Herbert Spencer is a philosopher of a wider range. A believer in organic evolution before Darwin published his epoch-making work, he accepted at once Darwin's useful idea, and incorporated it as a minor part in its fitting place in his own system. But that system itself, alike in its conception and its inception, was both independent of and anterior to Darwin's first pronouncement. It certainly covered a vast world of thought which Darwin never even attempted to enter. To Herbert Spencer, Darwin was even as Kant, Laplace, and Lyell - a laborer in the special field who produced results which fell at once into their proper order in his wider synthesis. As sculptors, they carved out shapely stones, from which he, as architect, built his majestic fabric. The total philosophic concept of evolution as a cosmical process - one and continuous, from nebula to man, from star to soul, from atom to society - we owe to Herbert Spencer himself, and to him alone, using as material the final results of innumerable preceding workers and thinkers...
May I begin with a passage which I quoted from one of Mr. Spencer's own early works no less than eleven years since, in my little monograph on Charles Darwin? It occurs in an essay on The Development Hypothesis, in that long-defunct paper, the Leader.
"Even could the supporters of the development hypothesis merely show that the origination of species by the process of modification is conceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents. But they can do much more than this. They can show that the process of modification has effected, and is effecting, great changes in all organisms, subject to modifying influences... They can show that any existing species - animal or vegetable - when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue, until ultimately the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, these changes have uniformly taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference, so produced, are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show that it is a matter of dispute whether some of those modified forms are varieties or modified species. They can show too that the changes daily taking place in ourselves - the facility that attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases - the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made of it, are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic Nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences, an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes; an influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of change."
Now, by most readers at the present day, this passage would undoubtedly be at once set down as "Darwinian." But when was it written?...
The Origin of Fruits and Cultivated Plants.
"To the attractive hues of fruit, I believe, we must ultimately trace back our whole artistic pleasure in the pure physical stimulation of beautiful colors, displayed by natural objects or artificial products.
Our present inquiry, then, will yield us some account of that primitive delight in red, purple, orange, and yellow, which we usually take for granted as an innate instinct of humanity, savage or civilized. When, some few months back, we analyzed the various elements of pleasure which make up our aesthetic enjoyment of a daisy, we were compelled, for the time being, to leave the original beauty of its pink-and-white rays wholly unexplained..."
This book deals with the evolution of human and organic forms.
"That men, or thinking beings akin to man, exist only on that minute fragment of the universe we call the earth is a conception so highly improbable, in view of the vast multitude of planets which we may logically conceive to exist, that it seems as if no reasoning being could entertain it. It is true, indeed, that in our own solar system perhaps only two or three of the planets, perhaps only the earth, are in a condition suitable for human habitation, and that the earth has been so for a comparatively brief period. It may well be, therefore, that only a very small percentage of the planets of space are in a similar condition. But in view of the vast multitude of planets that presumably exist, the number of those that possess reasoning beings is probably great. If we deal with this question from the point of view of actual evidence, the fact that the only planet whose conditions we know is inhabited by man is a strong argument in favor of his wide-spread existence. On the other hand, the fact that man's existence upon the earth is dependent upon a certain limited range of temperature, of brief duration in the earth's total history, is an argument on the opposite side, and goes far to narrow the possible domain of life in the universe. Yet if we extend our view to embrace the past and the future as well as the present, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the realm of life and thought in the universe is an immense one..."
This is a complete study of the cause and reasons of the migration of birds. What makes Birds Migrate? Migration is the act of changing an abode or resting place, the wandering or movement from one place to another, but technically the word is applied to the passage or movement of birds, fishes, insects and a few mammals between the localities inhabited at different periods of the year. The wandering of a nomadic tribe of men is migration; the mollusc, wandering from feeding ground to feeding ground in the bed of the ocean, migrates; the caterpillar migrates from branch to branch, even from leaf to leaf; the rat leaves the ship in which it has travelled and migrates to the granary; we pack our goods, hire a removing van and migrate to a new abode. The word migration thus applied may be literally correct but it fails to convey the generally accepted meaning, and the expression Bird Migration suggests periodical and regular movement, the passage as a rule between one country and another..."
In the great family of the animals, to which we ourselves belong, many different kinds of feet and hands are to be found. This book deals with the evolution of our feet and hands. "The succession of organic modifications which resulted in the formation of the human hand is part of the general process of evolution by which in the animal series the means of progression and of the taking of food were shaped by the environmental conditions under which life was carried on... The functions of life which call into service the bodily limbs are chiefly two-locomotion, an activity which has arisen in connection with the search for food and flight from enemies; and prehension, which is concerned primarily with the grasping and tearing of food, but secondarily also with processes assistive of locomotion and other biological functions, such as sexual congress, the care of the body, burrowing and climbing. Of these two functions, if we regard the vertebrate class only, the former is the more primitive. Upon the office of locomotion the prehensive and manipulative activities of the limb have been superposed as subsequent and more specialized adaptations...."
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