VI.
HERBERT SPENCER'S SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.
When the study of Anthropology—i.e., tho study of the physiological evolution of man and the growth of his institutions and religious beliefs—began to be carried on with the methods that are applied in all other natural sciences, it became possible at last to delineate in its essential outlines the history of mankind, and to do away with metaphysics which had obstructed till then the study of history, just as Biblical tradition had obstructed the progress of geology.
One might have thought, therefore, that when Herbert Spencer undertook in his turn tho construction of a synthetic philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century, he would have done so without falling into the errors that had characterised the "Positive Politics" of Auguste Comte. And yet, even though Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy" is a great step in advance (it does not lead to a religion or to a new form of worship), yet in its sociological part it contains fallacies quite as misleading as those that were embodied in Comte's Positive philosophy.
The fact is, that when Spencer came to the psychology of societies (after having admirably examined the substance of our knowledge in physical sciences, biology, and psychology), he did not remain faithful to his rigorous scientific method, and did not dare to face the consequences to which such a method would have brought him. Thus, to take one single example, Spencer fully recognised that land should never be private property; because the owner of the soil, profiting by his right to raise the land-rent, may hinder his fellow men from obtaining from the soil all they could get out of it by means of intensive culture; or, he may keep the land uncultivated, waiting till its value be raised by the work of other people around him. Spencer readily recognised that such a system is noxious to society and full of dangers. But while recognising this as regards land, he did not venture to use the same arguments as regards other accumulated riches, such as mines or docks, not to mention workshops and factories. In natural sciences he did not hesitate to come to opinions absolutely contrary to those that had been maintained for centuries under the influence of religious beliefs. But here he had not the courage to accept the logical conclusions of his own reasonings.
Or else, to take another striking example, he loudly raised his voice against State interference with the life of society; he even gave to one of his works a title representing in itself a whole revolutionary programme: "The Man versus the State." But little by little, under cover of safeguarding the protective functions of the State, he entirely reconstructed the State as it exists to-day, with but few very timid limitations.
These contradictions and many others besides could, of course, be explained by the fact that Spencer planned the sociological part of his philosophy under the influence of the English Radical movement of the "forties," long before he had written that part which dealt with natural sciences. In fact, he published his "Social Statics" in 1851, that is to say, when the anthropological study of human institutions was still in its infancy. But, be it as it may, the result was that, like Comte, Spencer did not undertake the study of human institutions as a naturalist, for their own sake, without preconceived ideas borrowed from other domains, outside science.
Moreover, as soon as he reached the philosophy of societies—that is, Sociology—Spencer began to adopt a new method, and a very treacherous one: the method of resemblances, or analogies, which he evidently did not resort to in his study of the facts of physical nature. The consequence was that this method allowed him to justify a mass of preconceived ideas. Altogether, up till now we have not yet a synthetic philosophy that would have been built up on the same foundation for both natural and sociological sciences.
It must also be said that for the comprehension of the primitive institutions of the savages—which represent a substantial portion of all Sociology—Spencer was the least suited man. In this respect he even exaggerated a failing that is frequent with Englishmen: a want of understanding for the morals and customs of other nations.—"We English are Roman Law people, while the Irish are Common Law people; that is why we do not understand one another," I was told once by James Knowles, a very intelligent and well-informed man.—The misunderstanding is still greater when an Englishman has to deal with those who are described as "inferior races." This was Spencer's case. He was quite incapable of understanding the savage's respect for his tribe and tribe-rule; or the hero of an Icelandic saga, who considers "blood revenge" as a holy duty; or the inner life of a mediaeval city, which, though it was full of strife within, was nevertheless, and precisely for that reason, a life of wonderful progress. The conceptions of Right and Law which prevailed at those stages of civilisation were entirely strange to Spencer: he saw nought but savagery, barbarism and cruelty in that life.
Besides—and this is perhaps even more important—Spencer, like Huxley and so many others, had completely misunderstood the real meaning of the "struggle for existence." He represented it to himself, not only as a struggle between different species of animals (wolves preying upon hares, many kinds of birds living on insects, and so forth), but also as an acute struggle within each species, among all the individuals of the species. In reality, however, such a struggle does not exist—certainly not to the extent imagined by Spencer—even among animals, and still less so among the most primitive savages. But once it was admitted by the philosopher, all his sociological conceptions suffered from that false supposition.
How far Darwin himself was responsible for this erroneous conception of the struggle for existence, we need not discuss here. But it is certain that when he published his "Descent of Man," twelve years after the "Origin of Species," he already took a far broader and a more metaphorical conception of the struggle for existence than that of a hard struggle between all the individuals within each species, which he had taken in his first great work in order to prove the importance of natural selection for the origin of new species. In his second great work, "The Descent of Man," he wrote, on the contrary, that those species which contain the greatest number of mutually sympathetic individuals have the greatest chance of surviving and of leaving a numerous progeny, and thus he entirely upset his first conception of the struggle for life. And nevertheless, Spencer maintained it in full.
The chapters which Darwin gave in "The Descent of Man" to the development of human ethics out of the sociable habits of the animal ancestors of man, might have been the starting-point for working out a conception, exceedingly rich in consequences, of the nature and evolution of human societies (Goethe had already divined it); but these chapters of Darwin passed unnoticed. It was only in 1879, in a lecture given by the zoologist Kessler, that we find a clear conception of the relations existing in Nature between the struggle for existence and mutual aid. "For the progressive evolution of a species," the Russian professor said, giving a few examples, "the law of mutual aid has far more importance than the law of mutual struggle."
A year later, Lanessan delivered at Paris a lecture, "The Struggle for Existence and Association for Struggle"; and soon after that Büchner published his work, "Love," in which he showed the importance of sympathy among animals as a step towards developing the first conceptions of morality; but he gave to filial love and compassion too prominent a position, and thereby uselessly limited his field of research.
It was easy for me to give (in "Mutual Aid: а Factor of Evolution") further proof of Kessler's remarkable idea, and to extend it to man. I had only to base my conclusions as regards mutual aid among animals on the accurate observations of Nature by the best field zoologists, and my views on the history of human institutions—on a mass of modern historical research. Among animals, mutual aid is, in fact, not only the most efficacious weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of Nature and against other inimical species, but it is also the principal instrument of progressive evolution. Even to the otherwise weakest animals it guarantees longevity (and consequently accumulation of experience), security for breeding their offspring, and intellectual progress. This is why those animal species which most practise mutual aid not only better survive in the struggle for life than those which lead an isolated life, but they also occupy a higher position in their own respective classes (of Insects, Birds, or Mammals) by the superiority of their physical structure and their intelligence.
This fundamental fact of Nature was not noticed by Spencer until 1890. He accepted, on the contrary, an acute struggle for life within each species as an established fact which needed no proof—as an axiom. A struggle to the death "with beak and claw" for each bit of food. "Nature stained with the gladiator's blood," such as Tennyson represented it, was his conception of animal life. It was only in 1890 that he began to understand, up to a certain point, the importance of mutual aid, or rather the sentiment of mutual sympathy in the animal world, and began to collect facts and make observations in this direction. But even then, primitive man always remained for him the ferocious beast of his own imagination, which exists only on the condition of seizing the last bit of food from the mouth of its neighbours.
It is evident that once he had adopted a premise as fallacious as this, Spencer could not construct his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series of errors.