Principles of western civilisation

I THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 83

There can be no doubt in the mind of the student as to this fact. As we follow Mr. Spencer through the successive stages of his theory of social development, we see how he conceives human progress to be controlled in all its features by one fact, namely, the relation of the past to the present in a struggle in which the interests in the present are becoming the ascendant factor in our social evolution. Of that deeper conception of human progress as an integrating social process, of which all the principles are in the last resort controlled by the fact that the present is in reality not so much related to the past as passing out under the control of the future, there is to be distinguished no grasp in Mr. Spencer’s writings.

We encounter the expression of this fact everywhere from the outset. If we take up the advance to the study of the science of society in Mr. Spencer’s writings with his Prznciples of Psychology, the application of the conception to which we are there carried forward is, we see, merely the application of the old-world conception of Condorcet, Cousin, and Quinet, according to which the theory of sociological principles is to be deduced from the introspective study of the individual mind. Of that transforming truth to which all the principles of psychology will be seen to be related in the future, namely, that the study of the individual mind must be itself approached from the stand-point

the very principle which was about to become the central conception of the Darwinian hypothesis. It tends to explain in some measure that fact of Huxley’s subsequent failure to apply the evolutionary hypothesis with any Teasure of success in the explanation of the phenomena of human society, which was in evidence in his Romanes Lecture in 1893, in the conception therein discussed of the cosmic process verses the ethical process (cf. Hvolution and Ethics, by T. H. Huxley).