Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/27

 to show that this law of evolution, with its corollary and associated laws, will explain the phenomena of our own world and our own race, as well as those of the Cosmos and of all things, organic and inorganic. These laws lie at the basis of Astronomy, Physics, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, and Ethics. These primary and universal laws would thus form a complete co-ordination of all our knowledge.

It is not assuming too much if we conclude that these laws are very widely admitted to possess, not only a very general application, but also to have a rare illuminating power in an immense number of special sciences. This would be admitted by most Physicists, and by the bulk of all adherents to the philosophy of experience. They constitute something which may be called a Novum Organum of scientific thought. But it would be, surely, going too far even for avowed Spencerians to claim, either, (1) that these laws are of universal application, or (2), that they form an adequate scheme of general science, a full synthesis of human knowledge. For my own part, admitting for these sixteen principles a high generality, and that they throw a most original light on philosophy, I must note some points in which we must await fresh elucidation.

If these sixteen propositions sum up the entire Synthetic Philosophy in germ, if the movement of Evolution and Dissolution, through alternate differentiation and integration, is the master-key of all science, then science is simply the law of the processes of Change. But the laws of stability, of permanence, are equally essential and dominant; indeed they come prior to laws of change. Using the terms in their true philosophic breadth, Order precedes Progress, determines it, and regulates it. Progress is evolution out of Order. That is to say, the course