MS 468-471 (1903) - Lowell Lecture V

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of that way of thinking or its fatal insufficiency? For the merit of some very great philsophers such as the Hedonists and Norminalists has been that they have carried out their principles with such severe logic as virtually to reduce them to absurdity.

Spencer's followers and, no doubt, Spencer himself imagined that he was the father of evolutionism. But almost all great philosophers have had a theory as to how the Cosmos came about, a theory lying near the heart of their systems. Such a theory must either suppose the Cosmos eternal and immutable or it must be evolutionary theory. Foreven a system of Emanation is a kind

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of evolutionism. The majority of great phiosophers have been evolutionists and not emanationists. The distinguishing peculiarities of Spencer's Evolutionism were two. In the first place, he supposed an eternal and immutable law of the persistence of force, and the principle of Evolution was for him a mere secondary result of the action of that Immutable Law. In the second place, Evolution for him, as he states in the distinctest language in a paper printed in Collier;s Synopsis Synthetic Philosophy, was only one of two alternating moverments which he regarded as analogous to a vibration and like a vibration to be governed by the

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one over-ruling principle of the persistence of force. Such a philosophy does not belong to the class of philosophies fundamentally evolutionary.

Other conception, however, were introduced in philosophy by Spencer; such was rhe doctrine that Innate Ideas are, in some and by some means Hereditary, and were their first appearence empirical. This idea was put forth in the fifties in Spencer;s Principles of Psychology, a book long antedating Fochner's most celebrated work; and I should have supposed that Spencer had some claim to be considered as the Father of Modern Psychology, but since Prof. James who knows a hundred times

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more than I do about that, says no such thing, it is plain that I must have been mistaken about that.

I do not know what other great ideas Spencer originated; but he certainly had extraordinary skill and ingenuity in forming theories that deserved examination. He may be studied with profit as master of abductive reasoning.

The answer to the second question, how much he taught the world by following out his own line of thought, is very difficult to make sure if for the reason that great historical forces were turning many powerful intellects to the study of

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social and his logical development; so that Spencer was only one of many who were following out lines of research which have resulted in giving to the idea evolution a government over all our opinions to an extent that it never had before. Spencer certainly took up this line of thought before anybody else did. It was as throughtly original with him, as any thought ever is with anybody, and his works certainly did in the beginning influence a collection of men as remarkable for their intellect as for their great numbers, and influenced. Then to such degree that all their subsequent opinio were built upon that basis.