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Search - List of Books by Herbert Spencer

"Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit." -- Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 — 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. In 1902 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, in the United Kingdom and the United States at "one time Spencer's disciples had not blushed to compare him with Aristotle!"

He is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.  This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.

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Life   more

Synthetic Philosophy   more

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This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Herbert Spencer", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
Total Books: 729
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