Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/623

Rh by him, many years ago, in a well-known essay entitled the "Social Organism;" it has since received further elucidation in a discussion with Prof. Huxley in this Review; and it has once more been expounded anew, and with fresh illustration, in the present volume. There is a certain sense in which, I presume, the doctrine of "Social Evolution" would be now pretty widely accepted, at least among those who have concerned themselves with the philosophy of history and kindred speculations. I mean the sense in which it expresses the fact that each stage in human progress is the outcome and result of the stage which has immediately preceded it, and that the whole series of stages, beginning with savage life and ending with the most advanced existing civilization, represents a connected chain, of which the links are bound together as sequences, in precisely the same way as in the instances of causation presented by other departments of Nature. Some such assumption as this must necessarily form the basis of all attempts at a rational interpretation of history. But, as enunciated and expounded by Mr. Spencer, social evolution carries with it a meaning much more precise and significant. As his readers are aware, Mr. Spencer insists very strongly on the analogy of evolution, as exhibited in the animal kingdom, whether in the individual animal or in the species, and evolution in human society—in other words, between the development, individual and specific, of the animal organism, and the development of what he calls "the social organism," meaning, thereby, organized social life. He finds in this analogy not merely a metaphor and an illustration, but a type, and even a clew. Thus he observes a law of development governing the growth of an individual organism from birth to maturity; and, again, a similar law governing the development of species from existence in an all but amorphous germ to the attainment of a very high and complex form of animal life; and he transfers these laws from physiology and zoology to the domain of social science; treating them not merely as the means of elucidating social phenomena, but as exhibiting the real character of the processes by which mankind have in fact attained their present civilization, and as foreshadowing, also, the lines along which society in its future development is destined to move. It is, for instance, a characteristic of the evolution of individual organisms under the laws of animal growth, as well as of that of the several species of animals under the influence of the struggle for existence and the law of the "survival of the fittest," that development takes place "spontaneously"—that is to say, is the incidental result of actions not consciously undertaken with that object in view. This is evidently so in the growth of an individual animal, and it is no less certainly so in the development of species. In neither case is the progress attained the result of efforts consciously put forth for its accomplishment. And the whole drift of Mr. Spencer's teaching on this subject is to show that the process is similar in the case of human society; that its growth and development