J. Arthur Thomson

“ Is there no hopefulness in trying to give a scientific account of the nature and history and genesis of the confessedly vast and perplexing orders of facts which we call Physical Nature, Animate Nature, and Human Nature?—then let us become agnostics pure and simple, or let us remain philosophers or theologians, poets or artists, and sigh over an impetuous science which started so much in debt that its bankruptcy was a foregone conclusion! ”

“ He evidently looked forward with hope to a time "when the general science of society has solved the problems which it has as yet only managed to define more or less clearly—when for positive knowledge it can offer us something better than a mixture of vague and variously applied physiological analogies, imperfectly verified historical generalisations, and unwarranted political predictions—when it has succeeded in establishing on the basis of a really scientific induction its forecasts of social evolution." ”

“ He looked forward to a unification of knowledge, to "one science, which has for its object-matter the continuous transformation which the universe undergoes." "Evolution being a universal process, one and continuous throughout all forms of existence, there can be no break, no change from one group of concrete phenomena to another without a bridge of intermediate phenomena." ”

“ The illustrious author of the Germ-Plasm has made it quite clear that there is a great difference between admitting that the germ-plasm has no charmed life, insulated from bodily influences, and admitting the transmissibility of a particular acquired character, even in the faintest degree. The whole point is this: Does a change in the body, induced by use or disuse or by a change in surroundings, influence the germ-plasm in such a specific or representative way that the offspring will exhibit the same modification which the parent acquired, or even a tendency towards it? ”

“ It is quite plain that the sociological evolutionist will not advance far if he disregards the concept of the social organism, if he shuts his eyes to the fact that a societary form, however simple, is an integrate; not a mere congeries of persons, but a unity with a life and mind of its own. Yet he may quite consistently try to trace the emergence of societary forms from a simply gregarious stock, and that again from entirely non-social organisms. ”

“ If we pass from these relatively near bodies to the thirty millions of remote suns and solar systems, where shall we find a reason for all this apparently unconscious existence, infinite in amount compared with the existence which is conscious—a waste Universe as it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery—whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? ”

“ Speaking of Huxley's wonderful versatility as a thinker, he said that it lent "some colour to the dictum—quite untenable, however—that genius is a unit, and, where it exists, can manifest itself equally in all directions." As it seems to us, there is much truth in the dictum which Spencer dismissed as "quite untenable." The genius is a new variation of high potential and is as such a unity, capable of expressing itself in many diverse ways, and always with originality. ”

“ When we reflect on the complex ways in which the influence of Greece and Rome has saturated into our life, and has become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, in literature and art, in philosophy and science, so that the ideas and feelings among and in which we live and move are hardly intelligible apart from it, we can hardly believe our ears when we listen to Spencer's sentence. It seems to throw a weird light on his Sociology. ”

“ For the biologist as a scientific inquirer "the problem of whether life is or is not a mechanism is not a question of whether the same things, 'matter' and 'force,' are or are not at the back of organic and inorganic phenomena—of what is at the back of either class of sense-impressions we know absolutely nothing—but of whether the conceptual shorthand of the physicist, his ideal world of ether, atom, and molecule, will or will not also suffice to describe the biologist's perceptions." ”

“ An inheritance is all that the organism is or has to start with on its life-journey in virtue of the hereditary relation to parents and ancestors. In all ordinary cases, the inheritance has its initial material basis in the egg-cell and the sperm-cell which unite in fertilisation at the beginning of a new life, and these two kinds of germ-cells, which bear the maternal and the paternal contributions, have their peculiar virtue of reproducing like from like, just because they are the unchanged or very slightly changed cell-descendants of the fertilised ova from which the parents arose. ”

“ In conclusion, after his wonted manner, Spencer pointed out that Variation, like everything else, is necessitated by the Persistence of Force. "The members of a species inhabiting any area cannot be subject to like sets of forces over the whole of that area. And if, in different parts of the area, different kinds or amounts or combinations of forces act on them, they cannot but become different in themselves and in their progeny. To say otherwise, is to say that differences in the forces will not produce differences in the effects; which is to deny the persistence of force." ”

“ Lastly come the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while, simultaneously, comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to realise, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of existence and the consciousness of having existed. ”

“ Let him duly realise the fact that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself—that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency—is a unit of forces, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. ”

“ What Sociology is.—By sociology is meant the study of the structure and activity, development and evolution of social groups, which have sufficient integration or unity to justify their being regarded as "organisms," with a life—and a mind—of their own. That many active-minded people persist in looking askance at sociology—as "a mass of facts about society," and "no science," is not unnatural, since the science is still very young and its definition is still elastic. At certain points it necessarily comes in contact with biology, e.g. in the study of heredity and eugenics ”

“ What must we say of the life, minute, multitudinous, degraded, which, covering the ocean-floor, occupies by far the larger part of the Earth's area; and which yet, growing and decaying in utter darkness, presents hundreds of species of a single type? Or, when we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which, murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved, how shall we answer the question—To what end? ”

“ All the processes by which organisms are refitted to their ever-changing environments must be equilibrations of one kind or another, for change of every order is towards equilibrium, and life itself is a moving equilibrium between inner and outer actions—a continual adjustment of internal relations to external relations. The process called Natural Selection is literally a survival of the fittest ”

“ With the development of tool-using and sentence-making, with recognition of the seasons as a fundamental illustration of the uniformity of nature, with the gaining of a firmer foothold in the struggle for existence, with slowly increasing altruism and sociality, and with the occasional emergence of the genius, there might gradually arise—in permanent products, in symbols and songs, in traditions and customs—an external heritage, which, it appears to us, has been the most potent factor in securing and furthering human evolution. ”

“ To me there is no place so delightful as the beach. It is the place where, more than anywhere else, philosophy and poetry meet—where in fact you are presented by Nature with a never-ending feast of knowledge and beauty. There is no place where I can so palpably realise Emerson's remark that 'Nature is the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.'"
One evening in August 1861 Spencer stood looking over the Sound of Mull from Ardtornish house. ”

“ There is no reason why he should stand aloof from the theory that inorganic and organic evolution are continuous, in other words from the theory of the spontaneous generation of living matter at an appropriate time in the Earth's history—a theory which is suggested by many facts. If that is a legitimate theory it increases our respect for what we call the inanimate, but it does not make our biological evolutionism any easier, nor are we any nearer explaining life. The organism remains what it is, a living creature with a behaviour which we are unable to redescribe in terms of mechanism. ”

“ For if the evolution idea is an adequate modal formula of the great process of Becoming, then we need to think of growth, development, differentiation, integration, reproduction, heredity, death—all the big facts—in the light of this. And this is what the Principles of Biology helps us to do. It is of course saturated with the theory of the transmissibility of acquired characters—an idea integral to much of Spencer's thinking—which had hardly begun to be questioned when the work was published, which is now, however, a very moot point indeed. ”

“ In an age of specialism he held up the banner of the Unity of Science, and he actually completed, so far as he could complete, the great task of his life—greater than most men have even dreamed of—that of applying the evolution-formula to everything knowable. ”

“ On the other hand, in many plants and lower animals, the distinction between body-cells and germ-cells is far from being demonstrably marked, and even in higher animals we cannot think of the germ-cells as if they led a charmed life uninfluenced by any of the accidents and incidents in the daily life of the body which is their nurse, though not exactly their parent. No one believes this, Weismann least of all, for he finds one of the chief sources of germinal variation in the nutritive stimuli exerted on the germ-plasm by the varying state of the body. The organism is a unity ”

“ No one can tell what the first thing that lived on the earth was like, what organisation it had, or what it was able to do, but we may be sure that vital organisation and vital activity are only static and kinetic aspects of the same thing. It is quite probable, however, that there is no one thing that can be called protoplasm, for vital function may depend upon the inter-relations or inter-actions of several complex substances, none of which could by itself be called alive; which are, however, held together in that unity which makes an organism what it is. ”

“ And, again, in 1876, in his Principles of Sociology, he amplified his statement thus: "All other organs, therefore, jointly and individually, compete for blood with each organ,... local tissue formation (which under normal conditions measures the waste of tissue in discharging function) is itself a cause of increased supply of materials... the resulting competition, not between units simply, but between organs, causes in a society, as in a living body, high nutrition and growth of parts called into the greatest activity by the requirements of the rest." ”

“ The general theory of organic evolution—the theory of Descent—tacitly makes the assumption, which is the basal hope of all biology, that it is not only legitimate but promiseful to try to interpret scientifically the history of life upon the earth. It [Pg 147] formulates the idea that the present phase of being is the natural and necessary outcome of a previous, on the whole, simpler phase of being, and so on, backwards and forwards in time, under the operation of more or less clearly discernible natural factors and conditions—notably variation and heredity, selection and isolation. ”

“ The old idea that character inheres in the ghost, and that the body is merely the ghost's house, having no causal relation to it, still lingered in more or less refined form when Spencer set himself to show "that, in both amounts and kinds, mental manifestations are in part dependent on bodily structures. Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep as the viscera." ”

“ On tracing up from its low and vague beginnings the intelligence which becomes so marvellous in the highest beings, we find that under whatever aspect contemplated, it presents a progressive transformation of like nature with the progressive transformation we trace in the Universe as a whole, no less than in each of its parts. If we study the development of the nervous system, we see it advancing in integration, in complexity, in definiteness. ”

“ When a plant is transferred from one soil to another it undergoes "a change of habit"; its leaves may become hairy, its stem woody, its branches drooping. "These are modifications of structure consequent on modifications of function that have been produced by modifications in the actions of external forces. And as these modifications reappear in succeeding generations, we have, in them, examples of functionally-established variations that are hereditarily transmitted." ”

“ Not only is it rational to infer that changes like those which have been going on during civilisation will continue to go on, but it is irrational to do otherwise. Not he who believes that adaptation will increase is absurd, but he who doubts that it will increase is absurd. Lack of faith in such further evolution of humanity as shall harmonise with its conditions adds but another to the countless illustrations of inadequate consciousness of causation. ”

“ But even if this tour de force seemed legitimate, we should still be unable to accept a universal formula of Evolution in terms of mechanism. For we are not at present able to think of the facts of bodily life in terms of mechanical categories. Thus, in short, when we enter the chariot of Spencer's Evolution-formula, and attempt to make an intellectual journey—"one and continuous" from the primitive nebula to human society, we confess to suffering serious joltings. ”