The Project Gutenberg eBook, Spencer's Philosophy of Science, by C. Lloyd Morgan

Title: Spencer's Philosophy of Science

The Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at the Museum 7 November, 1913

Author: C. Lloyd Morgan

Release Date: September 23, 2011 [eBook #37513]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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SPENCER'S
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

THE HERBERT SPENCER LECTURE

DELIVERED AT THE MUSEUM
7 NOVEMBER, 1913

BY

C. LLOYD MORGAN, F.R.S.

Price Two Shillings net

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MCMXIII

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON       EDINBURGH       GLASGOW     NEW YORK
TORONTO       MELBOURNE       BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Towards the close of 1870, while I was still in my teens, my youthful enthusiasm was fired by reading Tyndall's Discourse on The Scientific Use of the Imagination. The vision of the conquest of nature by physical science—a vision which had but lately begun to open up to my wondering gaze—was rendered clearer and more extensive. Of the theory of evolution I knew but little; but I none the less felt assured that it had come to stay and to prevail. Was it not accepted by all of us—the enlightened and emancipated men of science whose ranks I had joined as a raw recruit? Believing that I was independently breaking free of all authority, to the authority that appealed to my fancy, and to a new loyalty, I was a willing slave. And here in one glowing sentence the inner core of evolution lay revealed.

'Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular and animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and the lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion, intellect and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud.'[1]

With sparkling eyes I quoted these brave words to a friend of my father's, whose comments were often as caustic as his sympathy in my interests was kindly. With a grave smile he asked whether the notion was not perhaps stripped too naked to preserve the decencies of modest thought; he inquired whether I had not learnt from Sartor Resartus that the philosophy of nature is a Philosophy of Clothes; and he bade me devote a little time to quiet and careful consideration of what Tyndall really meant—meant in terms of the exact science he professed—by the phrase 'latent in a fiery cloud'. I dimly suspected that the old gentleman—old in the sense of being my father's contemporary—was ignorant of those recent developments of modern science with which I had been acquainted for weeks, nay more for months. Perhaps he had never even heard of the nebular hypothesis! But I felt that I had done him an injustice when, next morning, he sent round a volume of the Westminster Review with a slip of paper indicating an article on 'Progress: its Law and Cause'.

Such was my introduction to Herbert Spencer, some of whose works I read with admiration during the next few years.

I have no very distinct recollection of the impression produced on my mind by the germinal essay of 1857, save that it served to quicken that craving, which is, I suppose, characteristic of those who have some natural bent towards philosophy—the imperative craving to seek and, if it may be, to find the one in the many. In any case Tyndall's suggestive sentence was here amplified and the underlying law was disclosed.

'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 Manufacture, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, the same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.'[2]

Here was just what I wanted—on the one hand the whole wide universe of existence; and on the other hand a brief formula with which to label its potted essence. How breathlessly one was led on, with only such breaches of continuity as separate paragraphs inevitably impose, right away from the primitive fire-mist to one of Bach's fugues or the critical doctrines of Mr. Ruskin, guided throughout by the magic of differentiation. What if the modes of existence, dealt with in successive sections, were somewhat startlingly diverse! Was not this itself a supreme example of the evolution of that diversity which the formula enables us to interpret? For if there were a passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, the more heterogeneous the products—inorganic, organic, and superorganic, as I learnt to call them—the stronger the evidence for the law. Only by shutting one's eyes to the light that had been shed on the world by evolution could one fail to see how simple and yet how inevitable was the whole business.

If then differentiation be the cardinal law of evolution—for the correlative concept of integration receives no emphasis in this early essay—does not the universality of the law imply a universal cause? Just as gravitation was assignable as a cause of each of the groups of phenomena which Kepler formulated; so might some equally simple attribute of things be assignable as the cause of each of the groups of phenomena formulated in terms of differentiation. Now the only obvious respect in which all kinds of Progress are alike, is, that they are modes of change; and hence in some characteristic of changes in general, the desired solution must be found. Thus we are led up to the statement of the all-pervading principle which determines the all-pervading process of differentiation. It