SPENCER'S PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. * Mn. SPENCER'S Principles of Psychology is
a book only to be handled by men who can constantly check an author's conclusions by their own reasoning powers, and his facts by their own pre- vious knowledge. It is sketchy, highly abstract, audaciously Speculative, subversive of ordinary morality, and anti-Christian. We intend these latter epithets as 'descriptive. Morality depends on man's power to regulate his own conduct in accordance with a law either inward or outward, to control his desires, to educate his moral sense—in a word, to exert " free will." If the will is not free, man is not responsible; and Mr. Spencer denies in the plainest terms that man's will is free. Christianity implies that man has a soul as well as a body, and that the soul survives the dissolution of the body. Mr. Spencer denies that man has a soul—that be is anything but highly-organized tissue. In virtue of these doc- trines we apply the epithets. If the doctrines are true, morality is impossible, and Christianity is untrue. Meanwhile, we may observe that these issues are important ; and that the qualities preeminently needed in the man who undertakes to subvert the fundamental grounds of morals and religion are, the utmost cau- tion in advancing facts that seem to justify such alarming con- clusions, and humane consideration for the minds of such readers as are likely to be affected by his reasonings. It is in accordance with all experience that a writer bent upon this task should display neither caution nor consideration ; that he should not only eagerly admit such interpretations of obscure facts as tend to support his views, but largely draw upon his imagination for facts where ob- servation supplies none ; and that not a single precaution should be taken to obviate the apparently disastrous consequences that must follow the acceptance of his theories,—unless, indeed, we are to re- gard as a precaution having some object of this nature, that Mr. Spencer has made no attempt to divest his book of that technical and abstract phraseology which renders it quite unintelligible ex- cept to highly educated readers.
The work consists of four parts, and a fifth was projected, which would have connected the other four and brought their conclusions to a systematic body of coordinated results. The author apologizes in a preface for leaving his work imperfect, partly on the ground of impaired health, partly on the somewhat singularltehtid-firra philosophic investigator, that some of the suggestions of this con- cluding part might have prejudiced the public againstthedoetrines developed in the other parts. Curiosity is raised, considering the doctrines which Mr. Spencer has advanced, to conjecture the nature of those speculations which even he shrinks from bringing forward. Probably they are nothing more than a somewhat more detailed and circumstantial development of the results to which we have before alluded as immoral and anti-Christian.
Our business with this book is not to argue conclusions with the author, nor to criticize his reasoning, which would require as much space as he has himself taken if it were to be done satisfac- torily. We only propose to describe its contents.
The first part, which is reproduced on the basis of an article in the Westminster Review called "The Universal Postulate," is oc- cupied with an investigation into an universal criterion of belief. The conclusion arrived at is, that the only ground of our funda- mental beliefs is that we have them, and cannot help having them ; that in every attempt either to prove them or to disprove them is involved_the mistake of supposing that there is something mere certain than they are themselves. In the conclusion thus nakedly stated there is nothing novel. But in the application of the crite- rion to the various modes of Scepticism and Transcendentalism— to the theories, for instance, of 'Hume and Kant—and in the de- velopment of the consequences of the criterion, we recognize a logical strength and clearness of the highest order. The funda- mental beliefs themselves are "cognitions of an external world— of the primary properties of things—of personal existence—in short, those that make up the Realistic creed." Now there is not one of these beliefs that Mr. Spencer does not in the later portions of his work show to be inferential and highly composite. How is this apparent contradiction to be recon- ciled ? For a contradiction it is to call those beliefs funda- mental which are themselves resolvable into various elements, and are in fact conclusions inferred, according to Mr. Spencer, from a highly complex synthesis of sensation. We gather Mr. Spencer's theory to be, that these are organic inferences, which have ac- quired through the habit of countless generations the strength of instincts, and that, though now they are fundamental beliefs, they were originally arrived at by a process like that by which Newton reached the law of gravity or Copernicus learnt that the earth circled round the situ. In other words, these so-called funda- mental beliefs are only the most familiar inductions of the race and each individual, and differ from the most difficult and remote inductions of science solely by their familiarity, repetition, and consequent rapidity and facility of performance. If this is a misstatement of Mr. Spencer's position, we must attribute the mis- eonception to the uncompleted character of his book. Every other belief, we may add, is void in proportion to the number of times 3 assumes any fundamental belief ; because the chance of error is multiplied in each assumption. The whole process of belief is thus reduced to inference, and there is nothing fundamental, according to the ordinary usage of that word, except the sensations from changes in which consciousness and perception arise.
Belief being therefore reduced to inference or induction, and one belief being distinguished from another by its more or less frequent
• The Principles of Psychology. By Ilerbert Spencer, Author of "Social Statics." Published by Longman and Co.
recurrence in experience, what is the process of inference ? The second part of Mr. Spencer's book deals with this question; be- ginning with perfect quantitative reasoning as displayed in mathe- matics, and going down to simple consciousness. He analyzes the various forms of reasoning, and shows that they all without ex- ception consist in classifying new percepts as like or unlike per- cepts before classified. He then is led to investigate the nature of perception, and he finds it to consist also in classification of states of consciousness and their changes as like or unlike. The next step is to understand what consciousness is; and this is resolved into a series of changes of sensation, consciousness being possible only on condition of changes of sensation. Here, then, we get to the lowest elements of knowledge, and the lowest elements of the reasoning process—changes of sensation, and the faculty of re- gistering them. The result established is a unity of composition throughout all grades of intelligence, and a uniformity of process ; intelligence varying only in the degree of its composition, and the process ascending likewise only in the degree of its complexity. All belief is inference, and inference is the act of registering a new percept,—which itself consists of related sensations,—among the percepts registered in classes previously.
The phenomena of mind being thus analytically reduced to the simplest elements, the ground is cleared for connecting them with the general phenomena of life. The third part is a treatise on biology ; and is directed to establish the fact that all vital pheno- mena may be expressed under a definition of life as "The definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and suc- cessive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences "; and to develop this definition in its application to facts. By es- tablishing this generalization, Mr. Spencer conceives that he es- tablishes the essential identity of vital and mental action. "Whe- ther," he says, "the kind of life contemplated be that embraced by physiology, or that of whioli psychology treats, it equally con- sists of internal changes that mediately or immediately conform to external coexistences and sequences. The assimilative processes going on in a plant, and the reasonings by which a man of science makes a discovery, alike exhibit the adjustment of inner relations to outer relations.' And again—" Regarded under every variety of aspect, the manifestations of intelligence are universally found to consist in the establishment of correspondence between relations in the organism and relations in the environment ; and the entire development of intelligence is seen to be nothing else than the progress of such correspondence in space, in time, in speciality, in generality, in complexity." We prefer to give these results in Mr. Spencer's own words, because we might otherwise fail to do full justice to his meaning; our own conviction being, that his generalization is of that unfruitful kind whose characteristic is to embrace under the same term things essentially different, and whose breadth is gained by exhausting it of all significance, as if we defined a man and a cloud to be both things. Such generalizations may for special purposes have a logical value, but they have no objective validity : the objects comprehended under them are not thereby shown to have any such likeness as ought to be indicated by a scientific definition. And no amount of defining will make persons of ordinary sense look upon the assimilative processes of a plant and the reasoning processes of Sir Isaac Newton as analogous phenomena. They will rather be apt to concur in the sentiment we once heard ex- pressed by an eminent person of a great logician, "that he was a signal instance of what an ass logic could make of a clever man." But, of course, Mr. Spencer's generalization is subservient to a purpose—is an instrument for a theory of the genesis of "mind," if the obsolete phrase is still to be applied. To reduce mental and vital action under the same general definition, is the first step towards showing that the one is evolved out of the other; that man is a natural descendant of a zoophyte ; and that, in quite a novel sense, "the world is an oyster."
The fourth part of Mr. Spencer's book is accordingly occupied with an attempt to build up out of the assimilative processes which characterize the lowest forms of life an evolving series of phenomena terminating in human intelligence. And this means not only that he frames an ascending scale beginning with the plant and ending with the man, but that he educes each higher from the next lower development, the organisms rising in function and structure by degrees of complexity and speciality. He allows that to support this theory of development he has no facts—not a single one which thoroughly examined justifies in any instance the asser- tion that any known species has been:found to develop into any other known species. But his previous analysis has led to the conclusion that all vital action and all mental action are identical, and that therefore there is nothing absurd or impossible in sup- posing that tissue, once possessed of assimilative powers, can grow by habit and the inheritance of acquired habits, strengthening with each generation, into such an organism as man now exhibits. And many facts in physiology, looked at under the influence of this hypothesis, point, he says, to a confirmation of it. Indeed, we may allow that if it were absolutely necessary that we should form to ourselves an hypothesis of the mode in which the creative power acted in the production of the various forms of life upon the globe,—and if we were bound to reject as incredible that they were called into existence by the fiat of Almighty Will, each after its kind, with the power of propagating its like,—Mr. Spencer's hypothesis would demand more serious attention than in the pre- sent temper of scientific men it is likely to attract. But we ac- knowledge that of this process we know nothing ; all we know points not to Mr. Spencer's conclusion, but to the ordinary belief that the forms of life were originally impressed, and are trans- mitted with variations extremely limited, and constantly tending to return to their primitive type.
But though we conceive Mr. Spencer's speculations audacious and unfounded, we are bound to say of his book, that it displays a talent not often equalled ; and that, in the second part especially, his analytical power is of the highest order. The Sensationalist theory of the genesis of knowledge has not of late received so powerful an accession, and it will require more subtilty and strength to refute his conclusions on the origin of our notions of matter and its properties than any living Idealist writer has as yet displayed.
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