Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/182

168 conception: first, of evolution; second, of the goal of the evolution as adaption of human life to certain conditions beyond itself; and third (although implicitly the notion, however, being made explicit in other portions of the same book), the conception that it is the conditions to which life is to be adapted which are the causally operating forces in bringing about the adaptation, and hence the progress. The 'organism' of the Synthetic Philosophy is the projection of the individual man of the thought of 1850. The 'environment' of the latter system appears in the earlier sketch as 'conditions of life.' The 'evolution' of later systematic philosophy is the 'progress' figuring in the early social creed as the continual adaptation of human life to the necessities of its outward conditions. In all, and through all, runs the idea of 'nature,'—that nature to which the social and philosophical reformation of the eighteenth century appealed with such unhesitating and sublime faith. Load down the formula by filling 'nature' with the concrete results of physical and biological science, and the transformation scene is complete. The years between 1850 and 1862 (the date of the First Principles) are the record of this loading. 'Nature' never parts with its eighteenth century function of effecting approximation to a goal of ultimate perfection and happiness, but nature no longer proffers itself as a pious reminiscence of the golden age of Rousseau, or a prophetic inspiration of the millenium of Condorcet, but as that most substantial, most real of all forces guaranteed and revealed to us at every turn by the advance of scientific inquiry. And 'science' is in turn but the concrete rendering of the 'reason' of the Enlightenment.

Spencer's faith in this particular article of the creed never faltered. Eighteenth century liberalism, after the time of Rousseau, was perfectly sure that the only obstacles to the fulfillment of the beneficent purpose of nature in effecting perfection have their source in institutions of state and church, which, partly because of ignorance, and partly because of the selfishness of rulers and priests, have temporarily obstructed the fulfillment of nature's benign aims. The laissez-faire theory and its extreme typical expression, anarchism, did not originate in the accidents of