Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 3 of 13

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
The Synthesis of Knowledge from Scientific Examination of
Biology, Psychology, Sociology and Ethics
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 20, 1983

Transcript:

This is the third lecture in the series on the 19th century. And the lecture series bears the subtitle: The Journey into the Permanently Dissolving Universe. We chose the subtitle to highlight the general difficulties that the 19th century presents to us. And last time I tried to bring out an interesting aspect that the 19th century forms the basic hidden structure for the society, the culture, that we find ourselves living in today, but also the 19th century forms a subconscious level which exists in our psyches so that we are in effect, in our active participation in life, sandwiched in-between the 19th century inside us and outside both hidden. This situation of course is an ongoing situation and every epoch finds itself corralled by the preceding one. In a sense this is a cultural karma.

One of the great tasks of the 20th century has been to try to delineate the historical processes surrounding man so that more intelligent actions can be taken. Unfortunately, we have not understood the 19th century and consequently have, in our time, suffered greatly thereby. If we look at the 19th century in terms of what history books present to us: they present the great industrial revolution in England; they present the Napoleonic era in France; the fragmentation of Germany leading to the inculcation of the German state under Bismarck; the development of the British Empire; the civil war in the United States and its consequent reconstruction along military and industrial lines. All of this history is misleading to us. That history, the textbook history, about political events and military events. The material that would have occupied newspapers is dead and past.

What is alive is the achievement in vision of the 19th century ending in a tragic denouement. That is to say, the 19th century plays itself out as a cultural drama, in the tragic mode, so that the course will end with Count Leo Tolstoy who is the great heroic figure of the 19th century and we will find Count Tolstoy fleeing for his sanity at the end of his long life trying to find a monastery to enter to save himself. In order to appreciate that act for that individual at that time– And I take that as a symbolic guiding star for wending our way through the 19th century. I have chosen a succession of people– of individuals as I have done now for four years because the movement of event by personality discloses to us what was known in the Renaissance as the Chronologica Mystica. That is by following the manifestation of energy and intelligence form and content in terms of human personalities and then taking a succession of human personalities – we delineate for ourselves a sense of the durational flow of what Hegel would have called ‘the world spirit’.

The first person that we took in the course Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, was the father of capitalism. The second person that we took, Karl Marx, was the father of communism and we saw that capitalism and communism were sister developments, sibling developments, and produced shadow forms, shadow-projective forms in the realm of ideas: capitalism producing the shadowy form of liberalism and communism producing the shadowy form of socialism. Neither liberalism nor socialism are capable of being delineated with great accuracy. One can talk around them but both phenomenon, because they are shadows of great symbolic syntheses of ideas, do not admit of close knit logical analysis. Whereas, capitalism and communism both require minute ongoing analytical dissections in order to understand them.

The third figure that we come to tonight follows the developments of Bentham and develops them and is a contemporary with Karl Marx for the early part of his life. But our figure tonight, Herbert Spencer, lives on until 1903. So he's the first figure who carries us into the beginnings of the 20th century. Now, I have chosen Bentham, Marx, and Spencer to give us an overview of a direction. The way in which the durational flow, the transformative process, one has to imagine a phase and then another phase partially covering it and going on and another phase partially covering that and going on. This phase form transformation of the 19th century and these three figures disclosed for us a movement of thought which at its beginnings, in Bentham, characterized man's essential problem as one of language. We mentioned Bentham's theory of fictions; his belief that the human mind had a capacity to invent fictive language structures for itself’ and this forbade man to effectively deal with his world. The counterpart to it was to base man on the material world rather than upon the ideational world. If man is based on the material world, then we have a measure– an index to his improvement. Marx, we found, based his account upon a dialectical materialism and in this process there was an abstracting out of the historical tissue of circumstance via the views of class struggle and creating abstract forms of process which could be lifted out of the historical context and absorbed into the human consciousness. So that the material world became not only a guide for the index of man's happiness but became the touchstone, his source, of accurate information about his own consciousness.

Now we come to the third figure, Herbert Spencer, who was born in 1820 and as a young man – he was born in England in Derby. His parents were fairly well-to-do and he was offered a chance to go to Cambridge University. An uncle of his named Thomas offered to pay for him. He refused. Instead the young Herbert Spencer decided to educate himself. This later became a touchstone in Spencer's philosophy, for he would live to develop, over 40 years of continuous work, what he felt was the ultimate philosophy. In fact it was called, the Synthesis, and the great Synthetic Philosophy was published over a period of decades in large volumes like this. This is some of the original editions of– of Spencer's works. As a young man educating himself he discovered that if we take control of our consciousness we take control of our own evolution. And that one of the keys to man's development, as an individual, is his willingness for self-evolution. He records in his volume on Education the advantages of self-evolution. He writes, “But making a process of self-evolution has other advantages than this of keeping our lessons in the right order.” The first point was, is that if you educate yourself you make an order for yourself of how you're going to approach the material. You do what backtracking you have to. You do what speculating ahead you have to. You do what arranging in the present you have to in order to make it intelligible to yourself. So we keep our lessons in the right order for us and that's the first point.

He writes, “In the first place, it guarantees a vividness and permanency of impression which the usual methods can never produce.” We will take time he says, to couch the information in images that we will remember in terms that are close to us. We will literally make up whatever seasoning and choreography the ideas need in our own terms to make them permanent and indelible for ourselves. He writes, “Any piece of knowledge” – any fact, any page, any book – “Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired, any problem which he has himself solved, becomes by virtue of the conquest much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a school-book, can be registered. Even if he fails, the tension to which his faculties have been wound up insures his remembrance of the solution when given to him, better than half a dozen repetitions would.”

“Observe again,” he writes, “that this discipline necessitates a continuous organization of the knowledge he acquires.” That is to say if we teach ourselves self-education we set in motion a continuity because there is no convenient point at which we may stop. There is no end of a course. End of a book. End of an assignment. There are no exams. There are no tests. So that self-education when one gets into the feel of it into the flow opens up a continuously learning process. So that education then spreads itself out and lifts itself out of the calendar pigeonholing – which most education falls into – and raises itself up to the level of a flow process. At this point the self-education process becomes a context which allows us to observe for the first time the evolutionary movement in ourselves.

Now Spencer was not always concerned with evolution. He was not always concerned with his great Synthetic Philosophy. In fact, when he was a very young man, his profession was that of a railway engineer for seven years. The railways at this time – the late 1830s, early 1840s – the railways were being thrust across the face of England. England was the first country in Europe to receive a railway network and it was a great triumph of engineering and we think in our own experience in this country of laying the transcontinental railway and how that opened up the– the West. The laying of the railroads in early 19th century England did the same thing. It made all of the manufacturing centers in England coordinated in one fell swoop. It was like introducing a system of circulation and the energy of England economically at this time rose almost asymptomatically. It just became within a decade or two, a powerhouse. Literally it was the dynamo that made the British Empire feasible and possible.

So Spencer was involved as a railway engineer. At the age of 33 in 1853, his– one of his wealthy uncles died and left him an enormous sum of money and freed him from having to work for the rest of his life. Now Spencer had toyed with the idea of marrying his lady friend was the great English novelist George Eliot whose real name was Marion Evans. And George Eliot and Herbert Spencer got along very well. But Spencer was one of these highly individual characters. He felt almost as if coming into close contact with other human beings would require a modification on his part and change his capacity. And so he did not marry even an intellectual genius like George Eliot. He kept himself a bachelor all of his life.

When he was able to be financially independent he began publishing, in a magazine called The Westminster Review, a series of articles which he described as a descriptive sociology. Now we today would not call it sociology, today we would call this anthropology. He was collecting together the law and the reports of people who were coming back from the British Empire from all the four corners of the world. Observations on how people lived in every social condition how people lived in in Africa, how they lived in Asia, and South America. And Spencer in collecting this basic information was the first great compiler of what we would today call anthropological material. He called it sociological material. And he collected it towards the idea of eventually making available a whole encyclopedia describing completely all of the possibilities of the ways in which we are human. There is a famous book of anthropology written about 30 years ago called Four Ways of Being Human by a man named Gene Lisitzky. The advantage was that if we know all the variations of culture we are in a position then to make a science of culture and that we can only have a science of culture when we have completed this descriptive atlas as it were of all the different ways in which human beings have conducted themselves in life. Spencer was so taken by this that after he died in 1903, for more than 30 years, his enormous trust fund labored to bring out and complete his great monumental descriptive sociology which exists in I don't know twenty or thirty huge fat volumes. I suppose at UCLA in the library you could find this there. It was completed in 1934 and it's just a magnum opus in the largest sense. It is a wealth of tens of thousands of pages of describing in complete detail every human activity. By 1860 Spencer conceived of an idea which was staggering for its time and staggering almost in any time. He decided that he would devote the rest of his life to– to developing the great synthesis of all sciences. And so he sent out a prospectus, and I have a copy of the prospectus. I have– I have an 1860 edition of Spencer here. And this is what the prospectus sent out around the world. And it brought in huge sums of money because there were individuals in almost every country around the world who wanted to subscribe to this great work. It was proposed that he would work at it until it was finished. He actually did finish the work. It started in 1860 and he dotted the final corrections in October of 1899. So it took him 40 years.

Prospectus for the publication of A New System of Philosophy by Herbert Spencer. A System of Philosophy. “Mr. Herbert Spencer proposes to issue in periodical parts a connected series of works which he has for years been preparing. Some conception of the general aim and scope of this series may be gathered from the following program.”

And then the first publication was to be a volume called First Principles. And that is in fact what this volume is. This is the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer: First Principles. And in First Principles Spencer was to take all the possibilities of mentation from the beginning and lay down all the possibilities, the great structure. In fact in First Principles there are two great divisions, surprisingly. The first division in First Principles, part one is called The Unknowable. He was so complete he wanted first to get out of the way what we don't know, what we can't know, what we cannot expect to know. And so the first part, which is quite a large section, almost several hundred pages, on The Unknowable. And he takes the tack that ultimate answers, absolute conclusions are unknowable. There is no way to assure ourselves of success in approaching them. In fact, he says here, the very beginning, chapter one in The Unknowable: Religion and Science.

“We too often forget that not only is there ‘a soul of goodness in things evil,’ but very generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous. While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually a nucleus of reality, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing judgment on the opinions of others. A belief that is finally proved to be grossly at variance with fact is cast aside with indignation or contempt; and in the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief which commended it to men's minds.”

And so, he assures us that no matter what has come up in human nature there is something worth our attention therein. Therefore even the struggle to obtain an absolute, the unknowable has some value. And so he goes into this. Finally, at the end of the section on the unknowable, he comes to a conclusion where he writes, “To this end let him ever bear in mind three cardinal facts – two of them already dwelt upon, and one still to be pointed out. The first is that with which we set out; namely, the existence of a fundamental verity under all forms of religion, [no matter how] degraded.”

In other words, the first cardinal fact is there is always verity in whatever human beings do. It’s not a complete lie, it is not a complete falsification, there is a kernel of truth everywhere and no matter what happens.

“The second of these cardinal facts, set forth at length in the [following] section, is, that while [these] concrete elements in which each creed embodies this soul of truth are bad as measured by an absolute standard. [They are good as measured by a relative standard.] Though from higher perceptions they hide the abstract verity within them, yet to lower perceptions they render this verity more appreciable than it would otherwise be. They serve to make real and influential over men…”

Notice that he is saying here that there is utility in whatever man makes. Even if we consider someone in error, or something bad, there is utility in the error, there is utility in the bad. This is a carryover from Bentham. Bentham was the father of utilitarianism also.

“Though from higher perceptions they hide the abstract verity within them, yet to lower perceptions they render this verity more appreciable than it would otherwise be. They serve to make real and influential over men that which would else be unreal and influential. Or we may call them the protective envelopes without which the contained truth would die.”

So that even error and so-called falsity or even so-called evil has a function. They are events which like the good or like the acceptable, the agreeable, are envelopes which preserve the absolute the verity which is unattainable in an ultimate sense from disappearing. Thus, one begins to see the rationale for Spencer to collect all of the information about man, no matter what it is, no matter how absurd, how arcane, how primitive or how advanced, all of it must be collected together in one mind in one place.

The third, “The remaining cardinal fact is that these various beliefs are parts…” – they are all parts – “of the constituted order of things.” That is to say not only does everything contain a kernel of truth somewhere within but they all are parts leading towards a whole. Therefore, we do double service by collecting all the information we save from oblivion that which is necessary as an envelope for the real, for the verity, for the unattainable. And it gives us increasing clues of how to organize it and bring it into focus, into unity.

And Herbert Spencer is the founder of the idea of progress. This is what progress is. Progress is not only keeping track of billions and billions of facts, but coordinating them, organizing them, sifting them, and bringing them together. So that, in a way, Herbert Spencer's thought is responsible for the bureaucratic mess that we are in in the 20th century because it was a confidence that all of this so seemingly inane activity actually has some great culminating value to man and therefore we should pursue it assiduously, at all costs no matter how inane it seems to us or how absurd it might seem to us, those who come after us will appreciate our work. Therefore we must keep accurate records on everything, to every extent, that we can and seek to co-ordinate and codify it as rapidly as we can.

Yes, you're beginning to catch on. Philosophers of the second level are those whose great ideas we study. Philosophers of the first level are so important that they make the kind of life that we're having to live. Those are the kinds of people that we want to study.

So, “The remaining cardinal fact is that these various beliefs are parts of the constituted order of things, and not accidental but necessary parts. Seeing how one or [the] other of them is everywhere present, is of perennial growth, and when cut down redevelops in a form but slightly modified, we cannot avoid the inference that they are needful accompaniments of human life, severally fitted to the societies in which they are indigenous.”

Notice the– notice the emphasis here. That even if we seek to eradicate certain qualities they are in a very real large strategic sense necessary to the overall pattern of life – they will come back. We never really get rid of anything by cutting it down, cutting it out, repressing it. It always comes back in a slightly modified form. It is a direct obverse of Kant's categorical imperative. Kant's categorical imperative would have us ask the question before we do anything: What if everyone did this? Herbert Spencer in a very odd way, would have us ask: What if no one did this? Well the answer is the universe would be minus that value. It needs that value. Therefore do it.

So Spencer is remarkably responsible for the frenetic activity of Western civilization in the late 19th and 20th century. Constant activity because we are churning up values which otherwise would lay fallow and by churning them up by creating them through this immense activity, we are helping to hasten the true evolution of the universe. Now, all of this became a very very big cause celebre. When First Principles came out, it appeared to many reviewers in the United States and in England and on the continent, that Spencer was the ultimate optimist and that in fact he went even further than optimism, he was a positivist.

Now this rankled Spencer because the– the mind, the name, the person who had made positivism an -ism was a Frenchman named Comte. And Comte – Monsieur Comte – got under Spencer's skin. And so in order to clear up this issue, to point out that he was doing something totally different from what this so-called French savant was offering, he wrote a very revealing letter in January 1864 and I have a copy of that. I'm going to give you a little bit of it because this is interesting. It not only clears up what he felt was wrong with Positivism and Monsieur Comte, but also what he was trying to stand for and realized that the reviewers and the educators were going to try and chop him up. They're going to try and water him down. They're going to try to digest him in their terms to dish out an pablum in their courses. And Spencer didn't want this to happen. Spencer is one of the first authors to begin to try to outthink his critics and revisers before they got the information to work with. So Spencer becomes somewhat of a strategic phantom if you want to hear it in plain English.

Here's his letter:

“Sir,
While recognizing the appreciative tone and general candor of your article in the last number entitled Herbert Spencer on Ultimate Religious Ideas, allow me to point out one error which pervades it. The writer correctly represents the leading positions of my argument but he inadvertently conveys a wrong impression respecting my tendencies and sympathies. He says of me, ‘The spirit of his philosophy is evidently that of the so-called positivist method which has now many partial disciples as well as many zealous adherents throughout the thinkers of England.’ Further on I am tacitly classed with ‘the English admirers and disciples of the great positivist.’ And it is presently added that ‘in Mr. Spencer we have an example of a positivist who does not treat the subject of religion with supercilious neglect’. Here and throughout the implication that I am a follower of Comte. This is a mistake. That M. Comte has given a general exposition of the doctrine and method elaborated by science and has applied to it a name which has obtained a certain currency as true. But it is not true that the holders of this doctrine and followers of this method are disciples of Monsieur Comte. Neither their modes of inquiry nor their views concerning human knowledge in their nature and limits are appreciably different from what they were before. If they are positivists it is in the sense that all men of science have been more or less consistently positivists and the applicability of Monsieur Comte title to them no more makes them his disciples than does its applicability to men of science who have lived and died before Monsieur Comte wrote make them his disciples. My own attitude towards Monsieur Comte and his partial adherents has always been that of antagonism. In an essay on the Genesis of Science, published in 1854, and republished in Other Essays in 1857, I have endeavored to show that his theory of the logical dependence and historical development of the sciences is untrue.” The logical dependence and historical development of the sciences is untrue. “I have still among my papers the memoranda of a second review. The purpose of which was to show the untenableness of his theory of intellectual progress. The only doctrine of importance in which I agree with him. The relativity of all knowledge is one common with millions of other human beings.”

He goes on and he makes the point that what he is laying the first principles for is a great synthetic philosophy which will base itself upon the ultimate qualities of materiality and not upon ingenious mental wrangling or upon ingenious logical orderings of language. In fact, the First Principles, when it concludes with the unknowable, takes in large part the knowable. And so laws of The Knowable is part two of First Principles. And in it, for about four hundred pages, he gives us a rundown of what he's going to develop in large part or hopes to. And in fact he did, he lived long enough that his forty years work was complete. But notice how he begins. And this is interesting, this is characteristic of Spencer. He is misunderstood so often just like Marx was misunderstood so often, and Bentham, and so on.

He writes here, chapter one laws in general. He numbers each paragraph. He's the first person to do this. So this is paragraph number 35. Not every paragraph in the book has a number but every time he starts a new topic sentence that he wants you to take note of, he numbers it because he's creating a science. His synthetic philosophy will be a science, it will be a meta-science, as we would say today – he would not say that – we would call it a meta-science. Number 35. We have seen that intellectual advance has been dual. There's always a duality. It's been towards the establishment of both a positively unknown and a positively known. That is as we establish what we know we also establish what we don't know. In a very real way we have to be aware that as we increase what we know we also increase what we don't know. He's already treated the unknowable in the first parts. Now he's going to treat the knowable and he's going to keep in mind that it wasn't a wasted exercise of a hundred and thirty pages of talking about what we can't know, because every time we make an advance in knowledge we are also advancing the unknowable realm. Therefore there is a dynamic between the unknowable and the knowable and a true synthesis takes both of these into consideration. Spencer, in fact, will insist that as the universe progresses one of the most characteristic modes of its evolution in the survival of the fittest – he's the author of that phrase, not Darwin (“Survival of the fittest”) – that as it moves from homogeneity to individuality the individual becomes the increasing sum total of evolutionary forces and discloses by their appearance, by their manifestation, more and more of the unknowable in the universe. So that an individual, a human being who would be ultimately developed would find himself in a context of total universal mystery. So that we have a very complex situation happening here.

He writes, “in making ever more certain the inaccessibility of one kind of truth, experiences made ever more certain the accessibility of another kind.” So that as we give up trying to know the unknowable we in a corollary way become clearer and clearer about the material world which is knowable. And so he says, “I'm not a positivist. Far from it.” He's a great synthetic thinker and he's not just asserting something, hoping to establish it here. But there is a dialectic. There is a synthetic process working here. He chose the word synthesis and I think we should emphasize it. Just as Marx was a dialectician, Spencer was a synthesistician, somebody who's always making synthesis he's always paying attention to the fact that of if we have an individuality coming up we also have a genesis going on of something unknowable behind. He writes the differentiation of the knowable from the unknowable is shown as much in the reduction of the one to perfect clearness as in the reduction of the other two impenetrable mystery so that as we understand the physical material world more and more in terms of science in terms of technology and in terms of engineering we have to expect as a matter of course that the mystery of the universe is going to increase and it would be naive of us to suppose that that were not so. Therefore there is a humility involved.

These are all great thinkers. These are– these are not second rate thinkers. We're taking nothing but the cream. These are the cream. This is a very complex man, very complex mentality, very easy to mistake. And that's why I read you so much of that letter that he said I am not a positivist. I'm doing something different.

All right. We have to move on.

First Principles came out, the prospectus came out. He says in here, laws of the noble and his prospectus that part two will be a statement of the ultimate principles discernible throughout all manifestations of the absolute those highest generalizations now being disclosed by science which are severally true not of one class of phenomena but of all classes of phenomena and which are thus the keys to all classes of phenomena.

So he says, we are going to increasingly understand the material world and by our understanding of the material world we're going to disclose something about our nature that we never knew before. By bringing the material world into clearer and clearer focus we're going to disclose something about our nature as individuals that was alluded to before. Given hypothetically before wrapped up in clearness and ambiguity before but we are going to understand it poignantly. He's the first thinker to indicate that there's going to be a great deal of anxiety and tension in man's future. Not as a problem, but as part of the residual process of making the material world clear.

So the First Principles came out, occupied a volume like this, and then Spencer began putting out every quarter about 80 to 96 pages of his next great work. The next part of the Synthetic Philosophy, which followed the First Principles. And those volumes eventually became collected together and became known as the Principles of Biology – The Principles of Biology. And they occupy two large volumes of about six hundred and fifty pages each.

So that the next phase of the synthetic philosophy, once we have the First Principles down, now we're going to look at the origins of life as a biological phenomenon. We're not going to– We're not going to go any further than that right– right away. We're going to– we're going to do that. Then when we have accomplished that, then we're going to take a survey which became, eventually, the Principles of Psychology. So after we have this excursion, which took him years to produce. Every three or four– every three months he produced about a hundred pages. Then when that was finished, when he had the whole horizon of the Principles of Biology, not biology, but the Principles of Biology, the structure by which biological form discloses itself and evolves. And I'll go into this so you can see how he does this. He'll do the same thing to the Principles of Psychology – the human mind. The human mind, he says, has a structure. And I've got a little section here I hope we can get to about the– the way in which neural systems are made, the genesis of nerves, notice the title, The Genesis of Nerves. He's extraordinarily ironic. He's saying we have looked at Genesis for thousands of years. The Genesis I want to look at, he says, is the Genesis of Nerves. What are nerves? What are nerve cells? How do they work? How in fact do they come together? How do they make a structure? How is it that we have a structure which evolves and eventually becomes a spinal column – a brain. Does this not disclose again what we have found in first principles and what we will find in the principles of biology. That there is an enormous unfolding not quite in a Hegelian sense but in a very profound synthetic philosophical sense, an unfolding and a folding at the same time.

And after he does two huge volumes this size – about seven hundred pages each – on The Principles of Psychology, he will do three volumes this size on The Principles of Sociology what he calls sociology, we call anthropology. In here for instance, I marked off– there is a chapter on ancestor worship. There's a chapter on idol worship and fetish worship. There's a section in here, what is a society? He writes in here: “This question has to be asked and answered at the outset until we have decided whether or not to regard a society as an entity and until we have decided whether if regarded as an entity, a society is to be classed as absolutely unlike all other entities or as like some others our conception of the subject matter before us remains vague.”

So Spencer will apply the same principles as he did to the biological realm, to the psychological realm, to the realm of societies. And he finds again the same patterning the same principles and processes. And then finally towards the end of his life he will write two more great huge volumes called, the Principles of Ethics, because the sphere in which man must still evolve. He asked– he says, “Is man going to grow stronger in the future? Not likely. Is he going to grow more agile? That's not likely. Where is his evolution? His evolution is in the field of morality.” And here man has a lot to learn. And so he will develop the great Synthetic Philosophy from First Principles, through biology, through psychology, through sociology, and through ethics. And finally in his 78th year, 1898, he was so impressed by the advances since 1860 in biology, biological science, and the fact that almost everything that he had disclosed had come true, was found, verified his work. He went back and revised The Principles of Biology so that the first work, the first level, became the last completed. And in October of 1899 at the age of 80 he finished his corrections. He writes here, “On now finally leaving biological studies, it remains only to say that I am glad I have survived long enough to give this work its finished form.”

So I want to come to Principles of Biology for just maybe ten or fifteen minutes. One of the most poignant sections – this is volume two of the Principles of Biology. In here is a chapter, chapter ten, and it's called The Integration of the Organic World. And if you want a bird's eye view of Spencer it's in this chapter that you can get the whole interplay of how Spencer's mind works, how his principles work, how they work in this field of application and how they're going to work all the way through forty years of effort. And it's a colossal achievement.

He says, “That from the beginning of life there has been an ever increasing heterogeneity in the Earth's flora and fauna is a truth recognized by all biologists who accept the doctrine of evolution.” The key word there is heterogeneity. That what is developing is more and more individuality, more species, more kinds. And if man is the end product of evolution, we have to expect that there are going to be more and more individuals, types of people that we have not seen before, particular instances of human beings that are unique, qualities of human beings that have never been appreciated before, combinations that have never brought in. In other words, we are going to have more and more human beings that we do not recognize as having been seen before because they will be unique unto themselves. It's so often misinterpreted by critics who said, well Spencer is the philosopher of the British Empire, he must mean that there's going to be more English gentlemen playing cricket on foreign grounds. Well he's not saying that at all. He's saying this in a very highly structured way. He's saying this in a technical philosophical way, that we have to expect that human beings of the future are going to be increasingly one of a kind.

Now they're going to have problems because they're going to look around and not recognize anybody like themselves. They're going to look for models, role models, and they're not going to find anything adequate because no one else will do. So what are they going to have to do? We come right back to the beginning of Spencer – they're going to have to teach themselves. What man looks forward to, increasingly, is a future where he's got to educate himself. He's got to take control of his own evolution, himself, so that the ultimate responsibility for man is his ethical self-education. His greatest task. It is the culmination of the whole push, the whole amperage of creation. He uses the phrase time and time again of “Genesis and Individuality” – Genesis and Individuality.

So he says in here, “It will be thought by many readers that in speaking of the contrasted vital activities of plants and animals as constituting a ‘division of organic functions’ I am straining words beyond their meanings since the conception of organic functions postulates an organized whole in which they exist and animals and plants constitute no such organized whole. But there is at hand an unexpected defense for this conception. A defense not forthcoming a generation ago, but which now all biologists will recognize as relevant.”


So Spencer is saying we have come so far in the last forty years that I am now able to use an example and a proof conclusively that has come out of our research. He is going to try to make the point that all life is tending towards one universal form. And the point that he is making the clue, in biology, is the discovery of the phenomenon of symbiosis – symbiosis. “I refer to the phenomenon of symbiosis. These present various cases in which the plant function and the animal function are carried out in the same body.” And he will go on to explain that we not only have different organisms working together to form a gestalt something larger but within the same organisms we have different elements and biological processes that tend in their sophistication to work closer and closer together. That the phenomenon of symbiosis is a clue to the biological thread of integration that in fact all life forms are part of one grand symbiosis. That all of the life on the planet, tend towards, in their ultimate purposing of coming together and working together to produce a life entity, a phenomenon a life entity. In other words the world as a living whole tends more and more to individuate itself. And in its individuation to come to an equilibrium of forces. That evolution. Continues until a species manifests an equilibrium in all the forces that have compelled it – rather impelled it – towards manifestation. So he says not only man, not only human society, mankind, but all life is tending towards phenomenally becoming one form.

At the same time that this is happening, individual human beings are tending to become more and more individual so that there is a tremendous tension developing between man as an individual human being and life as a unifying phenomenon. So he says, we have to expect that this tension is going to increase. Why? Because this tension is the visible phenomenal index to the powers of creation in the universe. If we try to anesthetize ourselves to their effects we're being doubly foolish. We're anesthetizing our own dynamic and we're fooling ourselves by thinking that it's going to go away or that we can do without it. So he says– and we'll get to it because the end of this revision is a look at the future of man written in late 1899. He says here, in the Integration of the Organic World, paragraph 314D: “Another form of mutual dependence and consequently of integration is conspicuous, that is, that which accompanied the progressive increase of size in organisms in the higher classes. We have but to contemplate the possibilities to see that life must necessarily have commenced with minute forms and that the progress to larger ones must have been by small steps. For creatures of appreciable sizes had been the first to exist they would have inevitably disappeared from lack of food.”

So that there is no further integration until a ground is laid. There is no further manifestation until the horizon has already been established and then there is a movement for a new form to manifest. The new form, Spencer says, increasingly show – and this is where he differs from Darwin – increasingly show that learned characteristics become a part of the evolutionary process. Now this was left out, thrown out of Darwinian evolution; that acquired characteristics do not transmit. Spencer though is approaching this not just as someone speculating about a notebook full of facts but someone who for forty years has been working methodically with an outlook like an archaeologist who's been excavating all this time the life process. And he's saying, I'm not making this claim as a speculation. I know that it's so because I've seen it operating and my scientific hypothesis has confirmed itself over and over again. Where does it become more manifest but in man himself because it is learned characteristics that individual human beings pick up and pioneer for themselves that they transmit and pass on not in some kind of historical dialectic not in some kind of cultural milieu but in the very genes by which man passes his nature on. So that he says if further evolution of man is in the field of ethics and intelligence, we can look forward to the fact that every time an individual human being makes an advance, as an individual, in an intellectual area in a moral era area that this advance registers and goes into the gene pool of the race and produces a change in the next generation. That it makes then the next generation start from a higher more integrated plateau in terms of intelligence in terms of ethical responsiveness. This in turn makes it necessary for more and more exotic forms of individuality to manifest themselves, to be different, and that in turn cues in these exotically acquired characteristics to become part of the next generation.

And so he says, man is coming to a very difficult time; that he has carried over his habituation from the past so completely that he does not understand; that he is changing himself generation by generation now and that the acquired characteristics of individuals of genius are transferring back into the population as a whole. Requiring ever more exotic kinds of individuals who come out and when they mature they find themselves in tighter and tighter social integrations. So that there is a period, he says, where we can look forward to a century of wars and social disasters, but that it's an indication of the force of evolution being true to itself, of man being true to his own nature. And that when we pass through this threshold of ignorance and become aware of what we are doing to ourselves, we will turn to Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, learn what is going on, and take control of our own evolution. Not just educating ourselves, as individuals, but taking control of our evolution as a species. Which means, he says, understanding that it is up to us to integrate the life form; that the world as a whole as an organic whole needs the keystone of man's comprehension very badly; that having achieved that man will have made a life form in the universe that is at once individual and unique, integrated and whole, disclosing the fact that all the rest of the universe is shrouded in total mystery, permanently dissolving universe. We're getting there.

Now we're going to backtrack next week. We've come all the way through the 19th century and we have seen that it leads to incredible impasses. Now we're going to go back, and we're going to come back to the century in a different way. We're going to go back to an individual who felt that what man needed most of all to get a hedge on the material world, was a spiritual art form that was an integration of all the art forms that had previously been developed by man. The man would be Richard Wagner and his new art form would be a colossal integration which he would call Mythological Musical Drama. And we're going to take a look at Wagner and his new art form, and at the end of his life in 1882 when his final work was performed, The Parzival, critic after critic registered dismay and incomprehension. The only critic who understood what had happened was List. And List wrote a review very short he said “faced with such sublime genius one can only remain silent at the enormous capacity of a man to understand himself and all of us.” Because, The Parzival presents a very real understanding of the mystery that we've already had a glimpse of.

So we're going to go to Wagner next week.