Yet again with Herbert Spencer. My comment on him today is that a chapter on his work in a recent book by Robert Bannister makes the whole arc of Spencer's work and his life seem tragic.
Spencer's big picture was that the world is Matter in Motion There is a Mystery to this -- Spencer in full Victorian manner bowed toward the Mystery of why there is any matter in motion at all, but then he showed Mystery the door again as outside the purview of science or of his sort of philosophy, the sort that seeks to remain in close touch with science. Having bowed God out the door, he stuck with Matter in Motion. Moreover, what we can say about this world is that progress always proceeds from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The increasingly heterogeneous world, or for any given chunk of the world the increasing heterogeneity of THAT, requires ever more complicated relations among the parts, but change always works toward new equilibriums, accommodating these complications.
Spencer thought he had Figured It All Out. A great cosmic progression from rotating discs of dust to --- planets, then to life, then to intelligent life, then to human civilization -- at first military and later commercial in character. A coherent conception of "evolution" as something that includes the condensation of those dust discs into stars and planets, explains biology, psychology, and sociology all. Best of all, his theories suggested to his mind that human history is leading in a utopian direction, as "militarism" falls into the past. Commercialism will not only replace militarism, it will create an abundance that can be shared by all, and a spirit in which such sharing comes spontaneously.
Spencer was not only delighted that such a view helped him put together a lot of pieces of the world puzzle, he was further delighted to find a market for his writings. But he was too curious and had too much integrity, to rest with confidence in his "synthetic philosophy" at any given stage in its development. He had to keep learning, re-working, etc. And therein lay his downfall, for he would die as an embittered old man.
On the road to that embittered state, he gradually became aware (as Bannister recreates his development -- for all I know other scholars have challenged this) that the initial statements I have summarized above had rested on equivocations, on word magic, and that the actual course of the world was not kind to his equivocating. The world wasn't proving kind to his utopian notions -- militarism wasn't fading -- and his occasional use of an organicist metaphor for society seemed to have been taken over by collectivists whose ideas he abhorred.
It was on the way to bitter-old-man-hood, Bannister said, that Spencer wrote the passages most easily identified with "social darwinism." The neo-Malthusian "people are gonna starve and that's just the way it has to be" passages don't come in his early visionary books. They come about only once his early optimistic even utopian vision had come unglued even in his own eyes.
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