Frederic Harrison

“ When I reflect on the enormous gaps in the Synthetic System, the absence of any continuous theory of general history, the absence of any systematic treatment, or even of any sketch, of all the Inorganic Sciences—Mechanics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry—I reluctantly am forced to regard the claim, that out of all history, all science, Spencer has evolved 'one coherent conception,' as being far beyond the truth. ”

“ The men who succeed in organizing any scheme of general thought, in such a way as to command the attention of all those in the civilized world who devote themselves to philosophy and to science, are so infinitely few—the resources needed even to attempt such a task are so complex and so rare—their labours are so precious to the advancement of human thought, that we judge their work to be worthy of study and honour, even if we find manifest errors in certain parts, and they fail to satisfy their generation. ”

“ I do not say the greatest man of science, or the subtlest metaphysician, or the most creative genius, but the philosopher whose ideas have, had the widest range, and have commanded at home and abroad the most penetrating power. This judgement rests on the fact of the very rare band of those who can be called philosophers, and of the infinite difficulty of the task of constructing anything that can be treated as a Synthesis of human knowledge. ”

“ It is no paradox that, in philosophy, a systematic co-ordination of ideas may ultimately be judged as abortive, and yet may remain one of the landmarks of human thought and a monument of human genius. ”

“ An age which has dedicated its industry to infinitesimal analysis and an almost jealous specialism is too apt to slight the power of the imagination in the service of a great constructive brain. Philosophy, like poetry itself, can do nothing abiding without the synthetic imagination. To limit the attention to flaws in the details of a symmetrical scheme of ideas is like wasting time over anachronisms in the Iliad, or false astronomy in the Divine Comedy. ”

“ It is difficult to see how such a panorama of an objective world of things differs from the transcendental conception of 'Dinge an Sich.' The spectacle presented to our very limited powers of vision and of thought by such petty corner of the Unfathomable Universe as may be within our ken is still of itself so vast, so complex, so shifting, so subtle, and yet to us so infinite, that it must ever baffle our efforts to reach farther than a simple tabulation of what is within our range of mental vision. ”

“ Is any harmony or correlation of all human knowledge either possible or needful? Well, if not, then cadit quaestio, and Spencer's claim to be a philosopher falls to the ground, whatever his claims to acute thoughts on biology, sociology, and ethic. We well know the energy and ability of the many schools of thought—theological, idealist, and ontological (or it may be sceptical) —which would maintain that the only Philosophy is one that is concerned with the mystery of the Universe and the soul of man; that human science cannot attain to the higher knowledge or to any generalized truth ”

“ The sun, the everlasting mountains, human nature—all are changing, however subtle and invisible to us be the process. But relatively, an immense body of our observations, and nearly half our scientific knowledge, deal with phenomena of apparent stability, order, permanent type. It would be riding to death the old apophthegm of Heracleitus—πάντα ρεἳ—to think of things only in flux, to ignore the vast field of Persistence of Type as dominating change. To those who reject the relativity of knowledge, it may be open to disregard mere relative permanence in a universe of absolute movement. ”

“ This degradation of Science is repudiated, not only by Theology and by Metaphysics, but no less emphatically by Positive Philosophy.
The whole series of the human sciences, Psychology, Language, Art, Sociology, History, Economics, Ethic, and Politic—such branches of Knowledge as treat man otherwise than as an animal—have their special laws, their own logic, their own moral fibre, their own spiritual conclusion, quite incommensurable with the non-human sciences. Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology undoubtedly explain Man as an animal. ”

“ I pass to another difficulty which the scheme of Universal Evolution presents to many minds. It propounds a single set of laws which claim to be equally applicable to all the sciences, both cosmical and human; and, more than that, it claims to supply us with an adequate but general elucidation of all phenomena in the Universe, on our Earth, and in human nature. ”

“ According to the far humbler school in which I have been trained, any Objective synthesis, i. e. any co-ordination of our knowledge of phenomena according to their actual order in rerum natura, is an impossible Utopia. A true 'Cosmic philosophy,' to use the term of Spencer's American disciple, Prof. Fiske, is beyond the range of our relative powers of mind. Any real synthesis of our knowledge of phenomena must be one relative to the powers of the human observation and reflection—not claiming to be any record of things as they are in the Universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No man ever more entirely fulfilled the maxim of the French poet, which another philosopher took for his favourite device: 'What is it that makes a great life? It is the ideal of youth carried out in mature age.' It is thus that, almost alone of modern philosophers, Herbert Spencer achieved all that he purposed, and perhaps all that he was capable of completing. ”

“ As well ask the painter of a grand landscape to draw, not what he sees from his standing-point, but every object which is actually present within the horizon—nay, beyond the horizon and every object, not in just perspective as visible to the human eye, but in its actual proportion to all other objects around it. ”

“ It would be ludicrous to limit Astronomy to hypotheses about the origin of the Solar System, and to limit Geology to speculations how the Earth came about, neglecting all notice of the Earth as we find it. ”

“ Students of the Positive Philosophy do not need to be reminded that the Synthesis or co-ordination of the sciences, as proposed by Comte, consists, not in applying to them all alike one set of formulae, but in tracing their concatenation and mutual relations. To attempt a co-ordination of the sciences on one uniform theory—such theory primarily applied to the material world—inevitably forces the philosopher to reduce all social and moral problems to the terms of cosmical and physical problems, and ultimately to terms of molecular physics and mechanics. ”

“ What is the true definition of Philosophy—what of Synthesis—what of Evolution? Philosophy means ultimate generalization. Spencer correctly defined it as 'knowledge completely unified.' Our first crude observations are special, local, disparate. Science only begins with the colligation of crude separate observations. Each general science implies the colligation of a large body of departmental generalizations. The generalization of all the general sciences in their ultimate coordination is philosophy. ”

“ This side of Man's nature, the greatest side of his nature, the largest, most dominant, and most sublime fact in all Nature, can only be explained by Social Science, solid Philosophy, true Religion. As the poet saw it in a vision, the last man shall proudly confront in his conscious superiority the waning and unconscious sun. The central and vivifying life-blood of this Social Science, of this Philosophy, of this Religion, must be—not Evolution, or the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous by continuous differentiation and integration—No! ”

“ At one time to doubt such a dogmatic genesis was to risk being charged as an unbeliever in Darwin's great theory of animal transformation. I used to think that Professor Huxley looked on 'Evolution' as the nom de guerre of the Royal Society, or perhaps even of its most eloquent Fellow. But 'Evolution' in the hands of Herbert Spencer meant something quite different: far wider in scope and more philosophic in spirit. Spencer meant by Evolution a theory of the gradual development of all phenomena, cosmical and physical, human and moral, under a set of dominant and coordinate principles. ”

“ The literary and scientific world in Europe, in America, and in the Far East does homage to this devotion to the ideal of a Synthetic Philosophy. To many it comes like the dawn of a new era, in an age absorbed in the infinite analyses of fissiparous specialism. ”

“ The World and Humanity are not reducible to any common measure. If objectively, and in rerum natura, the World is everywhere in eternal flux; relatively and humanly, the world of inorganic Nature is in a state of comparative permanence and stability as compared with the organic world. So the Non-human world is relatively in a state of fixity as compared with the Human world and its infinitely complex and subtle laws of progress. The Evolution of Man is infinitely more subtle, more continuous, more important to us than the Evolution of the Physical world. ”

“ Spencer stands forth amid all our English philosophers since Bacon, as having deliberately set to himself, for the task of his life, the framing a Synthesis of Knowledge a Science of the Sciences a System whereby all human ideas, scientific, moral and social, could be harmonized in one dominant concatenation or correlation. ”

“ Spencer's conception of Evolution, though it incorporated Darwin's laws as to the mutability of species, is not only utterly different from pure Darwinian Evolution, but is not commensurable with it. We could no more compare them than we can compare Kepler's laws of planetary motion with Bacon's Inductive method. Darwin was a naturalist: Spencer was a philosopher. And no one was more ready than Darwin himself to recognize the difference and the higher rank of the philosopher. Darwin rarely quits the ground of multiple inductions and massive observations of the organic world. ”

“ It is one of the inherent vices of the objective synthesis, that it has to banish Statics from its scheme, and to concentrate its study on Dynamics alone. It is the intellectual and moral disease of our time to despise everything that is not in constant flux. The Philosophy of Evolution is limited ex hypothesi and ex vi termini to dynamical movements. But it is not true that Science consists solely of dynamical laws. The laws of Type, of a stability relative to human observations, are antecedent in fact, and also in order of thought. ”

“ The truly general syntheses are so extraordinarily few in the history of the human mind, they lead to such wide and unexpected results when they stir the interest of the philosophic world, that any substantial synthesis lives and moulds opinion, even when its details are rejected and its conclusions are ignored. ”

“ Complete philosophy must rest on a theory at once statical and dynamical. A full science of Ethic cannot be constituted by tabulating in a series the changes recorded in moral sentiment, whilst wholly ignoring the permanent instincts of the human heart, the qualities of the human will, the powers of the human intelligence, and the personal, domestic, tribal, and national institutions which cling round man under all conditions of development. ”

“ There is not in it, and never was even projected, any Philosophy of general History, the Dynamics in fact of Sociology. In the 'Principles of Sociology' there are a body of acute but miscellaneous observations, and some profound suggestions, as to the origin of institutions, primitive habits, rudimentary groups. But we never get further than glimpses of savage life, the variations in primaeval rites, and the survival of ancient customs. In all Spencer's vast output there is nothing that can be called any theory of general history. What we have is the embryology of society. ”

“ Let us turn to define Evolution—a word about which much ambiguity exists. In its narrower sense 'Evolution,' a term not at first used by Darwin, means the morphological and physiological variations of organic beings by the action of natural selection. It then came to be loosely applied to almost any specific theory about the origin and development of things. ”

“ That of which Francis Bacon dreamed with his luminous imagination Spencer planned out with a far sounder scientific basis and a less Utopian ambition. Spencer thereby remains our one synthetic philosopher. Whether that Synthesis has yet been, or is ever destined to be, accepted as adequate is a problem which we may presently consider. But its rare power to rivet the attention of the thinking world, and to plant the seeds of an infinite crop of fertile conceptions, can hardly be gainsaid by any serious student of the evolution of modern thought. ”

“ It testifies to the insatiable craving of the human mind for some coherent system of thought the invincible instinct that human science is not a bubble of the imagination, that as science means a generalization of observations, so the sciences in the sum are capable of some ultimate generalization, some co-ordination, some organic relation to each other. ”