Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/635

Rh of a species." Again, be admits 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 if Prof. Cairnes (without damping his reformatory ardor) can bold that society is bound in the chains of causation like "other departments of Nature," why should other laborers in the field of human improvement be paralyzed? If the holding of a belief in the utmost fatalism of law in social affairs is not sufficient to clip the wings or trip the heels of Prof. Cairnes's philanthropy, wherefore should Mr. Spencer be depressed, who avows no such extreme views? The effect, indeed, ought to be rather the contrary, for Prof. Cairnes maintains that his chain of causation, which is dragging the world's events along, is not raising or improving them, which would seem to be rather a gloomy reflection; while, on the other hand, Mr. Spencer holds that the great and irresistible tendency of things is toward a higher and better state, a view which is fitted to inspire something like the joy of a religious hope in a happier future. But, however that may be, Prof. Cairnes brings to the discussion of the subject his prejudices as a politician, or an Englishman, or some other perversity, and, as we are now to see, they blind him to the truth of the subject he has taken up.

Prof. Cairnes, as we have said, either does not understand Spencer, or he culpably misrepresents him. Everybody knows, or, at least, every one who writes upon the subject ought to know, that Mr. Spencer's labors for the last fifteen years have been only preparatory to the elucidation of the principles of sociology. He has but just entered upon that work which will occupy him, if he lives, for the next five or six years. The doctrine of social evolution he has not yet developed; and by that alone can he be fairly judged as a sociologist. Prof. Cairnes condemns him before he begins. His article is a review of the "Study of Sociology" which he assumes to embody "the elementary doctrines of the new science." But that work attempts no such thing; it, in fact, carefully avoids the consideration of the principles or science of the subject. It discusses outlying questions, which have, indeed, a bearing upon the general subject, but it is neither an exposition nor a defense of its elementary doctrines.

But, although Mr. Spencer's views upon sociology have hitherto only been put forth partially and incidentally, there is no excuse for such erroneous conceptions of them as Prof. Cairnes entertains. He goes back to an old essay on the "Social Organism," in which Mr. Spencer, nearly twenty years ago, pointed out some analogies between the structure and actions of the body politic and those of individual organisms, and says that Spencer's doctrine of social evolution is based upon this analogy. He asserts that Spencer's theory of social evolution "represents a speculation transferred from the domain of physiology and zoology into that of social inquiry, and the speculation so transferred is applied without question or scruple to the interpretation of human affairs;" and, again, he speaks of "that analogy between the social and animal organisms on which the whole speculation is built up." We cannot conceive a grosser misapprehension than this. Mr. Spencer maintains that the law of evolution is universal because the evidence of it is found in each of the great divisions