Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/254

 Rh began to search for a concept of evolution which could be applied to every sphere of experience.

According to his conception philosophy is unitary knowledge. Its task consists in the discovery of general principles under which the particular principles postulated by the special sciences can be organized. But this unitary knowledge can neither be attained by the a priori, deductive method, followed by Hegel, nor by the simple, encyclopedic collation of facts, as Comte thought. Spencer seeks to discover what is common in the special principles and laws by means of the comparative method. During the course of thirty-six years (1860-1896) he produced a detailed exposition of his Synthetic Philosophy filling ten large volumes. The first volume, containing the First Principles (1861), furnishes the fundamental principles of his world-theory and defines the concept of evolution both inductively and deductively as the fundamental concept of all science. The remaining volumes apply the special forms of this concept to the departments of biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. — Otto Gaup has published a valuable characterization and exposition of Spencer's philosophy (Frommann's Klassiker, Herbert Spencer, 1897).

a. Spencer's theory of knowledge shows the influence of both Stuart Mill and William Hamilton (and, through the latter, Kant). He challenged pure empiricism, on the ground of the fact that perceptions require elaboration before knowledge can arise and this elaboration presupposes both a faculty and a standard. The ultimate basis of all knowledge consists of the faculty of distinguishing the like from the unlike; even radical skepticism must presuppose this basal principle. The ultimate standard by which truth and error are distinguished consists of the