Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/184

170 body of scientific particulars and generalizations, getting themselves read into the political and social formula, and thereby effecting transformation into the system outlined by the prospectus of 1860. This fusion is, indeed, already foreshadowed in the Social Statics itself. This is not the time or place to go into detail, but I think I am well within the bonds of verifiable statement when I say that Spencer's final system of philosophy took shape through his bringing into intimate connection with each other the dominating conception of social progress, inherited from the Enlightenment, certain larger generalizations of physiology (particularly that of growth as change from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and of 'physiological division of labor' with accompanying interdependence of parts) and the idea of cosmic change derived from astronomy and geology,—particularly as formulated under the name of the nebular hypothesis. Social philosophy furnished the fundamental ideals and ideas; biological statements provided the defining and formulating elements necessary to put these vague and pervasive ideals into something like scientific shape; while the physical-astronomic speculations furnished the causal, efficient machinery requisite for getting the scheme under way, and supplied still more of the appearance of scientific definiteness and accuracy. Such, at least, is my schematic formula of the origin of the Spencerian system.