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Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer Author:Edward Livingston Youmans Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and command of a field of thought, even now regarded as new, a generation ago. It was while writing the "Psychology," in 1854, that Mr. Spencer first arrived ... more »at the conception of evolution as a universal law. The subject now opened up before him in all its breadth, and the problems multiplied right and left. As all things are constantly undergoing orderly changes, what are the common laws of transformation ? What the laws of this eternal redistribution of matter and motion, with their tendency through countless ages to a higher unfolding ? What, in short, are the causes and factors, the limits and formula, of the evolutionary process in all the diversities of its operation ? These were Herbert Spencer's questions from 1850 to 1860. They were problems of science now everywhere recognized as legitimate, immanent, and inevitable. In 1858 he had arrived at the idea that this universal process of law which accounts for the origin, continuance, and disappearance of the changing objects around us, is the deepest principle we can reach of the method of nature, and must necessitate a new organization of knowledge and a new dispensation of philosophy. We have here the secret of the originality that characterizes Spencer's work. The first great step he had taken compelled it. Whole branches of knowledge had to be reinvestigated and remolded in the light of an all-comprehensive and reconstructive principle. In brief, Mr. Spencer saw that the great advance of modern knowledge made it imperative to originate a new or- ganon of philosophy, grounded upon science and embodying throughout the theory of evolution. 'I can not here withhold my humble tribute of admiration to the courage, the pluck, the heroism of this thinker in engaging upon his great task. Everything was against him. Single-ha...« less