Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/327

Rh Mr. George writes: Talking one day with the late E. L. Youmans, the great popularizer of Spencerianism in the United States, a man of warm and generous sympathies, whose philosophy seemed to me like an ill fitting coat he had accidentally picked up and put on, he fell into speaking with much warmth of the political corruption of New York, of the utter carelessness and selfishness of the rich, and of their readiness to submit to it, or to promote it whenever it served their money-getting purposes to do so. He became so indignant as he went on that he raised his voice till he almost shouted.

Alluding to a conversation some time before, in which I had affirmed and he had denied the duty of taking part in politics, I said to him, "What do you intend to do about it?" Of a sudden his manner and tone completely changed, as remembering his Spencerianism, he threw himself back and replied, with something like a sigh, "Nothing! you and I can do nothing at all. It is all a matter of evolution. We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things. But we can do nothing."

Evidently Professor Youmans had only a partial view of the synthetic philosophy, for to be synthetic it must include everything that is, not only man but his works, and such was the task Mr. Spencer had set for himself, of accounting for all that is knowable concerning human beings in their ascent from protoplasm, via monkeydom, to "beings of large discourse that look before and after."

He nowhere says that man's faculties and volition, though derived from the evolutionary grind, are not assisting factors in the continuous development.

The law of heredity is an incident of evolution and he finds the genesis of it in the registered experiences of the race. Conscience was evolved from the fear of punishment transmitted through the nervous system. And it