill’s. In 1856 he inserted a supplementary chapter (bk II, ch.
7) in the System of Logic dealing with Spencer’s criticism of his views on
metaphysical necessity and inconceivability, while in Utilitarianism there
is a famous footnote responding to some remarks by Spencer on the util-
ity principle (Collected Works [CW] X: ch. 5, para 36 n.). but the brevity is
misleading – these two responses, the one dealing with the epistemology of
modality, the other with the foundations of the utility principle, are impor-
tant. I shall start with them before turning to Sidgwick and Moore in the
following section.
135
Mill
Mill’s and Spencer’s relations were cordial. They discussed philosophical

questions, in person and by letter, over many years. Mill saw Spencer as
an ally, and supported his publications financially.3 What interests us here,
however, is their disagreement. And we should begin with a purely episte-
mological disagreement: their disagreement about the nature of necessity
and its relation to conceivability.
Mill’s view of modality (i.e. necessity and possibility) is unsparingly
empiricist.4 He denies that there is any such thing as metaphysical necessity,
or any special, purely a priori intuition by which it is known, either in ethics
or in mathematics. In particular, contrary to the “a priori” or “intuitional”
school, the fact that we are unable to conceive the negation of a proposition
to be true – a fact that should be seen, he insists, as a strictly psychologi-
cal fact – does not show the proposition to have any kind of metaphysical
necessity.
Against Mill, Spencer argues that this fact of inconceivability – that a
proposition is universally accepted, and impossible to conceive as false –
does constitute a criterion of its truth, although a fallible one.5 If, however,
we abstract from the details of their dispute, we see that the disagreement
between Mill and Spencer is limited.6
Spencer holds that an invariable correlation of attributes in experience
produces an invariable association of ideas, to the point where it becomes
impossible for us to conceive the attributes existing apart. Given this aeti-
ology, we can legitimately argue from the fact that we find their separation
inconceivable to their actual association in experience. So far, this vindica-
tion of the “test of inconceivableness” is not unlike the vindication of the
reliability of geometrical intuition that Mill himself offered. The difference is
that Spencer proposes to strengthen the point by putting it in an evolution-
ary perspective. His brand of evolutionism envisaged biological inheritance
3. Mill subscribed to Spencer’s programme of intended works (Letter to Helen taylor

of 31 January, CW XV: 664) and offered to indemnify Spencer’s publisher against
loss (Letter to Herbert Spencer of 4 Feb 1866, CW XVI: 1145).
4. I discuss Mill’s empiricist account of logic and mathematics in Skorupski (1989: ch.
5).
5. Spencer argues this first in “The Universal postulate” (1853), which then reappeared
in expanded form in The Principles of Psychology (1855); see also Spencer’s “Mill
versus Hamilton – The test of truth” (1865), a discussion of Mill’s Examination of
Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in which Spencer reiterates his view of inconceiv-
ability as the “test of truth”. Mill reacts in a subsequent edition of the Examination;
CW IX: 145.
6. For a fuller discussion see Skorupski (1989: 157–60).
136
of habits acquired by experience. On this theory our innate incapacities to

separate certain ideas could be taken as indicating an invariable correla-
tion in experience over previous generations. In this sense their association
becomes a priori. In reply, Mill makes a sound point:
even if we believe with Mr Spencer, that mental tendencies origi-

nally derived from experience impress themselves permanently
on the cerebral structure and are transmitted by inheritance, so
that modes of thinking which are acquired by the race become
innate and a priori in the individual, thus representing, in Mr
Spencer’s opinion, the experience of his progenitors, in addition
to his own … All that would follow … is, that a conviction might
be really innate, i.e. prior to individual experience, and yet not
be true, since the inherited tendency to accept it may have been
originally the result of other causes than its truth.
(CW VII: 276)
The same points would, of course, apply to Mill’s associationist as much

as Spencer’s evolutionary explanation of the reliability of intuition. Some of
Mill’s criticism of Spencer could equally well have been directed at his own
confidence in the reliability of geometrical intuition, as when he argues,
quite correctly, that the uniform correlation in experience on which a gen-
eralization is based may be limited or in other ways misleading, and cannot
be accepted as a substitute for a properly scientific induction from the facts.
(consider, for example, the highly theoretical route by which rejection of
the parallels postulate of euclidean geometry found its way into physics.)
However, the point I want to emphasize here is that even if we could show
that some associationist-cum-evolutionary explanation of, say, geometrical
intuitions underpins their reliability – because it explains them as caused
by their truth – the resulting vindication of geometrical intuition would be
naturalistic, and so would not undermine Mill’s main point, namely, that the
test of inconceivability cannot establish a kind of metaphysical necessity and
aprioricity that is incompatible with naturalistic and empiricist epistemology.
If Spencer’s proposed justification of that test is simply based on his
theory of evolution, it is internal to a theory that is itself ultimately
grounded a posteriori. It thus differs fundamentally from the project of
philosophers of the a priori or intuitional kind, who propose to interpret
certain propositions of geometry as genuinely a priori in the sense that one
can infer from their intuitiveness to their truth transcendentally or exter-
nally, independently of any naturalist theory of mind and its relation to its
environment, which might underpin the inference from the inconceivable
to the false.
137
Things would stand otherwise if Spencer thought that the test of incon-
ceivability had epistemic authority independently of any such theory. That
would be a different view, according to which our modal intuitions had some
degree of entirely self-standing, although still fallible, normative force in
their own right. evolutionary theory might now confirm and strengthen that
prima facie force but it would not be its source. Such a view would argue that
without some irreducibly a priori starting-points inquiry cannot proceed, so
that complete empiricism is incoherent (as indeed both Kant and Sidgwick
[1882] argued). It would require an account of epistemic normativity that
was independent of any scientific theory, and the philosophical question
would be whether that could be done without some form of idealism.
but, in fact, this was not Spencer’s view. In his eyes, his account improved
on Mill’s simply by bringing in an evolutionary biological dimension to
underpin the reliability of our modal intuitions, thereby giving them a
stronger naturalistic foundation. So there is no real rapprochement between
Spencer and Hamilton or Kant. And thus it is understandable that Spencer
should stoutly resist being classified as actually belonging to their side of the
debate, as Mill had proposed in the first edition of the Examination:
considering that I have avowed a general agreement with Mr

Mill, in the doctrine that all knowledge is from experience, and
have defended the test of inconceivableness on the very ground
that it “expresses the net result of our experience up to the present
time” (Principles of Psychology, pp. 22, 23) … considering that I
have endeavoured to show how all our conceptions, even down
to those on Space and time, are “acquired” – considering that I
have sought to interpret forms of thought (and by implication all
intuitions) as products of organized and inherited experiences
(Principles of psychology, p. 579) – I am taken aback at finding
myself classed [with Hamilton].
(Quoted in Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy, CW IX: 590, from Spencer 1865: 536)7
Thus although at first sight Spencer seems to support Kant and Hamilton
on the “test of inconceivableness”, the apparent support is merely irenic and
does not go down to philosophical fundamentals. A closer look at Spencer’s
epistemology of modality reveals him as a naturalist and empiricist with
evolutionary characteristics; the importance of his contribution to the
7. Mill acknowledges his classificatory mistake in the subsequent edition of the

Examination (CW IX: 143).
138
naturalistic tradition turns on the plausibility, and then the relevance, of

those characteristics.
We find something similar when we consider Spencer’s view of utilitari-
anism – here again an exchange between Mill and Spencer makes a reveal-
ing starting-point.
In chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, Mill gives his utilitarian theory of justice.
Justice consists, he says, in observing rights – and rights are to be defined
in terms of obligations of protection and provision to individuals on the
part of society. These obligations are safeguards of “the very groundwork of
our existence” and thus acquire a special importance and inviolability; they
are nonetheless secondary principles justified by reference to general util-
ity. One of these obligations is that of impartiality; at the end of the chapter
Mill adds some significant further remarks about it. Impartiality is indeed,
he says, “an obligation of justice”. but, he adds, this “great moral duty” rests
on “a still deeper foundation” than the “highest abstract standard of social
and distributive justice”:
being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals,

and not a mere logical corollary from secondary or derivative
doctrines. It is involved in the very meaning of Utility, or the
Greatest-Happiness principle. That principle is a mere form of
words without rational signification, unless one person’s happi-
ness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made
for kind), is counted for exactly as much as another’s. Those con-
ditions being supplied, bentham’s dictum, “everybody to count
for one, nobody for more than one,” might be written under the
principle of utility as an explanatory commentary.
(Utilitarianism ch. V, para. 36, in CW X: 257)
In a footnote to this passage he notes:
This implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme, of

perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr. Herbert
Spencer (in his Social Statics) as a disproof of the pretensions of
utility to be a sufficient guide to right; since (he says) the principle
of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that everybody has
an equal right to happiness. (Ibid.)
The passage to which Mill refers is entertaining, interesting and signifi-

cant. Spencer attacks the “dominant sect of so-called philosophical poli-
ticians”, “disciples of bentham” who “boldly deny the existence of ‘rights’
entirely”. but, he continues:
139
it is amusing when, after all, it turns out that the ground on which
these philosophers have taken their stand, and from which with
such self-complacency they shower their sarcasms is nothing but
an adversary’s mine, destined to blow the vast fabric of conclu-
sions they have based on it into nonentity. This so solid-looking
principle of “the greatest happiness to the greatest number,” needs
but to have a light brought near it, and lo! it explodes into the
astounding assertion, that all men have equal rights to happiness
– an assertion far more sweeping and revolutionary than any of
those which are assailed with so much scorn.
(Spencer 1851: 93–4)
Mill’s reply is that the principle:
may be more correctly described as supposing that equal amounts

of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by
different persons. This, however, is not a presupposition; not a
premise needful to support the principle of utility, but the very
principle itself; for what is the principle of utility, if it be not that
“happiness” and “desirable” are synonymous terms? If there is any
anterior principle implied, it can be no other than this, that the
truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness,
as of all other measurable quantities. (CW X: 258 n.)
The contrast is striking. Spencer reads the utility principle as a theory of

rights (and in Social Statics, at least, seems quite hostile to it); Mill replies that
it is a theory of value, according to which equal amounts of happiness have
equal amounts of agent-neutral value, irrespective of who feels them. This is
why impartiality, according to Mill, is not merely integral to secondary prin-
ciples of justice, but is an “emanation” of what he takes to be the fundamental
level of ethics: an agent-neutral hedonistic theory of value.
Spencer might have replied that neither Mill nor any other utilitarian had
shown how to move from the claim that each person’s happiness is a good
to that person to the theory that (a) any episode of pleasure has an agent-
neutral value, which (b) is irrespective of any other property such as who
feels it or what quantity and quality of pleasure they already have. And he
could have argued that the only way to bridge that gap would be to appeal
to a pre-existing deontic principle of justice as impartiality: namely, that in
situations where distribution of happiness across people is at stake, it should
be distributed in accordance with some kind of right of equal treatment,
of which the aggregative principle might be one kind, although certainly
not the most obvious one. Thus, contrary to benthamites, the very move
140
from a hedonist account of individual or personal good to an agent-neutral

principle of utility would turn out to require a prior appeal to principles of
justice. Impartiality, therefore, far from being a “direct emanation” from the
principle of utility, would turn out, on the contrary, to be a premise required
for it, drawn from the theory of distributive right.
This seems to be the point originally made in Social Statics, and it is a
strong point. If maintained, it would distance Spencer from utilitarianism.
Moreover, it would be consistent with Spencer’s generally libertarian empha-
sis on individual rights. Worked through, it would result in a fundamentally
deontological ethic, within which there would be a right on the part of every
individual to equal consideration wherever society engaged in projects with
distributive implications. That is far from unappealing. One can contrast it
with Sidgwick’s reaction to the case Mill makes for utilitarianism. Sidgwick
agrees with Mill’s implicit premise that pleasure has agent-neutral value,
and with his very strong claim that “equal amounts of happiness are equally
desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons”, thus maintain-
ing the teleological standpoint of total or aggregate utilitarianism. The point
Sidgwick makes is meta-ethical rather than substantive: namely, that the
premise of agent-neutrality can be justified only as an a priori intuition.
However, when Spencer replies to Mill he does not adhere to the point
he made in Social Statics. Although the passage I have quoted (and its sur-
rounding context) certainly sounds strongly anti-utililitarian, in a letter to
Mill (reprinted in part in Spencer 1904: vol. 2, 87–90), he protests at being
classed with “the Anti-utilitarians”. He now explains his disagreement with
“the existing school of Utilitarians” in a different way. He acknowledges that
“happiness is the ultimate end to be contemplated” but denies that it should
be the “proximate end”, objecting only to the “empirical generalizations”
which are all that benthamite utilitarians “can supply for the guidance of
conduct”. In contrast he explains:
the view for which I contend is, that Morality properly so-called
– the science of right conduct – has for its object to determine
how and why certain modes of conduct are detrimental, and cer-
tain other modes beneficial. These good and bad results cannot
be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the con-
stitution of things; and I conceive it to be the business of moral
science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of
existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happi-
ness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this,
its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to
be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness
or misery. (Ibid.)
141
This looks like a version of indirect utilitarianism. Mill responds

urbanely; with the exception of the word “necessarily” he does not dissent,
he says, from Spencer’s view, adding only that no modern utilitarian would
dissent, and particularly that bentham would not. Sidgwick makes the same
point quite a bit more harshly; he protests at Spencer’s misunderstanding of
bentham and Mill (and even comte), and criticizes Spencer’s own version
of indirect utilitarianism (Sidgwick [1902] 2005: 182–7).8
but what does Spencer mean by his criticism of the benthamite’s empiri-
cal generalizations? In what way will the science of right conduct be deduc-
tive as against merely empirical? The letter continues:
to make my position fully understood, it seems needful to add

that, corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a devel-
oped Moral Science, there have been, and still are, developing in
the race, certain fundamental moral intuitions; and that, though
these moral intuitions are the results of accumulated experiences
of utility, gradually organized and inherited, they have come to
be quite independent of conscious experience. Just in the same
way that I believe the intuition of space, possessed by any living
individual, to have arisen from organized and consolidated expe-
riences of all antecedent individuals who bequeathed to him their
slowly-developed nervous organizations – just as I believe that
this intuition, requiring only to be made definite and complete by
personal experiences, has practically become a form of thought,
apparently quite independent of experience; so do I believe that
the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all
past generations of the human race, have been producing corre-
sponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmis-
sion and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of
moral intuition – certain emotions responding to right and wrong
conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experi-
8. “[I]f Mr. Spencer means to imply, as he certainly suggests to his readers, that the
practical directions of bentham and Mill are that every one is to make universal
happiness the object of direct pursuit, his misunderstanding of these authors is so
complete that it can only be accounted for on the supposition of his having read their
writings very partially. As regards bentham, it is weak to say that he does not teach
this: he teaches repeatedly and emphatically the exact opposite of this (Sidgwick
[1902] 2005: 183); “… the combination of benthamite Utilitarianism and comtist
Altruism against which Mr. Spencer appears to be arguing … is the most grotesque
man of straw that a philosopher ever set up in order to knock it down” (ibid.: 184–5);
“… even for comte’s suppression of egoistic impulses there is a somewhat better case
than Mr. Spencer admits …” (ibid.: 186).
142
ences of utility. I also hold that just as the space-intuition responds

to the exact demonstrations of Geometry, and has its rough con-
clusions interpreted and verified by them; so will moral intuitions
respond to the demonstrations of Moral Science, and will have
their rough conclusions interpreted and verified by them.
(Letter to J. S. Mill, reprinted in part in
Spencer 1904: vol. 2, 87–90)
Thus in both geometry and ethics Spencer wants to give “intuitions” an

authority, based on his theory of evolution, which (he thinks) a more simply
“empirical” set of rules of thumb unbacked by evolutionary theory cannot
have. In the spatial case our intuitions turn out to track the objective proper-
ties of space, in the moral case they track the happiness-enhancing proper-
ties of types of action. (We shall consider below why evolution should have
this implication for the moral case.)
How does Spencer envisage this working? I speculate here. Apparently
he thinks that deontic intuition can be developed into a deductive ethics
in the way that spatial intuition can be developed into a deductive geom-
etry. crucially, the question again arises whether the argument is simply the
empirical claim that evolutionary theory gives us a basis for thinking that
our inherited deontic intuitions track general happiness, or whether Spencer
thinks that those intuitions have some degree of entirely self-standing nor-
mative force in their own right. It may be that he confuses the two issues;
but I think his considered answer would have to be the former one. If so,
the overall claim is that we have deontic moral intuitions that, like spatial
intuition, are capable of being developed and articulated deductively (per-
haps in their own right or perhaps by a deductive social science) but that the
underlying reliability9 of intuition in each case is underpinned by evolution-
ary theory. In that case the science of morality, like the science of geometry,
is a posteriori, because it is grounded on the a posteriori theory of evolution.
to put Spencer’s view in perspective it is worth noting that Sidgwick
is similarly unclear, in The Methods of Ethics, as to the normative force of
moral common sense; moreover in the preface to the sixth edition of The
Methods of Ethics he resorts to a somewhat Spencerian-sounding account
of it:
[I]nvestigation of the Utilitarian method led me to see defects

[in it]: the merely empirical examination of the consequences of
9. In the spatial case, reliability in producing true beliefs, in the moral case, reliability
in producing habits that lead to general happiness.
143
actions is unsatisfactory; and being thus conscious of the practi-

cal imperfection in many cases of the guidance of the Utilitarian
calculus, I remained anxious to treat with respect, and make use
of, the guidance afforded by common Sense in these cases, on the
ground of the general presumption which evolution afforded that
moral sentiments and opinions would point to conduct conducive
to general happiness; though I could not admit this presumption
as a ground for overruling a strong probability of the opposite,
derived from utilitarian calculations. ([1907] 1981: xxiii)
now of course this evolutionary presumption will only do its work if

we are justified in accepting the normative thesis that general happiness
is the ultimate end. According to Sidgwick, as we have seen, this has to be
accepted as a self-evident a priori intuition. What, then, was Spencer’s view
of it? That question leads us to the criticisms of Sidgwick and Moore.
Sidgwick and Moore
When we move from Mill’s disagreements with Spencer to those later criti-
cisms, we immediately notice the shift of epistemological mood to which I
earlier drew attention. Mill and Spencer argue as colleagues who, to a signifi-
cant degree, agree about the terms of the debate; they come from an intel-
lectual world in which philosophy and speculative psychological and social
theory are discussed together, under the taken-for-granted assumption that
they form a single intellectual fabric. Sidgwick and Moore are leading figures
in a reaction against that mood that developed at the turn of the century.
The nature of this reaction is not quite easy to catch. Its essence, whether in
ethics or in logic or epistemology, is to place great stress on the self-standing
autonomy of these subjects as intellectual disciplines, or “sciences”, whose
basic principles can be known only by “a priori intuition”.10 This was a reac-
tion no more favourable to Mill than to Spencer.
but what did this new mood, or renewed preference for aprioristic lan-
guage, amount to in practice? It would have been a nice triumph for the
new perspective to convict Mill and Spencer of what Moore called the nat-
10. Independent not only of psychology but also of religion and metaphysics: “Spencer
and Green represent two lines of thought divergent from my own in opposite direc-
tions, but agreeing in that they do not treat ethics as a subject that can stand alone.
Spencer bases it on Science, Green on Metaphysics” (Sidgwick [1902] 2005: 1).
Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”, as he himself points out, is directed at supernaturalistic
and metaphysical theories of ethics as much as at naturalistic ones.
144
uralistic fallacy. but, however one interprets what Moore meant by that fal-
lacy, it seems that neither of them committed it. In particular, neither of
them really took ethical terms to have the same meaning as naturalistic
terms, even though both used language that might seem to convict them
of doing so.
nowadays it is generally agreed by philosophers with an interest in Mill
that he did not commit the fallacy Moore accuses him of (Moore 1903:
66–7), that of taking “good” to mean “desired”.11 In the passages Moore dis-
cusses, a careful reading makes that obvious. true, in other places, not dis-
cussed by Moore, Mill does sound as though he is committing a definist
fallacy of this kind (e.g. in the passage quoted above: “‘happiness’ and ‘desir-
able’ are synonymous terms”). but all this shows, I believe, is hyperbolic use
of terms like “synonymous”, “means the same as”, and so on. When Spencer
writes in the same way it is sensible of Sidgwick to note the issue without
pursuing it; even Moore is somewhat reluctantly willing to give Spencer the
benefit of the doubt. referring to Spencer’s The Data of Ethics, ch 4, §9ff.,
Sidgwick says:
we must distinguish inquiry into the meaning of words from

inquiry into ethical principles. I agree with Mr. Spencer in hold-
ing that “pleasure is the ultimate good,” but not in the meaning
which he gives to the word “good.” Indeed if “good” (substantive)
means “pleasure,” the proposition just stated would be a tautology,
and a tautology cannot be an ethical principle.
([1902] 2005: 145)
Sidgwick leaves it there; he simply stresses his main point, that “an ethical
end cannot be proved by biology” (ibid.: 144); it requires a premise about
ultimate ends and such a claim is both a priori and substantive.
citing the same passage in Data of Ethics, Moore says that it gives “reason
to think that part of what Mr Spencer means is the naturalistic fallacy: that
he imagines pleasant or productive of pleasure is the very meaning of the
word good” but adds that:
we cannot insist upon Mr Spencer’s words as a certain clue to

any definite meaning, … because he generally expresses by them
several inconsistent alternatives – the naturalistic fallacy being,
11. Moore also thinks that identifying goodness with any natural property (as against
taking the predicate “good” to means the same as some naturalistic predicate) is fal-
lacious; a common current view is that it is not. In any case there is no good ground
for attributing an identification of this kind to Mill either.
145
in this case, one such alternative. It is certainly impossible to find

any further reasons given by Mr Spencer for his conviction that
pleasure both is the supreme end, and is universally admitted
to be so. He seems to assume throughout that we must mean by
good conduct what is productive of pleasure, and by bad what is
productive of pain. (2003: 53–4)
That is biting, but the bite is weak. Spencer could and presumably would
simply reply that he gives no “further reasons” for his conviction other than
that everyone shares it, in practice if not in theory. Obviously Moore would
question whether everyone shares it; but in that case Spencer would have
other resources to draw on. These would involve both conceptual analysis
of pleasure and psychological enquiry into human ends: the kind of thing
Mill does in chapter 4 of Utilitarianism (which Moore does consider). At any
rate, whether or not the resulting line of thought is persuasive, it does not
involve the naturalistic fallacy.
What is at stake here? On the one hand, the fact that everyone aims at
pleasure or, come to that, any other end, does not prove (deductively) that
that end is good. On the other hand, there is the point that no “evidence”
(Mill’s word) can be produced that an end is good, or that it should be pur-
sued, other than that people in general regard it as an end and do pursue
it. This, one may say, is the psychologistic perspective in epistemology: it
assumes that our actual, reflective, psychology is the test or criterion or
“evidence” of fundamental normative claims.
The two perspectives are consistent, so long as stronger philosophical
claims are eschewed; so long, that is, as the psychologistic perspective does
not seek to reduce normative to psychological propositions, and the criti-
cal or aprioristic perspective does not reach for a metaphysics according to
which we are aware, by some mysterious mode of receptivity, of a domain
of non-natural facts. In that respect both can agree that the fundamental
principles of ethics are irreducibly ethical.
but (I would argue) Mill and Spencer did not mean to reduce normative
propositions to psychological ones or to identify normative properties with
psychological ones, nor (I would argue) did Sidgwick or Moore subscribe
to a non-naturalistic metaphysics. What the latter pair emphasized was the
aprioricity of purely normative convictions. At this point their disagreement
with Mill and Spencer, if there is a real one, is about what is going on when a
philosopher appeals to intuition.12 Is an intuition just a psychological disposi-
tion and, if so, how can it provide an epistemic basis for an a priori normative
12. On the sense in which Mill did and did not rely on “intuition”, see Macleod (2013).
146
claim? but then what else could an intuition be? These are subtle questions
that ramify profoundly through the whole of philosophy. In comparison to
Kant’s treatment in his Critiques, neither side, neither Mill or Spencer or
the common-sense school, nor Sidgwick and Moore, ever addressed them
in their full breadth. So the difference of epistemological mood proclaimed
by Sidgwick and Moore, although stark and interesting from the stand-
point of intellectual history, rapidly becomes elusive from the standpoint of
philosophy.
bringing evolution in makes no difference to this overall philosophical
picture. Let us suppose that evolution shows that human nature and society
jointly adapt to the environment in such a way as to bring about some result
X. So our dispositions are adapted to X in the environment as it is. Does
this show, first, that our cognitive dispositions are truth-conducive? That
depends on X, obviously. Suppose it is something like propagation of human
life, its survival and expansion. The Spencerian argument we considered
earlier worked through inheritance of acquired associations. The ones that
are inherited, and survive, the argument goes, are those that produce beliefs
that corresponded to actual worldly correlations. They survive because they
produce expectations that are true, and thus adaptive. That, of course, is a
claim that can be questioned, as by Mill above. Furthermore, with more
elaborate scientific theories that go beyond the observable correlations, evo-
lutionary theory might actually subvert our intuitions, at least if those more
elaborate theories are considered as true accounts of the world, as against
instrumentally useful predictive devices. Thus, for example, once we see
that a variety of geometries can be fitted into distinct predictively adequate
physical theories, evolutionary theory might weaken, rather than support-
ing, our belief that euclidean, or any other, physical geometry – together
with its corresponding physics – is true (as against adaptive to believe).
What, next, about ethical dispositions? Spencer’s evolutionary argument
is that we have the basic moral convictions that we have because they pro-
mote the survival and expansion of the human life.13 but how, then, do we
get a step to their truth?
One way would posit that since survival and expansion are what evolu-
tion tends to promote – the outcome that it tends to produce – they are also
the right ethical aim, and hence that ethical convictions that conduce to that
aim are true, valid, sound. If this step is not a blatant fallacy (since evolu-
tion promotes X, X is the ultimate ethical aim), we have to be independently
convinced that human survival and expansion are the ultimate ethical aim.
13. Of course, it is highly debatable whether or how they do that, but I’m waiving the
complicated scientific questions about that in order to focus on the logic of the
philosophical argument.
147
And that must be an a priori conviction. note the apparent disanalogy with
the theoretical case. On the face of it. Spencer’s justification of geometri-
cal intuition appeals to evolutionary theory alone; his justification of moral
intuitions must appeal to evolutionary theory plus an ultimate moral intui-
tion.14 philosophically speaking, that was really the main point Sidgwick and
Moore were concerned to establish: namely, that the theory of evolution does
not dislodge ethics as a self-standing enquiry, but is at most an auxiliary to it.
beyond that, there is the obvious point that mere propagation of human
life has little intuitive plausibility as an ultimate end. (Why this should be
so is itself an interesting question, given that we are trying to explain moral
intuitions from an evolutionary point of view.) At any rate, as both Sidgwick
and Moore recognized, it was not the ultimate moral intuition to which
Spencer appealed. His argument, rather, is that the mental characteristics
and social relationships that emerge through evolution do so by means
of their tendency to increase happiness or minimize pain.15 Hence – if we
accept the further premise that happiness is the basic ethical aim – it will
follow that more evolved characteristics and relationships, including more
evolved moral convictions, promote that ethical aim. However the truth of
the premise – hedonism – remains an a priori question of moral philosophy,
independent of Spencer’s (or anyone else’s) evolutionary theory.
Moore sums up nicely:
It would seem … that Mr Spencer’s main view, that of which he is

most clearly and most often conscious, is that pleasure is the sole
good, and that to consider the direction of evolution is by far the
best criterion of the way in which we shall get most of it; and this
theory, if he could establish that amount of pleasure is always in
14. This disanalogy turns out to be merely apparent if we accept the argument of Kant
and Sidgwick that pure empiricism is incoherent. If that is right epistemology as
well as ethics must contain a purely a priori element.
15. Sidgwick quotes this passage: “if the states of consciousness which a creature endeav-
ours to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and if the states of con-
sciousness which it endeavours to expel are the correlatives of beneficial actions, it
must quickly disappear through persistence in the injurious and avoidance of the
beneficial. In other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which,
on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with activities conducive
to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable and habitually avoided feelings went
along with activities directly or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever
have been, other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals
among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were the best, tend-
ing ever to bring about perfect adjustment” (Sidgwick [1902] 2005: 152, quoting
Spencer 1879: §33, which itself quotes Spencer 1855: §124).
148
direct proportion to amount of evolution and also that it was plain

what conduct was more evolved, would be a very valuable contri-
bution to the science of Sociology; it would even, if pleasure were
the sole good, be a valuable contribution to ethics. but the above
discussion should have made it plain that, if what we want from
an ethical philosopher is a scientific and systematic ethics, not
merely an ethics professedly based on science; if what we want is
a clear discussion of the fundamental principles of ethics, and a
statement of the ultimate reasons why one way of acting should
be considered better than another – then Mr Spencer’s Data of
Ethics is immeasurably far from satisfying these demands.
(1903: 54)
The contrast Moore makes here, between “a scientific and systematic

ethics” and “an ethics professedly based on science” neatly captures the way
in which he and Sidgwick conceived the task of a properly philosophical eth-
ics. Moore accepts that Spencer’s evolutionary theory could, if true, make an
important contribution to sociology: furthermore, if hedonism were true, to
ethics itself. It would do the latter by providing evolutionary insight into the
mechanisms by which our ethical dispositions track happiness. but Spencer
does not do what philosophical ethics should do, that is, provide a rigorous
a priori investigation of fundamental ethical principles. Sidgwick supplies
a much more detailed discussion of Spencer’s views than Moore, but his
overall conclusion is the same.
Conclusion
Spencer sees human dispositions and institutions as a dynamically adaptive,

continuous development towards propagation and expansion of human life.
two mechanisms in this development are (a) the evolutionary function of
pain/pleasure in signalling and directing the organism to survival-productive
actions, and (b) inheritance of acquired dispositions together with cultural
transmission of institutions.
to the degree that this conception turned out to be defensible, Spencer
could plausibly hold that he had at least one new contribution to make to
hedonistic utilitarianism: namely, that of showing how its “indirect” ver-
sions could be supported by the science of evolution – in his terms, given
a “deductive” and not merely “empirical” foundation. From the utilitar-
ian standpoint, evolutionism would provide an indirect confirmation
of moral common sense if it could show that human societies necessar-
ily evolve towards those institutions and moral dispositions that promote
149
happiness.16 The rub, of course, is that this would hold only to the degree
that the Spencerian version of evolutionary theory was defensible.
Aside from this potential contribution to the scientific bases of indirect
utilitarianism, did Spencer also have a contribution to make to the ethi-
cal foundations of utilitarianism as such? A first point here is that, under
pressure from Mill (see above), Spencer seems to have dropped his initial,
interesting, rights-based critique of utilitarianism conceived as an impartial
theory of the good. Had he pursued that critique, he would have moved
away from classical utilitarianism in a quite fundamental way, towards an
ethical theory that was still consequentialist but that brought deontic ele-
ments in at the very foundation. However, that did not happen.
We can also ask, secondly, whether his conception of the function pleas-
ure and pain play in evolution contributes anything to the plausibility of
ethical hedonism. Sidgwick and Moore were very definite that it did not. but
at this point we should come back to the significant difference of epistemo-
logical stance between Mill and Spencer on the one hand and Sidgwick and
Moore on the other. I earlier characterized the stance of Mill and Spencer
as “psychologistic”. I also suggested that this psychologistic stance is not
incompatible with Sidgwick’s and Moore’s insistence on the autonomy of
ethics, at least if that is understood in a moderate and defensible way. On
the psychologistic view, the data of normative epistemology are provided by
thoroughgoing analysis of which of our psychological dispositions are prim-
itive or natural, and resilient to reflection. This epistemological approach (as
instanced, for example, by Mill’s argument from what is desired “in theory
and practice” to what is desirable) is not reductionist; it is naturalistic but
commits no naturalistic fallacy. Spencer’s evolutionary theory, if correct,
could indirectly contribute to this epistemological case for ethical hedon-
ism. It would do so by providing a larger theoretical backing for the exist-
ence and primacy of those pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, dispositions
that ethical hedonists of Mill’s and Spencer’s kind cite as “evidence” – as
epistemic bases – for their view.
Spencer is on Mill’s side of the a priori/a posteriori debate about episte-
mology, both in what he does and what he fails to do. On the one hand both
seek naturalistic, scientific, explanations of the phenomenological appeal of
“intuitions”, and of their reliability, to the extent they are reliable. One might
say that they provide an internal or a posteriori critique and partial vindica-
tion of intuitions. On the other hand, neither of them deals head on with the
16. This leads to a familiar nineteenth-century historicist conundrum: if the actual is

the rational, what policy should we follow – if any – in reforming the actual? On
the idealist side D. G. ritchie was among those who connected evolutionism with
Hegelian historicism (see Weinstein 2007: 148).
150
transcendental Kantian critique: namely, that neither theoretical nor practi-

cal knowledge is possible without synthetic a priori principles of theoretical
and practical reason, and that the existence of such principles is incompat-
ible with naturalism. Yet that critique was increasingly made in their time.17
could a response to it be made on their behalf? Historically, the question
was rather cut off by the strong swing towards anti-naturalistic, aprioristic
positions that took place in philosophy at the end of the century. We are bet-
ter placed nowadays to reconsider it. The question, in a nutshell, is whether
recognizing that fundamental normative principles are synthetic a priori
entails Kantian idealism. Or can a fully naturalistic standpoint acknowledge
Kant’s critique of strict empiricism? The question was not settled in the phil-
osophical debates of the nineteenth century and is well beyond the scope of
this essay. but it is certainly relevant to assessing Mill’s and Spencer’s epis-
temological stance.
At any rate, whatever one thinks about that large issue in epistemology,
substantive ethical theory has not, on the whole, developed strongly towards
the hedonistic utilitarianism to which Mill, Sidgwick and, it seems, Spencer
subscribed. Hedonistic utilitarianism remains a strand in contemporary
ethical theory, and an important one, but only a strand. In particular the
difficulties facing both hedonism and the aggregate-utilitarian conception
of impartiality have been pretty fully explored from within the consequen-
tialist camp; at the same time there has been powerful rethinking of vari-
ous non-consequentialist standpoints. It is not easy, frankly, to see how any
combination of utilitarianism and evolution in a Spencerian spirit could
make an impact on the state of this debate. In that respect, at least, it seems
likely that the moral philosophers, if not the evolutionary theorists, political
theorists, sociologists or historians, have left Spencer behind.
Why should this be? Why, more generally, does evolutionary theory
have relatively little impact on current philosophical ethics and, indeed,
current epistemology? It is not that an evolutionary ethics or epistemology
has to commit the “naturalistic fallacy”; we have seen, when it comes to
it, that neither Sidgwick nor Moore really accuses Spencer of this. It is the
other criticisms they make that remain telling, not just against Spencer, but
against evolutionary ethics or epistemology in general. The problem is one
of relevance. How are the data of evolutionary theory supposed to bear on
first-order normative discussion, whether in ethics or epistemology? We can
review the points made by Sidgwick and Moore by examining the following
schema of argument:
17. perhaps most powerfully in the anglophone world by t. H. Green (1882).
151
(I) What I should do or believe is whatever has greatest survival value

for the human species.
(II) evolutionary theory shows that the practical and epistemic rules
by which we determine how to act and what to believe arise from
psychological dispositions that persist through their tendency to
maximize human-species survival.
(III) Hence I should choose my actions and form my beliefs in accord-
ance with these practical and epistemic rules.
So now, to begin with, why should (I) be accepted? At this point we either
need to claim (somewhat implausibly) that (I) is, in its own right, a funda-
mental normative truth, or we need to find indirect arguments for it. These
might be (a) that the epistemic rules that have greatest survival value are
those that have the greatest tendency to produce true beliefs, and (b) that
the practical rules that have greatest survival value are those that have the
greatest tendency to produce general happiness. Arguments (a) and (b) are
not obviously true; an evolutionary ethics or epistemology that builds on
them must give arguments for them.18
If we accept Spencer’s arguments, we can replace (I) by fundamental
normative propositions that are more plausible than (I): namely, that one
should follow (c) truth-conducive rules in forming one’s beliefs, and (d)
happiness-conducive rules in deciding on one’s actions. These propositions
are more plausible, but still controversial; with (d), for example, there are
familiar problems about act versus rule formulations of utilitarianism.
The main point however is Sidgwick’s: “an ethical end cannot be proved
by biology” (see p. 145, above).
What the theory of evolution can do for epistemology and ethics cru-
cially depends on what prior normative framework one starts from. If the
prior framework is (a) and (b), the challenge is to establish (c) and (d).
but what if one starts from a prior normative framework that is not, as
in (d), hedonistic and utilitarian? Suppose, for example, that one’s funda-
mental normative position is egoism. Then it seems one could use (b) in a
destructive way. “What causes your disposition to comply with happiness-
conducive rules is that those rules have species-survival value. but that’s not
an explanation that shows them to be normatively correct, for it explains
them by their tendency to produce an end-state which (for an egoist) there
is no reason to bring about.” compare: “what causes your disposition to
believe the simplest theory is that it involves the least cognitive processing,
18. For Spencer’s arguments on epistemology see pp. 136–7, and on ethics his argument
quoted in note 15.
152
and is hence efficient in terms of species-survival; but that has no tendency

to show that simplicity is a criterion of truth”. In each case the normative
relevance of the disposition is undercut because evolutionary theory discon-
nects it from, has it cutting across, the a priori normative framework within
which the theory’s normative consequences are being assessed.
Thus we seem to end up with the following dialectical position. On the
one hand, evolutionary theory can be used by opponents of hedonistic
utilitarianism in ethics, or of hypothetico-deductivism in epistemology, to
undermine these positions. The undermining argument is this: an evolu-
tionary account of the psychological dispositions to which those positions
appeal as “evidence”, in Mill’s word, explains them as functional to a biologi-
cal end that (according to the opponents) itself has no normative standing –
and in doing so it removes their significance as “evidence”, because they are
found to be tracking an outcome that is normatively irrelevant. And yet, on
the other hand, evolutionary theory cannot be used by proponents of those
positions (hedonistic utilitarianism, hypothetico-deductivism) to support
them. For those positions constitute a normative framework that is prior to
evolutionary psychology: a normative framework that “cannot be proved by
biology”. evolutionary theory is consistent with any normative framework,
and in combination with some of them can have subversive force; but it
cannot contribute persuasive force to any of them. It has negative but not
positive potential. I am afraid that this conclusion would not have appealed
to Spencer.19
19. I have not considered a further question that has been raised – whether evolution-
ary theory undermines meta-normative “realism” about morality – since this was a
not a topic Spencer discussed. See Lillehammer (2003), Street (2006). My thanks to
Mark Francis and David Weinstein for their helpful comments on an earlier version
of this essay.
153
8
the problem with star dust
Spencer’s psychology and William James
Mark Francis
Herbert Spencer’s psychology had a seismic impact in the late nineteenth

century.1 This was not because of its appeal to imitators, but from the way
in which it energized his detractors. His The Principles of Psychology both
fascinated and repelled early philosophers of mind because it provided an
explanation of the individual’s psyche that was pushed beyond the associa-
tion psychology of David Hartley, David Hume and James Mill. Instead of
viewing the development of the mind as caused by experiences of individuals
as they grew from infancy to maturity, Spencer explained mental growth as
a product of the historical experience undergone by humanity as a species,
and, before that, by animal life as a whole. In applying evolution to associa-
tion psychology, Spencer had revealed the mind to be a scientific phenom-
enon that was outside individual experience. He did this without invoking
the well-known existential parallel between personal consciousness and God:
in Spencer’s psychology the spiritual world had no standing. His study of
the mind was a record of how the brain and nervous system had gradually
achieved a more-or-less accurate set of perceptions of the physical world.
Human beings were no longer God-like in their understanding; they were
simply organisms who possessed similar mental equipment to other animals.
Human knowledge of the physical universe was the result of experience, of
trial and across countless generations. Such knowledge had a high degree of
1. As roger Smith (1992: 163) has observed, it was Spencer rather than Darwin
who elaborated an evolutionary psychophysiology and whose evolutionary ideas
influenced british medical psychology. Smith’s observation can be stretched
to cover evolutionary psychology as a whole, although Spencer’s influence was
most often felt in the late-nineteenth-century works of his critics rather than his
disciples.
154
t h e pro b l e m w i t h s ta r d u s t
accuracy because brains that were unable to obtain accurate knowledge of

the environment had failed to survive.
It was possible for a scientifically minded Victorian to speculate on men-
tal evolution without considering Spencer’s issues. For example, before
he adopted christianity, George romanes (1888) produced a Darwinian
and secular picture of the mind as a functioning brain, an account which
contained no references to Spencer.2 However, for the most part, Anglo-
American philosophers of mind who paid some heed to science and were,
therefore, hostile to Hegelianism, used Spencer as a repository from which
they drew basic information about both neurophysiology and association
psychology. After quarrying Spencer for data and borrowing his enthusi-
asm for evolution, their enthusiasm for Spencer waned and often became
perverse. This reaction was so common that it is reasonable to claim that
the concept of mind was constructed to be the mirror opposite of Spencer’s
views. If his late Victorian philosophy of mind seemed too reliant on his-
torical experience and empirical debate, these philosophers would have the
mind appear as a teleological entity that governed the future rather than
being controlled by the past, and which operated on scientific laws that
were independent of empiricism.
William James is the key figure in this reaction to Spencer, but start-
ing with Shadworth Hodgson and G. croom robertson, and continuing
with James Ward and W. r. Sorley, the philosophy of mind developed as an
anti-Spencerian doctrine before James arrived on the scene. That is, phi-
losophy had spilled over into a kind of metaphysically inspired psychology
before it acquired a champion in James but, once he joined the chorus, it
was his voice that was heard the most loudly. While other philosophers of
mind were more scrupulous scholars than James and could write on psy-
chology on their own behalf, none had his bombastic flair for publicity,
nor his desire to communicate to the masses. His voice was heard where
theirs were not. Under the leadership of James the philosophy of mind
emerged in such a way as to discountenance either inductive accounts of
mental phenomena or parallels between animal and human behaviour. In
their place, late Victorian philosophers of mind focused on the rationally
informed will, goal-focused behaviour and mental laws that they saw as
the unique preserve of human beings. to reiterate, philosophers of mind
adopted Spencer’s evolutionary language, but insisted that, when applied to
2. In case anyone missed the point that the human intellect had animal origins,
romanes began his book Mental Evolution in Man (1888) with a diagram of an
evolutionary tree that he had prefixed to Mental Evolution in Animals in 1883.
romanes’s work contained no references to Spencer’s psychology, but relied on
similar neurophysiological sources.
155
humanity, evolution must be intelligent, directed towards goals and expli-

cable by mental laws. Where Spencer, following mid-century natural sci-
ence, had pictured evolution as proceeding from past development, they
explained mental development as essentially teleological. Since this latter
process referred to ends that were beyond personal experience, this sug-
gested to its exponents that evolution was transcendental and controlled
by God. From the almost theological perspective of philosophers of mind
Spencer was too phlegmatic, and overly content to live in a universe in
which God was only a possibility or an “Unknown”. Their spiritual needs
were too great to be satisfied with uncertainty, so they resurrected the idea
that the living universe bore witness to the existence of God.
Spencer’s the Principles of Psychology is often overlooked by scholars who
concentrate their analytic energies on his writings on sociology, politics and
ethics. In a sense this neglect of psychology is reasonable because Spencer’s
public image, both for his contemporaries and for later generations, rested
chiefly on his accomplishments in these areas. Then, too, Spencer’s psy-
chological perspectives do not fit neatly with the ideas he generated when
thinking about social, political and ethical evolution. His thoughts on the
human psyche preceded his System of Synthetic Philosophy, and while The
Principles of Psychology was reissued as part of the system it continued to
echo the voice of a younger, bolder and coarser man: a voice that was never
entirely muffled in the more cautious and nuanced tones of his later works.3
The Principles of Psychology had appeared in the mid-1850s, when Spencer
was seriously thinking about evolution for the first time, and when his ideas
were closely allied to those of neurophysiology.4 In this period, Spencer’s
evolutionary theory, while rooted firmly in the development of the brain,
stretched out to encompass a notion of intellectual culture that served as a
theory of mind.5 This included a number of seemingly diverse phenomena
such as the inherited mental equipment of individuals, historically acquired
3. Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy began with First Principles in 1862, and was
continued with volumes on biology, psychology, sociology and ethics over the next
two decades.
4. The first edition of Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology appeared in one volume in
1855, and was similar to the first volume of the The Principles of Psychology, which
appeared in 1870 as part of his System of Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer’s 1855 psy-
chology was a response to contemporary neurophysiolology as well as philosophy.
Some useful information about the historical context of Victorian neurophysiology
can be found in Jacyna (1981: esp. 109–18). The connection between neurophysi-
ology and evolution was etched very firmly by Spencer’s friend G. H. Lewes in his
1853 study on comte’s philosophy of science. On Lewes see Francis (2014).
5. Spencer’s evolutionary theory was not unique in stretching his theory of mental
evolution to encompass products of the intellect such as the arts and scientific dis-
156
knowledge and scientific laws. In the 1850s Spencer believed that these phe-
nomena developed in harmony with each other. That is, Spencer’s theory of
mind included a notion of culture in which individuals, together with the
society in which they lived, progressed at the same rate.
The foundation of Spencer’s theory of mind was the brain, rather than
the spirit or soul. However, this did not prevent his theory from incorpo-
rating the higher parts of culture. The human mind always meant more
– both to Spencer and his critics – than a collection of functional reac-
tions to environmental pressures. emotions and desires may have begun
as responses to threats and needs, but they had evolved beyond this. As a
result of human progress, scientific discussions, the exercise of reason and
aesthetic values were not entirely explicable by their origins.
Despite its high-mindedness, Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology
was not as universalistic and culturally neutral as his later sociology. In
the 1850s Spencer was dependent on comparative anthropological data
that supported crude notions of uniform biological evolution that placed
europeans at the pinnacle of psychological and social development and
the inhabitants of other continents at lower levels. For example, he argued
that the simple numbering system used by aboriginals reflected a bio-
logical inferiority, whereas the complicated numerical system of more
advanced groups indicated that they had undergone physiological develop-
ment. These sort of arguments were simple extensions on mid-nineteenth-
century evolutionary physiology. However, in his later writings Spencer
became increasingly distant from his early neurological underpinnings and
his notion of progress became less coherent. He began to reject both ration-
ality and scientific accomplishment as markers of cultural progress. He also
became critical of the european reliance on the “will” or volition to mar-
ginalize “unprofitable” feelings such as compassion, pity and joy. More and
more, Spencer saw european progress as a temporary advantage that had
been achieved at the cost of psychological damage. In addition, Spencer
increasingly saw ethical and aesthetic values as detached from the func-
tional machinery of biological evolution. This meant that instead of regard-
ing indigenous peoples as primitives, Spencer viewed them as “pre-social”
peoples whose personal values might well be superior to those of techno-
logically advanced europeans. neurophysiology had ceased to be a key
that unveiled the secrets of a progressive concept of mind; scientific laws,
together with progressive ethical and political values, had become detached
from biological evolution.
covery. charles Darwin did something similar in the first part of The Descent of Man
(1871), as did William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890).
157
James, who spent a dozen years ruminating on Spencer before issuing

his 1400-page The Principles of Psychology,6 was a trimmer. part of him
stayed faithful to the objective tenets of association psychology while part
yearned to subscribe to the beliefs of a more spiritually inclined psychol-
ogy. He described the former as a school – whose numbers included Johann
Friedrich Herbart in Germany, David Hume in Scotland and James Mill and
John Stuart Mill in england – that professed “psychology without a soul”
(James 1890: vol. 1, 3). The other form of psychology was the polar oppo-
site, brimming with souls and spirits that operated on a different plane than
the one composed of matter. Instead of adopting one of those alternative
accounts of mental phenomena, James drew from both while, at the same
time, complaining of their respective faults.
In James’s eyes there was an almost incommensurate gap between the
material and spiritual psyche, and he bridged this by invoking material
drawn from neurophysiology. At first sight the procedure seems to suggest
that James was not keeping equidistant from both spiritualists and their
opponents, the materially focused associationalists, but taking sides against
the former. This strategy would seem paradoxical if you held that asso-
ciation psychology was rooted in the study of actual mental phenomena.
However, James took the view that the materialism underpinning associa-
tion psychology was severed from the functioning of the brain and was
only a product of a kind of “cerebralism” (ibid.: vol. 1, 4), which portrayed
the mind as divorced from the physical world. The materialism of asso-
ciation psychology might have explained mental phenomena without ref-
erence to the soul or to God, but its reliance on rationalism caused it to
ignore the host of psychological mechanisms that operated in the absence
of intelligence. to James this bias meant that association psychology had
the same pitfalls as spiritual psychology: both explained the mind as a
series of cerebral actions as if it were disembodied or detached from cor-
poreal existence. both psychologies were mistaken as “no mental modifica-
tion ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change”
(ibid.: vol. 1, 6).
James’s insistence on avoiding the dichotomous perils of association-
ism and spiritualism drove him to adopt Spencer’s evolutionary theory.
In particular, he borrowed Spencer’s emphasis on the way in which the
6. The “dozen years” refer to the time between James’s essay “remarks on Spencer’s
Definition of the Mind as correspondence” in 1878 and the publication of his The
Principles of Psychology in 1890. However, the gestation period was longer than
this. robert J. richards (2006: 110) notes that James had Spencer’s The Principles
of Biology in his study plan for January 1870. r. b. parry dated James’s reading of
Spencer to between 1860 and 1862 (croce 1995: 270 n. 81).
158
“inner” or physiological parts of the mind had adapted so as to be in cor-

respondence with the “outer” world by reacting to environmental inputs
(ibid.; James [1878] 1920: 44). That is, James relied on Spencer’s theory that
mind/brain had evolved to its present state by adjusting its operations in
order to survive environmental change. James believed that Spencer’s men-
tal evolution was inferior to Darwin’s theory of the natural selection of
species as a scientific theory, but that, with sufficient modification, it could
be used to negate the flawed “cerebral” psychologies that were then hold-
ing centre stage.
Spencer’s theory of evolution needed modification because, according
to James, it was primarily a hypothesis about the necessity of a particular
type of organic adaptation. He believed that Spencer’s theory was an argu-
ment that all complex organic systems of sensory apparatus, including the
human brain, must have undergone processes that would fit them to chang-
ing environments. This argument seemed axiomatic. James’s complaint was
that there was no way of looking behind Spencer’s hypothesis; essentially it
was a speculation that minds must have evolved so as to adjust to nature,
or the organism of which they were part would have perished. James felt
particularly aggrieved by this Spencerian account of the probable origin
of the mind because it appeared to include the suggestion that our theo-
retical notions of space and time had evolved as evolutionary responses
to the environment. For example, according to James, Spencer seemed to
claim that the abstraction “time” was the result of biological experimenta-
tion over the course of organic development. James was mistaken in view-
ing this as an essential aspect of evolutionary theory, because Spencer was
comfortable with reiterating commonplace distinctions between empirical
and deductive knowledge, and was willing to imagine that abstract notions
such as “time” belonged with mathematics and the deductive sciences.
James’s objection should not have arisen since Spencer was not making the
point that our evolutionary modified perceptions of the universe were cor-
rect. James could have accepted them as a plausible “just-so” story, or as
a heuristic device that was not intended to account for the actual origins
of consciousness. However, such strategies did not satisfy James because
he claimed that, in order to be scientific, all statements about evolution
should be law-like and have a causal form (James [1878] 1920: 56–7). Since
Spencer’s suggestions seldom had these qualities, but were statements about
the probable origins of mental evolution, James was troubled. A Spencerian
statement that it was improbable that an organism would survive and pro-
duce offspring unless it were adapted to the environment was not law-like.
Further, James believed that since Spencer viewed mental evolution as a
subset of general biological evolution, he would have needed to invoke a
special theory in order to explain it. A special theory would be necessary
159
because evolution did not seem to be subject to a general theory with sci-
entific laws. The closest thing James could find to a law-like statement in
Spencer’s speculation on mental evolution was when he stated as a fun-
damental law of intelligence that the increase of intelligence was caused
by the cohesion of psychic states, which increased in direct proportion to
their repetitions.7 Spencer, who was dependent on physiological studies of
reflex action, had extended these studies to speculate that compound reflex
actions were instincts. Subsequently, he suggested, intelligence developed
from instincts on the principle that “inner” or mental relations were organ-
ized into correspondence with “outer” relations by perpetual repetition
(James 1890: vol. 2, 621).8
James’s objection to Spencer’s evolutionary theory was not that it was
Lamarckian or progressive, but the opposite of these. His complaint was that
it was erroneous to suggest, as Spencer did, that mental evolution increased
cohesion of psychic states by repetition: this process would not select some
experiences over others because it lacked a goal, and was, therefore, non-
directional and non-progressive. Instead of holding correct information, the
Spencerian mind was as likely to repetitiously mistake information about its
environment and, as a result, neither increase its store of actual knowledge
nor evolve upwards. Since, for James, the merit in evolutionary psychology
was that it explained the progressive growth of intelligence from its first
appearance in animals up to its highest development in human beings, it
seemed crucial to refocus Spencer’s evolutionary theory. In order to accom-
plish this, James recast evolution as a causal theory that would be properly
scientific.
James modified Spencer’s evolutionary theory by invoking Darwin
as an advocate of progression towards a developmental goal. This strat-
egy now seems inexplicable as we have become accustomed to regarding
Darwinism as the enemy of such progressive theories. In the twenty-first
century it seems obvious that a primitive organism did not intend, or will,
change along a particular line of development, but that, retrospectively, we
postulate that there is a genetic inheritance from an ancestral form in the
past. However, this interpretation was not attractive to James.9 Instead, he
7. If one took Spencer’s statement about the effects of repetition seriously, then mental
repetition would seem to lead to habit, not to the growth of intelligence. James, who
was enamoured with carlyle’s notion of genius, thought that the intelligent actions
that were generated by habitual action were at a low level of the kind found in dogs
and horses.
8. On reflex action and the effect of habit see Spencer (1855: 473–9).
9. Although James’s The Principles of Psychology was published at a time when neo-
Darwinism was fashionable, many of its ideas harked back to the 1860s and 1870s
160
emphasized, as Darwin’s chief concepts, the notion of “spontaneous varia-

tion” as the producer of changed forms of life, and the idea that the envi-
ronment acted as a randomizing agent that could either preserve or destroy
the forms (James [1880] 1897: 247; [1878] 1920: 63). The element of ran-
domness in conjunction with “spontaneous variation” appealed to James
because this pairing of ideas supported his liberal belief that more evolved
individuals and societies also possessed greater quantities of variation and,
consequently, a more viable future. When, for example, he followed John
Lubbock in placing certain types of human intelligence on a lower level
than others, he was claiming the former were slaves to habit and displayed
little variation. Since James read Darwinism as implying that “lower types”
lacked spontaneity, this suggested to him that, when affected by the envi-
ronment, they only registered frequency of experience as repetition and this
made them slaves to habit and non-progressive ([1880] 1897: 247). to some
extent this was a rebuttal of Spencer’s reliance on repetition of experience
as the cause of mental evolution, but it also supported James’s romantic
emphasis on spontaneous intuition and originality at the expense of induc-
tive or evidence-based knowledge. For James, the presence of spontaneity
also marked a great divide between animals and humans. The former were
brutes imprisoned by routine while the latter possessed the capacity to cope
with randomness. In a perversely brilliant image, James praised “the inher-
ently unstable human brain” (ibid.: 248). This distanced him from Spencer,
who avoided flashes of intuitionism in favour of the painstaking collection
of empirical detail and who refused to elevate the mental and moral capaci-
ties of the civilized over the savage (ibid.: 247).10 There was little in Spencer’s
psychology that would support James’s strenuously theoretical version of
“Darwinism”.
James did not consistently subscribe to his peculiar brand of Darwinism;
when it came to the development of intelligence, he claimed that “variation”
could only be a property of a higher-order intelligence so, logically, it could
not be one of its causes. James could also reverse this opinion and regard
“variation” as a cause. This happened when he was espousing a kind of lib-
eralism based on John Stuart Mill’s idea of intellectual freedom. Such free-
dom was essential to the scientific progress and was achieved by activity in
the minds of great men who were protean in their output. That is, scientific
when natural selection was only one of a variety of ideas that one might comfortably
assign to Darwin. Louis Menand paradoxically noted the peculiar nature of James’s
views on Darwin’s evolutionary theory by remarking that he “was Darwinian, but
he was not a Darwinist” (2002: 141).
10. This was only true of Spencer’s writings from the 1870s; in the 1850s he had no such
sensitivities.
161
discoveries were produced by those whose brains were “mental cauldrons”

seething with the greatest variety of ideas. James’s Darwinism caused him
to adhere to a variety of liberalism based on increasing knowledge. When
elevating the value of higher minds in producing knowledge, James followed
W. Stanley Jevons, who recycled Darwin’s “spontaneous variation” as the
key phrase in a scientific language that expounded the genius of discovery
(ibid.: 248).
James’s evolutionary language was spliced to a liberal view of science; the
chief task of his liberalism was to protect the highest minds so that when a
variety of ideas was produced by the unrestrained activity of these minds,
this would give an impetus to the progress of science and civilization (ibid.:
249). For James, only Darwinism supported liberal progressive science.
Spencer’s evolutionary ideas were not progressive, since they were without
direction and did not rely on the random variation of ideas. even worse,
from James’s perspective, Spencer was hostile to the idea that genius played
a decisive role in scientific progress.11 Since he agreed with Spencer that sci-
entific progress was part and parcel of evolution in general, he experienced
a strong desire to rewrite Spencerism so that it would resemble a source
of causal statements that would promote future intellectual and scientific
progress. Unless it was modified, James warned that Spencerism would lack
scientific respectability and would amount to nothing more than a series of
hypothetical scenarios about how evolution might have occurred.
It was not just Spencer’s general evolutionary theory that James saw as
lacking respectability; more specifically, James was annoyed with Spencer’s
treatment of mental evolution as a mere subset of evolution in general.
Spencer’s formula was that inner mechanisms adjusted themselves to the
external environment, and this applied both to living organisms in general
and to the mind in particular. to James this implied that Spencer’s view of
inner life was reductionist in giving the mind no independence from biol-
ogy; it meant that our thinking processes, and the ideas that they produce,
were determined by organic evolution in the past. contrary to this, James
argued that some mental capacities, such as those responsible for aesthetic
judgements, were subject to choice, and were therefore free of outside evo-
lutionary forces (James [1878] 1920: 45).12 James was extreme on this sub-
ject, seeing the desire to nurture a child and laughter at a joke as voluntary
actions and as matters of choice (ibid.: 45). His views here said more about
his personal desire for self-control and his distaste for displays of instinctive
11. James thought that Spencer’s dismissal of the importance of great men in The Study
of Sociology was impudent (James [1880] 1897: 232–3).
12. In actuality, Spencer was not as reluctant as James believed because he had exempted
aesthetic feelings from originating in desires for food and sex.
162
action than it did about members of the nineteenth-century public, who, in

general, were like Spencer in being devoted to following natural inclinations
such as the desire to mother a child or to involuntary displaying laughter
or grief.
If, James argued, change in mental processes was reduced to a mirror
of organic changes, this would produce a faulty psychology. physiologists
and biologists tended to explain organic change by referring to origins, but
the transfer of this bias to the study of mental life would not advance its
understanding, especially in areas such as the study of intelligence. James’s
objection here (ibid.: 47) was to the practice of Spencer and of similar evo-
lutionary theorists, in focusing excessively on the origins of phenomena
instead of the future goals of change.13 This was the wrong perspective;
origins pointed to the past and he wanted the future. Goals were of such
importance to James’s notion of mentality that their presence was the crite-
rion of intelligence (ibid.: 49). Leaving aside James’s loose grasp of scientific
scholarship, and the fact that this criticism would have been more aptly
directed at the work of romanes and Hippolyte taine on the instinctual
aspects of mental life than at Spencer, the point was central to James’s reser-
vations about evolutionary theory in general: He believed that a concentra-
tion on origins would mistakenly direct the study of mental development
towards a science of essential forms of organic phenomena. That would be a
platonist enquiry rather than a properly scientific one because of its insist-
ence that the fundamental structure of a form was most clearly visible at its
very beginnings. even though James rebuked scholars such as e. b. tylor for
possessing such erroneous beliefs, it was Spencer who was the chief object of
his anger at the indulgence of origin-hunting. It was curious that James took
this path since Spencer did not write about palaeobiology or pre-historic
man. However, James paid little attention to Spencer’s mature work in biol-
ogy or sociology so he may not have noticed that Spencer did not follow
Lubbock, Huxley and others in such speculations. James was more familiar
with Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology than with the other evolutionary
works he cited so he used it as a kind of lone stalking horse when teaching
at Harvard as well as in his writings.
Spencer was assigned responsibility for the evolutionary habit of ana-
lysing intelligence as if its rudimentary qualities were the significant ones.
According to James, this method of dealing with intelligence stripped away
aesthetics and ethical judgements as later and peripheral additions to the
main stem of intelligence leaving reasoning as a fundamental remnant
13. Listed among other evolutionists here was e. b. tylor. This was particularly unfair
because tylor was known for resolutely rejecting both origin hunting and teleology
when analysing evolutionary data in anthropology.
163
(James [1878] 1920: 46). In order to overthrow this method, James had
recourse to a reductio ad absurdum, arguing that all theories of evolution
were mere appeals to the polyp (ibid.: 48; during this period a polyp typified
the smallest and most primitive organism). This meant that if one desired to
explain the central functions of a later organism, one had only to study the
functions in the more primitive versions first; these would serve as models
for the later complex ones.
Many of James’s arguments embroider the point that evolutionary argu-
ments relied on growth from simple forms, and repeated his objection that
a reductionism was the basis of enquiries into the origins of animal func-
tions and behaviour. If what he had wished to accomplish was to undermine
the credibility of evolutionary theory, it would have been sufficient to stop
here. However, James had the more complicated goal of rescuing evolution,
not destroying it, so he offered an additional argument that would redirect
the study of evolution so it would rest securely on safer grounds. Keeping
with the “polyp”, James argued that this was a narrowly “teleological” organ-
ism that cared nothing for subjects such as scientific progress and aesthet-
ics, but exclusively directed itself towards self-preservation. James’s rather
mischievous thesis here is that the “polyp”, the basic animal, seems to have
been endowed with a sort of intelligence, a Hobbesian foresight of its own
preservation, even though it was ignorant about scientific discovery and the
canons of beauty. Those were subjects that did not aid the animal’s survival.
This implied that the kind of rationality that led to survival was more fun-
damental than the other uses to which intelligence could be put. Also, the
presence of foresight in a primitive organism suggested to James that the
whole upward climb of Spencer’s evolutionary process – from “polyp” to the
advances of science such as the Laplace formula – was directed by the need
to survive and, hence, was goal-focused or teleological (ibid.: 61).
In case his audience was not sympathetic to hearing about the “polyp”,
James reinforced his arguments with the image of a moth flying into a can-
dle. In Spencerian terms, this should have meant that the instincts of the
moth did not correspond with its environment so it perished (ibid.: 49),
but James suspected that Spencer’s language incorporated more than this
since he had endowed the moth with an “implied criterion” for survival.
pushing the moth to one side, and refocusing on the “rational” polyp, James
then reinterpreted Spencer’s evolutionary formula. This formula had con-
sisted of “inner” relations changing so as to correspond with “outer” ones,
but, according to James, this caused Spencer to view scientific thinking as a
merely passive register of outward matter. Since this reductionist rephras-
ing was a trifle bland, James added that the Spencerian view of science was
ignoble and just a reflection of the responses of thought in the service of
survival. While earlier philosophers had regarded science as a mirror of
164
nature, Spencer saw it as the intellectual residue of partially forgotten sur-

vival strategies. to prevent Spencer’s evolution from degrading scientific
development, James felt he had to endow it with intelligence: His modified
Spencerianism meant that right or intelligent actions (the ones leading to
survival) consisted of the mental relations that would favour the “thinker”
(ibid.: 49–50), or the following of laws.
In modifying Spencer’s evolution, James ignored those parts of Spencer’s
System of Synthetic Philosophy14 that contained a variety of positions, some
of which were uncomfortably close to James’s own opinions and others that
would have been hostile to them. Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology had
extended those statements in mid-nineteenth-century neurophysiology that
had emphasized that human beings shared a great number of their instinc-
tive actions and their rationality with other animals. James glossed this
argument as saying animal and human behaviours were similar and, there-
fore, we should interpret the behaviour of animals such as moths and polyps
in the same way as we interpret human beings. In philosophical terms this
meant that we should view the physical prosperity and survival of an ani-
mal as “pure subjective interests” on its part.15 James’s insertion of “interests”
at this point in his argument is a significant interpolation. He knew per-
fectly well that neither Spencer’s theory of mental evolution nor his moral
philosophy were based on interests, but still wished to claim that Spencer
should have argued that animal and human behaviour were intelligible only
if regarded as governed by subjective interests. Spencer, he argued, should
have held that even the rudimentary desire to survive was a subjective inter-
est providing a sense of direction in evolutionary development. These emen-
dations made Spencer’s evolutionary theory goal-directed and teleological,
even though James knew that these were consequences that Spencer would
have wished to avoid. no mercy was shown to Spencer; James felt that he
should have foreseen the consequences of his argument because without
them his ideas of evolution lacked intelligibility.
Of course, it was disingenuous to assign teleology to Spencer’s evolution-
ary theory. part of James’s argument was intended as a jest since neither he
14. James seldom cited any of Spencer’s works on metaphysics, biology or sociology.
This suggests that when he argued that Spencer’s views on social evolution were
reductionist (James [1878] 1920: 46), he was extrapolating from what he thought
Spencer should have said given his psychological underpinnings.
15. James knew that Spencer, as an anti-utilitarian, did not base his philosophy on sub-
jective interests (see James [1878] 1920: 50 n.). In focusing on interests here, James
was probably borrowing chauncey Wright’s criticism of evolutionary philosophy for
ignoring utility when explaining the development of abstract principles in science
(see Flower & Murphy 1977: vol. 2, 541).
165
nor Spencer could decipher the subjective interests of a moth. However,

underneath the joke was a rebuttal of Spencer’s attempt to yoke empirical and
objective statements together with vaguely phrased progressive outcomes.
James’s thesis was that correspondence theory, the heart of Spencerian
evolution, lacked law-like features; it just so happened that Spencer could
gesture to developments that, on balance, could retrospectively be seen as
progressive.16 James was issuing a challenge to Spencerianism: either admit
that evolution was not progressive or build in a teleological principle that
perceived organisms, especially human ones, as directing development
towards a goal.
This was not a casual matter for James. He was drawn to evolutionary
theory, but, unless he could modify it in the teleological way he intended,
it would be impossible to him to comprehend the existence of higher-order
thinking of the kind one found in philosophy and psychology. If it were
not goal-directed, evolution could not account for human theoretical and
conceptual abilities. James believed that if people were goal-directed, this
necessitated that they would also possess subjective knowledge of their
interests. to put this dilemma in a bold Jamesian way, utility was a key fea-
ture of explanations of higher-order mental features, and Spencer was inex-
plicably hostile to utility theories. However, even if Spencer had accepted
utility theory when explaining conceptual ability, James suspected that
evolution had no basis in explaining intelligence. neither our own expe-
rience nor inherited experience could adequately explain our theoretical
abilities (James 1890: vol. 2, 667–8). In arguing against personal experience
as a basis for conceptual development James was broadening his argument
outside the evolutionary arena, but the purpose of his remark – that utility
could not be inherited – was to register his concern that Spencer’s evolu-
tion might carry a taint of Lamarckian transmitted experience. James did
not believe that Spencer was a true Lamarckian after the fashion of W. b.
carpenter and Henry Maudsley. rather, he viewed Spencer as balancing
between two varieties of Darwinism: initially favouring natural variation
as the cause of evolution and later espousing natural selection.17 However,
16. richard rorty, in reviewing the ideas of William James, suggested Darwinism,
utilitarianism and pragmatism all conspired to exalt plurality over the unity that
belonged to the “theologicometaphysical” world. While rorty might be correct
about pragmatism in general, he seems mistaken about James, who rewrote evolu-
tionary theory in order to avoid the philosophical pluralism that rorty admires (see
rorty 1999: 268–70).
17. James was not concerned with whether Spencer’s evolutionary theory was
Lamarckian, but was quick to notice if this quality appeared in the work of Maudsley
and carpenter (James 1890: vol. 1, 112–13).
166
since James believed that Darwin was like Lamarck in focusing on the
inheritance of characteristics, the distinction between them did not signify
a great deal to him when his main concern was to limit the role inheritance
played in psychology. This was an extension of James’s critique of the inad-
equacy of scientific explanations that referred to origins when explaining
later processes. In particular, he rejected the idea that an analysis of the ori-
gins of the human species could produce plausible explanations of mental
phenomena (ibid.: vol. 2, 685). even when origins were significant in the
explanation of instincts, this was not a matter of natural selection (ibid.:
vol. 2, 617). In so far as Spencer had followed Darwinism in regarding psy-
chology as the explanation of instincts and habits in the human species,
James believed that this had undermined the proper study of psychology,
which should be restricted to the development of the individual mind.
Since James had begun The Principles of Psychology by praising Spencer for
providing a neurological basis for psychology, and was on record as prefer-
ring Darwin to Spencer, his condemnation of Spencer for both relying on
neurophysiology and on Darwin was contradictory, and in need of some
explanation.18
Unlike Darwin and Spencer, James displayed little interest in the minu-
tiae of zoological and botanical reproduction, or in differences between spe-
cies and varieties of organisms. Instead, his interests were restricted to the
human mind and its intellectual pursuits. In addition, James’s treatment of
Spencer and Darwin was rambunctious and careless because he was untram-
melled by any sensitivity towards an author’s intentions. For example, the
fact that Spencer avoided palaeology and discussions about the historical
origins of a species did not prevent James from suggesting that Spencer was
ensnared by origin hunting and biological determinism. Also, when James
discussed Darwinism he elided Darwin’s scientific theory of spontaneous
variation with his own religious fear that the universe might be Godless and
only contain the randomness of physical attractions and reactions. rather
than objectively considering “spontaneity” and fearing “randomness”, James
read them together as affirmations that the universe was a joyful place that
encouraged unplanned change.
James’s use of Darwin and Spencer seems paradoxical chiefly because the
twenty-first century identifies Darwinism exclusively with natural selection
and the struggle for survival, while Spencer is discussed as someone who
was less enamoured with these ideas. However, in James’s era it was possi-
ble to assign quite different values to both Darwin’s scientific work and to
18. A. J. Ayer (1968: 216) observed that James’s idea of evolution did not fit with his
psychology and its neurological basis, and wondered why James did not take the
more radical view that “willing” was not a psychological process at all.
167
Spencer’s evolutionary theory. In James’s case he claimed to be a Darwinian

who was sceptical about natural selection and survival of the fittest because
he believed that these had hidden teleological implications. Since he also
considered Darwin to be without faults, he blamed Spencer for this non-
scientific and teleological blemish while claiming that, properly considered,
Darwinism was a theory of benign randomness and “spontaneous variation”
based on the idea that individuals directed their own development. Since
individuals were capable of comprehending causal laws once these were
spontaneously produced, this would direct the growth of scientific knowl-
edge because such laws were predictive. In other words, James’s Darwinism
consisted of two strategies: one allowing for the understanding of the indi-
vidual psyche, and the other for the explanations of the advancement of sci-
ence in such a way that the life sciences would be explicated by the same sort
of laws that applied in the physical sciences. Opposed to this, James glossed
Spencerianism as an evolutionary theory that would erroneously group the
development of the individual psyche with organic change in general and
as resistant to the notion that scientific progress was a matter of subject-
ing phenomena to causal laws. He believed that Spencer’s evolution was a
theory of undirected change within which some accidental processes were
arbitrarily assigned a prepotency over others (James 1890 : vol. 1, 593). Since
the processes were accidental, rather than necessary, they interacted with
each other in capricious ways, which meant that the direction of change
could shift at any time (ibid.: vol. 2, 619).
It was this last word, “time”, that was particularly important to James
because it suggested that Spencerian knowledge of theoretical abstracts
was subject to experience. That is, our understanding of time was not inde-
pendent, but subject to historically acquired experience. At this point James
forced himself to adopt a serious tone to combat naturalistic evolutionary
philosophy as a whole, whether that was Darwinian or Spencerian. James’s
chief concern here was caused by his agreement with Spencer that philo-
sophical ideas and scientific knowledge were mental phenomena in much
the same way as emotions and instincts. While Spencer did not see that this
posed a difficulty for a distinction between necessary and contingent truths,
James felt that there was a quandary here; for him, the first of these were
absolutely true, and, therefore, could never have been subject to inherited
experiences.
James understood the old empirical school of David Hartley, James Mill
and Alexander bain as saying that experience shaped us every hour, and
moulded our minds into mirrors of the real connections time made in space
between things in the world (ibid.: vol. 2, 620). experience acted as a prin-
ciple of habit within us that so fixed a copy of the world that we eventu-
ally had difficulties in considering any other reality, and we became content
168
with predicting a future based on the present. contrary to this, evolution-

ary theorists hypothesized about the developed experience of the human
mind over time (ibid.). James regarded this as an improvement as long as
one avoided using experience when explaining necessary or a priori argu-
ments.19 James (ibid.: vol. 2, 620) quoted Spencer to the effect that, although
we have no actual evidence that reflex action and instincts were based on
experience, there was some reason to conclude that automatic psychical
connections had resulted from the registration of “experience continued for
numberless generations”.20 Spencer had argued that such experiences should
not be regarded as received by a single individual, yet they “may be received
by a succession of individuals forming a race” (ibid.: vol. 2, 621).21 In saying
this, Spencer was offering a progressive view of the future without relying
on the individual’s rationality. In his The Principles of Psychology (1855) he
viewed intelligence as the pinnacle of evolution of life in general rather than
as the possession of an individual. The reception of experience over many
generations, Spencer concluded, was the genesis of instinct as well as of
the development of memory and reason, together with the consolidation of
natural actions and inferences into instinctive ones. All of these processes
“are alike explicable on the single principle that the cohesion between psychi-
cal states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between
the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experience” (James
1890: vol. 2, 621).
Spencer had been writing about the way in which the relations of space
or time have accumulated in the subjective consciousness, not only within
specific species but throughout successive species, each having a set of expe-
riences that became more consolidated over time. The Spencerian corol-
lary to this is that the human brain is an organized register of an almost
infinite number of experiences recorded throughout the evolution of life
(James [1878] 1920: 56–7). Spencer’s overview of how organisms might
have evolved ideas of space and time was a useful approximation of what
might have happened, but James was adamant that this speculation could
not amount to a scientific statement. He had emphasized Spencer’s “single”
principle because he believed that it was typical of the habit of employing
falsely causal arguments in evolutionary psychology. As a corrective, James
insisted that arguments about mental evolution had to show how experience
19. James gives his quotation as taken from Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology, §207.
In the english editions of Spencer’s work the excerpted material is from §197 in the
1855 edition and §205 of vol. 1 of the 1870 edition.
20. Spencer’s own doubts about the progressive nature of evolution did not become
prominent until the early 1870s.
21. by “race”, Spencer meant “species”.
169
was bequeathed from one generation to the next. James’s stated rationale
for insisting on one standard or criterion for a law of mental evolution is
peculiar; he insists that unless we restrict the scope to a single principle our
analysis would be subjective or personal (James 1890: vol. 2, 632). It seems
plausible that he upheld the theory that only a single principle could explain
mental evolution because it was a convenient way of avoiding the exhausting
chaos that would accompany the analysis of empirical data. chaos was an
undignified origin for theories of time and space, aesthetic judgements and
other products of the human mind. While James was attracted to Spencer’s
attempt to put the mind at the head of the great progression of life, he felt
that Spencer needed to do more or we would be left as “mere offshoots and
creatures of our environment and naught besides” (ibid.: vol. 2, 632).
James’s general complaint about Spencerianism was a variation on a
standard pre-genetic argument against evolution. Many Victorians had
felt uneasy with evolutionary theory because, while it seemed plausible,
it lacked a serious causal mechanism explaining its operations. However,
James’s specific criticism of Spencer’s evolutionary theory of mind was more
novel. It suggested that scientific knowledge differed from ordinary percep-
tions of the universe. “The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent
either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which it comes
before us” (ibid.: vol. 2, 634). James’s argument was that even if our percep-
tions of reality can be explained by evolution, and are more or less accurate,
this would not account for scientific knowledge. to be more precise, James
was arguing that our scientific knowledge of space and time was not depend-
ent on evolutionary experience. The burden of this argument was to counter
Spencer’s assumption that those organisms that had not adjusted themselves
satisfactorily to the external world of space and time would cease to exist
while surviving organisms would necessarily have had correct perceptions
(James [1878] 1920: 44–5). This was unfair on James’s part because Spencer
was not hinting at a concept of variable reality for space and time so that
different contingent outcomes of evolution would have produced different
senses of reality. Instead, he was making the unprovable historical claim that
evolved organisms had had to acquire more or less accurate perceptions of
reality. James agreed with Spencer’s point about why ordinary perceptions
of reality were accurate, but was adamant that this could not be true about
scientific knowledge. The latter, James claimed, was based solely on neces-
sary relations. In the philosophy of science this was an extremely radical
position. Most of James’s contemporaries, including Spencer, conventionally
distinguished between inductive and deductive sciences (the former dealing
with contingent matters and the latter with necessary relations), and thought
that the acquisition of scientific knowledge was possible in both kinds of sci-
ence. In throwing this aside, and in denying that inferences based on data
170
from the inductive sciences would coincide with reality – or at least with
anything that human beings and other living organisms were conditioned to
see as reality – James had abandoned his roots in neurophysiology.
James’s position on the mind is complicated. His primary desire was to
employ evolution to overthrow the “cerebral” philosophy of mind and to
replace it with a modern psychology that was anchored to neuroscience and
the physical world of reflexes, actions and instincts, but this seemed too sec-
ular: the “non-cerebral” basis for the study of mental operations was usually
accompanied by the notion that human minds were little more than brains
responding automatically to threats and desires. This reductionist implica-
tion of treating minds as brains appalled James. In his view, minds were
distinguished by the presence of scientific theories and discoveries as well
as by the possession of private thoughts so he felt that they must be greater
than a series of responses to past and present environmental stimuli. The
existence of scientific knowledge was James’s starting-point: the primary
purpose of his notion of mind was to explain this, together with the human
progress that science fostered. However, scientific knowledge in the life sci-
ences was not all of one piece. There was, in James’s view, a tension between
biological evolution, which could be explained by reference to empirical
data, and mental evolution which required a more theoretical exposition.
The first science referred to matters of fact that were reliant to biology as
the brain analysed the environment in an effort to survive. However, this
was not the whole story because the human mind performed a multitude of
other tasks that were unrelated to the survival of a group or an individual:
“In a word, ‘Mind’ as we actually find it, contains all sorts of laws – those of
logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, decorum, beauty, morals and so forth, as well
as of perceptions of fact” ([1878] 1920: 46).22
According to James, Spencer and other early evolutionists were too
focused on cognition – which James defined as the assessment of empirical
facts – and not enough on emotion, play and other feelings that served no
immediate role in survival (ibid.: 56). to James this distinction was worth
fighting for; as without it scientific knowledge would be employed to support
only harshly competitive societies such as Sparta in which survivalist eth-
ics were paramount. In the case of a conflict with such a militaristic society,
he believed that it was probable that a civil society with scientific strengths
would be defeated. This argument was directed at Spencer’s attempt to com-
bine biological evolution with pacificism.
22. part of this argument was an assault on the reliance of evolutionary argument on
inductive logic. In this James had an ally in Jevons, who saw induction as failing to
make any real addition to knowledge and unable to work out a new theory of nature
(see Jevons [1873] 1958: 149, 576–7).
171
James was well aware of Spencer’s belief that evolutionary ethics would
eventually lead to peaceful characteristics becoming dominant, and he also
knew that Spencer advocated that everyone should employ themselves in
recreational activity and the acquisition of scientific and literary culture.
However, James predicted, if the world was governed solely by biological
laws, then the desire for peace together with the enjoyment of recreation
play and culture would be weeded out. While Spencer’s concept of “Mind”
contained items such as aesthetic values, love of truth, conscience and the
eager delight in fresh impressions, these qualities would prove inferior
in a struggle with people who were devoted to the “monomania of tribal
preservation” (ibid.). If assisting survival was the sole criterion of mental
excellence, then the human society that Spencer admired was inefficient
and wasteful. For the purpose of survival, society does not require luxury,
amusement, or cultural icons such as Shakespeare, beethoven and plato
(ibid.: 56). The latter were cultural goods lacking biological utility.
Since utility could not account for scientific advance or for progress in
general, James claimed it was necessary to consider the mind as an organ
that followed laws rather than one that mirrored reality (ibid.: 56–7).23 The
laws in question would be “ideal” ones that were dictated by subjective
interests. to James this argument was a coup de main, destroying Spencer’s
definition of mind: “This greater part of Mind qualitatively considered,
refuses to have anything to do with Mr Spencer’s definition” (ibid.: 46). As is
obvious, the laws in question were not objective, but existed above “actual”
facts. They were laws that could be understood from the perspective of the
subject whom James credited with possessing interests or with having sub-
jective interests. In a memorable baker’s phrase, James mused that interests
were the very flour from which our mental dough was kneaded (ibid.: 61).24
Kneaded dough was a well-shaped metaphor for James’s notion of “mind”
because, unlike his better-known image of “the stream of consciousness”, it
does not summon up a process that is outside the control of the observer but
instead points to something over which the individual has control. Images
such as flour and dough suggested an image of a product that was random
and directionless until it assumed an intelligible shape when processed by
subjective interests.
23. Instead of employing words such as “reality” and “real”, James, who was familiar
with Hegelianism, preferred to use “actual”.
24. Since Spencer was, to some extent, an exponent of Thomas reid’s realism rather
than a follower of “rational” philosophers such as David Hume, James was running
aground here on a hidden reef in the history of philosophy. James had no aware-
ness of reid or of the French electic philosophers who followed him, so he critiqued
Spencer as a baconian inductivist.
172
James’s assault on Spencer’s evolutionary theory was not a commentary

cooked up in isolation by a Harvard psychologist. While it is true James
spent years honing his criticism of Spencer while using the latter’s The
Principles of Psychology as a textbook, his commentary is best analysed as
part of a broadside fired at Spencer and evolutionary theory by english phi-
losophers such as Hodgson and robertson, who were determined to free
philosophy from the organic bondage imposed on it by evolutionary phi-
losophers. This bond was imagined to be objective, so the way to destroy it
was to appeal to its antithesis, subjectivity. James, like his english colleagues,
opposed subjectivity to objectivity because the latter was too rational a con-
ception to adequately reflect reality (James [1878] 1920: 57). As has already
been observed, the solution here for James was to take refuge in the idea of
laws of the mind. This was borrowed from Shadworth Hodgson’s Time and
Space, and was an argument to the effect that if the law of mind refers to
what we do think, then it must be seen as analysing error and nonsense as
well as facts; that is, it encompasses the worthless as well as the worthwhile,
and it engages with myth as well as with scientific truths that reflect the
environment (ibid.: 57).
At first glance, James’s argument here appears flawed. Its logic rests on a
cascading series of sensations, many of which are untrue, making them the
basis for the establishment of a law. James himself was blind to the flaws in
his argument because he was so irritated while criticizing Spencer’s corre-
spondence theory that he could not proceed in a scholarly fashion. He was
aware that Spencer did not subscribe to a correspondence theory as a mir-
ror of nature and, therefore, did not rely on the idea of the mind accurately
reflecting reality. Since Spencer was not brandishing the mirror of nature,
James should not have charged him with being false to his roots in natural-
ism. However, James’s argument here was subordinate to his real purpose,
which was that he, not Spencer, had decided to search for what reality truly
is (S. Hodgson 1865: 280).25 James had uncritically adopted Hodgson’s Time
and Space as the key philosophical response to Spencer’s evolution after
anchoring himself in Spencer’s neurologically based theory of the mind.
Hodgson’s chief lament had been that physiological theories such as
Spencer’s had no place for consciousness, seeing it as “a mere foam, aura or
melody, arising from the brain, but without reacting upon it” (ibid.: 280).
Hodgson’s rejection of these ephemeral images was unconvincing; he sim-
ply claimed that it was impossible to conceive of the consciousness in this
way. While this response had a certain rhetorical value in that it reversed
25. echoes of Hodgson’s language can often be heard in James’s writings. See e.g. James
(1890: vol. 1, 161).
173
Spencer’s argument that one could dismiss a hypothesis if one could not
conceive of its negation, it was feeble because the mid-century physiolog-
ical theories canvassed by Hodgson (ibid.: 211–12) were, in fact, able to
conceive of consciousness as a mere foam that had no function in mental
operations. This denial that consciousness had a function was disturbing to
Hodgson because he believed consciousness to be purposive. In addition,
he felt that it underpinned the christian theory of progression towards God.
For Hodgson, evidence of this progression could be found in the metaphysi-
cal analysis of successive states of consciousness (ibid.).26 The determinate
causes of this change were the pleasure and the interest felt in the objects
that the consciousness dwelt on: this fact, concluded Hodgson, contained
“in germ” the whole progress of consciousness (ibid.: 262). Space and time
were the wallpaper of the laws of mental association (resemblance, contigu-
ity and causation), and were indifferent towards the material objects that
they contained. Our ideas on these matters did not come from the objects
themselves, but were put together in the consciousness by the feelings of
the empirical ego (ibid.). According to Hodgson, the objects of perception
were not parts of an external whole, but only juxtapositions that took place
in time within the ego (ibid.: 213).
Hodgson’s ideas on this subject were not so much a reply to Spencer
but religiously inspired metaphysics brought into existence in reaction to
Spencer’s belief that the existence of humanity was a consequence of evolu-
tionary development. Unwittingly, Spencer’s speculations on evolutionary
psychology and progress had encouraged Hodgson to believe that cog-
nitions, feelings and mere consciousness were contained in phenomena
before they existed in actuality. Hodgson had interpreted instinctive actions
as those that appeared to be performed for a purpose “but as yet without
apparent knowledge or perception of the end for which they are done”
(ibid.). This was a strained reading of the psychology of reflex actions, which
had insisted that instinctive actions were not directed towards accomplish-
ing an end, but Hodgson was primarily motivated not to accurately report
on physiology, but to establish a clear distinction between the history and
the nature of phenomena. It was his view that any speculation that focused
solely on the former was not part of a legitimate philosophical enquiry.
26. Hodgson’s treatment of space and time was more sympathetic to science than that
of some christians. For example, W. e. Gladstone simply rejected Spencer’s notion
of evolution because it predicated that there was warrant for believing that space
and time were conditions of all existence (Letter from W. e. Gladstone to W. S.
Jevons, 10 May 1847, in Jevons [1972–81: vol. 4, 38]; see also ibid.: vol. 4, 38 n. 2 for
Gladstone’s dispute with Spencer on the nature of sociology in the Contemporary
Review.
174
Hodgson believed that by itself the historical domain had no place in an

explanation; anything it contained could only be in anticipation of later
developments. Since evolutionary psychology was necessarily historical in
focus, it was outside the kind of nature that science should consider. For
Hodgson, nature included cognitions, feelings and consciousness as long as
these were not conceived historically. Hodgson admitted the past if it were
seen as a series of predictive moments. James enthusiastically paraphrased
Hodgson to say that only passing moments existed; while this notion of
the present did not rank as a datum, it was the only thing that was real or
concrete (James [1895] 1920). However, for James this sort of knowledge
was illusory and subjective. Hodgson had come perilously close to claiming
that the universe exists because of our personal volition, and that human
beings were empowered because their minds were endowed with the poten-
tial of directing the external world towards an end. Hodgson also seemed to
believe that one could direct oneself towards this goal by examining states
of consciousness with an eye open for those possessing any potential or
prepotency for development.
This was an exciting futuristic prospect, and even more enticing than
Spencer’s speculations because those had dampened the excitement of
future development by having it constrained by the past. The temptation
held out by Hodgson was too much for James to resist, and he abandoned
the parts of Spencer he saw as rooted in biological science and, instead,
subscribed to a religious metaphysics. He was especially attracted by
Hodgson’s simple faith in progress and in mental laws that gave human
volition the chief role in controlling destiny. As James put the matter, the
mind had a “vote” in directing itself from birth onwards (ibid.: 67). It was
this hope that the mind participated in directing itself that caused James
to side against biologically determined evolutionary science. progress, he
felt, should not be left in the hands of Spencer, who lacked a proper tele-
ological grasp of the ends towards which we were evolving. In addition,
James faulted Spencer for relying on the brain in a way that did not make
allowance for the special nature of psychological concepts. Spencer’s brain
was just a collection of specialized functions in the same way that a tooth,
a limb, a stomach or even an intelligent device or a machine was a func-
tion or a collection of functions. If intelligence were considered to be no
more than an organ or a device then, to James, this implied that it was no
more than a spin-off from a brain that was devoted to survival (ibid.: 63).
At this point, James sensed that there was something conceptually weak in
the notion of functionality as used in evolutionary psychology, but, instead
of correcting it, he momentarily abandoned his discipline and claimed that
intelligence was the science of consciousness and could not be shaped by
evolution. consciousness was an end in itself, and, further, it served a final
175
purpose (ibid.: 64).27 This argument removed consciousness from any evo-
lutionary framework while, at the same time, severing it from the brain.
James classed teleology as a necessary part of all contemporary psycho-
logical debates, whether or not its protagonists were aware of it. Whatever
side of this debate they had chosen to support, they were goal-focused. One
group of combatants, the empiricists, wanted to pay obeisance to the actual,
while the other, the idealists, refused to acknowledge any connection with
the nature of things.28 both sides, he concluded, were waiting to be proved
right by the course of events. This suggested to James that both empiricists
and idealists were without true certainty and were dependent on an appeal
to an outcome. to James this implied that both groups had teleological
intentions whether or not they were aware of it (ibid.: 61). James’s conclu-
sion would not have troubled idealists, but it would have perplexed empiri-
cists because it claimed that the goal-driving evolution was partly subjective;
consciousness could not be truly an objective quality because it supplied
that standard of reason without which we could not measure progress.
besides his insertion of teleology into Spencerian evolutionary theory,
much of James’s commentary was a commonplace reiteration of the claim
that at some point in evolutionary development consciousness arose and
became a factor. While this seems a conventional observation, it had, in
James’s psychology, a strange corollary. Since it was James’s belief that evolu-
tion did not produce new organic forms but only modified old ones, he rea-
soned that consciousness itself had to be present, perhaps in a latent mode,
in the early or primitive brain or in the cells of which it was composed.
This bizarre idea was a simple consequence of James’s literal application of
biological evolution to psychology. Since Darwinism had insisted that spe-
cial creations were inadmissible in scientific discussions of the origins of
species, it was clear to James that such startling interpolations should also
not be present in mental development. Despite his adoption of Hodgson’s
divinely inspired teleology, James would have no commerce with the notion
that God had directly intervened in evolutionary processes by creating a
27. James’s perplexity on how to reconcile consciousness with evolution is not just one
for the Victorian era. The psychologist richard L. Gregory (1981: 451) found prob-
lems with whether consciousness would have evolved if it did not possess any sur-
vival value and whether consciousness could have survival value if it has no causal
effects.
28. even at the end of life when he belatedly withdrew his objection to the idea that
the human consciousness might have been composed of simpler parts, James kept
faith with the teleology that he had erected to negate the notion that the human
consciousness had arisen through an evolutionary process (see James [1907] 1977:
85–6, 87 n. 3.1; [1907] 1975: 50–51). This reiterates the fact that it was James who
was drawn towards teleology, not Spencer.
176
condition such as consciousness. That would be the insertion of a new form

when “all the new forms of being that make their appearance were really
nothing more than results of the redistribution of the original and unchang-
ing materials” (James 1890: vol. 1, 146). When such a theory was employed
by biologists speculating on the decent of species it was a harmless scientific
injunction against attempts to insert special creations into natural history,
but when James employed it on the larger canvas of Spencerian evolution, it
had radically strange consequences. These arose because James, like Spencer,
was engaged in speculating on non-biological evolution but he did this in
conjunction with a peculiar cosmological theory. Initially, this seemed nor-
mal: the origins of the physical world were to be found in star dust, and
the development of life from stellar particles as well as the growth of intel-
ligence to the level of consciousness was controlled by the same principle as
applied to the origin of species. Another way of putting this was that a full
account of the development of the brain would begin with a record of how
the atoms that compose the human brain came to be caught in an organic
framework. However, the trouble began when James added, “In this story
no new natures, factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any
later stage” (ibid.). This refusal to countenance innovation led to a dilemma
because James suspected that the dawn of consciousness would have been
marked by the novel presence of something approximating a new kind of
nature that had been absent from “the mere outward atoms of the original
chaos” (ibid.).
James’s dilemma here was not a genuine one; he was merely pointing out
the obscurity of generalizing about the mind on the basis of scientific beliefs
in special creations and the nebular hypothesis. That is, James’s story about
star dust was not a serious attempt to provide a cosmology; it was more in
the way of a destructive parody of the attempt by Spencer and John tyndall
to separate the material and spiritual worlds. According to James, the essence
of their materialist argument was that our brain cells were composed of star
dust, and that there is no significant break between the earliest particles
and the chemicals that make up the human brain; both can be explained in
the same way. It was nonsense to argue, like tyndall, that the passage from
the physics of the brain to the consciousness was unthinkable (ibid.: vol. 1,
147 n.). Like Spencer, tyndall had posited two separate classes of phenom-
ena, the physical and the mental, with an unbridgeable gap between them.
However, there was no basis for this other than Spencer’s recycling of the old
distinction between objective and subjective classes of phenomena (ibid.).
It was Spencer’s assumption that we should not fear materialism because
we could not step over the gulf between molecular actions and sensations
but, to James, this was not truly comforting because we could, in fact, eas-
ily link physical actions and mental reactions. He noted that, as Hermann
177
von Helmholtz had admitted, temporal succession existed in both classes

of phenomena, and that a number of qualities – such as identity, volume,
simplicity, complication and the difference between smooth or impeded
change, rest or agitated – were habitually predicated of both physical and
mental states. This led James to conclude that where such parallels held then
the things to which they referred had something in common (ibid.: vol. 1,
147). Such close analogies supported the doctrine of materialism, to which,
if they had been honest, tyndall and Spencer would have subscribed. This
would, in James’s view, have also made sense of their belief that “mind grew
out of body in a continuous way” (see Spencer 1855: §179).29 by “continu-
ous” James meant “contiguous” and signifies that, for an evolutionist, mind
and body were not separated by an unbridgeable gulf.
While James was irritated by Spencer’s claim that there was a gulf, he was
roused to a fury when Spencer narrowed this by assigning it to the past.
Obviously, at least to Spencer, there was a time in the past when conscious-
ness did not exist and a subsequent period when it had a rudimentary form.
Spencer’s suggestion was that for progress to have occurred then the mental
apparatus of an organism would have had to have achieved a greater corre-
spondence with the environment. This greater correspondence would have
been accompanied by a gradual reduction of sensorial changes in succes-
sion, and this, in turn, had produced a distinct consciousness (James 1890:
vol. 1, 149–50). Spencer also could write about “nascent” consciousness in
a perfective tense referring to development that would be completed in the
future. The anticipatory qualities of “nascent” in biology might disturb a
neo-Darwinian, but that was not James’s concern. Instead, he was troubled
with Spencer’s implication when claiming to build a retrospective bridge
between physical and mental phenomena. James felt that no such bridge
could exist; there had to be a discontinuity between those classes of phe-
nomena because, otherwise, consciousness would have been new in nature
(ibid.) and evolution did not allow for novelty.
After mentioning the girl in Midshipman Easy who excused her illegiti-
mate child on the grounds that “it was only a very small one”, James became
sententious and emphasized, “If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness
in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things” (ibid.: vol.
1, 149).30 It is difficult to take him seriously at this point: he himself would
29. Spencer, as James noticed at the beginning of his own psychology, was attempting
to unseat reason by embedding the mind in the brain and the ganglia.
30. James (1890: vol. 1, 149 n.) noted that Spencer had not intended to write about the
origins of consciousness in the wording that was cited, but this problem was brushed
aside with the insulting remark that Spencer’s wording was too inane to ever carry
meaning.
178
have excused his levity on the grounds that his opponents were scandalously
vague and deserved to be pilloried. He liked to startle others with flights
of rhetorical fancy, and he did not care whether the butt of his ridicule
deserved to be slighted. James’s sense of humour had been tickled by the
existence of a group of evolutionary philosophers who supposed that each
atom of the nebulae had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with
it (ibid.: vol. 1, 146). This doctrine of “atomistic hylozoism” must, James
hoped, be an indispensable part of any thoroughgoing philosophy of evolu-
tion. Since James was always torn between the desire to mock his victims
and the temptation to employ reductio ad absurdum to pound them into
pieces, it is difficult to follow his ideas on how it was that “primordial mind-
dust” had become aggregated into higher forms. It is probable that he was in
a jocular mood when he quoted Spencer speculating at considerable length
that consciousness may have been constructed from several homogeneous
elements in the same way that music is composed. Spencer was cited in a
similar hypothetical vein, comparing the origins of fragments of conscious-
ness with electric shocks. bridling at this last suggestion, James objected
that Spencer had blurred consciousness with awareness in an illegitimate
way. Suddenly serious, James was repelled by Spencer’s refusal to elevate
consciousness to a higher level than that which existed in a simple sensation
such as awareness.
Whether in jest or in earnest, James’s reactions to Spencer’s theories of
mental evolution were rooted in his inability to accept scientific informa-
tion of a modern empirical kind. James avoided data about the natural
world that failed to place human volition at its centre. In addition, he clung
to the pre-modern idea that behind scientific phenomena was an unchang-
ing nature that would not allow for the transformation of creatures, or of
their organs.31 For James, nature was static, not dynamic. There were nei-
ther new phenomena nor ones that could take on a truly novel existence.
even chemical components had to remain as they were. If H2O appeared
as H-O-H then the parts of the old atom were simply in novel positions,
and any different properties they possessed were just their combined
effects when in new positions (James 1890: vol. 1, 159). Similarly, individ-
ual primitive minds could not become transformed into higher compound
minds. If consciousness existed now, it should not be hypothesized that
it had sprung into existence from nothingness in the past. In constantly
reiterating this point, James was distancing himself from science as well as
31. It is remarkable that James, when writing about biological perceptions, never
explores Spencer’s The Principles of Biology in depth. It is also puzzling to consider
that while James identified himself as a Darwinian, he did not seem familiar with
the actual writings of Darwin or contemporaries such as A. r. Wallace and Asa Gray
179
from Spencer. He could not risk having a consciousness that he could nei-
ther control nor locate in the world, a consciousness that was ephemeral
like an aura or a melody. Instead, James adopted an ontological theory that
credited consciousness with permanent existence and with unity in nature.
James had started his psychology by relying on Spencer’s theoretical physi-
ology to defeat the excessively “cerebral” association philosophers, but he
ended his exploration of the human psyche by retreating from science.
taking issue with Spencer had caused James to construct an anthropomor-
phic philosophy of mind that was divorced from biology.
In essence, James’s philosophy of mind was little more than a variable
critique of Spencer’s evolutionary psychology and of biological science in
general. He had borrowed much of his philosophical analysis from scholars
such as Hodgson and Wright. His own views never took flight as meta-
physics, remaining a rebarbative reworking of evolution. even when James
occasionally paid lip service to Darwin this was not based on an appre-
ciation of the notion that organic structures and behaviour were somehow
determined by a genetic inheritance. In James’s eyes that would have been
a “genetic fallacy”, which had nothing in common with Darwin’s produc-
tive ideas, which were the spontaneous variation of organic forms and the
randomness with which outcomes occurred in nature. Such ideas harmo-
nized with James’s belief in freedom of choice and in volition as the key fac-
tors shaping the development of the intellect. pressure from spontaneously
produced ideas had caused individuals to develop moral and intellectual
personae and scientists to make discoveries. Any evolutionary theories that
diminished the importance of spontaneity were deterministic; they failed
to appreciate the central role that consciousness played in advancing the
intellect. James regarded Spencer’s evolutionary theory as the antithesis of
his protean version of Darwinism. even though James frequently sniped
at Spencer’s altruism and pacifism, he also credited him with advocating
the theory that human behaviour was chiefly moulded by competition and
survival of the fittest. James blamed Spencer, not Darwin, for the biologi-
cal commonplace that the human intellect was determined by its origins,
and for the excessive focus on the past rather than the future when theoriz-
ing about organic and psychological development. Looking backwards was,
according to James, non-progressive.
The only way James could conceive of modifying Spencer’s evolution-
ary theory so that it would serve a progressive function was by rewriting it
as a teleological doctrine. evolution began with star dust and ended with
mind dust so its explanation must be grounded in the physical sciences,
and be understood in terms of laws in much the same way as other material
phenomena. Since Spencer ([1857a] 1858: 52) had begun by speculating
on origins of the universe and the nebular hypothesis of William Herschel
180
and La place, James felt it only right to insist that he remain in the mate-
rial world.32 His target was not simply Spencer, but all empirically minded
english natural scientists who had employed induction as a method. That is,
James’s insistence that evolutionary arguments lacked the scientific rigour
that one expected from science was a claim that all scientific explanation
should be predictive, and, therefore, it needed to specify outcomes. Since
english philosophers of natural science such as paley and scientists such
as Lyell and Darwin had explained evolution as a process of a development
from a beginning rather than towards an end, James’s remark that histori-
cally based evolution was a particularly Spencerian flaw demonstrates his
lack of interest in sciences outside psychology. However, despite its lack of
substance, James’s attempt to prove that Spencer’s theory should have been
teleological helped establish a twentieth-century solecism that Spencer’s
arguments were based on a covert teleology. Of course, the reality was that
it was James, not Spencer, who desired an idea of human development that
would direct him towards a spiritually satisfying and ultimate goal.
Spencer’s problem with star dust had grown out of his progressive faith,
and was largely independent from his serious studies of psychology, biol-
ogy and sociology. These were empirically grounded and taught him to
distinguish between various types of change and evolution, but the idea of
progress was a free-floating aspiration, linked to science only by specula-
tion. In his early essay on progress Spencer had gestured to the cosmos,
claiming that the nebular hypothesis showed that the universe was an
organism, and that the laws governing the formation of matter were the
same as those in the development of life. This was more than a metaphor;
it was a testament of faith in the evolution of the universe that had iden-
tified the early stellar particles with the chemicals composing the human
brain. James adopted Spencer’s cosmological synthesis from star dust to
mind stuff, but could make sense of it only when he transformed progres-
sive evolution into a teleological movement, a transformation that did not
fit comfortably with Spencer’s mature ideas in psychology. to lessen this
strain, James had reworked Spencer’s psychology so it would stay faithful
to its early cosmological foundation even though this undermined its sci-
entific basis.
Star dust had been troublesome from early in the nineteenth century.
Thomas chalmers (1822), the eminent presbyterian divine, had indulged
32. James’s decision to cite Spencer’s essay on progress as the origin of his evolutionary
philosophy rather than the metaphysical foundation of his system First Principles
pointed to James’s disinclination to investigate any philosophical defence of empiri-
cism. Unlike other pragmatists James’s suspicion of idealism was not bolstered by a
genuine attempt to balance between idealist doctrines and scientific truth.
181
himself by muttering about the astronomy of newton and the “free-

thinkers”.33 Writing in 1838, baden powell remarked upon the peculiar
degree in which the nebular hypothesis had called forth censure and oblo-
quy. powell noted that the “milky way” and some of the “nebulae” had been
resolved into vast multitudes of stars, but as an analogy the “nebular hypoth-
esis” was still useful in illustrating the process of formation of our own sun’s
planetary system (1838: 172–6).34 At the mid-century the controversy about
the nebular hypothesis became even more heated, and its acceptance or
denial became a test for christian orthodoxy. The geologist Adam Sedgwick
recanted (he had originally supported the hypothesis), and objected that
William Herschel’s original speculation about nebulae had not been con-
firmed by recent astronomical discoveries (Sedgwick 1850: 126, 178). In
reply, William Whewell, Sedgwick’s colleague at trinity college, cambridge,
wrote a defence of the nebular hypothesis in geology and astronomy; see-
ing it as a useful analogy that could be modified to incorporate the astro-
nomical discoveries of Lord rosse and Mr bland that Sedgwick had cited
(Whewell 1853: 64, 116). newspapers in britain and America canvassed
Whewell’s ideas, pitting them against those of David brewster, who had
revived Thomas chalmers’s denial of a progressive scientific interpretation
of the universe. This debate was polarizing. to accept nebular hypothesis
meant that you were likely to see your religious beliefs as not conflicting
with science; to reject the nebular hypothesis meant that you were likely to
reject theories about the origin of the universe or the geological origins of
the earth which conflicted with divine revelation.
From the 1850s a reference to the star dust was never quite innocent;
the heartfelt sense of wonder was no longer omnipresent. Increasingly to
the orthodox, an admiration of a self-evolving cosmos meant adhesion to
a possibly atheistical doctrine. Instead of the glory of the universe signal-
ling to God’s power, it suggested his absence. Since the nebular hypothesis
had become weighted towards scepticism, James’s insistence that Spencer’s
evolutionary theory depended on it was an attempt to demonstrate that
Spencer’s gesture to the “Unknown” was not an honest admission that there
may be something divine outside the purview of science. That is, James was
signalling to orthodox christians that they should discard Spencer’s evo-
lutionary theory as materialistic and godless and not believe in Spencer’s
“Unknown” because it reeked of atheism. It was convenient for James to
33. chalmers wrote nothing specific on William Herschel, La place or on the nebular
hypothesis, but his discourses were read as if he had.
34. powell defended geology as well as astronomy from “religious bigots” (1833: 28).
powell was acting on behalf of Sir John Herschel and the british Association for the
Advancement of Science, who were being pilloried by Dr nolan.
182
hint at this rather than to argue the point because Spencer’s casual and brief
mention of the nebular hypothesis in the 1850s was not the basis of his
system of evolution philosophy which began to appear in 1862, nor was
it fundamental to his The Principles of Psychology (1855). Spencer’s refer-
ence to the nebular hypothesis was a journalistic aside that, in the 1850s,
would have been compatible with a liberal Anglican theology. Only the
ultra-orthodox would have been discomforted by talk of nebulae. In taking
Spencer’s early remark out of context, James was furtively appealing to those
who had turned against science.
James’s claim to have found star dust at the core of Spencer’s philoso-
phy was essentially dishonest. Since he had endlessly re-read Spencer’s The
Principles of Psychology, and had some familiarity with other volumes of
the System of Synthetic Philosophy, James knew perfectly well that they con-
tained no discussion of either earth science or astronomy. If Spencer had
relied on a material basis of life it was not to be found in geological strata or
cosmological data, but in chemistry. Spencer’s serious reflections on the ori-
gins of life did not concern species, but the formation of organic molecules.
This emphasis caused Spencer to decorate the covers of his scientific books
with a symbol of a crystal transforming into a living theory. The only func-
tion star dust had in James’s reinterpretation of Spencer’s evolutionary psy-
chology was to bedazzle the reader. Without this stellar distraction it might
have been noticed that James’s real task was to repackage Spencer’s evolu-
tionary psychology in such a way as to make it more palatable to orthodox
christians. This was not simply a matter of pleasing his audience: He needed
to compromise between religion and science. He himself was more sym-
pathetic to varieties of religious experience than he was to any attempt to
touch a scientifically based reality.
183
9
spencer, cognition, fiction
Vanessa L. Ryan
In recent studies of Herbert Spencer, scholars Mark Francis and Michael

W. taylor both cite the same revealing letter, written by George eliot, to
capture Spencer’s fame in his own day and its relative eclipse in the twenty-
first century (Francis 2007: 5; taylor 2007: 9). In 1854 eliot read an essay by
Spencer on “The Genesis of Science”, which explained his theory of human
mental and cultural evolution. It was the kernel of what became his The
Principles of Psychology, first published a year later in 1855. In a letter to her
friend Sara Hennell in 1864, she imagined how he might be described in a
biographical dictionary a hundred years in the future: “[Herbert Spencer:]
An original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great
work XXX, which gave a new impulse to psychology, and has mainly con-
tributed to the present advanced position of that science” (Francis 2007: 5;
taylor 2007: 9).1 For today’s reader, it may come as a surprise that Spencer’s
influence on the history of biology is not predicted here, but his place in
the science of psychology. This emphasis has been missed by many of our
histories of Victorian evolutionary and scientific thought, which, because
of their focus on natural selection have placed Darwin rather than Spencer
at their centre. rearticulating the immense influence that Spencer had on
Victorian thought, especially on literature, demands a shift of attention from
biology as the dominant model for evolutionary theory to Spencer’s emphasis
on the mind. Spencer’s grounding of his system of thought in psychology,
necessarily inflected by his ideas of individual development and education,
marks his broad appeal to writers of literature, as varied as eliot, Theodore
Dreiser, edith Wharton, Olive Schreiner, H. G. Wells, Jack London and
1. I also discuss this passage elsewhere (ryan 2012: 20).
184
spe n c e r , c o g n i t i o n , f i c t i o n
Thomas Hardy.2 Spencer’s plea for individualism, believing that each indi-
vidual should better himself or herself, echoed broader Victorian interests
in self-help and self-improvement.
Spencerian approaches to mind and evolution form a kind of “shadow
discourse” to the better-known Darwinian discourse: in literary studies,
the compelling scholarship that has brought to light the importance of
Darwinian language and ideas to novelists and writers in the nineteenth
century has at the same time obscured the importance of Spencer. Shadow
discourse, as recently defined by John Kucich, describes ways of understand-
ing and speaking that “dominant epistemological paradigms fail to recog-
nize” (Kucich 2011: 88). Kucich emphasizes the way a shadow discourse
remains dormant; it does not generate interpretation and is subsumed in
other conceptual frameworks that conceal it. In short, “shadow discourse
remains inert for those that cannot see it” (ibid.: 89). A few decades ago,
attention to the pervasiveness of Darwinian language and ideas in Victorian
literature and culture was crucial to the rise of the field of science and lit-
erature studies. pioneers, including Gillian beer (1983) and George Levine
(1992), focused on the way the emergence of evolutionary theory, in par-
ticular Darwin’s theory of natural selection, shaped important aspects of the
Victorian novel. The dominant place given to Darwin in Victorian studies
has, however, meant that the vast influence of Spencer on Victorian literary
writing has been relegated to the shadows, often subsumed under the more
readily visible Darwinian paradigms, and has thus remained largely unrec-
ognized, despite important differences.
The effect is something akin to the sociologist robert Merton’s theory of
“obliteration by incorporation” (Merton [1949] 1968: 27–8). The Victorian
psychologist James Sully recognized this phenomenon himself, writing in
his memoir that Spencer’s:
ideas, in a modified form no doubt, had become so largely assimi-

lated into our thought and our forms of speech that we had half for-
gotten their originator. We of to-day all talk of evolution, whether
we are thinking of the material cosmos, or of life and mind, or
even that of art, morals, and religion. It is too soon to judge of how
posterity will estimate [Spencer’s] Synthetic philosophy.
(Sully 1918: 294–5; quoted in carneiro 2005: 248)
2. This essay develops further a number of ideas also discussed in my Thinking without
Thinking in the Victorian Novel (ryan 2012).
185
va n e s s a l . rya n
Sully marks the ubiquity of ideas of evolution, in the many spheres consid-
ered by Spencer, while Spencer’s role in originating those ideas was, only
fifteen years after his death, already being forgotten.3 In an essay from 1888
on “evolution”, Grant Allen makes a similar claim:
it is a strange proof of how little people know about their own

ideas, that among the thousands who talk glibly every day of evo-
lution, not ten per cent. are probably aware that both word and
conception are alike due to the commanding intelligence and vast
generalizing power of Herbert Spencer. (Allen 1888a: 47)
Allen, a defender of Spencer’s place as a founding father of evolution, expresses

exasperation in his essay at the way in which evolutionary theory has been
reduced to Darwinism, what he called the “drawing-room view of the evolu-
tionist theory” (ibid.: 35). beatrice Webb also noted the way Spencer’s ideas
had become dissociated from his name, recounting that she had on her last
visit told Spencer, “What you have thought and taught has become part of our
mental atmosphere, Mr. Spencer. And like the atmosphere we are not aware
of it” (b. Webb [1926] 1980: 36).4 charles W. eliot, president of Harvard,
noted Spencer’s influence on American education: “Many schools, both pub-
lic and private, have now adopted – in most cases unconsciously – many of
Spencer’s detailed suggestions” (eliot 1928: xiii). Spencer himself wrote about
the very principle through which, as Grant Allen and others suggested, he
had been positioned in Darwin’s shadow: Spencer maintained that history is
not to be equated with the acts of individual great men – a theory of history
often identified with Thomas carlyle – but rather to been seen as a series of
complex influences, in which the individual is but one among many forces,
including social, biological, and environmental. As Allen puts it in his essay
“evolution”, “It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all working up,
though some of them unconsciously, toward a grand final unified philoso-
phy of the cosmos” (Allen 1888a: 47). That same year, in his essay “Genius
and talent”, Allen gives a similar account of artistic creativity, noting that
there is no difference between his central terms, “genius” and “talent”: “It is
the wave that makes the crest, not the crest that makes the wave” (1888b:
249; quoted in Atchison 2005: 58). That Spencer’s role had been relegated
3. carneiro (1981: 158) also notes that it was Spencer, rather than Darwin, who intro-
duced the word “evolution” into scientific discourse.
4. In her autobiography, Webb describes her early interest in Spencer’s ideas as being
followed with a disenchantment, particularly with his ideas of laissez faire: “My case,
I think, is typical of the rise and fall of Herbert Spencer’s influence over the men and
women of my own generation” (b. Webb [1926] 1980: 39).
186
to the background is in keeping, we might even say, with his own theories
of development.
It is tempting to let Darwin stand in for the complex debates over evolu-
tionary theory in the later part of the nineteenth century, in literature as in
other fields. Many of the groundbreaking studies in Victorian science and
literature – with Darwin at their centre – have reshaped our understand-
ing of the relationship between these disciplines in the nineteenth century,
showing the productive interrelationships between them: in a sense, impor-
tant works like Gillian beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) and George Levine’s
Darwin and the Novelists (1992) uncovered the place of science itself as a
“shadow discourse” in much of Victorian literature. The continued strength
and development of this field of science and literature studies now makes it
possible to rearticulate the more specific “shadow discourse” of Spencerian
language and thought in Victorian literary writing and to consider in what
ways it differs from the more dominant Darwinian model. Historians of
science have done much to revisit Spencer’s influence and to historicize
Darwin’s place among other evolutionary thinkers. Literary scholars have
only begun to trace the importance of Spencer in Victorian and early-
twentieth-century literary writing.5
The prevailing emphasis on Darwin in Victorian studies echoes a broader
critical phenomenon. roger Smith, a historian and philosopher of science,
suggests that histories of science tend to privilege moments when the phys-
ical sciences become the dominant explanatory model. He identifies this
phenomenon in studies of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, where
Darwinian evolutionary theory has received particular attention (r. Smith
1973: 76ff.; see also r. Smith 1997). There are, of course, other reasons for
the relative neglect of the many facets of Spencer’s thought, not least that he
has been embraced by twentieth-century libertarians as a precursor to their
thinking.6 Smith’s observation, however, that narratives of scientific devel-
opment that emphasize the physical sciences tend to receive greater promi-
nence has probably further contributed to Spencer’s occlusion in critical
studies: as robert Young writes, while “the attention of Darwin’s circle was
turned to man’s body rather than his mind”, Spencer provided the earliest
conception of adaptive, evolutionary psychology (Young 1970: 191).7
5. Scholars who have begun this work, looking at a number of literary figures, include
nancy paxton (1991), Heather Atchison (2005), robert carneiro (2005), Michael
Davis (2006) and brooke cameron (2008).
6. For Spencer’s relationship to libertarian thought, see G. H. Smith (1978).
7. Darwin’s attention shifted to the mind as well, as robert Young (1970: 191) notes,
with the publication of The Descent of Man (1871).
187
As eliot’s letter suggests, Spencer’s early writing, particularly his psychol-

ogy and his interest in the place of the individual, caught the imagination
of literary writers. There are many accounts from the period that an initial
reading of Spencer was, for many, a vital turning point. Henry Holt, an
influential publisher, wrote: “About 1865 I got hold of a copy of Spencer’s
First Principles and had my eyes opened to a new heaven and a new earth”
(Holt 1923: 46–7, quoted in carneiro 2005: 261). Andrew carnegie attrib-
uted to Spencer the epiphany of his life: “I remember that light came as in
a flood and all was clear … I had found the truth of evolution” (quoted in
Hofstadter 1944: 31).8 As William James noted, Spencer’s appeal was broad:
he “enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of count-
less doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and chemists, and
of thoughtful laymen generally” (James 1904: 104).9 Literary authors, too,
recounted the profound effects of reading Spencer. robert carneiro (2005)
brings together an impressive collection of similar accounts from influen-
tial late-nineteenth-century authors, including H. G. Wells, Arnold bennett,
Theodore Dreiser, Olive Schreiner and Jack London. In a biography of Wells,
his son recounts that during his father’s early apprenticeship to a draper, “an
angry shop-walker found him hidden away in a corner of the cellar, read-
ing Herbert Spencer”, adding, “no boy of sixteen can read Spencer’s First
Principles and remain orthodox!” (West 1930: 40, 44, quoted in carneiro
2005: 257). edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence and The House of
Mirth, cites Spencer as among the “greatest” of her “formative influences”.10
Arnold bennett, author of The Old Wives Tale, read First Principles on his
honeymoon, and wrote:
When I think how First Principles, by filling me with the sense

of causation everywhere, has alerted my whole view of life and
undoubtedly immensely improved it, I am confirmed in my opin-
ion of that book. You can see First Principles in nearly every line
I write. (1932: 393)11
8. richard Hofstadter’s highly critical account of Spencer as an ultra-conservative

reinforced the marginalization of Spencer. For a discussion of carnegie’s relatively
superficial grasp of Spencer’s philosophy, see bannister (1979: 83ff.).
9. Although James used Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology in his early teaching of
physiological psychology at Harvard, he was increasingly critical of Spencer’s work,
writing a number of critical accounts of it.
10. The library at The Mount, edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, contains
her marked copy of Spencer.
11. elsewhere he wrote that “If any book can be called the greatest in the world, I sup-
pose this can” (bennett 1933: 192).
188
Such varied reports are echoed by fictional accounts that show the reading
of Spencer as a central turning point, moment of intellectual awakening
or rite of passage. In nineteenth-century literature, we can see many of the
central concerns of the period recast and engaged through the lens of fic-
tion, especially questions about the place of the individual, of agency and
responsibility, that Spencerian philosophy raised. Above all, the nineteenth-
century novel is often seen as the high point of representing the mind in fic-
tion and as the apex of the “psychological novel”. It is not surprising, then,
that these writers turned to Spencer’s psychology, an area of his thought
that has recently begun to receive critical attention. Spencer’s marked influ-
ence on these and other literary writers is a legacy worth recuperating for
our understanding of the breadth of engagement with Spencer’s ideas in the
period, as well as for our understanding of these literary works. They engage
a specifically Spencerian model of evolution, turning to his early work, in
particular. They envisage a potentially progressive evolution of human beings
within social organizations and explore notions of individual intellectual
development and education. These authors grapple with the implications of
Spencer’s theory of cognition and the implications it has for the place of the
individual, especially for the power of the self-regulating and independent
individual, most notably of the new Woman.
Spencer and cognition
progress, Spencer wrote, was “not an accident, but a necessity” (Spencer

1851: 65). As Steven Shapin puts it, “For Darwin, evolution was directionless
and morally neutral” (Shapin 2007: 79); but Spencer considered, especially in
his early work, whether evolution might be progressive. The possibility that
the law of evolution is one of progress marks one of the important differences
between Spencer and Darwin.12 Spencer himself manifests non-progressive
elements elsewhere in his work, particularly in his biology and sociology,
where he grappled with the possibility that social progress might involve the
destruction of the individual.13 but it was his early work rather than his later
12. Shapin cites G. e. Moore as identifying this difference between Spencer and Darwin,
labelling it the “naturalistic fallacy” (Shapin 2007: 79).
13. Although at moments in First Principles, Spencer questions whether the general
direction of psychological and social change is necessarily progressive, he concludes
his final chapter with an optimistic view: “there is a gradual harmony between man’s
mental nature and the conditions of his existence. After finding that from it are
deducible the various characteristics of evolution, we finally draw from it a warrant
for the belief, that evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfec-
189
reconsiderations that struck an enthusiastic response in fiction writers of his

time. His psychology and educational theories, particularly as articulated in
The Principles of Psychology (1855) and Education (1861), feature some of his
most progressive writing, ideas that he, as well as the novelists, continue to
grapple with later in the century.
Another important point of distinction between the two thinkers is that
whereas Darwin applied the idea of evolution “to species change, speculat-
ing about society and culture only with reluctance, Spencer saw evolution
working everywhere” (Shapin 2007: 75); as Grant Allen put it, “from nebula
to man, from star to soul, from atom to society” (Allen 1897: 262). Spencer
did not recognize the divisions between different realms of inquiry that
were being shaped into discrete disciplines during his lifetime. He applied
the idea of evolution, not just to biology, but broadly to everything from
aesthetics to economics, from society and culture to psychology. Spencer
wrote that:
this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. 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 Manufactures, of commerce, of Language, Literature, Science,
Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through
a process of continuous differentiation, holds throughout.
(1857a: 446–7, quoted in Shapin 2007: 75–6)
He saw the development of the mind as following a principle of progression

from the “simple to the complex” that was true of all spheres: “The mind
develops. Like all things that develop it progresses from the homogeneous
to the heterogeneous” (Spencer 1861: 73). It is thus hard to consider any area
of Spencer’s thought, including his psychology, within narrow disciplinary
terms. When in 1866 George Grote, a professor of classics and treasurer of
the University of London, responded to Alexander bain’s suggestion that
Spencer might be invited to the university Senate, he asks, for example, “How
should I describe his merits to Lord Granville, as a physiologist, or psycholo-
gist or physical philosopher in general? What is his position in society? Has
he any profession?” (letter from Grote to bain, 18 november 1866, quoted
in Jones 2004: 1). A short text by Thomas Gibson bowles that accompanied
tion and the most complete happiness” (Spencer 1862: 486). As Mark Francis shows,
before the writing of The Principles of Sociology, Spencer’s “political and scientific
writings had been progressive, regarding social change as an upward movement.
However, by the time he came to write the political section of his sociology, he was
no longer convinced that evolutionary processes were uniform” (2007: 306).
190
a caricature portrait of Spencer in Vanity Fair in 1879, nonetheless, high-

lighted Spencer’s work on psychology: “when Darwin invented evolution,
evolution invented Herbert Spencer, who saw how the notion might be
applied to psychologic problems” (bowles 1879).14 This short descriptive
text reinforces the account of Darwin as originator of evolutionary theory,
while also emphasizing that it was Spencer who applied evolutionary ideas
beyond biology, specifically to psychology.
Spencer’s ideas on evolution first appeared in his writing on psychology,
as opposed to his writings on many other subjects.15 As Francis has put it,
“Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology not only pre-dated his philosophical
system: the work was its bedrock” (2007: 186). This is of central importance:
as Julian Leslie writes, “it signals Spencer’s commitment to the strong links
between psychology and biology” (2006: 124). This connection between
psychology and biology, of interest again today, was of central interest in
the 1850s, and was reinforced by Darwin’s later works (The Descent of Man
[1871] and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872]).
Where others might argue from biology to society, Spencer argued more
often the other way, from mind and culture to biology. Spencer applied his
central idea systematically, from the development of the individual to that
of society, to that of the species, to that of the cosmos: each driven by the
same laws of evolution. Interested in studying how evolutionary laws oper-
ated in society, he was one of the first to call this sort of analysis sociology.
The breadth of his argument is doubtless one of the reasons why Victorians
in so many areas cited Spencer as the central source of ideas of evolution: his
work suggested that evolutionary theory had a place in psychology, sociol-
ogy, anthropology, education and, crucially, in literature.
While many nineteenth-century scientific controversies around evolu-
tionary theory, as Young writes, “were primarily concerned with the inter-
pretation of the geological, paleontological, and biological evidence”, the
public debate centred “above all on man’s place in nature” and the conse-
quences of evolution for an understanding of mind and culture ([1967]
2000: 378). This is what caught the imagination of many novelists as well.
If we broaden our sense of the origins of evolutionary thought in the
14. The caricature is by Sir Francis carruthers Gould, accompanied by text by Thomas
Gibson bowles. See Watson (1949: 219) for a reproduction of the text and image.
15. robert Young’s (1970) pioneering discussion of Spencer’s psychology places The
Principles of Psychology as pivotal in the development of Spencer’s larger project,
forming a bridge that connects his philosophical to his scientific concerns. More
recently, the philosopher peter Godfrey-Smith (1996) takes seriously Spencer’s phil-
osophical thinking, specifically his constructivism, and he attempts to rehabilitate
Spencerian psychology for contemporary philosophy of mind.
191
nineteenth century by turning to Spencer, not just to Darwin, we make a

shift in emphasis, away from biology to thinking about the mind’s place in
evolutionary thought. Leslie emphasizes that Spencer characterized psychol-
ogy “as involving the interaction of the individual with a complex environ-
ment that includes social as well as physical aspects” (2006: 125). Spencer
put forward a view that insisted on the contribution of the environment to
psychological processes.
particularly important for nineteenth-century literature is Spencer’s the-
ory of mind, specifically mind as an adaptive function. The experience of
the individual is important in his account, as the development of the mind
shapes the moral improvement of the individual, and, in turn, shapes the
community, and the next generation. Mental phenomena, for Spencer, thus
share in and reinforce a larger process of development. His main princi-
ple is that as the individual organism adapts to the environment the cor-
respondence between “inner” and “outer” increases. Mental processes and
physiological processes follow the same principles; both develop through a
“progressive evolution of the correspondence between organism and envi-
ronment” (Spencer 1855: 620). Spencer, as John Greene observes, “traced
this from the simplest organic responses to environmental stimuli to the
highest thought processes” ([1959] 2000: 434). He thereby establishes a sim-
ilarity of mental processes to life processes in general. He gives a hypotheti-
cal example that outlines the process of learning:
Suppose, now, that in putting out its head to seize prey scarcely
within reach, a creature has repeatedly failed. Suppose that along
with the group of motor actions approximately adapted to seize
prey at this distance, the diffused discharge is, on some occasion,
so distributed throughout the muscular system as to cause a slight
forward movement of the body. Success will occur instead of fail-
ure; and after success will immediately come certain pleasurable
sensations … On recurrence of the circumstances, these muscular
movements that were followed by success are likely to be repeated:
what was at first an accidental combination of motions will now
be a combination having considerable probability … every repeti-
tion of it will … increase the probability of subsequent repetitions;
until at length the nervous connexions become organized.
(Spencer [1855] 1870: vol. 1, 545, quoted in Leslie 2006: 126)
Spencer outlines a process shared by many physiological psychologists of

the period. repeated physiological and nervous actions come to be organ-
ized and thus form the basis of habit, instinct and, finally, something akin
to reason. Spencer’s concept of mind as a mechanism of adjustment and
192
adaptation was, Young argues, “a crucial influence on the development of

the pragmatic philosophy and functional psychology of William James and
John Dewey” ([1967] 2000: 380).16 James had, as Young shows, reservations
about many aspects of Spencer’s system, but praised him for “insisting that
since mind and its environment have evolved together, they must be studied
together” (James 1912: 139–40).
crucial to Spencer’s functional definition of mind as a mechanism of
adjustment and adaptation are the consequences for self-development. The
ability to train the mind through repeated action, leading to habit, and ulti-
mately to instincts suggested a striking power of self-determination. This
potentially progressive process was true not only of the individual but of
the species as a whole, suggesting that each new generation would inherit
the accumulated experience of their forebears. Of course, the principle of
inheritance could be argued as suggesting a non-progressivist view of devel-
opment, as well. certainly, numerous nineteenth-century novels engage this
more pessimistic and elegiac view, some even at the same time as they con-
sider more optimistic accounts. Yet one of the most notable – and perhaps
most obscured – influences that Spencer had on literature was on socialist
and progressive novelists, including new Women novelists. Attending to
the importance of Spencer’s emphasis on the mind and education gives us
a somewhat different view than a reading focused on the later sociology or
the more libertarian The Man “Versus” the State, allowing us to recognize
a particular Spencerian “shadow discourse” in late-nineteenth-century and
early-twentieth-century literature.
Spencer and the novelists
The idea that evolution shapes psychological processes and that we need to
understand the contribution of the environment to psychological processes
was fascinating for novelists. eliot is one of many novelists to examine the
concept of mental habit that an adaptive model of the mind seemed to sug-
gest.17 While for Spencer this aspect of the mind is efficient, easy, and inno-
vative, eliot explores the darker questions of individual responsibility. I have
16. Julian c. Leslie argues that Spencer’s principle that adaptive changes in behaviour in
response to the environment is a version of the “law of effect”, an important concept
in selectionist approaches to behaviour analysis and psychology (Leslie 2006: 129).
17. paxton (1991) offers a close analysis of the interplay between eliot’s novels and
Spencer’s writing within the context of their thirty-year friendship, revealing also
possible influences of eliot’s writing on Spencer’s thinking. paxton also attends to
the feminist elements in both authors and addresses Spencer’s more conservative late
193
shown elsewhere how in The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie tulliver learns
negative lessons from her failure to direct her actions purposively when
her brother entrusts her with the care and feeding of his pet rabbits (ryan
2012: 69ff.). In this episode, eliot suggests that since some mental processes
remain inaccessible to the individual, enlightened self-development is more
problematic than Spencer’s model allows. repeated non-purposive action of
this kind might – in contrast to Spencer’s principle of progressive adaptation
– entrench poor habits in ways that are counter to the development of the
individual.18 Furthermore, eliot seems to understand that instinctive, auto-
matic and habitual mental processes may not necessarily correspond with
the needs of the social unit. In her late novel Daniel Deronda (1876), she
explores the problems that arise when an individual is less firmly anchored
in a cultural community. The contrast between Daniel and Gwendolen in
this respect is striking. As Mark M. Freed shows, the novel is “fundamentally
concerned with the consequences of opposing models of selfhood” (2005:
62). What Freed terms eliot’s “sense of cultural dissolution” seems to work
here as a critical response to Spencer’s more optimistic sense of an essential
parallel between individual and social evolution (ibid.: 63). eliot’s novels
often focus on examples in which the adaptive mechanisms that Spencer
saw as the vehicles for such evolution do not function as expected. For eliot,
natural and social organisms are not alike in all details, but are fraught with
complexities.
eliot’s interest in Spencer’s ideas are perhaps not surprising, given her
friendship with him. Spencer’s influence and importance in other writ-
ers of the period is hard to underestimate. robert Louis Stevenson lists
three works as having become intimate parts of him, like friends: the new
testament, Walt Whitman and Herbert Spencer, whose influence we might
see in a work like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. “close upon the back of my discov-
ery of Whitman”, Stevenson writes,” “I came upon the influence of Herbert
Spencer. no more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better” (Stevenson
[1887] 2008: 118). Theodore Dreiser recalls in a well-known passage in A
Book About Myself, that he experienced a turning point in his intellectual
development when he read “Herbert Spencer, whose introductory volume
to his Synthetic philosophy … quite blew me, intellectually, to bits” (1922:
writing. More recently, Davis (2006) has offered a rigorous and compelling account
of the importance of Spencer’s psychology to eliot’s writing.
18. Davis offers a careful analysis of eliot’s engagement with Spencer’s theory of evolu-
tion; he focuses specifically on the question of adaptation in the development of
individual minds and the role of memory and heredity (Davis 2006: 47–85). He
shows that while eliot works within a Spencerian model of mental adaptation, she
“points implicitly to the limitations” of Spencer’s theories (ibid.: 78).
194
457). Spencer challenged his view of the place of man in nature. On reading
First Principles, Dreiser wrote,
and discovering that all I deemed substantial – man’s place in

nature, his importance in the universe … man’s very identity save
as an infinitesimal speck of energy or a “suspended equation”
drawn or blown here and there by larger forces in which he moved
quite unconsciously as an atom – all questioned and dissolved
into other … things, I was complexly thrown down in my concep-
tions … of life. (Ibid.: 457–8)
His account in his novel Sister Carrie (1900) of the rise and fall of one of the
central characters, George Hurstwood, is strongly marked by Spencerian
ideas, beginning with analogy to the body:
A man’s fortune or material progress is very much the same as

his bodily. either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the
youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less
incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age … Frequently
there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and
the setting in, in the case of middle-aged man, of the tendency
toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly bal-
anced and there is little doing in either direction. Given time
enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave
side.
The search for a “balance” between “youthful accretion” and “tendency

toward decay” translates Spencer’s more technical language of an “equilibra-
tion” between “evolution” and dissolution.19 Dreiser shows the natural and
the social body to be necessarily inseparable. The Spencerian model high-
lights the ways in which mental states and material circumstances mutually
reinforce each other, showing often a tension between individual impulses
and social restraints.
For all his association today with libertarian and laissez-faire thought,
Spencer was influential on socialist or progressive novelists, including
the American novelist Jack London. London drew deeply from Spencer,
while also disagreeing with aspects of Spencer’s philosophy. 20 In his
19. John Limon considers Spencer’s influence on Sister Carrie and notes that the passage
also cited here is “pure Spencer” (1990: 160).
20. James Williams (1987) makes a case for the influence of Herbert Spencer’s “The
philosophy of Style” (1852c) on London’s style. barbara Lundquist (1997) also sees
195
semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden, the hero is brought to a new life

by reading Spencer:
He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing

detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, mak-
ing superficial little generalizations … And here was the man
Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything
to unity … All the hidden things were laying their secrets bare.
He was drunken with comprehension.
(London [1909] 1984: 149)
echoing Spencerian ideas of evolution, this passage marks the reading

of Spencer as an intellectual rite of passage. Yet the revelation is ultimately
a source of conflict and despair for eden. His intellectual growth alienates
him not just from his own class but from all classes and is the beginning of
the descent that leads to his suicide: “He was disappointed in it all. He had
developed into an alien. He had exiled himself ” (ibid.: 429). rather than
showing a progressive and productive relationship in the “equilibration” of
individual and community, London traces a tension between the develop-
ment of the individual and his place in society and shows the fraught role
that self-education plays in the process. “As for myself, I am an individualist.
I believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Individualism is the
hereditary and eternal foe of socialism”, eden stridently declares, barring
himself from the socialist group that might accept him (ibid.: 314). His fate
points to the social and personal challenges that Spencer’s model of devel-
opment as a process of increasing individuation presents to the relationship
between the individual and society.
Spencer and New Woman novels
In Anton chekhov’s story “The Duel” (1891), the protagonist Laevsky thinks
back to a past romance: “I fell in love with a married woman; and she fell in
love with me … In the beginning there were kisses, quiet evenings, vows;
there was Spencer, and ideals, and common interests” ([1891] 2005: 120).
The shared reading of Spencer stands in for heady ideas, but it also sug-
gests progressive, even transgressive, notions of sexuality. As such, chekhov’s
story alerts us to one of the most interesting aspects of Spencer’s influence
London as an adherent of Spencer’s theory of style. Lawrence berkove (2004) argues

that London replaced an early commitment to Spencer with views increasingly
drawn from Thomas Henry Huxley.
196
on literature: new Woman fiction repeatedly considers the late Victorian

Woman Question within the context of Spencer’s evolutionary model. These
novels frame their projects within Spencer’s model of social evolution.21 A
few critics today have also sought to shed light on this aspect of Spencer’s
influence. Thomas Dixon argues against the image of Spencer as the “appar-
ently merciless advocate of the operation of the survival of the fittest within
society as well as within nature, as the mechanism of progress towards the
ideal social state” (2004: 8). Instead he makes the case for Spencer’s impor-
tance as a pioneer of evolutionary approaches to ethics. taylor observes
that Spencer’s writing, specifically his political pamphlets, such as “From
Freedom to bondage”, inspired many late-nineteenth-century individualists
(taylor 1996: vii–xxvi; cf. cameron 2008: 284). These new Women novels
see the sexual revolution as part of a broader progressive social project and
recast Spencerian individualism as what cameron describes as “an ideal of
progressive evolution, culminating in the self-regulating and independent
individual” (2008: 281).22
Although Allen’s best known novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), is
more clearly a new Woman novel, his novel Dumaresq’s Daughter (1891),
written a few years earlier, explores the tensions between Spencer’s indi-
vidualism and the rest of his philosophy.23 In Dumaresq’s Daughter, Allen
fictionalizes Spencer in the character of Haviland Dumaresq, the origina-
tor of the “encyclopaedic philosophy”, and “the profoundest thinker of
our age and nation – the greatest mathematician and deepest metaphysi-
cian in all europe” (Allen 1891: 7). Allen captures, for example, Spencer’s
drive towards generalization: “He saw nothing – not even the smallest
small-talk – as isolated fact: every detail came to him as a peg on which to
hang some abstract generalization” (ibid.: 20). Despite having dedicated his
Physiological Aesthetics (1877) to Spencer, Allen’s thinly veiled portrait of
Spencer is largely critical: Dumaresq lives in rural poverty, embittered by
his lack of success, addicted to opium. Dumaresq echoes some accounts
21. cameron (2008), for example, shows the way in which Grant Allen’s novels in par-
ticular are deliberately conceived within the Spencer’s framework of social evolution.
Sally Ledger (1997) considers the way in which new Women novels appropriate
discourses of the reproductive sciences and evolution. See also richardson (2003)
for the connections between new Woman writing and evolutionary discourse.
22. In his earliest book, Social Statics (1851), Spencer takes a stridently progressive
stance on the question of women’s suffrage, rejecting claims of women’s mental infe-
riority and lesser political rights. For a study of the complexity of Spencer’s views
on women, see Francis (2007: ch. 4, “Spencer’s Feminist politics”).
23. Heather Atchison (2005) offers an excellent study of Allen’s evolutionary views in
relation to those of Spencer and Darwin. For a discussion of Allen’s portrait of
Spencer in Dumaresq’s Daughter, see Lightman (2007: 91–2).
197
of Spencer, described by James Moore as “petty, monotonous, self-pitying,

cantankerous”, even the “eeyore of Victorian science” (Moore: 1985). The
novel focuses on the tension created by the fact that, despite his criticisms
of aristocratic interest in wealth, he denies his daughter a match with an
apparently poor man:24
Money, money, money, money: the dross he despised, the pleasure

he looked down upon, the vulgar aims and ends that he himself
had cast like dirt behind him – he dreamed them all for the daugh-
ter he loved, and was no longer ashamed: for Haviland Dumaresq
the philosopher was dead within him now, and there remained
for the moment but that shell or husk, Haviland Dumaresq the
incipient opium-eater. (Allen 1891: 84)
Dumaresq thus finds himself abandoning the principles of a lifetime

in a misguided love and protection of his daughter. As bernard Lightman
shows, the novel demonstrates how the asceticism of the System of Synthetic
Philosophy “was too much for those who had families or any substantial
human relationships” (2007: 287). Allen’s novel juxtaposes the aging philos-
opher with an equally unsympathetic treatment of Ida Mansel, a highly edu-
cated and determined new Woman, who makes such declarations as “war’s
an outlet for our surplus population. It replaces the plagues of the Middle
Ages” (Allen 1891: 169). Intellectual development has left both Dumaresq
and Ida Mansel unable to grasp the inhumanity of keeping Dumaresq’s
daughter from her beloved. Lightman cites Allen as believing that Spencer’s
notion of individualism lay in tension with the rest of Spencer’s philosophy.
Spencer, Allen writes, “did not see that an individualism which begins by
accepting all the existing inequalities and injustices is no individualist at all;
… and that socialism offers the only real hope to the thorough-going and
consistent individualist of the future” (Allen 1904: 626–7). In Dumaresq’s
Daughter, then, Allen explores the inconsistencies that he perceived in
Spencer’s political and social thought, highlighting the way both the philos-
opher and the new Woman are unable to find a fuller sympathy with others.
In Olive Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), we find
a similar exploration of the conflict between the individual and society.
Schreiner cited Spencer’s First Principles as a foundational influence. In an
1884 letter to her friend Havelock ellis, she recounts that she was first given
a copy of the book when she was sixteen. In 1871 a young colonial official,
24. For more on Allen’s increasingly critical view of Spencer, see Lightman (2007: 286ff.).
For a brief discussion of their relationship and Dumaresq’s Daughter, see Morton
(2005: 92ff.).
198
Willie bertram, had left her a copy of Spencer’s work: “He lent me Spencer’s
‘First principles.’ I always think that when christianity burst on the dark
roman world it was what that book was to me” (Draznin 1992: 39). Her early
crisis of faith was crystallized by her reading of Spencer, with his scientific
naturalism offering her an alternative system of belief. “He helped me believe
in a unity underlying all nature”, she wrote to Havelock ellis (ibid.: 43).
Spencer revealed that social order reflected a biological order, with the law of
progress underpinning the whole of organic creation. Her experience read-
ing Spencer is echoed in her novel The Story of an African Farm in the figure
of Waldo Farber. In the interlude chapter, “time and Seasons”, written largely
in the first-person plural, Waldo finds a developmental principle in the face
of the “weltering chaos” of experience (Schreiner [1883] 1995: 154).25 In a
state of deep doubt about faith and the society around him, Waldo starts
to see the natural world around him with new eyes: “and now we turn to
nature. All these years we have lived beside her, and we have never seen her;
now we open our eyes and look at her” (ibid.: 151). He watches the cycle of
life, seeing “the grub come out, turn to a green fly, and flit away” (ibid.: 152).
He cracks eggs “to see the white spot wax into the chicken”, he dissects “dead
ducks and lambs” and he plants seeds and watches as “a living thing starts
out – starts upwards … shaking brown seeds with little embryo souls on the
ground” (ibid.: 153). In an echo of Spencer’s principles of unification and
development, the boy finds, “not a chance jumble” but “a living thing, a One”
(ibid.).26 He sees in the life cycle of one organism a microcosm of all living
development. Waldo then encounters a Stranger passing by the farm who
leaves him a book, “a centre round which to hang [his] ideas”. As Schreiner
told ellis, “The book that the Stranger gives to Waldo was intended to be
Spencer’s First Principles” (Draznin 1992: 39).
Waldo’s process of discovery follows Spencer’s educational principles.
It is telling that Waldo comes to his new insight about the world without
the book, which, when he receives it afterwards from the Stranger, seems
to confirm his own intuitions. Impressed by Spencer’s educational theory
that “our lessons ought to start from the concrete and end in the abstract”
(Spencer 1861: 74), his own experience confirms that learning should be
25. Jed esty reads these Spencerian moments as a foil in the novel of “a more ran-
dom and cruel form of temporality, a naturalist clock whose uneven, unpredictable
strokes cut across any sense of pure progress, whether individual or civilizational”
(2007: 422).
26. J. W. burrow suggests that the value of Spencer to Schreiner was “in his making her
aware of possibilities besides the two extremes of dogmatic christianity and ‘blank
atheism’, and of a meaningful alternative creed by which to shape her life” (2000:
193).
199
drawn from the learner’s own explorations and active involvement. Waldo’s
Spencerian revelation enacts Spencer’s belief in recapitulation: “the educa-
tion of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the edu-
cation of mankind, considered historically” (ibid.: 75). by placing Waldo’s
insight before his reading of Spencer, Schreiner follows both Spencer’s edu-
cational philosophy and his challenge to the “great man” theory of history.
The value of Waldo’s education, both self-taught in nature and made explicit
in the book he receives, remains highly ambiguous: it does not open oppor-
tunities for him. The novel is thus equivocal about any narrative of progress,
since, like Martin eden in Jack London’s novel, Waldo remains an outsider,
excluded from modern progress.
Lyndall, the proto-feminist heroine of The Story of an African Farm, also
articulates a Spencerian vision, linking the progress and development of an
individual with that of the nation and the entire race.
And sometimes what is more amusing still than tracing the like-
ness between man and man, is to trace the analogy there always
is between the progress and development of one individual and
of a whole nation; or again, between a single nation and the entire
human race. It is pleasant when it dawns on you that the one is
just the other written out in large letters; and very odd to find
all the little follies and virtues, and developments and retrogres-
sions written out in the big world’s book that you find in your
little internal self. It is the most amusing thing I know of; but of
course, being a woman, I have not often time for such amuse-
ments. professional duties always first, you know. It takes a great
deal of time and thought always to look perfectly exquisite, even
for a pretty woman. (Schreiner [1883] 1995: 198–9)
echoing Spencer’s theories of recapitulation – that an individual and the race

follow the same laws of progress and development – Lyndall also considers
the problem of the individual, specifically of women, within these laws. to
her, the recognition of these Spencerian laws of development are offered as
an intellectual indulgence from which women are excluded: the revelation
of the analogies between different spheres of existence mocks the woman,
who remains marginal to intellectual exchange, such as the one Waldo expe-
riences with the Stranger. Although Spencer persuaded Schreiner that social
order reflected a deeper biological order and that there was a law of progress
that underpinned the natural and social worlds, she places emphasis on those
who are ultimately excluded from such progress.
even in her second and unfinished novel From Man to Man, published
after her death, Spencerian ideas play an important role in the development
200
of the protagonist, rebekah. In a moment that seems to echo Waldo’s rec-

ognition of the order underpinning organic creation, rebekah meditates
about possible ways of understanding the universe. She contrasts the famil-
iar christian view with one of evolutionary connectedness:
between the furthest star and the planet earth we live on, between
the most distant planet and the ground we tread on, between
man, plant, bird, beast and clod of earth, everywhere the close
internetted lines of interaction stretch; nowhere are we able to
draw a sharp dividing line, nowhere find an isolated existence.
(Schreiner [1926] 1982: 180)
Yet, as carolyn burdett has shown, women’s entry to society and independ-
ence in the novel is gained through a markedly feminine principle that
counters the “natural law”, namely “love and expansion of the ego to oth-
ers” (ibid.: 209–10; see burdett 2001: 101). In Woman and Labour, with her
refrain, “Give us labour and the training which fits for labour!”, Schreiner
advocated instead for women’s education and labour as a remedy for female
exclusion (Schreiner [1911] 1978: 33). Yet she also maintained that “feminist
demands could be justified only in the context of women’s obligations to the
species as a whole” (Kucich 2011: 101). In this later work, Schreiner com-
bines Spencer’s theories with the theories of Karl pearson, who subordinates
the instinctual lives of individuals to the needs of the social whole, replacing
Spencer’s individualist model with an internationalist model of competition
between nations.27 Schreiner remains, however, dedicated to female eman-
cipation and equality between the sexes, insisting on individualism as crucial
to a free ethical society.
These novelists take up a central claim of Spencer’s early theory that all
progress is progress towards individualism. considering the place of the
individual within an evolutionary model, these late-nineteenth-century
novelists focus less on Spencer’s concern with privacy and political laissez-
faire, than on whether his early philosophy allows sufficient space for auton-
omy and self-development or self-determination. This is a strain of Spencer’s
thinking that is clearest in his theories of mental evolution, his psychology
and in his educational thought: education is effective, he argues, when it aids
the “process of self-development”. “remember, that the aim of your disci-
pline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being
to be governed by others” (1861: 140). In Spencer’s model, mind is a crucial
27. For a discussion of the increasing influence of pearson’s thought on Schreiner and
its relationship to her interest in Spencer, see burdett (2001: 49ff.).
201
component of evolution: cognition and its training is a guiding force at all

stages of development, leading to the progressive perfection of moral pow-
ers created by the cumulative mental activity of earlier generations. As peter
bowler argues, “Mind has not been banished from nature; it has been incor-
porated into it as the guiding force of evolution” (1990: 183). These novelists
grappled with the difficulty of reconciling the democratic impulse with the
complexity of growth and the drive towards individuation in Spencer’s evo-
lutionary paradigm, a problem Spencer himself grappled with.
As for any “shadow discourse”, important literary engagements with
Spencer are undoubtedly dormant in many more works than the novels
highlighted here; the novels considered here make explicit their considera-
tion of Spencer, at least at certain moments. This widespread engagement
with Spencer’s ideas, especially in the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, means that we might be wise to consider any mention of evolution-
ary and developmental theories in Victorian literary writing as potentially
signalling an engagement with Spencer, not just with Darwin. The curi-
ous dissociation of Spencer’s key ideas from his name and larger body of
work – culminating with the subsumption of his developmental model into
the Darwinian framework – began during Spencer’s lifetime and continues
to obscure his thought from critical recognition. The novelists discussed
here are not in any straightforward sense “Spencerian”, since they work both
through and against the progressive strand in Spencer’s early philosophy.
Illuminating an important Spencerian “shadow discourse” in these novels
allows us to reconnect these progressive novelists to important alternative
and partly obscured evolutionary accounts. These nineteenth-century nov-
els consider competing ideas about the place of mind and the individual in
development models of the time. In this way, they shed light on the engage-
ment between evolutionary theory and literary texts, revealing the novels to
be productive sites for thinking through these complex debates.
202
10
herbert spencer and lamarckism
Peter J. Bowler
Was Herbert Spencer a Lamarckian? Anyone familiar with the evolutionary

debates in late-nineteenth-century biology will almost certainly answer in the
affirmative. As defined by the participants in these debates, a “Lamarckian”
was someone who upheld the validity of the inheritance of acquired char-
acteristics as an evolutionary mechanism, the term being derived from the
name of the early-nineteenth-century zoologist Jean-baptiste Lamarck.
Although Mark Francis (2011) has argued that Spencer should not be asso-
ciated with these biological debates, he was in fact deeply involved, and was
regarded as a leading defender of Lamarckism. Some modern commentators
on Spencer’s social philosophy recognize that this evolutionary mechanism
was crucial to his thinking (for instance taylor 2007; Offer 2010; Gissis 2011).
Others, however, insist that he should not be treated as a Lamarckian (e.g.
Hawkins 1997: 86–8). In their eyes, “Lamarckism” refers to an evolutionary
ideology that repudiates the Darwinian struggle for existence and presents
evolution as a process driven by purposeful forces towards a preordained
goal. Since Spencer did accept a role for struggle and did not see evolution
as teleological, he cannot be a Lamarckian (whether or not one prefers to see
him as a Darwinian). evidently we are dealing here with a clash between two
very different definitions of Lamarckism. In this essay I shall try to uncover
the complex history of Lamarckism to show how two such contradictory
understandings of the theory could have emerged, and how Spencer himself
fits into the picture.
On the original biological definition of Lamarckism, Spencer was cer-
tainly a Lamarckian and was recognized as such at the time. but by looking
at the history of the movement we can see how an alternative definition
emerged along with a very un-Spencerian approach to evolution that could
also use the inheritance of acquired characteristics as its central proposition
(on late-nineteenth-century evolutionism, see bowler 1983; 1988; 2009b: ch.
203
pet e r j . b ow l e r
11). This alternative, often referred to as “neo-Lamarckism”, was associated

with a group of American biologists and the anti-Darwinian worldview pro-
moted by literary figures such as Samuel butler and George bernard Shaw.
For neo-Lamarckians, the process allowed evolution to be driven by the
purposeful activities of living organisms, thus restoring some of the teleo-
logical aspects of the natural world undermined by Darwinism. This version
of Lamarckism became so well known in the early twentieth century that
it seems to have become the only form of the theory recognized by some
later commentators. On this interpretation, Lamarckism and Darwinism
are mutually incompatible: a polarized vision that leaves no room for fig-
ures such as Spencer (and Darwin himself) who were willing to see both
selection and the inheritance of acquired characters working to produce
adaptive evolution.
In fact, we shall see that even butler acknowledged Spencer as a
Lamarckian in the context of the earlier debates. but by the end of the cen-
tury the scientific world had become polarized between the neo-Darwinians
(who accepted only natural selection) and the neo-Lamarckians (who used
the mechanism to challenge the whole Darwinian worldview). The long-
term consequence of this black-and-white model was the retroactive elimi-
nation of figures such as Darwin and Spencer from the Lamarckian camp
and the assumption that Lamarckism was an inherently teleological and
vitalist worldview. twentieth-century biology soon turned its back on this
worldview, thanks in part to the emergence of the new science of genetics
and the eventual vindication of Darwinian natural selection. Lamarckism
was increasingly seen as an evolutionary philosophy for intellectuals who
rejected genetic determinism in favour of a more optimistic ideology.
As a historian of biology I am inclined to press for a return to the tra-
ditional, more flexible, definition of Lamarckism, which focuses on the
mechanism of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, whatever the
wider implications associated with it. This allows us to see a Lamarckian
component in Spencer’s thought, and to recognize that this element could
be applied in very different ways by other thinkers. We thus gain a much
richer understanding of the role played by that theory both in the bio-
logical debates and their wider applications. We can see how the basic
Lamarckian idea could be exploited in a variety of ways by a diversity of
thinkers with very different agendas. In addition to the positions identified
with Spencer and butler, I shall cite the use of Lamarckism by – among oth-
ers – the American opponents of social Darwinism, the German biologist
ernst Haeckel (sometimes and very controversially linked to the origins of
nazism) and the anarchist peter Kropotkin. The belief that the future of the
species can be shaped by the positive actions taken by organisms (including
human beings) is attractive to a wide variety of thinkers, and understanding
204
h e rb e rt spe n c e r a n d l a m a rc k i sm
how they have made use of it will help us come to grips with important
issues in cultural history.
That being said, it is important to recognize that we are talking here about
the psychological or biological improvement of the race. It is often said that
social change is Lamarckian in the loose sense that the innovations made
by one generation are passed on to the next via teaching and learning. but
this is mere analogy, and if the next generation is not taught appropriately it
has no way of recovering the innovations. Lamarckism implies a permanent
transformation of the species, including the translation of learned habits
into inherited instincts, which is why it appears to offer such a powerful tool
to social philosophers, and why its rejection by modern biology has such
important ramifications.
In this chapter I shall first examine the origins and complex nature of
the Lamarckian theory in biology, including its adoption as an alterna-
tive to Darwinian natural selection in the late nineteenth century. This will
illuminate the polarization by which the flexible Lamarckism of Spencer
and Darwin was transformed into a dogmatic neo-Lamarckism. I will then
look at Spencer himself to see whether he regarded himself a Lamarckian:
a complex question because he recognized Lamarck’s pioneering role but
sought to distance his own use of the inheritance of acquired characters
from the earlier formulation. equally important is the question of whether
Spencer was regarded as a Lamarckian by his contemporaries, and this can
be answered pretty definitely in the affirmative. Finally, I shall offer some
reflections on the diversity of Lamarckian positions that emerged in the
late nineteenth century and how changing attitudes have consigned most of
them to the dustbin of history, leaving only the teleological version of neo-
Lamarckism as the figurehead for a particular kind of social philosophy.
Lamarck’s theory and its implications
In the biological debates of the late nineteenth century, the term “Lamarckism”
was used to denote the evolutionary mechanism based on the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, also known as use-inheritance and, by Spencer,
as functionally acquired modifications. The term recognized the pioneer-
ing contribution of the French zoologist Jean-baptiste pierre Antoine de
Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), who published some of the earli-
est comprehensive arguments for the theory of evolution in his Philosophie
zoologique of 1809 (translation as Lamarck 1914; see burkhardt 1977).
Lamarck proposed two processes to explain the development of life on
earth by natural means, as opposed to supernatural creations. The first was
an inherently progressive trend that forced living things to become more
205
complex in each successive generation. He seems to have believed that, left

to itself, this process would generate a linear hierarchy or chain of being for
both the plant and animal kingdoms. Lower forms continue to be found at
each level of the hierarchy because spontaneous generation is constantly
starting new lines of evolution at the bottom of what is, in effect, an “escala-
tor of being”. This inherently progressive trend is probably the source of the
later belief that Lamarckism is a philosophy in which evolution is directed
towards a predetermined goal.
The main concern of the later Lamarckians was, however, the second
process that Lamarck himself proposed. As an experienced invertebrate
zoologist who had also worked in botany, he knew that plants and animals
cannot be classified in a single hierarchical scheme. to explain the diver-
sity of species, he argued that the ascent of life is constantly disturbed by
the necessity for living things to adapt to the changing conditions of the
earth’s surface over geological time. As the environment changes, organisms
develop new needs or desires and to satisfy these desires they develop new
habits, allowing them to adopt new lifestyles better suited to the new con-
ditions. Darwin also recognized adaptation to changing conditions as the
key to explaining the formation of new species and developed his theory of
natural selection to explain how the changes come about. It is crucial that
we understand the difference between Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance
of acquired characteristics and Darwinian natural selection, because their
end result is the same: better-adapted species.
As the basis of natural selection Darwin appealed to the variability of
individuals within the species, something routinely observed by animal
breeders. This individual variation is undirected and was often referred
to as “random”, although Darwin insisted that it had unknown causes (we
now explain it by genetic diversity within the species). Since species always
tend to breed more prolifically than the environment can sustain (Thomas
Malthus’s principle of population) there will be a struggle for existence
caused by shortage of resources, and in this struggle those individuals best
adapted to any change in the environment will survive and breed, while
those less well adapted will die: the process that Darwin called natural selec-
tion and for which Spencer later coined the term “survival of the fittest”. If
the variant characters are inherited, then selection over many generations
will produce a significantly modified species that is well adapted to the new
environment, in effect a new species.
The inheritance of acquired characteristics would also produce better
adapted species but by very different means. Lamarck argued that individual
plants and animals have a purposeful adaptive capacity that can allow them
to respond in a positive manner to any challenge posed by a changed envi-
ronment. The resulting acquired characters (acquired during the organisms’
206
own lifetime) are not random because they are produced by this adaptive
capability. An often-quoted example is the weightlifter’s bulging muscles,
acquired after many years of pumping iron; they are a purposeful response
to this particular lifestyle. Thanks to modern genetics we do not believe that
such acquired characters can be passed on to the next generation, because
there is no known mechanism by which they could be imprinted on the
DnA that transmits characters from parent to offspring. but in the nine-
teenth century almost everyone (Darwin included) believed that there was
at least some slight tendency for acquired characters to be inherited, and
Lamarck pointed out that if this were so, there could be a cumulative proc-
ess of change because each generation would add an additional increment
of modification. In the natural world where organisms would be responding
en masse to any environmental challenge, the result would be new species
adapted to the new conditions.
Lamarck was originally a botanist and he argued that for plants there
must be an inherent flexibility of the organism’s physiology that responds
to new conditions. Unlike animals, plants cannot change their behaviour,
and thus the acquired characters must come from some automatic inter-
nal adjustment. A plant grown in a drier than normal environment, for
instance, might grow a thicker skin in order to retain moisture. A simi-
lar process might work for animals; one can imagine an animal raised
in a colder environment growing thicker fur, for instance. but Lamarck
ignored this possibility and insisted that in animals the new charac-
ters were always acquired as the result of changed behaviour through the
development of new habits. Faced with an environmental challenge, ani-
mals have new needs or desires, and these drive them to modify their hab-
its in ways that offered a positive response to the challenge. As a result of
the new habit, parts of the body would be used in new ways and struc-
tures used more energetically would develop (like the weightlifter’s mus-
cles) while those used less often would degenerate. This is why the process
in animals is often called use-inheritance or, in Spencer’s terminology,
functionally acquired modification. As each generation continued the new
habit and the individual modifications were transmitted to future genera-
tions, they would accumulate to produce a major adaptive change in the
species. An often quoted example is that of the giraffe, whose ancestors
adopted the new habit of feeding from trees and thus elongated their fore-
limbs and necks over many generations. Lamarck himself did not elaborate
this case, although he does briefly mention the giraffe or camelo-pardalis
as an example (1914: 122).
Spencer acknowledged Lamarck’s pioneering role but objected to one
aspect of his formulation of the theory, indirectly putting his finger on the
feature that has caused most confusion in later discussions. He thought that
207
by identifying the animals’ new desires as the ultimate source of the modi-
fications, Lamarck had introduced an unnecessary psychological element
into what was better seen as a purely automatic process by which organisms
adjusted to their environment. This had been almost immediately seized
on by critics, who accused Lamarck of believing that animals could modify
themselves by pure willpower; even Darwin seems to have thought that this
was the case (see his letter to J. D. Hooker, 11 January 1844, in Darwin 1987:
2). In fact, Lamarck made no such claim; the physical modifications came
about because of the changed patterns of use and disuse required by the
new habits. The later neo-Lamarckians also focused on this psychological
element, but switched their attention to the creativity involved in the proc-
ess by which the animals developed the new habits. For Samuel butler and
his followers, and for some members of the American school, Lamarckism
became a vitalistic philosophy in which the creative life-force within each
organism responded to the challenges posed by the material world. It was
also teleological or purpose-driven, because the animals’ own decisions
shaped the future evolution of their species. God may not have imposed
purpose on the world by supernatural fiat, but he had transferred an ele-
ment of creativity into the life-force that directed both individual activity
and the future of each species. needless to say, Spencer did not approve of
this extension of the theory.
The emergence of “Lamarckism”
It has often been claimed that Lamarck’s theory was almost universally
rejected in his own time, but we now know that it was still promoted by radical
biologists in the 1820s and 1830s (corsi 1988; Desmond 1989). conservative
thinkers rejected it, of course, and it was also attacked in the second volume
of charles Lyell’s otherwise radical Principles of Geology (1830–33). It was
this critique that actually converted Spencer to evolutionism, and we shall
see that he was always willing to credit Lamarck with being a founder of the
theory. In fact, Spencer emerged as a leading supporter of the evolution-
ary mechanism of use-inheritance in the 1850s, but he did not refer to it as
“Lamarckism” and that term only seems to have come into general use in the
later decades of the century. There was widespread opposition to Darwin’s
theory of natural selection following the publication of On the Origin of
Species in 1859, and as naturalists sought alternative mechanisms the inherit-
ance of acquired characters began to seem an increasingly attractive propo-
sition. Darwin himself had always accepted that this mechanism played a
subsidiary role in evolution and stressed this point further in response to
attacks on his book (Vorzimmer 1970). Spencer, of course, accepted natural
208
selection but retained his belief that the inheritance of acquired characters
was more important. Thus the original version of what soon came to be
known as “Darwinism” was a flexible position allowing room for both natural
selection and alternatives such as use-inheritance.
All this changed as opinions polarized in the later decades of the cen-
tury (bowler 1983; Gayon 1998). August Weismann’s concept of the germ
plasm, a material substance responsible for transmitting hereditary charac-
ters, was formulated in a way that made the inheritance of acquired char-
acters impossible (Weismann 1893a). Along with Alfred russel Wallace,
Weismann insisted that natural selection was the only plausible mechanism
of evolution. This school of thought became known as neo-Darwinism (or
occasionally ultra-Darwinism); as was often pointed out, Darwin him-
self would not have been regarded as a neo-Darwinian (romanes 1892–
97: vol. 2, intro.). but there were many naturalists who did not think the
selection theory was adequate, and in response many adopted an openly
anti-Darwinian position, often stressing use-inheritance as an alternative
explanation of adaptive evolution.
In britain, the emergence of an anti-Darwinian form of Lamarckism
is associated with the novelist Samuel butler, who conducted a feud
with Darwin lasting until the latter’s death. Originally an enthusiast for
Darwinism, butler soon found its denial of teleology and its reliance on
struggle distasteful. He looked to the earlier evolutionism of the comte de
buffon, erasmus Darwin (charles Darwin’s grandfather) and Lamarck for
an alternative that preserved some element of purpose in nature. In his
Evolution Old and New (1879), butler hailed the inheritance of acquired
characteristics as a process that would allow the purposeful behaviour of
living things to direct their evolution. At this point he saw Lamarck as only
one among several founders of this alternative and did not use the term
“Lamarckism”. He continued his attack in a series of later books and arti-
cles, culminating in his essay “The Deadlock in Darwinism”, in which he
described natural selection as a “nightmare of waste and death” and did
now denote his own alternative as “Lamarckism” (butler 1908: 308, 240).
For butler, Lamarckism was preferable to Darwinian materialism on moral
grounds, although he was able to draw on the support of a significant
number of scientists.
Thanks to this support, the theory of the inheritance of acquired charac-
ters was recognized as a major player in the debates of the 1890s and early
1900s, later known as the era of an “eclipse of Darwinism” (bowler 1983). by
now the term “Lamarckism” was increasingly used to denote the position.
In 1889, e. ray Lankester, himself a Darwinian, argued that “Lamarckism”
was not a mere nickname but “as reputable a denomination as Darwinism”
for the rival position (Lankester 1889: 485). The term found its way into
209
numerous contemporary surveys of the debate including those by George

John romanes (1892–97: vol. 2, intro.), Vernon L. Kellogg (1907: ch. 10),
J. Arthur Thomson (1912: ch. 8) and William Keith brooks (1915: lecture
4). For most of these biologists, Lamarckism meant the basic mechanism of
use-inheritance, and they were willing to accept both Darwin and Spencer
as supporters of the theory. but in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of
the 1890s they all found it necessary to stress that even Darwin had accepted
the theory and thus would not have endorsed the position now known as
neo-Darwinism.
As romanes indicated, the situation was all too often portrayed as a
struggle between two irreconcilable alternatives, neo-Darwinism and neo-
Lamarckism (1892–97: vol. 2, 13). Use of the latter term to denote the more
extreme, anti-materialist interpretation of use-inheritance originated with
a group of American naturalists and palaeontologists who independently
developed a position equivalent to that staked out by butler in britain.
edward Drinker cope, Alpheus Hyatt, Alpheus packard and Joseph Leconte
had all been drawn towards the idea of use-inheritance by their distrust of
Darwinian materialism and an enthusiasm for the recapitulation theory, in
which the development of the embryo repeats key stages in the evolution
of its species (see bowler 1983: ch. 6). One way of explaining recapitulation
was to assume that as new characters were acquired, the older ones were
forced back into the later stages of embryological development. Lamarckism
thus emerged as a corollary of recapitulation, although none of these natu-
ralists had originally been aware of Lamarck’s ideas. by the 1880s, though,
the connection had been made and it was packard who suggested the term
“neo-Lamarckism” to denote their school of thought (1884: 367–8 n.). He
later published an account of Lamarck’s life and work (packard 1901). The
anti-materialist implications of the theory were openly stressed by cope and
Leconte, both of whom were deeply religious. cope’s Theology of Evolution
(1887a) invoked a non-physical “growth-force” to explain how living things
could transform themselves, while Leconte’s survey of evolutionism and
its implications stressed its divinely planned goal and saw the human spirit
as an extension of the creative spiritual powers of all animals ([1895] 1898:
311–12, 329).
As I shall show in conclusion, the subsequent history of Lamarckism
consists of an expansion of this vitalistic, teleological neo-Lamackism at the
expense of the more general Lamarckian position, to the extent that many
now find it incomprehensible that someone who endorses the Darwinian
selection theory can also be a Lamarckian. but we have seen that several
commentators at the time took pains to insist that both Darwin and Spencer
did include an element of Lamarckism in their systems, and it is to Spencer’s
position in the debate that we now turn.
210
Spencer and Lamarckism
Spencer did not call himself a Lamarckian and had a somewhat ambiguous
relationship to Lamarck’s legacy, but he was widely recognized as an advo-
cate for the inheritance of acquired characters in both biological and social
evolution. As a result, most surveys of the biological debates at the time
did call him a Lamarckian, and there was widespread recognition that use-
inheritance played a vital role in his overall evolutionary philosophy.
Spencer tells us that he was converted to biological evolutionism by read-
ing Lyell’s rebuttal of Lamarck’s theory in his Principles of Geology (Spencer
1904: vol. 1, 176; vol. 2, 7). He also notes that his views on the modifiabil-
ity of human nature through adaptation emerged as a “corollary from the
theory of Lamarck” (ibid.: vol. 1, 552; see also Spencer 1908: 351). Although
Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology (1855) does not mention Lamarck by
name, one of the book’s main proposals was that human nature was indeed
the produce of previous generations’ self-adaptation to the evolving social
environment. In the first volume of The Principles of Biology he presents
adaptive evolution as a product of two processes, an indirect adjustment
to changes in the environment (natural selection) and, more importantly,
a direct process that is use-inheritance or the production of functionally
acquired modifications. He attributes the origins of the latter theory to
both erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and criticizes both for presenting the
process as being driven by the animals’ efforts to satisfy their new needs or
desires (1864–67: vol. 2, 402–10). Spencer wanted the whole process to be
described without invoking a purely psychological component.
When Weismann and others began to attack the Lamarckian theory in the
1880s, Spencer emerged as a significant figure in its defence. His Factors of
Organic Evolution (1887; originally published in the magazine The Nineteenth
Century) defended the idea of functionally acquired modifications and again
attributed its origins to both erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. Significantly, the
preface stresses the importance of the theory for psychology, ethics and soci-
ology because, if valid, it would imply that populations can be modified by the
actions of their members much more rapidly than if the process has to wait
for the appearance of favourable characters by chance variation (1887: iii–
iv). In 1893 Spencer published “The Inadequacy of natural Selection” in the
Contemporary Review, attacking the neo-Darwinist position and again insist-
ing on the validity of use-inheritance. It was in this article that he declared:
“close contemplation of the facts impresses me more strongly than ever with
the two alternatives – either there has been inheritance of acquired characters
or there has been no evolution” (1893a: 446).
Spencer’s commitment to the inheritance of acquired characters was
widely noted. cope later implied that it was by reading Spencer that he was
211
first alerted to the significance of Lamarck’s ideas (1887b: viii–ix). From the
1890s onwards, Spencer’s response to neo-Darwinism was noted by numer-
ous commentators on the biological debate, several of whom thought his
intervention was a major reason for continuing to take the inheritance of
acquired characters seriously. He was frequently labelled a Lamarckian, even
though he did not use the term himself. romanes saw the theory as originat-
ing with erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, but suggested that the “Lamarckian
hypothesis” might better be designated by Spencer’s name (1892–97: vol. 2,
255). In his survey of the debates about heredity, Thomson noted Spencer’s
support for Lamarckism and proclaimed: “This authoritative statement
removes all need of apology for the prominence which we have given to
the question” (1912: 166). Spencer’s support for the inheritance of acquired
characters was also listed by those who offered a very different interpretation
of the theory’s significance, including butler (1908: 240), Leconte ([1895]
1898: 92) and Kropotkin ([1902] 1908: 65). Vernon Kellogg’s account of the
Darwinian debates even listed Spencer as a neo-Lamarckian (1907: 264 n.),
as did richard Swann Lull’s evolution textbook (1917: 164). In these cases,
however, it looks as though the term neo-Lamarckian was being used in a
general sense to indicate support for the biological mechanism.
The ideological ambiguity of Lamarckism
Spencer was thus clearly identified as a Lamarckian by his contemporar-

ies although (despite the confusion introduced by Kellogg and Lull) it was
usually recognized that he was not a neo-Lamarckian. Along with Darwin
he was frequently portrayed as a Lamarckian in an older sense as defined
before the polarization of the neo-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian camps.
The varying interpretations of Lamarckism surveyed above make it clear that
if we wish to retain a sense of what the theory meant in Spencer’s own time
we must recognize that it did not define a particular ideological position.
Lamarckism simply meant the evolutionary mechanism of the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, and this mechanism could be exploited in a vari-
ety of different ways each with its own moral, philosophical and ideological
implications. The vitalistic and teleological interpretation of butler and the
American neo-Lamarckians was only one such application, and Spencer’s
another. The moral differences in turn opened up different applications of
the theory, especially in political debates that have left their legacy in modern
ideas about “social Darwinism”.
butler and the neo-Lamarckians wanted to present the theory as an alter-
native to Darwinism, not a supplement. For them, having this alternative
explanation of adaptive evolution meant that one need not become involved
212
with the nightmare of Darwinian materialism. Instead of random variation

and trial-and-error selection brought about by a ruthless struggle for exist-
ence, the Lamarckian could see animals as creative beings whose actions
had universal as well as individual significance because use-inheritance
allowed their newly chosen habits to shape the future evolution of their
species in a purposeful direction. For several members of the American
school, especially cope and Leconte, the vital powers of living things was,
in effect, God’s creative power delegated to nature.
For most neo-Lamarckians, there was no need to postulate a struggle for
existence as the driving force of evolution. Kropotkin’s essays, collected in
his Mutual Aid (1902) argued that far from competing with one another,
animals routinely cooperated to ensure their species’ survival. Kropotkin,
like butler and the American school, invoked Lamarckism to replace natu-
ral selection, but he did not go along with their vitalist interpretation; in
a later article on the inheritance of acquired characters in plants he com-
plained about the exaggerated role given to the animals’ will by some
“metaphysically-inclined” writers on Lamarckism (1910: 77 n.). He believed
that by improving the conditions under which human beings live, the race
itself could be permanently improved.
There was thus a significant difference of emphasis in the neo-Lamarckian
camp over which aspect of Darwinism was most distasteful. Another
source of disagreement focused on the possibility that use-inheritance
might be used as the basis for a coordinated programme of human evolu-
tion. Kropotkin was an anarchist, unlikely to be an enthusiast for a state-
controlled education programme aimed at improving the character of the
human race. but this is exactly what American neo-Lamarckians such as
cope and Leconte advocated. Along with sociologist Lester Frank Ward,
also an enthusiast for Lamarckism, they envisaged the human race taking
charge of its own evolution (on Ward’s alternative to social Darwinism see
Hofstadter [1944] 1959: ch. 4). A coordinated programme of moral educa-
tion would not only improve the character of our children, but would also
– via the Lamarckian effect – begin to imprint these improvements onto the
human race as a whole. In Leconte’s words: “All our schemes of education,
intellectual and moral, though certainly intended mainly for the improve-
ment of the individuals, are glorified by the hope that the race is thereby
elevated” (Leconte [1895] 1898: 97–8; see Stephens 1982).
Spencer clearly had no sympathy with those who denied any role for
struggle in nature and was a confirmed opponent of all schemes for state-
sponsored education or social improvements. He was quite happy to accept
natural selection in addition to use-inheritance and famously coined the
term “survival of the fittest” to describe its action (1864–67: vol. 1, 444). His
was a purely naturalistic worldview in which progress might be inevitable
213
but was certainly not following some divinely preordained course. He was
anxious to avoid any hint of a purely psychological driving force behind
the animals’ changing habits. Where butler and Kropotkin wanted to deny
any significant element of struggle in nature, he was prepared to accept it
as the basis for natural selection and as the stimulus that drove animals and
humans to change their behaviour in a new environment.
The fact that Spencer favoured an individualist model of society in
which each was responsible for his or her own well-being, with shortage
of resources ensuring that anyone who did not keep up would suffer the
consequences, has led to him being routinely depicted as a social Darwinist
(Hofstadter [1944] 1959: ch. 2; Hawkins 1997: 82–103). but his social the-
ory did not depend on the wholesale elimination of unfit individuals in
every generation. On the contrary, it promoted the virtues of industry and
thrift, which would allow people to adapt their behaviour to new circum-
stances and thus avoid the penalties of failure. This was a philosophy of self-
improvement driven by the market economy and it shaped the evolution of
the species precisely because newly acquired mental and physical characters
could be inherited. It was a form of social Lamarckism, not a real social
Darwinism. Those religious thinkers who were influenced by Spencer were,
in effect, seeing his philosophy as a version of the protestant work ethic
updated to the age of evolution (Moore 1979, 1985), and although Spencer
himself was not religious he saw his philosophy as having a moral founda-
tion (r. J. richards 1987: 246, 287). The captains of American industry who
saw themselves as his followers shared the same ideology. Yet because they
welcomed an element of competition, Spencer and his followers have come
to be regarded as social Darwinists, and hence – in some commentators’
eyes – they cannot have been Lamarckians.
A key ideological fault line between neo-Darwinians and Lamarckians
was defined by the role of heredity as a determinant of character. For
Lamarckism to work, the individual had to be free to develop new char-
acters not inherited from its parents. but for Weismann and the neo-
Darwinians, character was rigidly predetermined by heredity, and any new
characters were both trivial and transient. Weismann insisted that there was
no mechanism by which changes in the body could be imprinted on the
germ plasm that transmitted characters to the next generation. This heredi-
tarian assumption was subsequently taken up by the pioneers of modern
genetics in the early twentieth century, although they did not at first share
Weismann’s enthusiasm for natural selection (bowler 1989). When genet-
ics and the selection theory were synthesized in the 1930s, hereditarianism
became a central feature of modern Darwinism, and Lamarckian effects
were excluded. Only a few scientific heretics remained suspicious of the
hereditarian position, although the situation has become more flexible in
214
recent years thanks to the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology

or evo-devo (Gissis & Jablonka 2011).
For critics outside science, the Darwinian–hereditarian position has
helped to promote a range of unpleasant social policies often referred to as
social Darwinism. In fact much of the earliest phase of social Darwinism
turns out to have been inspired by Spencer’s philosophy and was more
Lamarckian than Darwinian; later critics have just been unable to see how
anyone could advocate a role for struggle in evolution without being a
Darwinian. In the early twentieth century, neo-Darwinian ideologues such
as Karl pearson tended to focus on competition at the national or racial
level, and called for artificial selection to improve the european population.
This was the eugenics programme, which was hugely influential in both
American and europe until discredited by the excesses of the nazi regime
in Germany. The twentieth-century proponents of Lamarckism present
their theory as an alternative to the harshness inspired by hereditarianism,
but they have tended to ignore not only Spencer’s support for their theory
but also the fact that the earlier generation of Lamarckians could be just as
focused on the power of heredity when it came to the race question.
The dark side of neo-Lamarckism
to understand how it was possible for neo-Lamarckians to insist on the

permanent nature of racial differences, we can start from an element of
the American version of the theory that tended to undermine its optimis-
tic implications. cope, who certainly derived a theological message from
his Lamarckism, was nevertheless an exponent of a theory of orthogenetic
evolution in which species were supposed to be driven in a predetermined
direction (bowler 1983: ch. 6). Later palaeontologists emphasized that in
many cases the trends identified by cope led to overspecialization and –
when the environment changed – extinction. One might hail the creativity
of the original giraffes that first adopted the habit of feeding from trees, but
their descendants were in effect condemned to a treadmill of ever-increasing
specialization for that way of life. Once their necks had begun to elongate,
it would be difficult for them to revert to feeding at ground level and if the
trees disappeared they would be doomed to extinction. not surprisingly, the
proponents of the more optimistic interpretations of Lamarckism seldom
refer to this consequence.
It was this focus on the ability of the Lamarckian effect to impose pre-
determined trends on future evolution that paved the way for a hereditar-
ian view of racial differences. Since these trends tended to drive all related
species in the same direction, it was possible to imagine a group of related
215
species evolving in parallel towards a similar goal. Applied to humans, this

could imply that the various races were not recently evolved from a common
ancestor, but had each emerged separately from an ape ancestry and were,
in effect, distinct species. It was then an easy matter to assume that some
races had progressed more quickly and had thus reached a higher stage in
the process of humanization. cope, in particular, called in the recapitulation
theory to imagine parallel lines of evolution with some races being stuck at
a lower stage in the sequence of development (Haller 1975: 192–202; Gould
1977: ch. 5). The black race was less advanced from the ancestral ape and,
for all practical purposes, was trapped at that level. Leconte too – a south-
erner by origin – insisted on the separate identity of the black race and its
inferior character (Stephens 1982: 235–45). because the races had evolved
separately for so long, the Lamarckian effect that could be used to improve
the white race would be unable to raise the blacks up to the same level in
any reasonable amount of time.
european Lamarckians also became involved in the science of racial dif-
ferences. The most active british Lamarckian at the turn of the century was
the embryologist ernest William Macbride, who favoured an extreme form
of eugenics by calling for the compulsory sterilization of the Irish race. He
endorsed the view that the Irish were descended from a Mediterranean race
that had evolved separately from the hardier and more intelligent Anglo-
Saxons. In the 1930s he wrote openly in support of the racial policies adopted
in nazi Germany (for details see bowler 1984). Those policies drew on a long
heritage of race science, one of the leading proponents of which had been the
evolutionist ernst Haeckel. Although widely known as a Darwinist, Haeckel
had little interest in natural selection except at the level of group competition
and invoked the Lamarckian mechanism to explain most individual vari-
ation. His monist philosophy allowed an element of mental activity in all
natural objects, and his evolutionism, although ostensibly non-teleological,
seems to involve an inherently progressive tendency. For my money, he is
as much a neo-Lamarckian as a genuine Darwinian. Yet Haeckel’s so-called
social Darwinism has been linked to the origins of nazism (Gasman 1971;
Weikart 2004), and although this view has been vigorously opposed by other
historians (e.g. r. J. richards 2008), his endorsement of distinct racial iden-
tities and the inferior position of the non-white races is indisputable. Here
again a scientist with strong Lamarckian sympathies managed to square that
position with an extreme hereditarianism at the level of racial characters.
Darwin and Spencer were both opposed to these efforts to exaggerate the
level of racial differences, as were most of Darwin’s immediate followers.
They were not entirely free from the race prejudice so prevalent at the time,
but they did not accept the claim that the human races were distinct species
with separate evolutionary origins. It has been argued that Darwin actually
216
developed his theory of divergent evolution in order to bolster the view that
the human races shared a recent common ancestry (Desmond & Moore
2009). His hatred of slavery led him to argue that all humans share a com-
mon heritage. Spencer too campaigned to prevent the exploitation of other
races by european imperialists. Far from being a product of Darwinism,
the most extreme form of late-nineteenth-century race science was derived
primarily from non-Darwinian, often neo-Lamarckian, sources.
The confused legacy of Lamarckism
This detour into the darker aspects of Lamarckism has been taken in order
to sharpen our appreciation of the ideological complexities of the late-
nineteenth-century debates. The claim that Spencer cannot have been a
Lamarckian is based on a sanitized image of that theory constructed by
proponents anxious to demonize Darwinism so that their alternative can
be presented as the ideology for anyone who seeks to oppose materialism,
hereditarianism and the ruthless exploitation of those deemed unfit to par-
ticipate in the modern world. On this sharply polarized model, Darwin and
Spencer are seen as materialists whose rejection of all traditional values leads
to an enthusiasm for individual (and by implication national and racial)
struggle, for the rigid predetermination of character by heredity, and for race
as the most powerful determinant of all. Lamarckians, by contrast, reject
materialism in favour of seeing living things as active agents capable of crea-
tive actions. They have no need for an ideology of struggle and seek human
progress through benevolent interventions to shape our future moral devel-
opment. If one accepts this model, Spencer is automatically eliminated from
the Lamarckian camp and branded a social Darwinist committed to all the
unpleasant ideological consequences that label implies.
This essay has undermined this black-and-white model of the Darwinian–
Lamarckian divide from several different directions. by the standards of their
own time, Spencer and Darwin were both Darwinians and Lamarckians,
since they incorporated natural selection and the inheritance of acquired
characters into their evolutionism. Spencer gave use-inheritance a much
more prominent role and made a cornerstone of his vision of human
progress brought about by the cumulative effects of self-improvement.
This was widely recognized by his contemporaries, as was his intervention
in the biological debates of the time in defence of Lamarckism. but like
Darwin, Spencer’s thinking was rooted in an individualist, utilitarian view
of nature and society, ensuring that an element of struggle and competi-
tion played a significant role as the driving force of evolution. For Spencer
the struggle for existence provided the stimulus that drove individuals to
217
seek self-improvement, thus providing the raw material of positive, adaptive

variation on which the Lamarckian effect depends. Self-improvement was
a purely natural process that did not require some transcendental or vitalist
source of creativity, and there was no predetermined course marked out for
evolutionary progress.
Spencer’s Lamarckism thus repudiated most elements of the rival posi-
tion staked out under that name by butler and the neo-Lamarckians. He
was a Lamarckian but not a neo-Lamarckian, and has been left behind as
the rival version became recognized as the only true form of the theory.
The neo-Lamarckians wanted a vitalist source of organic creativity and were
happy to see evolution as the working out of a morally significant, and prob-
ably divinely ordained plan. The Americans, at least, saw that plan being
realized through the human race taking charge of its own evolution and
exploiting the Lamarckian effect by imposing consciously chosen new hab-
its on the next generation through a coherent educational policy. These are
the elements that have become identified with Lamarckism in later debates,
allowing the theory to be presented as a key resource in the promotion of
anti-materialist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist ideologies. Spencer’s version
of the theory has been written out of its history, allowing all the elements
rejected by his opponents (along with other factors such as extreme rac-
ism) to be identified with Darwinism. Our venture into the darker aspects
of neo-Lamarckism has exposed the one-sidedness of this interpretation,
revealing it to be a myth based on a sanitized version of the theory’s implica-
tions. In fact one of the worst forms of social Darwinism – the extreme view
of racial differences – was promoted far more actively by neo-Lamarckian
than by Darwinian biologists. The efforts of later Lamarckians to seize the
moral high ground were based on an ignorance – or deliberate concealment
– of some aspects of their theory’s original ideological applications.
The rehabilitation of Spencer as a Lamarckian thus feeds into a more
general reassessment of the relationship between Darwinism and its rivals
in the history of biological and social evolutionism. The evils often identi-
fied as social Darwinism turn out to have strong Lamarckian foundations.
Laissez-faire social Darwinism, usually seen as a product of Spencer’s phi-
losophy, included a significant element of Lamarckian self-improvement.
race science and its eugenic applications, again widely seen as forms of
social Darwinism, also turn out to have Lamarckian foundations, this time
in the alternative, ostensibly more high-minded version of the theory. Our
efforts to identify Spencer’s Lamarckian credentials have thus not only clar-
ified his position in the moral and social debates of the time; they have
also fed into a wider reassessment of the traditional interpretation of the
ideological divide between Darwinism and the most prominent alternative
mechanism of evolution.
218
The only remaining question is: just how did the sanitized image of
Lamarckism and its ideological consequences become established? The
answer lies in the intellectual debates of the early and mid-twentieth cen-
tury, a time in which hereditarianism and eventually Darwinism were flour-
ishing in biology thanks to the emergence of Mendelian genetics. Whatever
the growing strength of this approach in science, a significant number of
intellectuals (and a few unorthodox biologists) continued to insist that a
purely mechanistic theory of life was morally dangerous, opening the way
to a host of social evils. It turned out that the easiest way of making the
anti-mechanist point was to demonize Darwinism, and to drive home this
message it was convenient to pretend that Darwin’s theory was a product of
a rampant Victorian materialism whose moral dangers were only now being
recognized (bowler 2004). Lamarckism was thus presented as the founda-
tion for a new and more hopeful theory of life, just when it was in fact being
largely eliminated from science.
A good example of this technique of rewriting history can be seen in the
fulminations of the playwright George bernard Shaw. In the preface to his
Back to Methuselah, Shaw revived butler’s arguments against Darwinism,
insisting that if natural selection were true “only fools and rascals could bear
to live” (1921: liv). but he also presented butler as a lone figure struggling
against a dominant Victorian materialism that had nailed its colours to the
Darwinian mast. The widespread enthusiasm for the inheritance of acquired
characters in the late nineteenth century was ignored in order to create the
impression of a new reaction against materialism. Shaw’s own Lamarckism,
which he identified with Henri bergson’s creative evolution and the idea of
a non-material life-force, offered a way out of the outdated worldview. On
this vision of history, all the moral and social ills that could be identified
in the Victorian period had to be the product of the malign influence of
Darwinian materialism, while no stain could be admitted on the character
of Lamarckism. In such a polarized world, Spencer and Haeckel would have
to be depicted as Darwinians with no links to the Lamarckian mechanism.
Like most europeans, Shaw simply ignored the American neo-Lamarckians,
so he did not have to worry about their ventures into race science.
Shaw’s campaign against Darwinism and materialist biology in general
was sustained in the middle decades of the century. by this time the tri-
umph of genetics and the new Darwinian synthesis within science could
hardly be ignored, but to many outside science this represented a continu-
ation of old-fashioned materialism. basil Willey (1960) focused on butler
as the source of a key alternative to Darwin. Far more explicitly, Arthur
Koestler followed butler and Shaw in presenting Lamarckism as the best
available antidote to Darwinian materialism. Koestler insisted that the sci-
entific community’s commitment to hereditary determinism and natural
219
selection had become an entrenched orthodoxy against which no biolo-

gist dared to speak. In his The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), he identi-
fied the Lamarckian experiments conducted by the Austrian biologist paul
Kammerer as a classic case of the scientific community closing ranks against
results that challenged its established paradigm. In the 1920s Kammerer’s
experiments, which appeared to show the inheritance of acquired characters
in salamanders and the midwife toad, were dismissed as fraudulent by the
geneticists. Kammerer subsequently committed suicide, and Koestler now
insisted that he had been driven to this by a campaign of vilification by a sci-
entific community obsessed with determinism. His experiments should be
repeated and if done fairly this would reveal the validity of the Lamarckian
alternative.
Like his neo-Lamarckian predecessors, Koestler was convinced of the
moral case against determinism and saw the geneticists’ theory as bad sci-
ence driven by ideological commitment. The one-sidedness of his position
is reflected in his description of the leading british defender of Kammerer,
e. W. Macbride, as “the Irishman with a heart of gold” (Koestler 1971: 82).
Macbride was actually an Ulster protestant and, as we have seen, he was a
vocal exponent of race science who called for the compulsory sterilization
of the Irish and later wrote openly in support of the nazis. Koestler was
oblivious of this; as far as he was concerned, Macbride was a Lamarckian
so he could do no wrong. Here we see a particularly clear example of how
the intellectuals’ campaign against genetics and Darwinism led to a rewrit-
ing of history and the establishment of a myth in which Lamarckism could
never be associated with any of the ideological positions now known as
social Darwinism.
exactly the same polarized model now became visible from a transat-
lantic perspective in richard Hofstadter’s now classic Social Darwinism in
American Thought, first published in 1944. Here Spencer is presented as
the archetypical social Darwinist, whose enthusiasm for struggle motivated
the robber barons of late-nineteenth-century American industry ([1944]
1959: ch. 2). The Lamarckians are represented by Ward, whose campaign for
moral education was seen as the best antidote to the gospel of unrestrained
capitalism. Again, the involvement of several of Ward’s biological colleagues
of the American school in the race science of the time was conveniently
ignored. A similar distrust of the Darwinian theory and its implications
can be seen in the historical writing of Jacques barzun (1958) and Gertrude
Himmelfarb (1968).
The demonization of Darwinism had by now proceeded to a level where
many intellectuals outside science simply assumed that any unpleasantness
arising from the application of biological theory to society must be a prod-
uct of genetics and/or the theory of natural selection. If Spencer encouraged
220
unrestrained competition, then he must be a Darwinian. Lamarckians, by

contrast, could do no wrong because their stance against Darwinism would
automatically ensure that they would oppose any policies based on struggle
or the depiction of some sections of the human race as inferior. So not only
must Spencer be a Darwinian, but he could not possibly have tolerated a
Lamarckian element in his system. I hope that this essay has dispelled this
oversimplified interpretation of the history of evolutionism, allowing the
Lamarckian component of Spencer’s thought to be recognized for what it
was: a biological theory whose ideological applications were considerable,
but far more flexible than some of its later defenders would care to admit.
Given the re-emergence of a Lamarckian component in modern biology,
this clarification has all the more significance (Gissis & Jablonka 2011).
221
11
spencer’s british disciples
Bernard Lightman
On 8 December 1903, beatrice Webb recorded the death of Herbert Spencer

in her diary. “My old friend”, she wrote sadly, “passed away peacefully this
morning”. She had visited the ailing Spencer throughout the autumn. The
week previous to his death she had made the trip from London to brighton
three times, “trying to soften these days of physical discomfort and men-
tal depression by affectionate sympathy”. Spencer was appreciative. During
these last visits he called Webb his “oldest and dearest friend”. The day after
Spencer’s death Webb reflected in her diary on her “long debt of gratitude
for his friendship”. She recalled that as a small child he was “perhaps the
only person who persistently cared for me – or rather who singled me out
as one who was worthy of being trained and looked after”. eventually, he
was more than a friend. He became a “dominant influence” intellectually
when she began to study his work systematically at the age of twenty. Later,
as Webb was slowly drawn towards Fabian socialism, she questioned many
of Spencer’s social and political principles. but the friendship survived. After
attending Spencer’s funeral on 14 December 1903 at a crematorium on the
outskirts of London, she wrote, “And here ends a long-drawn-out tie of
friendship, extending from my earliest childhood to part middle life – a tie
unbroken by growing discordance of opinion, by marriage, or by extreme
old age and disease” (Mackenzie & MacKenzie 1983: 306–8).
While he was Webb’s intellectual guide, she was only one of Spencer’s
many followers. As Mark Francis has pointed out, Spencer became “the
world philosopher of the late-nineteenth century” (Francis 2007: 8). Michael
W. taylor has referred to Spencer as “the first international public intellec-
tual” who was read by a large global audience (taylor 2007: 2). In addition to
admiring readers, Spencer also had devoted disciples, like Webb, who mag-
nified his influence by praising his accomplishments and actively dissemi-
nating his ideas. Through a donation of £1,000, Shyamaji Krishnavarma,
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spe n c e r ’ s b ri t i sh d i s c i pl e s
one of Spencer’s Indian disciples, was responsible for the founding of the
Herbert Spencer lectures at Oxford University. Yen Fu translated Spencer’s
The Study of Sociology and Principles of Sociology into chinese (ibid.: 3).
The American historian and philosopher John Fiske wrote extensively on
Spencer’s concept of cosmic evolution, while the founder of Popular Science
Monthly, edward Youmans, was the driving force behind the International
Scientific Series, through which he hoped to spread Spencer’s evolutionary
philosophy throughout the world.
In britain, Spencer’s fellow X-club members, Thomas Henry Huxley and
John tyndall, were sympathetic to Spencer’s notion of the Unknowable,
although Huxley later regretted using the term in one of his essays (Lightman
1987: 134–9). but they would not have considered themselves to be his dis-
ciples. Spencer did have british followers. Frederick Howard collins (1857–
1910) wrote An Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer in
1889. Spencer appointed collins as his literary executor in 1892. Auberon
Herbert (1838–1906), author, politician and younger brother of the fourth
earl of carnarvon, was elected as a member of parliament for nottingham
in 1870. Here he allied himself with the liberal radicals. Shortly after retir-
ing from parliamentary life in 1874, he met Spencer at the Athenaeum. This
led him to study Spencer’s work, which resulted in a conversion experience.
Spencer’s influence lasted for the rest of Herbert’s life. An agnostic and a
republican, he became a fierce opponent of state interference and was one
of Spencer’s three trustees (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1982: 237; edyvane
2006; taylor 2004). Webb knew both of them. Spencer introduced her to
Herbert to check her drift towards socialism (Muggeridge & Adam 1967:
84). They became friends and at one point they began to collaborate on
writing a novel (MacKenzie 1978: 263). but Webb was not on good terms
with collins. When Spencer asked her to help collins write his biography,
she told Spencer that he was “utterly unfit” for the task. “I think, moreover,”
she wrote Spencer on 9 February 1892, “that it would not be merely a matter
of literary failure – but that it might damage you very considerably” (ibid.:
388). collins and Herbert cannot be counted among the most influential
british disciples of Spencer. Their impact, especially in the case of collins,
was limited.
The most important british disciples were Webb, the novelist and popu-
larizer of science Grant Allen, and a group of disaffected secularists, who
took up Spencer’s religion of the Unknowable. These disciples celebrated
Spencer as one of the great minds of the nineteenth century and they dis-
seminated his ideas to the british public. Many of them were determined to
correct misunderstandings of Spencer’s thought and to delineate the mag-
nificence of his achievements. Since Victorians often conflated Darwin and
Spencer’s evolutionary theories, they argued for his unique contributions
223
b e rna rd l i g h tm a n
to the edifice of modern science. However they were attracted to different

aspects of Spencer’s thought. Spencer had devoted his life to building a tightly
integrated system of thought based on evolutionary theory. In his mind, the
ten volumes of the System of Synthetic Philosophy formed an organic whole.
His disciples tended to focus on specific books and ideas, depending on
their agenda. Moreover, two of his british disciples later adopted positions
viewed by Spencer as inimical to his entire project. turning on their master,
their apostasy led to schisms within the Spencerian “church”.
Beatrice Webb and the social organism
Late in Allen’s life, when he looked back on his relationship with Spencer in
the posthumously published “personal reminiscences of Herbert Spencer”
(1904), he commented on the grave political differences that now separated
the philosopher of evolution from many of his early supporters. Many of
his young disciples were led by Social Statics to accept the principle of land
nationalization. According to Allen, two of them were particularly impor-
tant to Spencer. “two of those whom he specially regarded as his chosen
disciples”, Allen asserted, “were Miss beatrice potter, afterwards Mrs Sidney
Webb, and myself.” Spencer looked on Allen and Webb as “his two favorite
followers”. and it was a great blow to him when they both, “as he expressed
it, ‘turned socialist’” (Allen 1904: 626). Webb’s personal ties to Spencer ran
far deeper than Allen’s. When Webb was growing up, Spencer was a friend
of the family, who visited regularly. It was Webb who Spencer first appointed
as his literary executor in 1887. Her relationship with him passed through
four phases. First, he was the childhood friend; then he became the master
and she the disciple; in the third phase, she slowly began to pull away from
Spencer’s influence as she became involved in various studies of working-
class poverty; and finally, on becoming a socialist, she publicly disassociated
herself from Spencer’s increasingly conservative social and political views.
Spencer knew beatrice Webb (1858–1943) from when she was born. He
met Webb’s parents, richard potter and Lawrencina Heyworth, in 1845,
before they were married. Spencer enjoyed talking politics with Lawrencina.
According to Webb, Spencer adored her father, a wealthy lawyer and rail-
way entrepreneur, despite richard’s “complete indifference to the working of
the philosopher’s intellect”. Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy “bored
him past endurance; he saw no sense in it” (Webb [1926] 1950: 20–21). but
Spencer was treated as if he were a member of the family. In her autobiog-
raphy Webb describes him as “the oldest and most intimate friend of the
family” (ibid.: 19). The potter family provided Spencer with warmth and
a supply of young girls on whom he could lavish his affection. (Of the ten
224
children, nine were girls.) As Francis puts it, “it was with the potters that he
could feel truly human” (Francis 2007: 41). Webb recalls, that as an “enthusi-
astic novice in scientific reasoning” she was impressed by Spencer’s “ingen-
ious intertwining of elementary observations with abstruse ratiocination”
(Web [1926] 1950: 22). As a child and young teenager she was fascinated by
how he collected illustrations for his theories. Out of “sheer curiosity about
the workings of his mind” she became his “apprentice” in the “game” of
inventing proof for his theories. She did not learn to “discover and describe
new forms of life”, but Spencer taught her “the relevance of facts”, essential
to “the social investigator confronted with masses of data” (ibid.: 23–4). The
day after Spencer’s death, Webb wrote in her diary that he had stimulated
“curiosity as to the facts and my desire to discover the principles or laws
underlying these facts”. In addition, he had taught her to look at social insti-
tutions “as if they were plants or animals, things that could be observed,
classified and explained” (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1983: 307). Spencer had
taught her all of this in his role as her first intellectual mentor, before she
had read any of his books.
Webb read Spencer for the first time in the winter of 1876–77, when she
was eighteen. She began with Social Statics and First Principles. but she was
looking for a creed – a substitute religion – at that point in her life, rather
than a scientific guide to understanding the evolution of society (nord 1985:
42). In the early 1870s she had vacillated between orthodox christianity
and the attractions of London social life. Her encounter with eastern reli-
gion detached her from christianity. to a Victorian girl in her teens, “the
buddha and his philosophy seemed logically and ethically superior to the
christ and the teachings of the new testament” (Webb [1926] 1950: 76).
but, starting in the autumn of 1876, just before she began reading Spencer,
she decided to reject all traditional religion and embrace the “religion of
Science”. She thought that she had found “a resting-place” from which could
direct her life “according to the dictates of pure reason, without denying
the impulse to reverence the power that controlled the Universe”. The God
of the religion of Science was “The Unknowable: the prophet was Herbert
Spencer” (ibid.: 77). On 15 December 1878, she wrote in her diary that
First Principles “has had certainly a very great influence on my feelings and
thoughts. It has made me feel so happy and contented”. She was buoyed by
the idea that each new discovery of science would “increase our wonder at
the Great Unknown” (ibid.: 83). Webb “tried the religion of science” for six
years, from 1876 to 1882 (ibid.: 80).
However, in the end, she “found it wanting” (ibid.). After her mother’s
death on 13 April 1882 she was overwhelmed by religious feelings, which
raised serious doubts about the religion of science. On 23 April 1882 she
was “still an agnostic” rationally, but she feared she would be forced to
225
acknowledge the supremacy of “religious feeling” over her “whole nature”.

She found relief and strength in prayer. During the ten years between her
mother’s death in 1882 and her father’s death in 1892, Webb entered a new
phase of her intellectual development. by 1892 she believed that science was
“bankrupt in deciding the destiny of man; she lends herself indifferently
to the destroyer and to the preserver of life, to the hater and to the lover
of mankind”. However, she still valued the scientific method as a means
for attaining worthy goals. “Yet any avoidance of the scientific method in
disentangling ‘the order of things’,” she declared, “any reliance on magic or
on mystical intuition in selecting the process by which to reach the chosen
end, spells superstition and usually results in disaster” (ibid.: 89–90). It was
during this ten-year period that Webb “acquired the craft of a social inves-
tigator” and experienced “intense emotional strain”. She credited the “habit
of prayer” to “an all-pervading spiritual force” with enabling her to survive
this difficult time in her life (ibid.: 90–91).
At the beginning of this period of her intellectual development Spencer
still had some influence on her thinking. The summer after her moth-
er’s death she began a systematic study of Spencer’s System of Synthetic
Philosophy that took a year to complete. This was part of a larger interest
in applying the scientific method to an understanding of human nature.
In August 1882, she plunged into First Principles, and this produced such
“agreeable sensations” that she read the book every morning before break-
fast (ibid.: 119–20). but she began to have doubts about the usefulness of
Spencer’s generalizations and for the first time she began to see how the
shortcomings in his entire philosophy were connected to the imperfect
development of his emotional qualities. She noted on 5 May 1883, “there is
something pathetic in the isolation of his mind, a sort of spider-like exist-
ence, sitting alone in the centre of his theoretical web, catching facts, and
weaving them again into theory”. Webb believed that Spencer suffered from
a mental deformity resulting from the extraordinary development of the
intellectual faculties (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1982: 83). She began to pity
him. She also had reservations about Spencer’s use “of the analogy between
the animal organism and the social organism for the purpose of interpret-
ing the facts of social life” (Webb [1926] 1950: 121). She became dissatisfied
with mere book reading and decided in 1883, at the age of twenty-five, to
become an investigator of social institutions.
Starting in 1883, Webb undertook a series of social studies, focused pri-
marily on the condition of the working class. In november, 1883 she visited
the town of bacup, in east Lancashire, where she had maternal relations. Her
goal was to examine working-class associations and self-help. In 1885 she
became a rent collector in a new block of working-class dwellings located
in the east end of London. Starting in 1886, she joined charles booth’s team
226
of researchers, who were studying east London poverty. While Spencer was
busy in the 1880s criticizing Gladstone’s liberals for passing laws regulating
private enterprise and taxing the rich for the benefit of the poor, Webb was
encountering the grim reality of working-class life (ibid.: 159). She became
more and more critical of Spencer’s social and political views. In her diary,
an entry for July 1884 points to the contradictions in Spencer’s use of the
analogy of the organism to deal with human society. Spencer maintained
that because society is a natural growth it should not be interfered with.
but it was also possible to argue that “the government is a ‘naturally differ-
entiated organ’ … developed by the organism to gratify its own sensations.
This might lead straight to a state socialism.” Webb now denied that social
laws could be deduced from the laws of another science. Only those work-
ing on carefully prepared data could discover these laws. to date, nobody
had collected and classified the data needed to understand english society
(ibid.: 166). On 4 October 1886 she recorded in her diary that she disa-
greed fundamentally with Spencer on how to understand society scientifi-
cally. Whereas she wanted to be empirical, Spencer wanted to use a theory
to prescribe what had to be done. “The object of science”, Webb wrote, “is
to discover what is; not to tell us according to some social ideal what ought
to be” (ibid.: 252).
Looking back, Webb saw her studies of the poor to be the significant
turning point in her life. “The four years between my visit to bacup in 1883
and the publication in 1887 of my first contribution to charles booth’s The
Life and Labours of the People in London were the crucial years of my life”,
she asserted in her autobiography (ibid.: 221). It was during this period that
she learned “the art of social investigator” and that her faith was confirmed
“in the application of the scientific method to social organization” (ibid.:
290). At the same time she became acutely aware of the flaws in Spencer’s
thinking and how they had limited her approach to social and politi-
cal issues. A “queer, deep-rooted fallacy” lay at the “very base of Herbert
Spencer’s administrative nihilism”. This same error pervaded “the capitalist
world in which I was brought up” (ibid.: 292). The error was in thinking that
the system of profit-making belonged to the natural order of things while
state activity, such as factory acts, public health administration, compul-
sory schooling and standard rates of wages, were artificial contrivances that
were doomed to be social failures because they were against nature. There
was, Webb now understood, nothing natural in society. “The plain truth is
that to apply the antithesis of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ to social action”, she
affirmed, “is sheer nonsense”. every social transformation – every devel-
opment of human society – constituted an “experiment in the conduct of
life” (ibid.: 293). And Webb realized that the industrial revolution, with its
terrible consequences for the british working class, had been “a gigantic
227
and cruel experiment which, in so far as it was affecting their homes, their
health, their subsistence and their pleasure, was proving a calamitous fail-
ure”. The only way to counter the fallacious thinking shared by Spencer and
capitalists alike was to insist on the “supreme value, in all social activity, of
the scientific method” (ibid.: 294).
right up until 1892, Webb concealed the full extent of the growing dis-
tance between her views and Spencer’s. In 1886, when Spencer was hav-
ing trouble summoning the energy to complete his System of Synthetic
Philosophy, he asked Webb if he should continue to work on his autobiog-
raphy or return to his System. Webb noted in her diary that she had recom-
mended that he “continue his autobiography rather than his other work,
those long drawn deductions, wearisome to all except his blind disciples”
(MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1982: 172). In April of 1888, Spencer appointed
Webb as his literary executor. “He can think of me as the child whom he has
trained”, Webb observed (MacKenzie 1978: 62). but behind his back, Webb
was consorting with socialists. In 1891 she was taking care of Spencer’s
house in St John’s Wood while the philosopher was out of the country. After
inviting a succession of trade unionists to dine, she composed an entry in
her diary that revealed a hint of guilt. “poor Herbert Spencer”, she wrote.
“to think that his august drawing-room is nightly the scene of socialist talk,
clouds of tobacco, aided with whisky” (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1982: 361).
but when her engagement to the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was made
public, it was impossible for her to hide how far they had grown apart.
Spencer told her he could no longer have her as his literary executor. He
feared it would damage his reputation (ibid.: 368).
nevertheless, they remained friends. Webb visited him right up until his
death. In 1900 she stayed with Spencer for a week. “He still retains his per-
sonal affection for me,” she noted, “more out of habit, I think, for every
year he becomes more suspicious of our aims and of our power of reaching
these aims” (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1983: 197). Webb had rejected two
key components of Spencer’s System. The day after his death, Webb recalled
what had led her to question the master during the 1880s. “Once engaged in
the application of the scientific method to the facts of social organization in
my observations of east end life, of co-operation, of Factory Acts, of trade
unionism,” she wrote in her diary, “I shook myself completely free from
laissez-faire bias – in fact I suffered from a somewhat violent reaction from
it.” As for Spencer’s impact on her religious thought, Webb came to see his
philosophy as materialistic. “In later years,” she wrote:
even the attitude towards religion and towards supernaturalism

which I had accepted from him as the last word of enlightenment
have become replaced by another attitude, no less agnostic but
228
with an inclination to doubt materialism more than I doubt spir-

itualism, to listen for voices in the great Unknown to open my
consciousness to the non-material world – in prayer.
(MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1983: 307)
Webb repudiated the overly rationalistic religion of science, based on

Spencer’s Unknowable, and in her move to socialism had cast off his notion
of social organism as unscientific and capitalistic. but it was Spencer who had
originally taught her to value the scientific method and to think about social
issues from a scientific perspective. Despite her move away from Spencer, she
brought these lessons with her when she became a socialist.
Grant Allen and cosmic evolution
On 20 February 1897 Spencer wrote to Allen, who had been writing a book
on the evolution of religion. Spencer pleaded with Allen to rethink the title.
“Let me beg of you not to use the proposed title for your new book,” Spencer
wrote, “‘The evolution of God.’ It will be a fatal slip” (clodd 1900: 174).
Spencer pointed out that although Allen’s recent sensation novel, The Woman
Who Did (1895), had sold well, it had led to a backlash against his fiction. In
this novel, Allen told the tragic story of an advanced Girton graduate who
chose to “live in sin” rather than be enslaved by marriage. Spencer believed
that since Allen had dared to tackle such a controversial topic, the demand
for his fiction had dropped. If Allen adopted the title The Evolution of God
the result would be even “more disastrous”. “The expression is sufficient to
shock not only the orthodox, but no end of people who are extremely liberal
in their theology and you would tend by using it still further to diminish your
public”, Spencer warned. Moreover, Spencer argued that the title was illogical
and misleading. He pointed out that Allen was not tracing the evolution of
“something you believe in as a reality”. On the contrary, “you do not believe
in God’s reality, and therefore propose to trace the evolution of a thing which,
according to you, does not exist”. Spencer suggested several alternate titles,
one of which, “evolution of the ‘Idea’ of God”, Allen eventually used for the
book published in 1897 (clodd 1900: 174–6). but Allen never altered his
commitment to atheism; he was not attracted to Spencer’s worship of the
Unknowable. For Allen, being a Spencerian meant disseminating the concept
of cosmic evolution, a process that operated in a godless universe. Although
Webb had a deeper personal bond with Spencer than Allen, it was Allen who
played a more important role in bringing Spencer’s ideas to the public.
charles Grant blairfindie Allen (1848–99) was born in Kingston, canada,
the son of J. Antisell Allen, then incumbent of the Holy trinity church on
229
Wolfe Island. Allen graduated from Merton college, Oxford in 1871 and
became a schoolteacher. He took a teaching post at the new Queen’s college
at Spanish town, Jamaica, for several years, but returned to england in 1876
when the college closed. He then began a career as a prolific popularizer of
science, producing countless periodical articles and over eighteen science
books, many of which contained collections of his essays. Allen became
the master of the short scientific essay, contributing to such periodicals
as Belgravia, Cornhill Magazine, Fortnightly Review, Longman’s Magazine,
Pall Mall Gazette and Knowledge. Allen had ambitions to be more than a
popularizer of science. His books Physiological Aesthetics (1877) and The
Colour-Sense (1879) were intended as original scientific works that applied
evolutionary theory to new domains. but Allen was unable to earn enough
to support his family through science journalism, and beginning in 1880 he
began to shift his energies to writing novels and short stories. Allen’s liter-
ary writings brought him financial success and the respect of such authors
as Arthur conan Doyle and George Meredith. but he continued to produce
scientific works, and his fiction served as a means for pushing forward his
evolutionary agenda.
Whereas Spencer was a constant visitor to the potter household even
before she was born, Allen did not meet Spencer until he was a young
man. Allen’s father, who admired Spencer, exposed his son to the philoso-
pher at an early age. While he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Allen read
Spencer’s First Principles and The Principles of Biology. When he was in
Jamaica he read The Principles of Psychology several times, which inspired
him to write to Spencer on 10 november 1874 to express his apprecia-
tion of his work (Allen 1904: 612). He included a poem he had written
in Spencer’s honour, praising the philosopher’s intellectual achievements.
“My sole object in sending you these lines”, he told Spencer, “is that which
I mention in the concluding stanza – to render you thanks for the personal
assistance you have rendered me in interpreting the phenomena of the
universe” (Spencer papers: MS 791/102[i]). pleased by the verses, Spencer
replied on 10 December 1874, writing, “your letter and its enclosure are
so unusual in their kinds, that ordinary forms of response seem scarcely
appropriate. Fitly to acknowledge so strong an expression of sympathy
is a task for which I find myself quite unprepared”. Spencer then noted
that only a few were able to see the general purpose running through-
out the System of Synthetic Philosophy (Allen 1904: 612–13). encouraged
by Spencer’s response, Allen sent him a paper on “Idealism and evolution”
on 9 February 1875, asking Spencer if he could use his influence with
journal editors to have it published. Spencer advocated for the article to
the editor of the Contemporary Review (Spencer papers: MS 791/104, MS
791/108).
230
When Allen returned to england in 1876 he arranged to meet Spencer,

although he was disappointed that his hero looked like “the confidential
clerk of an old house in the city” (Allen 1904: 614). nevertheless, Allen kept
in contact with Spencer as he tried to build a career as a scientific writer.
On 26 February 1877 he wrote to Spencer asking if he could dedicate his
Physiological Aesthetics to Spencer, noting, “everything which I say in it is
strictly in accordance with your views of psychological evolution” (Spencer
papers: MS 791/117). Spencer reacted with enthusiasm. On 28 February
1877, Spencer wrote that the book deserved “a great success” and that it
would “be a very valuable development of evolution doctrines”. Then he
assented to the proposed dedication, explicitly designating Allen as his dis-
ciple. “I think I shall have every reason to be proud of a disciple”, Spencer
wrote, “who achieves so important an extension of the general theory as
this which your work promises to do” (clodd 1900: 61). The dedication
read: “The Greatest of Living philosophers, Herbert Spencer, I Dedicate (by
permission) This Slight Attempt to extend in a single Direction the General
principles Which He Has Laid Down” (Allen 1877).
Six months later, on 16 August 1877, Allen was in touch with Spencer
again, telling him that “quasi-prophetic passages” in Spencer’s works had
led him to write another poem. titled “pisgah”, it depicted Spencer as a
Moses-like figure who looked down on the promised land of milk and
honey knowing that he will never reach it, but realizing that due to his work
the next generation would enjoy this paradise (Spencer papers: MS 791/123
[i–ii]). two years later, in a letter on 22 June 1879, Allen thanked Spencer
for sending him the recently published Data of Ethics, and remarked
that completion of the System of Synthetic Philosophy was not that far off.
Despite Spencer’s fears about the significant work remaining to be done,
Allen encouraged him that “your great work will yet be finished” (Spencer
papers: MS 791/134). The following year Allen was working on an article
defending Spencer from the damaging charge of atheism. Spencer and Allen
colluded on the piece. On 8 July 1880, Spencer told his American disciple
e. L. Youmans that “the materials for it, which I have furnished for him,
are abundantly strong, and will, if rightly put together, form a very telling
response to their attacks” (Duncan [1908] 1911: 221). In his “The Ways of
Orthodox critics”, Allen declared that Spencer was too busy completing
his System of Synthetic Philosophy to respond to his critics, so Allen had
assumed the task of defending him. He argued that orthodox critics had
“either wilfully or with culpable negligence” misrepresented Spencer’s true
views (Allen 1880: 274, 299).
Allen was not content merely to defend Spencer from attack. From the
mid-1870s to the end of the 1880s, Allen wrote a series of articles and
books praising Spencer’s genius as the great founder of a system of cosmic
231
evolutionism. The appeal of Spencer as system builder is obvious in the

first poem that Allen wrote in his honour in 1874.1 titled “to Herbert
Spencer”, the poem refers to the philosopher of evolution as the “deepest
and mightiest of our later seers” who had “read the universal plan”. Spencer
is described as possessing a special cosmic insight that penetrates through
time and space:
no partial system could suffice for thee

Whose eye has scanned the boundless realms of space,
Gazed, through the aeons, on the fiery sea,
And caught, faint glimpses of that awful face
Which, clad with earth and heaven and souls of men,
Veils its mysterious shape forever from our ken.
Spencer is the “skilful architect” who joins “part to part” to build “a grand
consistent whole” (Spencer papers: MS 791/102 [ii]). Allen believed that
Spencer was a more important evolutionist than Darwin. In his biographi-
cal study Charles Darwin (1885), Allen credited Darwin with showing that
evolution was scientifically valid and applicable to the human sciences. but
Spencer, “the other great prophet of the evolutionary creed”, was responsi-
ble for establishing “the total esoteric philosophic conception of evolution
as a cosmical process, one and continuous from nebula to man, from star
to soul, from atom to society” (Allen 1885: 191). two years later, in “The
progress of Science From 1836 to 1886”, Allen emphasized, even more, that
Spencer’s contribution to evolutionary science was greater than Darwin’s.
It was to Spencer that we owed “the word evolution itself, and the general
concept of evolution as a single all-pervading natural process”. It was “in
Spencer”, and not Darwin, that “evolutionism finds it personal avatar: he
has been at once its prophet, its priest, its architect, and its builder” (Allen
1887: 875–6). Allen also disseminated Spencer’s cosmic evolutionism in his
short natural history essays as well as in his novels. In the first he drew the
evolutionary epic out of the history of a common object in nature, like a
feather, nut or berry; in the second he set the plots of his fiction within the
world of Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy (Lightman 2007: 272–5;
cowie 2000: 159).
Allen’s relationship with Spencer changed significantly in 1890. Owing
to Allen’s growing support for socialism, he could no longer be the uncriti-
cally devoted disciple. According to Allen, Spencer’s letter of 23 October
1. Spencer liked the poem and sent it to edward Youmans, who had it published in
Popular Science Monthly (Allen 1875). Later, Allen put it into his The Lower Slopes
(1894a).
232
1890 was the only one in which Spencer touched “at all seriously on the
crying political differences which now divided us”. Spencer had heard
from beatrice Webb (still potter at the time) that Allen had “turned social-
ist”. Spencer had hoped that “there might be some mistake; but a verifica-
tion reached me a day or two ago under the form of a statement that you
have been lecturing on the subject”. Allen noted that in the letter Spencer
used a “chillier” form of address (Allen 1904: 626). Allen’s turn to social-
ism opened up a rift with Spencer that lasted until Allen’s death. Allen
aired some of his criticisms of Spencer publicly. One of the characters in
his three-volume novel Dumaresq’s Daughter (1891) is engaged in writing
an ambitious encyclopaedic philosophy. Haviland Dumaresq is an eccen-
tric hypocrite who grasps the unity of nature only when under the influ-
ence of opium (Lightman 2007: 287). It is not clear that Spencer ever read
the book. but after Spencer learned about Allen’s socialist sympathies from
Webb, he believed that he could not be linked publicly with him. When
Spencer needed to appoint a new literary executor in 1892, he ruled out
Allen owing to his socialism (Webb [1926] 1950: 29). However, like Webb,
Allen remained friends with Spencer despite their growing political differ-
ences. After reading Allen’s article on the late John tyndall, which referred
to Spencer as the “philosopher and organizer of the evolutionary move-
ment”, Spencer wrote to Allen on 18 november 1895 to thank him (Allen
1894b: 21). “You have, as always before,” Spencer told Allen, “proved your-
self a most outspoken and efficient advocate” (Duncan [1908] 1911: 377).
When Spencer heard that Allen was ill in 1899, he invited him to stay with
him while he recovered. On 2 June 1899 he wrote to Allen to say, “I am
glad to hear that your wife thinks that you have profited by your stay here”.
but Spencer warned that total recovery was dependent on whether or not
Allen improved his “mastication”. Then he launched into a lecture on the
importance of reducing food to small fragments. “That you, a scientific
man,” Spencer remonstrated, “should not recognize this is to me astonish-
ing” (ibid.: 415).
However, Allen concealed the depth of his antagonism to Spencer while
he was still alive. In an extraordinary article that appeared in 1904, five years
after Allen’s death, and shortly after Spencer’s death, Allen revealed the full
extent of his apostasy. Allen had written “personal reminiscences of Herbert
Spencer” in 1894, but would not permit publication while Spencer was still
alive (Allen 1904: 610). Allen realized that Spencer, who was extremely
sensitive, would be devastated if he knew how far they had drifted apart.
Allen started off by stating that Spencer “possessed the finest brain and the
most marvelous intellect ever yet vouchsafed to human being” (ibid.). He
repeated his profound respect for Spencer’s power as the builder of a system
of cosmic evolution. “no man”, Allen declared, “ever correlated all the facts
233
of the universe, physical and spiritual, into so magnificent, so consistent,

and so profound a synthesis”. but Spencer was deeply flawed, as a social and
political thinker, and as a human being. to Allen, and here he agreed with
Webb, Spencer had developed his intellect at the cost of his emotions. “He
was pure intellect”, Allen asserted, “and little more: the apotheosis of reason
in a human organism” (ibid.: 610–11).
Allen devoted more space to his disagreements with Spencer on social
and political issues. He believed that “especially toward the end of his life,
I think he went often grievously wrong, more particularly in his social and
political thinking”. Allen’s chief criticism was that Spencer’s “so-called indi-
vidualism did not hang together with the rest of his philosophy”. In accept-
ing all the currently existing inequalities and injustices in Victorian society,
Spencer made it impossible for true individualism to flourish. Socialism, in
Allen’s opinion, offered the “only real hope to the thorough-going and con-
sistent individualist of the future”. Instead of following out his “own early
principle of land nationalization” to its logical socialist conclusion, Spencer
had remained trapped in “the bourgeois political economy of the thirties
and forties”. Although Allen believed that Spencer’s political theories “had
never much real organic connection with his general system”, his rejection
of this component of Spencer’s thought raised serious questions in his mind
about the internal consistency of the entire System of Synthetic Philosophy
(Allen 1904: 610, 627).
Allen devoted much of his career as a writer to disseminating the key
conception of cosmic evolution at the heart of Spencer’s System of Synthetic
Philosophy. He wanted the public to be fully aware of the important con-
tributions that Spencer had made to the establishment of evolution as
the defining idea of the nineteenth century. “It is a strange proof of how
little people know about their own ideas”, Allen told the audience of the
Cornhill Magazine in 1888, “that among the thousands who talk glibly
every day of evolution, not ten per cent are probably aware that both word
and conception are alike due to the commanding intelligence and vast gen-
eralizing power of Herbert Spencer” (Allen 1888a: 47). but for Allen, the
Unknowable was not an important element in Spencer’s system. After 1890,
neither was the emphasis in Spencer’s social and political thought on the
abstract individual, which Allen linked to outmoded bourgeois political
economy. Allen had begun as a disciple who celebrated the cosmic evolu-
tionary process underlying the organic unity of Spencer’s system. by the
1890s, he believed that religious, political and social components of the
system could be detached somehow without affecting the integrity of the
whole. In the end, despite his continued praise for Spencer as a great syn-
thesizer, Allen offered the Victorian public mere fragments of his master’s
evolutionary system.
234
Agnostic secularists, the religion of the Unknowable

and the politics of evolution
In 1885 the Agnostic Annual carried an announcement of the establishment

of the “AGnOStIc teMpLe” in south London. It was intended to be “the
first attempt at organisation on avowedly Agnostic principles”. The temple
was to disseminate knowledge of “the teachings of Agnosticism by the dis-
tribution of literature, the holding of meetings”. regular weekly meetings
would be held with a programme consisting of music, readings, and a short
address (Watts 1885a: 54). A similar notice appeared in the Agnostic (Watts
1885b: 48). The religion of agnosticism to be practised at this temple was
tied to Spencer in the pages of both journals. Six months after the announce-
ment of the founding of the temple, the Agnostic praised Albert Simmons’s
Exposition of the Spencerian Philosophy, and referred to it as an “Agnostic
text-book” (Watts 1885d: 335). In the September issue for 1885, Spencer
was again the central topic of an article in the Agnostic. Defending Spencer
against a critic, the piece referred to him as the “great master” (Watts 1885e:
432). both the Agnostic Annual and the Agnostic were filled with expressions
of admiration for Spencer and his conception of agnosticism. The Agnostic
extolled the “cultured Agnosticism of Mr Herbert Spencer” while one of the
three quotes on the title page of the Agnostic Annual for many years was
Spencer proclaiming the existence of an “utterly inscrutable” power in the
universe (Watts 1885c: 142).
It is no coincidence that these journals were so filled with acclaim for
Spencer. charles Albert Watts (1858–1946) founded both of them. He was
the son of charles Watts (1836–1906), a leading english Secularist. Watts’s
respect for his father and the tradition of non-militant unbelief led him
to envisage a new strategy in the middle of the 1880s to counter charles
bradlaugh’s more aggressive secularism. Impressed by the success of
middle-class unbelievers like t. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he decided
to model his strategy on their methods by adopting agnosticism as the term
describing his religious position. He hoped to distance himself from the
vulgarity of militant, working-class freethought and to form an alliance with
respectable middle-class agnostics (Lightman 1989). His journals were key
parts of his strategy. Frederick James Gould, who was part of Watts’s circle,
recalled that the short-lived Agnostic “gave to Herbert Spencer a homage
that came close to reverence”. According to Gould, Spencer was the first to
subscribe to the journal (Gould 1929: 2).
When Watts took over his father’s publishing business in 1884, he had the
opportunity to experiment with his new strategy for dissident secularism.
Watts, who wrote little himself, formed a group of writers who shared his
commitment to reputable secularism. They supplied books and articles for his
235
journals. The group included Simmons, whose succinct summary of Spencer’s

First Principles was published by Watts in 1885. It also included richard
bithell (1821–1902), who wrote Agnostic Problems (1887), The Worship of the
Unknowable (n.d. [c. 1889]), and A Handbook of Scientific Agnosticism (1892)
for Watts & co. In addition, bithell was a prolific contributor to the Agnostic
Annual. born at Lewes, Sussex, bithell was the son of a smithy. He taught
mathematics and chemistry for the british and Foreign Schools Society and
received a phD from Göttingen University and a bSc from London. From
1865 until his retirement in 1898 he worked at the banking house of the
rothschilds (Mccabe 1920: 78; Anon. 1903: 8–9). Gould (1855–1938) was
another important member of Watts’s group of Spencerian agnostics. Gould’s
poor family sent him at the age of ten to St George’s chapel, Windsor castle,
to sing in the choir. In 1871 he became a zealous evangelical, but after increas-
ing doubts he began to participate in the secularist movement. He wrote sev-
eral important books for Watts & co, including Stepping Stones to Agnosticism
(1890) and he wrote a series of articles for the Agnostic Annual. He taught
for the London School board from 1877 to 1896, but resigned to work in the
ethical movement, and later became secretary of the Leicester Secular Society
(Gould 1923; Mccabe 1920: 300–301). Watts published Agnosticism and
Christianity (n.d. [c. 1885]) by Samuel Laing (1811–97) as well as articles by
him in the Agnostic Annual. Laing’s other books, published by chapman and
Hall – Modern Science and Modern Thought (1885), A Modern Zoroastrian
(1887), and Problems of the Future (1892) – won him an influence with the
general public equal to some of the chief thinkers of the day. Unlike the other
secularists, Laing had a middle-class background and a cambridge educa-
tion. He was chairman of the London, brighton and South coast railway for
over thirty years, and served as a Liberal Mp almost continuously from 1852
to 1885 (Seccombe 1917).
Although none of the agnostic secularists had personal relationships with
Spencer like Webb and Allen, they hailed him as a great genius to which they,
and other secularists, were indebted for insight into humanity’s true place
in the cosmic scheme of things. Like Allen, they ranked Spencer and his
intellectual achievements well above those of Darwin. In his Agnostic First
Principles, purportedly an abstract of Spencer’s First Principles, Simmons
described Spencer as “the greatest philosopher that the world has ever seen”.
but Spencer, according to Simmons, was a distinguished scientist as well.
Darwin, who was widely acknowledged by scientists to be a pre-eminent
collector of facts, could not compare with Spencer. “by the side of Spencer,”
Simmons declared, “Darwin is a dwarf ” (Simmons 1885: 1, 4). Members of
Watts’s group also expressed how much they owed to Spencer for their intel-
lectual development. In the preface to Simmons’s Agnostic First Principles,
bithell remarked:
236
I am indebted to Mr Spencer’s works more than to those of any

other writer, and it gives me pleasure to have an opportunity of
publicly saying so; and partly because I am glad to assist, in how-
ever humble a degree, in directing the attention of readers to what
I consider some of the most important truths the human mind
can contemplate. (Ibid.: v)
The secularist agnostics did not believe that they were unusual in being
indebted to Spencer. Laing affirmed that Spencer’s speculations “have undoubt-
edly exercised a great influence on modern thought, especially among the ris-
ing generation” (1893: 226), while Gould maintained that Spencer’s “doctrine
of the Unknowable is assented to by so many professed Agnostics” that it con-
stituted one of the three cardinal beliefs in the agnostic creed (1890: 91).
Scholars have pointed out that contemporaries saw Spencer as a “prophet
of a new religion” based on a belief in the shadowy deity that he referred
to as the Unknowable (Francis 2007: 155). taylor asserts, “a large part of
the appeal of First Principles was as the source of an alternative faith to
christianity” (2007: 141). This is especially true of the dissident secular-
ists who worked with Watts. They enthusiastically recommended worship-
ping the Unknowable. Unlike Allen, they saw the Unknowable as the key
to Spencer’s entire philosophy. They saw this form of religion as verified
by the findings of modern science and therefore as rationally acceptable to
the thinking individual. The law of evolution acquired its teleological char-
acter thanks to Spencer’s deity. Directed by a divine being, the evolution-
ary process was progressive. It gradually eliminated evil and the suffering
that accompanied it (Lightman 1989: 296–300). bithell reminded his read-
ers that one of the “manifestations of the Unknowable” was a principle at
work in nature: “a tendency towards the Elimination of evil” (bithell 1883:
102). to Simmons, Spencer’s religion of the Unknowable was far superior
to comte’s religion of humanity. The System of Synthetic Philosophy held
“that the object of religious sentiment will ever continue to be that which it
has ever been – the unknown source of things”, Simmons declared. “Having
in the course of evolution come to have for its object of contemplation the
Infinite Unknowable, the religion sentiment can never again (unless by ret-
rogression) take a Finite Knowable, like Humanity, for its object of contem-
plation” (Simmons 1885: 6). The worship of the unknowable was the next
stage in the evolution of religion. Laing agreed with Simmons. The growing
demand among the working classes for schools, libraries, museums, music
halls, mutual-aid societies and amusement were the:
plastic cells multiplying and forming new combinations, out of

which, in due time, will be evolved the “priests and temples, the
237
rites and ceremonies,” and other institutions requisite to give life

and form to the demonstrated truth of the “great Unknowable”.
(Laing 1892: 222)
bithell also insisted that the “Unknowable is … the proper object of our
highest worship”. Whereas all knowable existences could eventually be “rel-
egated to science”, the Unknowable was “the sole object” that could never
become an object of knowledge. “The absolutely Unknowable”, bithell
asserted, “can never be dethroned from its exalted position as the object of
supreme worship, of unwavering belief, or of pure faith” (bithell 1888: 124).
The Unknowable provided an impregnable rock upon which to anchor a
stable religion. bithell wrote an entire book devoted to the issue of how to
worship the Unknowable. For bithell, worship involved a “contemplation of
the ways in which the Unknowable manifests itself ” in nature. christianity,
which demanded the worship of an “anthropomorphic personal Deity”,
sneered at nature and asked agnostics “what consolation can you get from
a faith in the reign of law, from which all trace of a loving, pitying, watchful
father is blotted out”. but bithell maintained that:
science teaches that the reign of law and the inflexibility of

nature’s behaviour constitute her chief claim on our gratitude,
since it is the invariability of law, the uniformity of nature which
makes science, invention, and live itself possible and permanent
things. (Ibid.: 7)
contemplating the ways in which the Unknowable manifested itself should

lead to a feeling of gratitude and a desire to conform to the laws of nature,
“which are the laws of God”. Since aspiration was the very essence of prayer,
bithell maintained, and the most “legitimate object of aspiration [is] to know
more of the laws of nature,” practicing science was the most important form
of prayer (ibid.: 9).
The secularist agnostics’ devotion to the Unknowable led them to pre-
fer Spencer to Huxley as the pre-eminent exemplar of agnosticism, despite
the fact that Huxley was the one who had coined the term. In 1889, Gould
was working on what would become Stepping-Stones to Agnosticism (1890).
to help him prepare he read Huxley’s article on agnosticism published in
the February 1889 issue of the Nineteenth Century. This article contains
Huxley’s first public declaration of his invention of the term. Gould was
surprised to find that Huxley and Spencer disagreed significantly on the
status of the Unknowable. He wrote to Huxley on 23 December 1889, asking
if he affirmed its existence. Huxley responded to Gould, accusing Spencer of
succumbing to crude idolatry in his worship of negative abstractions. David
238
Hume, Immanuel Kant and William Hamilton had destroyed the notion
of an Absolute, Huxley wrote. Spencer’s Unknowable was “the Absolute
redivivus, a sort of ghost of an extinct philosophy, the name of a nega-
tion hocus-pocussed into a sham thing” (clodd 1902: 220–21). but in his
Stepping-Stones to Agnosticism, Gould insisted that affirming the existence
of an Unknowable was one of the three primary principles of the mod-
ern agnostic position, and offered a summary of Spencer’s First Principles
(Gould 1890: 88–91; Lightman 1987: 142). Spencer, not Huxley, was the
almost infallible master for the agnostic secularists. Although the agnostic
secularists focused primarily on religious, philosophical and metaphysical
issues, relying on Spencer’s First Principles for their agnosticism, when they
dealt with politics and society they looked more to Spencer than to Huxley.
They embraced a form of liberal radicalism, although not outright social-
ism, believing that it was more in line with evolutionary theory. Laing, who
was the political spokesman for the agnostic secularists, traced the growth
of his democratic convictions during the course of his political career in
the January 1884 issue of the Fortnightly Review. He was astonished to find
how far he had moved from his original sympathy with peelite liberalism
towards the radicalism of Joseph chamberlain. He justified this “gradual
process of ‘political evolution’” by depicting it as a healthy experience shared
by many other sincere Liberal politicians. In his own case, the conversion to
“rational radicalism” had come about through familiarity with the events
in the United States, where democracy had proved to be wise and successful.
The english aristocracy, by contrast, had been on the wrong side in all the
great questions of foreign policy, choosing to pursue a course of action con-
trary to the well-considered and permanent interests of the entire country.
to Laing, recent history demonstrated that the aristocracy could no longer
rest their claim to superior power on the basis of greater political wisdom
(Laing 1884: 74–5, 78–9, 88).
Six years later, Huxley’s essay “On the natural Inequality of Men” (1890)
spurred Laing to enlarge on his political convictions in the Contemporary
Review. He began his article “Aristocracy or Democracy” (1890) by not-
ing how remarkable it was that Huxley, long looked upon as the most bril-
liant champion of advanced thought, now proposed the same fossilized tory
principles put forward ever since the controversies that surrounded the first
reform bill. Huxley supported the aristocratic theory that the best govern-
ment is selected by a small, hereditary, privileged class who, on account of
superior wealth and education, understand political questions better than
the masses. The democratic theory took the opposite position. According
to this theory, the best government was obtained from the “outcome of the
varied opinions and conflicting views of a very large number of voters”,
composing nearly the whole of the adult community (Laing 1890: 525, 527).
239
to decide which of the two theories was best, Laing applied “the sur-
est test of truth, whether in scientific, or in political and social evolution,
‘the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence’”. Laing argued that
the democratic theory had proved that it was better. countries in which
democratic principles prevailed, such as the United States, had managed the
struggle for existence far better than countries in which aristocratic princi-
ples operated. Whereas the foreign and domestic policy of the United States
had been successful on the whole, the aristocratic principles embraced by
england had served only to weaken the country’s position in the world.
Had england been left to the guidance of the select few, all of the beneficial
reforms of the previous sixty years, such as the reform bills, the education
Act, Free trade and the repeal of the corn Laws, would have been rejected,
and england would have experienced a revolution. The aristocracy, in
Laing’s opinion, had become a useless organ inhibiting the social organ-
ism’s struggle to survive. The “enervating influences of luxury and idleness”
had rendered the aristocracy unfit and out of step with the political views of
most of their countrymen. Laing concluded that Huxley’s aristocratic theory
was bound to lose credence as the aristocracy themselves succumbed to the
“inevitable progress of democracy” (Laing 1890: 527, 529–31, 536).
to Laing, Huxley had become more conservative because he had not
realized that a “right appreciation of first principles and of the history of
evolution are useful in enabling us to state the conditions of social and
political problems”. Huxley had failed to understand the true implications
of evolutionary theory for contemporary politics. Strikingly, Laing recom-
mended that Huxley read Spencer to correct his error. “At the same time I
so far agree with Herbert Spencer”, Laing declared:
as to think that it is not only interesting, but may be useful in

arriving at practical conclusions, to trace back the results which
have survived in the course of evolution of civilized societies, as
far as possible to their origin or first principles, so as to see what
factors have become permanent and inevitable, and what are tem-
porary and evanescent. (1890: 526)
Although Huxley was right to reject the axiom that all men are born equal,
“he might study Herbert Spencer with advantage in tracing the conditions
under which this axiom, absurd as an absolute conclusion, has yet in some
cases a real element of truth” (ibid.; Lightman 1989: 303–6).
Starting in the middle of the 1880s, Watts & co published a series of
articles and books by bithell, Laing, Simmons and Gould that disseminated
the principles of agnosticism. These publications were part of Watts’s strat-
egy to chart a respectable course for secularists unhappy with bradlaugh’s
240
aggressive atheism. by adopting agnosticism as their creed, these men were

imitating the strategy of middle-class unbelievers. but they were attracted
more to Spencer’s concept of agnosticism than Huxley’s or Darwin’s, and
more to Spencer’s application of evolution to political issues than Huxley’s.
referring to Spencer as the master, they highlighted the theistic dimension
of his Unknowable. They treated the Unknowable as the centre of a new faith,
destined to be the next phase in the evolution of religion. Although they
were interested in other aspects of Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy,
such as his political and social theories, his religious ideas were seen as
his most important contribution to modern thought. Spencer himself was
unhappy with those who put too much emphasis on his Unknowable and
who neglected the rest of his system. According to the rationalist A. W.
benn, Spencer complained to him in a letter, “people took more interest
in the portico … that is to say, the metaphysical introduction to his philo-
sophical edifice – than in its interior” (benn n.d.: 141; taylor 2007: 142).
The agnostic secularists were disciples of a somewhat reluctant prophet. but
their interpretation of Spencer’s philosophy of evolution reached a signifi-
cant readership in the 1880s, and later an even larger audience was exposed
to freethought and agnosticism when Watts flooded the market with cheap
reprints of nineteenth-century evolutionary works. The rationalist press
Association, which he founded in 1899, published books by Huxley, ernst
Haeckel, and Spencer (Stein 1981: 79). Watts attempted to turn his head-
quarters at Johnson’s court into a propaganda machine that would rival the
Society for promoting christian Knowledge and the religious tract Society.
Conclusion: dismantling the system
In 1894, Allen looked back at the complicated relationship between the first
and second generation of evolutionists. He observed, “all the men of that
first generation who spread the evolutionary doctrine among us are now
reactionary in politics”. tyndall, Huxley and Spencer were “bitterly hostile
to the Socialism of the future”. but “the younger brood whom they trained
have gone on to be radicals, Fabians, Socialists”, although “the germs of Land
nationalisation, and of that extreme individualism which can only be real-
ized in a Socialist commonwealth, were derived direct by most of us from
Social Statics”. He concluded, “each generation finds the conclusions drawn
from its premises by the men who succeed it go a great deal too far for it”
(Allen 1894b: 25). For Allen, the gulf between Spencer and his disciples could
be attributed to generational revolt. Webb also emphasized the generational
context when she reflected on the evolution of her religious beliefs shortly
after Spencer’s death. She had begun as a christian, and then became an
241
agnostic materialist under Spencer’s influence. but later she rejected materi-
alism and found meaning in opening her “consciousness to the non-material
world – in prayer”. Strikingly, she believed that if she had to live her life over
again according to her current attitude in 1903, she would remain a member
of the Anglican church. “My case”, she wrote in her diary, “I think, is typical
of the rise and fall of Herbert Spencer’s influence over the men and women
of my own generation” (MacKenzie & MacKenzie 1983: 307–8).
but the generational revolt against Spencer was more complicated than
Allen and Webb imagined. The rebels can be divided into at least two main
camps. taylor has argued that Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy was
inherently unstable since he was attempting to “graft the flesh of nineteenth-
century positivism onto the bones of eighteenth-century deism”. Whereas
Spencer had acquired the latter from members of the Derby philosophical
Society, the former came to him later from his friends in the chapman
circle (taylor 2007: 8, 20). This points to a crucial distinction between
the agnostic secularists on one side, and Webb and Allen on the other.
The agnostic secularists, who were part of a radical tradition with roots
in eighteenth-century deism, were attracted to what Spencer shared with
the pre-Darwinian worldview in which nature was a scene of benevolent
design (taylor 2007: 150). The agnostic secularists were so enamoured with
Spencer’s Unknowable that they made it the central focus of his philosophy
almost to the exclusion of almost everything else. If the agnostic secularists
were generational rebels, then their revolt was more against Darwinism than
Spencerism. Owing to their commitment to socialism, Webb and Allen were
more attracted to the positivist side of Spencer (despite Webb’s rejection of
materialism). Webb emphasized the need to construct a scientific method
based on empirical study that could then be applied to change how society
was organized. even though Spencer was far too deductive, his champion-
ing of evolutionary science had led the way. Allen was critical of Spencer for
making the abstract individual the centre of his social and political thought.
He viewed socialism as being far more scientific than Spencer’s outmoded
liberalism and more consistent with Spencer’s early thought.
The existence of two streams of disciples, attracted to different dimen-
sions of Spencer’s thought, demonstrates that Spencer’s System of Synthetic
Philosophy was not as integrated as he thought. The tensions existing within
it made it possible for different groups or individuals with different agendas
to select the components that suited their needs. even within one stream
of disciples, there were significant disagreements. Allen, the cosmic evo-
lutionist, rejected the Unknowable, and believed that Spencer’s early social
and political thought could be incorporated into socialism, which Spencer
loathed with a passion. Webb agreed with Allen that socialism accorded
more consistently with Spencer’s early thought. but she was attracted to a
242
more religious interpretation of the Unknowable, like the agnostic secular-

ists. In questioning aspects of the System that Spencer had so carefully con-
structed to be an integral whole, his disciples helped to dismantle it. Since
they were so divided on what was to be valued in the System, Spencer’s dis-
ciples contributed to the rather swift decline in his reputation.
243
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bibliography
Select list of Spencer’s works
This list gives the publication details of Spencer’s works when they were first published,
together with details of other editions cited. Spencer papers are held at the University
of London Library.
1842–43. “The proper Sphere of Government”. Letters to The Nonconformist. reprinted

as The Proper Sphere of Government (London: W. brittain, 1843 [1843a]). reprinted
in The Man “Versus” the State: With Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom,
181–264 (Indianapolis, In: Liberty Fund, 1982).
1843b. “Mr Hume and national education”. Nonconformist 3(2): 537–8.
1844. “A Theory concerning the Organ of Wonder”. Zoist 2: 316–25.
1851. Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and
the First of them Developed. London: John chapman. reprinted: (i) (new York: D.
Appleton, 1888); (ii) (new York: robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970).
1852a. “The Development Hypothesis”. Leader (20 March): 280–81. reprinted in his
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Library Edition, 1–7 (London: Longman
& robert, 1901).
1852b. Letter to t. H. Huxley, 25 September. papers of t. H. Huxley, college Archives,
Imperial college London, 7.94–95.
1852c. “The philosophy of Style”. Westminster Review 58 (October): 435–59. reprinted
in his Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 1, 227–61 (London: Longmans,
brown, Green).
1852d. “A Theory of population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility”.
Westminster Review 57 (April): 468–501.
1853. “The Universal postulate”. Westminster Review 60(118), (n.s. vol. 4) (1 October):
513–50.
1855. The Principles of Psychology. London: Longman, brown, Green, and Longmans/
new York: D. Appleton. Second edition published in instalments and reprinted in 2
vols (London: Williams & norgate, 1870, 1872). Third edition, 2 vols (new York: D.
Appleton, 1897).
1857a. “progress: Its Law and cause”. Westminster Review 67: 445–85. reprinted in
245
b i b l i o g r a ph y
(i) Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative, 1–54 (London, Longman, 1858); (ii)
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Library Edition, 8–62 (London: Longman
& robert, 1901).
1857b. “The Ultimate Laws of physiology”. National Review 5: 332–55.
1857, 1863, 1874. Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, 3 vols. London: (i) vol. 1,
Longmans, brown Green; (ii) vols 2 and 3, Williams & norgate. reprinted in 3 vols in
a new edition containing essays from the 1880s (London: Williams & norgate, 1891).
1860. “The Social Organism”. Westminster Review 17: 90–121. reprinted in his Essays:
Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Library Edition, 265–307 (London: Longman &
robert, 1901).
1861. Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical. London: Williams & norgate. reprinted
(paterson, nJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1963).
1862. First Principles. London: Williams & norgate. reprinted (new York. A. L. burt,
1888). Third edition (London: Williams & norgate, 1875).
1864–67. The Principles of Biology, 2 vols. London: Williams & norgate. reprinted (new
York: D. Appleton, 1897, 1899, 1900).
1865. “Mill versus Hamilton – The test of truth”. Fortnightly Review I: 531–50.
1871. “Specialized Administration”. Fortnightly Review 10: 627–54. reprinted in Essays:
Scientific, Political and Speculative, vol. 3 (London: Williams & norgate, 1874).
1873. The Study of Sociology. London: Henry S. King/boston, MA: Kegan paul, trench.
reprinted (1873, 1898).
1873–1881. Descriptive Sociology; or Groups of Sociological Facts, parts 1–8. London,
Williams & norgate.
1874–96. The Principles of Sociology, part publication followed by 3 vols. London:
Williams & norgate/new York: D. Appleton, 1888. Volume 1 reprinted in a 2nd edi-
tion (London: Williams & norgate, 1877). reprinted in 4 vols (new brunswick, nJ:
transaction, 2002).
1879. The Data of Ethics. new York: D. Appleton. reprinted with an introduction by J.
H. turner (new brunswick, nJ: transaction, 2012).
1884. The Man “Versus” the State. London: Williams & norgate. reprinted in The Man
“Versus” the State: With Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom (Indianapolis,
In: Liberty Fund, 1982).
1887. The Factors of Organic Evolution. London: Williams & norgate.
1892–93. The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. London: Williams & norgate. (part I of this
was published in 1879 under the title The Data of Ethics.) reprinted (new York: D.
Appleton, 1904).
1893a. “The Inadequacy of natural Selection”. Contemporary Review 63: 153–66, 439–56.
1893b. “A rejoinder to professor Weismann”. Contemporary Review 64: 893–912.
1904. An Autobiography, 2 vols. London: Williams & norgate/new York: D. Appleton.
1908. The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, D. Duncan (ed.). London: Methuen.
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index
Abrams, philip 127 booth, charles 127, 226–7

Allen, Grant 190; a defender and disciple bowler, peter 10n1, 111n1, 131n20,
of Spencer 223, 231, 232, 234, 241; and 202–3, 209–10, 214–16, 219
Spencer 224, 229–34, 236, 242; novels bowles, Thomas Gibson 190–91
of 197–8, 237 brain 7, 97, 169, 173, 181; body 123;
anthropology 36, 70, 84, 125–7, 157, 191; comte on cerebral organs and 19;
and Darwin 26; see also kinship development of 26, 156–7, 177; mind
astronomy 8, 182, 183 as 9, 23, 155, 157, 159, 171, 178n29;
Atchison, Heather 186, 187n5, 197n23 phrenologists view 19
Ayer, A. J. 167n18 brinton, crane 88
britain 31, 57, 104, 125, 128, 209, 210,
backhouse, r. 120, 129 223; and America 6, 16, 182; biology
baer, Karl ernst von 15, 24, 26, 91, 108, in 113, 114; Great 21, social science
121 in 114, 120; Spencer’s impact in 6,
bain, Alexander 7, 168, 190 113; Spencer’s view of 57; Victorian
bannister, r. 47, 188n8 113
barberis, Daniela 105, 107, 108 burdett, carolyn 201
barkow, J. H. L. 80 burkhardt, r. W. 205
barth, paul 106 butler, Samuel 210, 219; and Darwin
barton, r. 114 209, 219; the neo-Lamarckians 204,
bateson, William 110n11, 130 208–9, 212–14, 218; novels of 209; see
barzun, Jacques 220 also literature
beck, n. 12 burrow, John W. 50, 199
beer, Gillian 185, 187
bell, A. 96 cameron, brooke 187n5, 197
benn, ernest 45–6 canguilhem, G. 92
bennett, Arnold 188 cantor, G. 120
bentham, Jeremy 21, 120, 139, 142 capitalism 9, 10, 33, 47, 76–7, 220; see also
bergson, Henri 38, 219 laissez-faire
berkove, Lawrence 196 carlyle, Thomas 160n7, 186
bernard, claude 100 carnegie, Andrew 188
bithell, richard 236–7, 238, 240 carneiro, robert L. 185, 186n3, 187n5,
blau, p. 62 188
boakes, robert 25 caron, Joseph A. 114, 115
267
index
carpenter, William b. 97, 99, 166; leading and 3, 7; Milne-edwards and 97–8,
critic of phrenology 24 106; psychophysiology, Spencer and
chamberlain, Joseph 42, 45, 239 154n1; Spencer a distinct intellectual
chambers, robert 121 entity from 116, 118; Spencer and 2,
chalmers, Thomas 181, 182, 182n3 14, 81, 104, 116, 204–5, 217, 232; Spencer
clodd, e. 229, 231, 239 borrowed from 13; Victorians conflated
collini, S. 128 the evolutionary theories of Spencer and
collins, Frederick 223 223; see also anthropology; Alfred russel
collins, randall 83 Wallace; literature; natural selection;
cooley, c. H. 66 Samuel butler; William James
combe, Abram 20 Darwin, erasmus 22, 209, 211, 212
combe, Andrew 29 Darwinism 9–11
combe, George 24, 30; and Spencer Davis, Michael 187n5, 194n17–18
18–20, 22, 26, 27, 31–2; the Scottish Day, Thomas 22
phrenologist 17 Desmond, A. J. 114, 114n4, 208, 217
compayré, G. 16n1, 40 Dewey, John 33, 36–9, 193
comte, Auguste 105; Spencer and 2, Dilke, Sir charles 42
35, 65, 91n2, 107, 124, 142, 142n8; disciples see Spencer’s disciples, Spencer’s
philosophy of science 7, 156; followers
positivism 7–8, 66; view of sociology dissolution 69, 194; and death 1;
64–5, 68, 125, see also brain; religion evolution and 1, 123, 195
condorcet, Jean Antoine nicolas de Dixon, Thomas 112, 123, 133, 197
caritat, Marquis de 120 Draznin, Y. c. 199
condillac, Étienne de bonnot 21 Dreiser, Theodore 184, 188, 194, 195
contemporaries 8, 170; Spencer’s 9, Duncan, D. 95, 96, 118n8, 231, 233
12–13, 89, 135, 156, 179n31, 205, 212, Durkheim, Émile 13, 38, 60, 63–4, 66, 68,
217, 237 83, 88, 105–8, 124
cook, Simon 130
cope, edward Drinker 210, 211, 213, 215, Education 2, 17, 18, 25–6, 39, 190; widely
216 reprinted 5, 16, 32, 45
corsi, p. 208 egan, Kieran 16, 32–7, 39
cousin, Victor 8 eliot, George 184, 188, 193–4
cremin, Lawrence 16 elliott, paul 21–2, 96, 115, 121
croce, p. J. 158n6 ellis, Havelock 198, 199
crook, D. p. 130n19 elwick, James 94–5, 99, 108, 109, 130; on
Huxley and Spencer 92, 123
Daniels, Stephen 22 espinas, Alfred 105, 106, 108–9
Darwin, charles 26, 106, 112, 126, 189, esty, Jed 199n25
206, 216–17; acquired characteristics and ethics 4, 128, 135, 140, 143, 153; and
207–8; and natural selection 53, 116, autonomy of 133, 144, 144n10, 148,
159, 184, 185, 206, 208, 217; and Spencer 150; and psychology 62, 156; and
and the word “evolution” 117, 186n3; Sidgwick and Moore 144–6, 149; and
and the Victorian novel 185, 187, Spencer 5, 49, 52–3, 143; Spencer,
191–2, 202, comte and 7; differences evolutionary theory and 61–2, 133–4,
in evolutionary theory to Spencer 7, 148–9, 151–3, 172, 197, 211; Spencer’s
37, 116n6, 189–91; 197n23; Huxley and philosophy of 60; Spencer’s works on
201; inspired by Malthus’s population 49, 61, 71, 87, 123, 156
principle 119, 129, 206; Lamarckian evans, Marian 24; see also George eliot
elements in Spencer and 13, 204, 208,
210, 212, 217–19; James and 160, father 17, 22, 25, 35, 96; see also Spencer,
180–81; Lamarck and 11, 13, 14; Mills William George
268
index
First Principles 5, 61, 62, 102, 116, 123, groups 49, 80, 81, 90, 101, 109, 157;
128, 156n3, 181n32, 188, 189n13, 195, cooperation between 56; primitive
198, 199, 225, 226, 230, 236, 237 Fiske, 58; social 95; voluntary 50
John 59, 223
Flourens, pierre 97n5 Haddon, Alfred cort 127, 128
Flower, e. 165n15 Haeckel, ernst 93, 102–4, 106, 109,
followers of Spencer see Spencer’s 110n11, 204, 216, 219, 241
disciples, Spencer’s followers Haines, Valerie 12, 14–15
Foster, Michael 118, 127, 128 Haldane, J. S. 128
Foucault, Michel 114 Hall, G. Stanley 3
Fox, robert 8 Hamilton, Sir William 136n5, 138, 239
France 6, 7–8, 65, 105, 113 happiness 43, 148; exercise of faculties
Francis, Mark 10, 133, 191, 203, 222, to achieve 18, 23, 98; general 143–4,
225, 237; on Lewes 7, 156n4; on 152; of individuals 18, 139; Mill
Spencer’s fame 184; on Spencer’s on 140, 145; principle of greatest
intellectual (development) 24, 53, 139–40; Sidgwick on 141, 149; Spencer
115; on Spencer’s politics 121n10, on 32, 60, 142n8, 143, 150, 152,
190n13, 197n22 190n13
Frazer, James G. 126 Hartley, David 21, 154, 168
Freed, Mark M. 194 Hawkins, M. 203, 214
Frege, Gottlob 133–4 Hawley, A. 62, 82
Hayek, A. F. 46
Galton, Francis 114, 118, 127 Helmholtz, Hermann von 177–8
Gamble, A. 46 Helvétius, claude Adrien 21
Gasman, D. 216 Herbart, Friedrich 158
Geddes, patrick 104, 118, 127–8 Herbert, Auberon 44, 50, 51, 223
geopolitics 72, 73; see also politics; Herschel, William 180, 182
power Hilton, b. 120
George, David Lloyd 45 Himmelfarb, G. 220
George, Henry 53 Hinsley Jr, c. M. 3
Gibson, A. 106 Hobbes, Thomas 92, 120, 164
Giddings, Franklin 66, 68 Hobhouse, L. t. 127, 128, 129
Gilbert, S. F. J. 103n9, 110 Hobson, J. A. 10, 58
Gissis, Snait 100, 108, 203, 215, 221 Hodgson, G. M. 11, 14, 129, 130
Gladstone, W. e. 42, 174n26, 227 Hodgson, Shadworth 155, 173–6, 180
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 12 Hofstadter, richard 9, 40, 47–8, 59, 188,
Goffman, erving 83 213, 214, 220
Gondermann, Thomas 9, 12–13 Hölldobler, b. 106
Gooday, G. 128 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 48, 50
Goschen, G. J. 43, 44, 45 Holt, Henry 188
Gould, Frederick James 235–40 Hooker, J. D. 114, 208
Gould, S. J. 110n11, 112, 117, 216 HrAF 67–8, 88
Govini, p. 6 Hrdy, S. b. 47
Gray, Asa 179 Hull, David L. 14
Green, e. H. H. 45 Human relation Area Files see HrAF
Green, t. H. 135, 144, 151n17 Hume, David 120, 154, 158, 172n24, 239
Greene, John 192 Hunter, John 92
Greenleaf, W. H. 45–6 Huxley, Thomas Henry 12, 24, 32, 57, 92,
Gregory, richard L. 176n27 99, 102, 108, 110, 114–15, 118, 122, 123,
Groenewegen, p. 129, 130n18 125, 128, 163, 196n20, 238, 241; see also
Grote, George 190 bernard Lightman
269
index
“imminent” change 11, 12 195, 201; label repudiated by Spencer

indigenous peoples 9, 59, 157; see also 49, 59; beatrice Webb’s interest in
savages 186n4, 228
individualist 37, 48, 196–8, 201; and Lankester, e. ray 110n11, 209
Spencer 40, 41, 44–5, 51, 90, 214, 217; Lamarck, Jean-baptiste 11, 15, 117, 166,
“minimum” 42, 51 203, 205–12
individualism 6, 37, 38, 41–8, 49, 196, Lamarckianism 10–15
201, 241; Spencer and 2, 9, 23, 41–8, land nationalization 5, 52–3, 224, 234,
64, 127, 185, 197–8, 234 241
industrial societies see societies, La place, pierre-Simon 181, 182n33
industrial laplace formula 164
intuitions and intuitionism 11, 51, 135–8, Laurent, John 14, 129n17
141–4, 146–8, 150, 161, 199, 226 law of equal freedom, Spencer’s 49–51,
54
Jablonka, e. 215, 221 Leconte, Joseph 210, 212, 213, 216
Jacyna, L. S. 99, 156n4 Leonard, Thomas (tim) c. 9, 48
Jackson, John Hughlings 127 Leslie, Julian c. 191, 192, 193n16
James, William 9, 16–17, 157 ; a key Levine, George 185, 187
figure 155; and Darwin 159–60, Levy, J. H. 44, 51
161n9, 162, 166, 167–8, 180–81; a Lewes, George Henry 7, 24, 156n4
well-informed Spencer interpreter 6; liberal 2, 7, 10, 41–6, 49, 57, 103, 108,
adopted Spencer’s evolutionary theory 115, 120, 162, 183, 223, 227, 229, 236,
158–9; and neurophysiology 158; 239
made Spencer’s evolutionary theories liberalism 41, 44, 54, 161–2, 239; british
goal directed 164–8, 175–6, 180–81; 37; Spencer’s 134–5, 242
on the brain 158–61, 171, 175, 176, Lidgard, S. 93, 109
178n29 life sciences 92, 102, 110, 168, 171; see
Jevons, W. Stanley 162, 171n22, 174n26 also physical sciences; social sciences
Jones, G. 115, 190 Lightman, bernard 113n2, 237; discusses
Jouffroy, Théodore Simon 8 James Allen 197n23, 198, 232–3; on
Huxley 223, 235, 239, 240
Kammerer, paul 220 Limoges, c. 97, 129n17
Kant, Immanuel 138, 147, 148n14, 151, literature 31; Darwin and evolutionary
239 theory in 121, 187, 190, 191–2;
Keith, Arthur 89, 92–3, 104, 105, 107, 108 nineteenth-century or Victorian 187,
Keith, Joseph 46 189, 191; Spencer’s immense influence
Keller, Albert Galloway 66, 67, 68, 88 on Victorian thought and 184–5, 193,
Kellog, Vernon L. 210, 212 197; see novelists
Kidd, benjamin 130 literature studies 187; rise of 185
kinship 81, 82, 84; Spencer’s analysis of Locke, John 16n1, 21
84, 87; see also anthropology, social London, Jack 184, 188, 195–6, 200
organization Long, roderick t. 52
Koestler, Arthur 219, 220 López- beltrán, c. 117
Kropotkin, peter 40, 56, 103–4, 204, Lubbock, John 114, 161, 163
212–14 Lukes, S. 41
Kucich, John 185, 201 Lull, richard Swan 212
Kuklick, H. 11, 126, 127n16 Lyell, charles 116, 181, 208, 211
Laing, Samuel 236, 237–40 Macbride, ernest William 216, 220

laissez-faire 21, 201, 218; capitalism Mccabe, J. 236
associated with Spencer 9, 10, 40, 50, Machan, tibor r. 54
270
index
MacKenzie, J. 222, 223, 225–6, 228–9, 242 Müller, Johannes 102

MacKenzie, ned 222, 223, 225–6, 228–9, Murdock, George p. 67, 88
242
MacLeod, c. 146n12 natural history 24, 111, 114, 115, 122, 125,
MacLeod, r. 125n15 131, 177, 232
Macrae, Donald 46 natural selection 1, 4, 10, 11, 93, 119,
Maine de biran, pierre 8 159, 161n9, 166–8, 204, 205, 209, 211,
Malthus, Thomas 10, 68, 119–20 213, 214, 216, 219, 220; see also charles
Malthus’s population principle see charles Darwin; Alfred russel Wallace
Darwin natural rights see rights
Mamiani della rovere, terenzio, conte 12 nebular hypothesis 177, 180, 181, 182–3;
Man “Versus” the State 2, 5, 6, 41, 43, see also star dust
45–8, 55, 58, 193 needham, Joseph 100
Mandelbaum, Maurice 134 nervous 25, 92, 101, 142; connections 34,
Marshall, Alfred 129–31 192
Martineau, Harriet 97–8 nervous system 34, 99, 104, 154; animal
Martineau, J. 135 24
Marx, Karl 2, 40, 54, 56, 60, 65, 68, 76, 77, nested orders 94–5, 98–9, 102, 106, 109;
88, 124 analysis and 90, 97; of individuals
Maryanski, A. r. 63 102–3
mathematics 8, 30, 136, 159, 236 neurophysiologists 99
Maudsley, Henry 166, 166n17 neurophysiology 156n4, 157, 158, 171;
Mayr, ernst 112 Spencer and 8, 155–6, 165, 167
Mead, George Herbert 60, 66, 68, 88 neuroscience 99, 171
Mehdaoui, S. 109 new Woman novels see novel
Menand, Louis 161n9 nightingale, John 14
Meredith, George 230 nock, Albert J. 47
Merton, robert M. 185 Nonconformist 17, 18, 91, 95
metaphysical 12, 15, 144, 181n32, 239, novel(s) 201, 202; Spencer and new
241; necessity 135–7 Woman novels 189, 196–202; the
metaphysics 5, 111, 134n1, 146, 174–5; nineteenth-century 189, 193, 201; the
James’s 165n14, 180; Spencer and Victorian novel 185; see also literature
Green’s 144n10; Spencer’s 6, 133, 197; novelists: importance of Darwinian
Spencer’s legacies in 4, 8 language and ideas to 185, 191;
Miall, edward 17, 95 Spencer and 190, 193–6, 201–2; see
Mill, James 21, 120, 154, 158, 168 also literature
Mill, John Stuart 2, 3, 7, 21, 23, 24, 57, nozick, robert 51–52
120, 134–47, 150, 151, 153, 158, 161 nyhart, Lynn K. 93, 102, 109, 118
Milne-edwards, Henri 97–8, 104, 106, 107
militant societies see societies, militant O’brien, M. D. 44, 51
mind 1, 4–6, 8, 9, 13, 18, 20, 21, 24–5, 30, On the Origins of the Species 26, 98, 104,
31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 65, 66, 74, 137, 116, 119, 122, 129, 208
154, 158, 160, 162, 167, 168, 170, 172, organism social 89, 90–94, 99, 100–103
177–80, 185, 187–93, 194n18, 202; see organisms 14, 54, 89, 91–3, 99, 100, 103,
also brain 105, 109, 117, 131, 154, 162, 166–7, 169,
Mingardi, Aberto 46 170–71, 206–8
Moore, G. e. 134n1, 135, 144–51, 189n12 Owen, richard 12, 92
Moore, J. r. 198, 214, 217 Owen, robert 20
Morgan, Lewis Henry 4
Morgan, M. 129 packard, Alpheus 210
Morley, John 51 paley, William 181
271
index
pareto, Vilfredo 77 163, 165, 167, 169, 173, 183, 184,

parsons, talcott 67, 88 188n9, 190, 191, 211, 230
paxton, nancy 187n5, 193n17 Principles of Sociology 2, 5, 6, 13, 15, 57,
pearce, trevor 117 62–4, 68, 71, 72, 82, 85, 87, 88, 128,
pearson, Karl 201, 215 190n13, 223
peel, J. D. Y. 12, 13, 48, 53, 115, 121n10
perkin, H. J. 94 Quetelet, Adolphe 125
perrier, edmond 103–4, 105, 107
perrin, robert 11–13, 105, 107 race 38, 221; evolutionary history of 27,
pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 22, 26 216–17, 218; improvement of 20,
phrenological 19, 26, 29, 31, 98; 205, 213; individual and 169, 200;
arguments 18 question 128, 215; science 216, 217,
phrenologists 19, 22, 25, 97, 98 218–20; Spencer and 35, 63n2, 137,
phrenology 20, 34, 97n5, 114; Spencer a 142, 148n15
convert to 22; Spencer and 24, 27, radcliffe-brown, A. r. 126
28, 39, 98; Spencer’s interest in 115, radick, Gregory 112, 117, 127n16, 128,
121 132n21
physical sciences 114, 168, 180, 187; see rawls, John 134
also life sciences; social sciences reid, Thomas 8, 24, 172n24
piaget, Jean 33, 36–9 reform 9, 18, 22, 42, 45, 94, 95
pinker, Steven 4 regression 12, 43, 55, 58
politics 5, 10, 51, 122, 134; Huxley’s 122, reid, Thomas 8, 24, 172n24
240–41; of evolution 6, 9, 235–40; religion 76, 144n10, 235; and science
Spencer’s feminist 127n22; Spencer’s 114, 183; and Spencer 85, 87, 94, 185,
politics 2, 95, 121n10, 123, 128, 156, 228–9; and Spencer’s Unknowable
224 223, 237–8, 241; and Spencer’s
poor 9, 21, 47, 198, 227 “Unknown” 9, 156, 182, 225, 229; as
population 10, 75, 76, 84, 86, 198, 211, an institution 66, 82; of humanity
215; differentiated 69, 70, 74; growth (comte’s) 8, 125, 237; place in
64, 68–70, increases 53, 70; preliterate education 17, 32, 44; right to freedom
63, 84; pressure 15, 69, 73; size 64, 52
76; see also Thomas Malthus renwick, chris 10, 104, 112, 123, 127,
porter, D. 125n14 128
positivism 7–8, 66, 242 ribot, Théodule-Armand 8, 38
posititivist(ic) 7, 8, 74, 76, 125, 242 ricardo, David 120–21
potter, beatrice 224–5, 230, 233; see also richard, nathalie 6, 8
beatrice Webb richards, G. 127, 127n16
powell, baden 182 richards, peter 52
powell, John Wesley 3 richards, robert J. 25, 102, 109, 112,
power(s) 52; and evolution 73–5; 114n3, 116n6, 117n7, 119, 120, 158n6,
consolidation of 69–70; dialectics of 214, 216
77–9; dynamics of 71–3; geopolitics rights 48, 61, 95, 139–40; government
of 75–77; of government 43–4, 47; and 43; natural 22, 41, 44, 49, 51, 52;
of the state 57–8; the state’s coercive of liberty 49, 50, 51–2; of property
powers 49, 54–5, 61, 75; Spencer a 42, 51, 55; protection 51; women’s
scholar concerned with 71; Spencer a 40
theorist on 87 ritchie, D. G. 50, 150
Principles of Biology 5, 12, 69, 101–4, 106, rivers, W. H. r. 127, 127n16
115, 116, 118, 158n6, 179n31, 211, 230 roberts, Morley 105, 107–8
Principles of Psychology 5, 8, 16, 24, 62, robertson, G. croom 155, 173
99, 101, 136n5, 138, 154, 156–8, 160n9, roget, p. M. 97
272
index
romanes, George J. 155, 163, 209, 210, social theories or theory 11, 87, 115, 127,
212 144; Spencer’s 54, 214, 241
rorty, richard 166n16 societies: industrial 15, 39, 42, 54–8, 63,
rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16n1, 21–2 70–72, 74, 76–9, 87, 113, 130, 227 ;
roux, Wilhelm 93, 109n11 militant 15, 54, 55, 58
royce, Josiah 16–17 Sorokin, pitirim 67
royer-collard, pierre-paul 8 Spencer as an author or writer 3, 10,
ruse, Michael 106, 117n7, 118, 120 105; and other writers 39, 44, 59,
ryan, Vanessa 185n2, 194 185; and use of his single texts 5, 6,
224; impact of 36, 113, 117, 124, 126;
Sapp, J. 103n9, 104, 109 inspired literary writers 113, 188–90,
savages 10, 27, 34–7, 161; see also 194; large global audience 222; on
indigenous peoples, race evolution 4, 5, 112; popularity 2,
Schabas, M. 120, 121n11, 129 16, 64
Schleiden, Matthias 99, 100, 102 Spencerians 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 113
Schreiner, Olive 184, 188, 198–201 Spencer, John 94, 99; see also uncle
Schwann, Theodore 99 Spencer’s disciples 111, 154n1, 223, 224,
Scott, W. r. 62 228, 241, 242; see also Allen, Grant;
Secord, James A. 114, 121 Webb, beatrice
Sedgwick, Adam 182 Spencer’s followers 5, 50, 52, 89, 216;
selection 77, 80, 81, 94, 204, 210, 213, individualists 40, 44–5, 51; regarded
215; competition and 80; pressures as Social Darwinist 55, 214; two
68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 85, 86; see favorite 224
also natural selection Spencer’s ideas 7, 8, 41, 44, 64, 69, 120;
Semmel, b. 58 dissociated from his name 33, 186;
shadow discourse see Spencerian eliot’s interest in 194; engagement
shadow discourse with 189, 202; in anthropology 127;
Shapin, Steven 114, 119, 189, 190 in biology 111–13, 116, 116n6,
Shaw, George bernard 204, 219 118–20; in evolution 191; in sociology
Shuttleworth, S. 120 60, 65–8, 82, 87; radical reconstruction
Sidgwick, Henry 6, 42, 43, 133–4, 135, of 39; rediscovered 60, 68, 88; taken
138, 141–3; and Moore 144–9, 150, from his single texts 5, 6
151 Spencer’s legacies 2, 4, 6, 7–9, 48, 51, 110
Silver, Harold 32 Spencer’s legacy 1, 4, 5, 6- 9, 32–3, 39–41,
Simmel, Georg 79, 88 47, 48, 58–60, 67, 68, 79, 82, 88, 90,
Simmons, Albert 235–7, 240 103, 107, 108, 189, 211, 212, 217
Simpson, James 20, 22, 26, 30, 31 Spencer’s reputation 52, 100, 115, 131,
Skorupski, John 6, 134n1, 136n4, 136n6 133, 228; began to fade 64, 88; in
Smith, Adam 73, 120 decline 110, 243; in lifetime 116;
Smith, roger 120, 154n1, 186–7 lasting 40, 59; public 133, restoration
social sciences 2, 34, 63, 67–8, 81, 123– of 112; see also Spencer as an author
4; biology and 112, 113, 119, 120, or writer, Spencer’s ideas, Spencer’s
124–6, 130, 134; historians 12, 102; legacies
theory 14; 126, methodology 67 Spencer’s Unknowable see religion
social scientists 11, 120, 124, 131 Spencer, Thomas 95, 96; see also uncle
Social Statics 2, 5, 18, 19, 25–7, 37, Spencer, William George 96; see also
48–52, 53, 54, 56, 60, 96n4, 98, 139, father
140, 141, 197, 224–5, 241 Spurzheim, J. G. 97
social structures 55, 62, 69–71, 79, 82, Stack, D. 17n3, 24n6, 29n7, 31
92 star dust 177, 180, 181–2, 183; see also
social systems 68, 69, 91, 123 nebular hypothesis
273
index
state 6, 21, 50, 57–8, 72, 74; action taine, Hippolyte 163
43, 44, 46, 48–9, 41; education and tansley, Arthur 104, 106–7, 109
17–18; individual and 40, 44, 51,55; tarde, Gabriel 108
individualism and 41–8; machine 23, tattersall, Ian 4
35; nightwatchman 41, 45, 59; role taylor, Michael W. 107, 223, 241; on
and functions of 42, 47, 50, 52, 56; Spencer and religion 24n6, 237, 242;
Spencer’s opposition to 18, 22, 33, 40, on Spencer’s evolutionary theories 9,
41, 48–9; Spencer’s views on the state 203; on Spencer’s fame and global
30, 45, 55 appeal 184, 222; on Spencer’s politics
Stephens, L. G. 213, 216 40, 41, 46, 121n10, 197
Stevenson, robert L. 194 teleological: and neo-Lamarckism 204–5,
Stocking, George 126, 127, 127n16 210; Spencer did not see evolution as
struggle for existence 203, 206, 213, 203; Spencer’s theories referred to as
217, 240; see also struggle for survival, 11–12; see also Lamarckianism; James,
survival of the fittest William
struggle for survival 9, 47, 58, 167, 240; Thatcher, Margaret 46
see also struggle for existence, survival Thomson, J. Arthur 111–12, 116, 117, 128,
of the fittest 210, 212
Study of Sociology 5, 57, 64, 68, 125, turner, F. M. 114
223; James and 162n11; Principles of turner, Jonathan H. 4, 13, 65, 66, 82, 87;
Sociology and 2, 62, 63; turner after and societal evolution 62, 63
reading 87 tyndall, John 114, 177–78, 223, 233, 241
Sully, James 185, 186 tylor, e. b. 4, 163
Sumner, William Graham 47–8, 66, 68, 88
superorganism 65, 66, 69, 71, 80, 81,107– uncle 94–6, 99
8; individuality of the third order 103, United States 64, 65–6, 239–40; Spencer’s
105–7; orders of individuality 89–90, impact in 6, 7, 47
94, 103; Spencer’s general principles and Unknowable see religion
61; see also organism; organism social, “Unknown” see religion
social organism utilitarianism 21, 42, 51, 146, 152, 166n16;
survival 71, 91, 147, 149, 152–3, 171–2; hedonistic 149, 151–53; indirect 142,
animal 164–5; human 69, 147, James 149–50; Spencer a distinctive figure in
and 175, Kropotkin and 56, 213, liberal 134–5; Spencer’s individualism
value 152, 176n27; see also struggle for and 64; Spencer’s view of 27, 139,
existence; struggle for survival; survival 141, 142n8, 150
of the fittest
survival of the fittest 47, 71, 80, 112, 116, Van Whye, J. 114
168, 180, 197, 206, 213, 240; see also voluntaryism / voluntaryists 17–18; and
struggle for existence; struggle for secularism 18–20, 23
survival Vorzimmer, p. J. 208
System of Synthetic Philosophy 4, 90,
131, 156, 194; Allen and 232, 234; Wallace, Alfred russel 5, 53, 110n11, 117,
and religion 237, 241; and The Man 179n31; and natural selection 103–4,
“Versus” the State 43–4; background to 117, 209
publishing 43, 49, 87, 156n3, 228, 231; Ward, Lester Frank 3, 6, 65, 68, 108, 213,
biology after 114–19; few saw general 220
purpose of 230; James and 165, 183; Watts, charles Albert 235–6, 237, 240, 241
Lightman and 198; monumental 45; Watts, M. r. 94
Spencer’s aims in writing 53, 123, 128, Webb, beatrice 50, 186, 233; a disciple
224, 234; taylor and 242; Ward 65; and follower of Spencer 222, 223–4;
Webb’s study of 226 friendship with Spencer 222–4, 229;
274
index
on death of Spencer 222, 225, 228; Wilson, edward O. 4, 80, 106, 232n1
reading Spencer’s works 225–8 Winter, A. 93
Webb, Sidney 56–7 Worms, réné 105, 106
Weber, Max 2, 60, 63, 66, 68, 88, 124 Wright, chauncey 165, 180
Weinstein, David 133, 134, 150n16, Wright, Sewall 118
153n19 Wundt, Wilhelm 3
Weismann, August 111, 209, 214; Spencer
and 93, 103, 117, 127, 130–31, 211 X-club members (charles Darwin, Francis
Wells, H. G. 184, 188 Galton, J.D. Hooker, Thomas Henry
Wharton, edith 184, 188 Huxley, John tyndall) 114–15, 118,
Wheeler, William Morton 103, 105, 106, 223
109
Whewell, William 24, 182 Young, robert M. 25, 112, 119–20, 187,
White, Leslie A. 3–4 191, 193
White, p. 114 Youmans, edward L. 223; a disciple of
Whitman, Walt 194 Spencer 231
275

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Herbert Spencer

also by mark francis

routledge is an imprint of the taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Trademark notice: product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

typeset in Minion pro by Kate Williams, Swansea

2. The method of nature: Herbert Spencer and the

3. Herbert Spencer: nineteenth-century politics and

4. Herbert Spencer’s sociological legacy 60

5. containing multitudes: Herbert Spencer, organisms social

6. Herbert Spencer, biology, and the social sciences in britain 111

8. The problem with star dust: Spencer’s psychology and

9. Spencer, cognition, fiction 184

10. Herbert Spencer and Lamarckism 203

11. Spencer’s british disciples 222

Peter J. Bowler is professor emeritus of the history of science at Queen’s

James Elwick is Assistant professor in the Science and Studies Department

Mark Francis is professor of political Science at the University of canterbury,

Bernard Lightman is professor of Humanities at York University, toronto,

Chris Renwick is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York,

Vanessa L. Ryan is Assistant professor of english at brown University,

John Skorupski studied philosophy and economics at the University of

Michael W. Taylor has had a varied career as a central banker, a journal-

Stephen Tomlinson is professor of education at the University of Alabama,

Jonathan H. Turner is Distinguished professor of Sociology at the University

on honouring “classical” evolutionary writers such as Spencer, Lewis Henry

understand such comment, they would have equipped themselves better

Distant legacies and positivism

paper by nathalie richard (forthcoming) on the use of Spencer in the Third

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Spencer’s evolutionary the-

moral grounds when attempting to prohibit powerful european states from

The substitution of Lamarckianism for Darwinism

evolution, and encourages social scientists to rely on a crude reading of the

(2000: 509) statement that secondary literature on Spencer should be rep-

strengthened by frequent and constant use. However, this sort of example

1. University of Michigan professor W. H. payne claimed that “the most useful and pro-

plications of educational theory” (royce 1904: 148). With the publication of

3. On the life and teachings of George combe see Stack (2008).

Voluntaryism and secularism in Spencer’s theory of education

Spencer’s phrenological voluntaryism is clearly evident in his earliest politi-

comparison of Social Statics with the most famous phrenological text of

4. On the influence of Owen and Wilderspin, see tomlinson (2005: 115–82).

A Copernican revolution in pedagogy

evident in the writings of richard edgeworth, Thomas Day and erasmus

5. Spencer reports in An Autobiography that he and his father considered opening a

born from his provincial, middle-class and nonconformist roots,

that is selfish – if in short, you produce a state of mind to which

In 1848 Spencer accepted the position of subeditor at the Economist.

establishing a science of education was one of Spencer’s first goals as he

to be impressed upon a blank mind. He admitted that aligning instruction

(ibid.). children may be born innocent as regards knowledge, but hardly

Intellectually you must cultivate to good purpose that most com-

turning to physical well-being, Spencer found more interest in the con-

Vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious,

Forget common sense. On matters of intellectual, moral and physical educa-

occupations. The instrumental skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were

relations of nature, thus improving in one stroke memory, understanding

by accumulated expenses the man of science acquires a thor-

Spencer’s legacy in education

pedagogic arguments seeped into the common sense of late-nineteenth-

nature’s plan, as Spencer outlines it, is to deliver a baby with just

on the environment, and from the reaction of the environment,