volumes were thus made known, but from them it was impossible more than to conjecture what the treatment would have been. The complete scheme was drawn up early in 1858 and sent to his father in a letter, but the revised scheme, issued in 1860, and with which we are all familiar, wants the details for all below the biology. Not until the "Autobiography" appeared in 1904 was this hiatus supplied.[1] This was the reason for publishing a letter from him dated September 19, 1895, in which considerable was said on this subject. Nearly eight years, however, were allowed to elapse before this step was taken in 1903. His permission to publish it would have been asked had it not been known that at that date Mr. Spencer was nearing his end, his death occurring in December of the same year, and it seemed highly important that information so vital to his system should not be lost.[2]
While, therefore, Mr. Spencer's treatment of inorganic nature, so far as it could be judged from "First Principles" and other indications, was full of promise, still, inasmuch as he did not fulfil that promise by an exhaustive elaboration of it, it was soon overshadowed by his work in the next great field, that of biology, the only other field of his labors in which no early preconceptions existed to warp his judgment or impede the flight of his genius.
Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" is the gem of his "Synthetic Philosophy," and must rank for all time as his masterpiece. In it he founds the science of biology squarely upon that of organic chemistry, and "Chemical Development" was to have been the final topic of "The Principles of Geogeny."[3] This makes clear the filiation of the sciences thus far. Then come his several proximate definitions of life, closing with "the broadest and most complete" one: "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." Few have been satisfied with this, and the more it is studied the less it seems to fulfil the conditions. The objection to it is that there is no life in the definition. It is strange that he should have failed to cement the lowest organic science, biology, to the highest inorganic science, chemistry, by recognizing the brief step from the spontaneous molecular activities of the most complex organic compounds, the albuminoids, to the no more spontaneous molar activities (motility) of the simplest living substance, which we know as protoplasm, and believe to result from the further recompounding of the former.[4]
- ↑ "Autobiography," Vol. II., p. 17; "Life and Letters," Vol. II., pp. 158-159.
- ↑ "Pure Sociology," pp. 66-67. A portion of this letter appears in "Life and Letters," Vol. II., pp. 90-91. Mr. Duncan should have mentioned this earlier publication of the letter in full followed by the reply to it and a further discussion of the principles involved.
- ↑ "Life and Letters," Vol. II., p. 159.
- ↑ Cf. "The Organic Compounds in their Relations to Life," Proc. A. A. A. S., Vol. XXXI, pp. 493-494; The American Naturalist, Vol. XVI., December, 1882, pp. 968-979.
