The life and letters of Herbert Spencer / by David Duncan.

  • David Duncan
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life and letters of Herbert Spencer / by David Duncan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    617/692 (page 567)
    tions of each. The only course was that of engaging one or more assistants who should, under guidance, collect facts for me. My first step was to scheme an arrangement in which they should be so presented that while their relations of co- existence and succession were easily recognized, they should be so presented that those of each kind could be readily found when required. In the tables drawn up the primary division of social phenomena is into Structural and Functional, and the main divisions under these are Regulative and Operative. A glance will show that ranged under these main and subordinate groups, the heterogenous masses of facts societies exhibit, dis- orderly as they at first seem, are made intelligible, and the comparing and generalizing of them easy. Sundry modifica- tions of beliefs at once resulted from thus facilitating in- duction. The work on The Study of Sociology formed no part of the programme of the Synthetic Philosophy.1 But, rather fortun- ately, it was written before the Principles of Sociology was com- menced ; and, while serving to prepare the public, was also a good discipline for me. The cultured classes and their leaders—Carlyle, Froude, Kingsley, etc.—were in utter darkness about the matter. They alleged the impossibility of a “ science of history,” and were without any conception that there had been going on the evolution of social structures, not made or dreamed of by kings and statesmen, or recognized by historians. Two chapters “ Is there a Social Science ? ” and “ The Nature of the Social Science,” explained that there is a distinction between history and the science of sociology like that between a man’s biography and the structure of his body. Evidence was given at this time of continued natural growth from a germ dating far back. In the comparison between a society and an organism, made in Social Statics, where the mutual dependence of parts common to both and the progress in both from a primitive state of no dependence to a state of great dependence, were pointed out, there was no recognition of any fundamental division in the classes of parts or classes of functions. But “The Social Organism,” published ten years later, exhibited the analogy between the expending organs of the two and between the sustaining organs of the two. And now this conception had become more definite. In an essay on “ Specialized Administration ” published in December, 1871, it was shown that the militant structures and the industrial structures, while growing more distinguished as expending structures and sustaining structures, grow more distinguished also by the different forms of government proper to them : the one being under a despotic central control needful to produce \Supra, chap, xiii., p. 159.]