Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770–1850 Author(s): Paul Elliott Reviewed work(s): Source: Isis, Vol. 94, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 1-29 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/376097 . Accessed: 04/04/2012 14:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770–1850 By Paul Elliott*
ABSTRACT
The significance of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy has been generally recognized for over a century, as the familiarity of his phrase “survival of the fittest” indicates, yet accounts of the origins of his system still tend to follow too closely his own description, written many decades later. This essay argues that Spencer’s own interpretation of his intellectual development gives an inadequate impression of the debt he owed to provincial scientific culture and its institutions. Most important, it shows that his evolutionism was originally stimulated by his association with the Derby philosophical community, for it was through this group—of which his father, who also appears to have espoused a deistic evolutionary theory, was a member—that he was first exposed to progressive Enlightenment social and educational philosophies and to the evolutionary worldview of Erasmus Darwin, the first president of the Derby Philosophical Society. Darwin’s scheme was the first to incorporate biological evolution, associationist psychology, evolutionary geology, and cosmological developmentalism. Spencer’s own implicit denials of the link with Darwin are shown to be implausible in the face of Darwin’s continuing influence on the Derby savants, the product of insecurity in his later years when he feared for his reputation as Lamarckism became increasingly untenable.
C
ONSIDERABLE WORK HAS BEEN UNDERTAKEN into the background to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, “Darwinian” evolution by natural selection through random mutation now being recognized as just one possible form of developmentalism prevalent during the nineteenth century rather than as a “whiggish” yardstick with which to
* School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England. I am extremely grateful to William H. Brock, Ian Inkster, Desmond King-Hele, Hugh Torrens, Greg Radick, and the Isis referees for critical comments and suggestions on various parts of this material. I would also like to thank all the staff of the various libraries I have used, but particularly Linda Owen, Mandy Henchliffe, and the staff of Derby Local Studies Library for their unstinting efforts and Viv Rudd and Sarah Allard of Derby Museum for help with illustrations. Isis, 2003, 94:1–29 䉷 2003 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/03/9401-0001$10.00 1
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judge rival theories. This essay provides further evidence for the importance of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the provincial context in the acceptance of evolutionary theories. Although the indirect role of Erasmus Darwin’s developmentalism in stimulating the thought of his grandson has long been acknowledged, I argue that the elder Darwin arguably exerted a greater influence on Herbert Spencer through the activities of the Derby scientific community. This stimulus is evident, for instance, in Spencer’s highly original and influential associationist evolutionary psychology. It provides a much more satisfactory explanation for the origins of some aspects of the Principles of Psychology (1855) than Robert Perrin’s assertion that Spencer “literally evolved it from the inner reaches of his own mind after having read only a smattering of formal psychology.”1 Some aspects of Spencer’s Derby background were explored by John Peel, who was interested in his status as a founding father of sociology. Peel recognized the possible relationship between Darwin and Spencer but advanced the argument only tentatively: “It is hard not to think that in his rapid adoption of Lamarck’s ideas Spencer was not only seizing on a theory of biological evolution which lends itself well to sociological use, but was reverting to an older source of evolutionary influence—that of Erasmus Darwin, mediated through his father and the other ‘Darwinians’ of the Derby Philosophical Society.” Peel considered that there were convincing internal and biographical reasons to “suppose that Spencer was more subject to Erasmus Darwin’s influence than Charles Darwin was,” but although his analysis of the Derby background was the first study of Spencer to give due consideration to his provincial origins, he did not explore the nature of this possible relationship further. The time is ripe for a much more detailed critical study of this question, partly because the complexity of rival developmental theories prior to the publication of the Origin of Species is now much better appreciated, but also because of the valuable work that has been done on provincial urban society and scientific culture in the period between 1750 and 1850.2 Complementing Adrian Desmond’s analysis of the relationship between Lamarckism, political radicalism, and medical education in the anatomical schools of London and Edinburgh and James Secord’s work on the reception of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, this study confirms that there was an important provincial dimension to the emergence and acceptance of biological developmental theories. It will argue that, if they are to be fully appreciated, these theories cannot be divorced from broader developmental 1 Robert G. Perrin, Herbert Spencer: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 29. On Erasmus Darwin see Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Doctor Darwin (London, 1804); Hesketh Pearson, Doctor Darwin (London: Penguin, 1943); Desmond King-Hele, ed., The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987); and King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: De la Mare, 2000). 2 John D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London: Heineman, 1971), p. 134. On the problems of defining scientific “influence” and the relationship between the two Darwins and between Spencer and Charles Darwin see Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology, 1974, 15:211–237; and Michael T. Ghiselin, “Two Darwins: History versus Criticism,” Journal of the History of Biology, 1976, 8:121–132. For an introduction to Darwinian ideas see Jon Hodge and Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002). Studies on provincial urban society and scientific culture include Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns (London: Hutchinson, 1985); Peter Borsay, The English Provincial Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997); Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society, and Culture (London: Longman, 1999); and Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2: 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
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worldviews that were emerging at the same time.3 Consideration of the origins of the evolutionary aspects of Darwinian and Spencerian theories in the context of English provincial scientific culture will indicate the kind of social, economic, and intellectual conditions under which developmental theories arose, revealing the degree to which Spencer’s early scientific and political activities were stimulated by the concerns of the Derby savant community. Hence it will be argued that British provincial urban cultural renewal and industrialization were important factors in the emergence of a distinctive developmental worldview, which helps to account for the reception accorded the Vestiges, particularly by reformers and some Dissenters. THE DERBY SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
Of Herbert Spencer’s background G. J. Holyoake wrote: Strange to say, dreamy, stagnant, obfuscated Derby—which burnt alive a poor blind girl, twenty two years old, because she would not profess belief in the real presence; a town which procured a charter to enable it to expel anyone having a new idea; a town in which no Jew, or Quaker, or Nonconformist, or theological reformer of any type, was to be found—this town gave birth to Herbert Spencer, the greatest master of innovatory thought England has produced.4
Although it may well have appeared strange from the perspective of 1904, particularly given Spencer’s own disparagement of local scientific culture in his hometown, a century before Derby had in fact been a vibrant cultural and philosophical center with a strong Dissenting community, during a period when provincial towns such as Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham seriously challenged the cultural and economic domination of the metropolis. Much scholarly attention has focused on scientific societies such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and they have been associated with the formation of a distinctive “middle class” “consciousness” or identity. However, science-oriented societies were already an important feature of polite associational culture in many British towns in the decades before the 1760s. Small communities with shared scientific interests generally preceded the foundation of philosophical clubs and societies in most English towns, while a broader scientific culture was stimulated by print and itinerant lecturers. Derby, a textile- and china-manufacturing county town of the English Midlands that became an important railway center after 1839, was no exception, and by about 1770 a community of natural philosophers including clergy, gentry, and professionals had formed a philosophical society, with interests including electrical experimentation and astronomy. The town’s scientific culture received an important boost when the physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) moved there from Lichfield in 1781. (See Frontispiece.) Darwin, who had been born in Nottinghamshire, had already helped to found the Lunar Society and was instrumental in the launch of a more formally constituted Derby Philosophical Society in 1783. This was never very large, more of a gentlemen’s club than anything, but it did sometimes publicize its actions—for instance, the 3 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989); and James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000). 4 George J. Holyoake, “Obituary for Herbert Spencer,” Literary Guide and Rationalist Review, 1 Jan. 1904, 91:1.
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balloon launch celebrating its founding was described in the local press.5 However, its membership came to include some who could claim a national reputation, including the poet, writer, and botanist Brooke Boothby, the radical novelist and paper-mill owner Robert Bage, the cotton barons William and Joseph Strutt, and the chemist Charles Sylvester. This society was not the only institutional manifestation of scientific culture in the town between 1780 and 1850: a Literary and Philosophical Society was formed in 1808 with the express purpose of conducting scientific research in its own laboratory and organizing public lecture courses in the town. This was followed by the Derby Mechanics’ Institute (1825), which was inspired by the rhetoric of rational recreation to provide a scientific education for the laboring classes but, as was common, came to be largely dominated by the middle classes, and by a Derby Literary and Scientific Society that flourished in the 1840s and 1850s. Moreover, as elsewhere, other kinds of institutions promoted scientific culture, attracting broad support from men of most politicoreligious affiliations and some women, though there were times, as in the 1790s and the 1810s, when this inclusivity came under strain owing to the radical sympathies of some of the more prominent scientific activists. These organizations included the Derbyshire Agricultural Society (1793), the County Museum and Natural History Society (1835), the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society (1837), and the Derby Arboretum (1840), where Herbert Spencer and his father used to stroll. Designed by the landscape gardener and botanist John Claudius Loudon as a representative repository of the trees and shrubs of the world, the arboretum contained over a thousand specimens arranged according to Loudon’s “Gardenesque” principles. It was a “living museum,” open free to the public two days a week, that exerted an important influence on the development of public parks in Britain and the United States.6 ERASMUS DARWIN’S DEVELOPMENTALISM
With his medical practice and reputation safely established by the 1780s, and using the experience he had gained working on the translation of Linnaeus under the auspices of the Lichfield Botanical Society, Darwin felt able to embark on the publication of a series of prose and poetical works (See Figure 1.) The two parts of the Botanic Garden—the 5 Eric Robinson, “The Derby Philosophical Society,” Annals of Science, 1953, 9:359–367; Paul Sturges, “Cultural Life in Derby in the Late Eighteenth Century, circa 1770–1800” (M.A. thesis, Univ. Loughborough, 1968); Sturges, “The Membership of the Derby Philosophical Society, 1783–1802,” Midland History, 1968, 4:212–229; Paul Elliott, “The Birth of Public Science in the English Provinces: Natural Philosophy in Derby, c. 1690–1760, ” Ann. Sci., 2000, 57:61–100; and Elliott, “Science, Medicine, and Industrial Technology in the English Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Derby Philosophers and the Derbyshire General Infirmary,” Medical History, 2002, 46:65–92. On scientific societies during this period more generally see Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963); Albert Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1969); Arnold Thackray, “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,” American Historical Review, 1974, 79:672–709; Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell, eds., Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Colin A. Russell, Science and Social Change, 1700–1900 (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Gwendoline Averley, “English Scientific Societies of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” (Ph.D. thesis, Teeside Polytechnic, 1989); Inkster, Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997); Elliott, “The Origins of the ‘Creative Class’: Provincial Urban Society, Scientific Culture, and Socio-Political Marginality in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Social History, 2003, 28, in press; and Elliott, “Literary and Scientific Associational Culture in the English County Town, c. 1750–1850,” in The English County Town, c. 1780–1900: Government, Politics, and Society, ed. Evelyn Lord (Leicester: Univ. Leicester Press, 2003), in press. 6 Paul Elliott, “The Derby Arboretum: The First Specially Designed Municipal Public Park in England,” Midland Hist., 2001, 26:144–176.
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Figure 1. Photograph of Erasmus Darwin’s microscope, which was acquired by Mathew Spencer and is now in the Derby Museum collection.
Loves of the Plants and the Economy of Vegetation—made him famous as a writer, while the Zoonomia outlined his medical philosophy, the Phytologia his horticultural and agricultural ideas, and the posthumously published Temple of Nature his grand progressive evolutionary philosophy. Five interconnected aspects of Darwin’s Enlightenment evolutionary worldview may be discerned: geological developmentalism, biological evolutionism, developmental psychophysiology, cosmological developmentalism, and scientific and political progressivism. Even if not undertaken explicitly by evolutionists, geological study of course had an important influence on the development of biological evolutionary theories, as the inspiration that both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer found in Charles Lyell’s Principles
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of Geology demonstrates. However, the stimulation that geology gave to early forms of developmentalism is also evident in the earlier work of Enlightenment philosophers such as Buffon and Lamarck and in the relationship between the emergence of a developmental geology of Derbyshire and Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary speculations. By the 1820s Derbyshire was one of the most comprehensively surveyed and studied counties in Britain. The diverse geological character of the county—with many types of rock, from gritstone to fossil-bearing limestone and igneous toadstone, along with various faults, warm springs, underground rivers and caverns, gorges, dales, cliffs, and hills—stimulated geological study among the local philosophical community, as is evident from the career of Darwin’s friend, the Derby clockmaker, geologist, and “Lunatic” John Whitehurst. This interest took a number of forms, but perhaps the major stimuli were the lead-mining industry and its role in the development of geological knowledge, the thriving ornamental trade in fossils and minerals, the presence of warm springs and igneous rocks, and the rise of a lateGeorgian Romantic aesthetic that placed new value on landscapes, such as the Peak District, that were previously considered to be inhospitable wildernesses. All these factors helped to stimulate Darwin’s evolutionary geology and his larger developmental worldview. He utilized the knowledge of the lead miners obtained via his friends Whitehurst and the Tissington brothers, made tours into the Peak, and conversed with and bought fossil and mineral specimens from local dealers and geologists involved in the trade, such as White Watson and Richard Brown.7 Darwin’s developmental geology held that calcite material was produced by the digestion and secretion of organized beings, giving “pleasure” in its production and after decomposition becoming accumulated at the bottom of oceans. With the action of “submarine fires” it was thrust up and now constituted “the immense racks and unmeasured strata of limestone, chalk and marbles.” Thus the limestone gorges and the coals, sand, iron, clay, and marl were “originally the products chiefly of vegetable organization,” making them “MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!— AND CONSEQUENTLY OF THE BENEVOLENCE OF THE DEITY!” Darwin saw evidence for the “submarine fires” in the action of earthquakes and in the warm springs of the Peak, which he had described in James Pilkington’s History of Derbyshire; an earthquake that struck Derbyshire and adjoining counties in 1795 prompted him to outline his theory in local newspapers. He argued that the quake had resulted from the striking of a “boiling cauldron of lava” condensing steam in the rocks and forcing in seawater, creating an immense body of steam “which bursts its way in all directions, raising up rocks and mountains, [and] produces a concussion for 50 or 100 miles, and an undulating vibration over many degrees of the globe.”8 (See Figure 2.) The importance of the influence of naturalists such as John Ray, Buffon, and particularly Linnaeus on the biological theories of Darwin has been well established. In their taxonomies Ray and Linnaeus had established means of differentiating between species, while 7 Charles Hutton, “Authentic Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Whitehurst, FRS,” Universal Magazine, 1788, p. 225; Jim H. Rieuwerts, “Derbyshire Lead Mining and Early Geological Concepts,” Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, 1984, 9:51–100; Maxwell Craven, John Whitehurst: Clockmaker and Scientist, 1713–1788 (Ashbourne: Mayfield, 1997); Trevor Ford and Rieuwerts, eds., Lead Mining in the Peak District, 4th ed. (Ashbourne: Landmark/Peak District Mines Historical Society, 2000); and King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (cit. n. 1), p. 89. 8 Erasmus Darwin, Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening, 1st ed. (London, 1800), pp. 559–560; E. Darwin, “Of the Medicinal Waters of Buxton and Matlock,” in James Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (Derby: Drewry, 1739), pp. 256–275; and Derby Mercury, 26 Nov. 1795.
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Figure 2. Schematic diagram of a section through the Earth from Erasmus Darwin’s Economy of Vegetation (1791).
Buffon considered that variation or mutation was possible within species. Darwin referred in the Loves of the Plants to the Linnaean theory of variation within species and hybridization. In the Economy of Vegetation, while discussing plant sexuality, he asked whether “all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection? An idea countenanced by the modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe.” He also noted that the uselessness of “incomplete appendages” to plants and animals appeared to show that they had “gradually undergone changes from their original state; such as the stems without anthers and styles without stigmas of several plants . . . and the paps of male animals; thus swine have four toes, but two of them are imperfectly formed.” This made him consider whether “all the supposed monstrous births of Nature” were “remains of their habits of production in their former less perfect state or attempts towards greater perfection.” But although the emphasis on the power or tendency of species to change its form was novel, as James Harrison has said, the Loves of the Plants exhibited merely “a tentative and vague eighteenth-century faith in cosmic progress.”9 9 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts, Pt. 1: The Economy of Vegetation, 2nd ed. (London, 1791), Pt. 2: The Loves of the Plants, 2nd ed. (London, 1790), quotations from Economy of Vegetation,
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However, in the Zoonomia, the Phytologia, and, particularly, the Temple of Nature, evolution and progress moved from being an occasional component to becoming the overarching theme, with the apparent wastefulness, destructiveness, and prodigality of life being taken as evidence for overall progress. Comforting his audience through occasional deistic exclamations and using the machinery of Neoplatonic classical imagery as a structure, Darwin recounted the production and reproduction of life from its oceanic origins, equating the gravitational and chemical forces of attraction with the inanimate forces of nature. Contraction, unique to life, resulted from the actions of the ethereal spirit of animation as life began: Hence without parent by Spontaneous birth Rise the first specks of animated earth; From nature’s womb the plant or insect swims, And buds or breathes with microscopic limbs.
Enlightenment chemistry was combined with a materialist theory of the generation of life to render nature self-sufficient and divine intervention unnecessary.10 Using the anatomical knowledge he had acquired as a physician, Darwin marshaled a recapitulationist argument as evidence for the oceanic origins of life. Development in the womb was analogous to the way that creatures such as gnats and frogs “in their embryonic state” were “aquatic.” In the placenta, the “fine extremities of the vessels which permeate the arteries of the uterus, and the blood of the foetus, become oxygenated from . . . maternal arterial blood; exactly as is done by the gills of the fish,” which extract oxygen from the water that they pass through. Sexual reproduction was crucial to the progress of the higher forms of life, producing descendants of “superior powers.” This was the “chef-d’oeuvre . . . of nature; as appears by the wonderful transformations of leaf eating caterpillars into honey eating moths and butterflies, apparently for the sole purpose of the formation of sexual organs, as in the silk-worm, which takes no food after its transformation, but propagates its species and dies.” Animals competed with each other to satisfy “three great objects of desire”—lust, hunger, and security—and competition for females necessitated the acquisition of “weapons to combat each other . . . as the very thick, shield-like horny skin on the shoulder of the boar is a defence only against animals of his own species.” Thus “the final cause of this contest amongst the males” was that “the strongest and most active” should “propagate the species, which should thence become improved.” Competition allowed weaker forms of life to be progressively removed, ensuring that Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the wreck, unchanging but in form.
Reproduction triumphed over decay:
canto 1, ll. 5–6, and Loves of the Plants, note 7; James Harrison, “Erasmus Darwin’s View of Evolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1971, 32:247–264; and McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (cit. n. 1), p. 88. For other illuminating considerations of Darwin’s botany see Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and the Loves of the Plants,” Isis, 1989, 80:593–621; and Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 22–27. 10 Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (London, 1803), canto 1, ll. 233–246, 247–250, 295–302.
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The clime unkind, or noxious food instils To embryon nerves hereditary ills; The feeble births acquired diseases chase Till death extinguish the degenerate race.
Physicians fought an “eternal war” on diseases such as the gout, mania, consumption, and scrofula, but these also enabled weaker forms of life to be removed.11 In the Zoonomia, which was dedicated to the medical profession, Darwin detailed an associationist psychophysiology that ensured that geological, biological, and cosmological evolution were reflected in the progress of human culture and society. The Zoonomia was designed to “reduce the facts belonging to Animal Life into classes, orders, genera, and species, and by comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diseases.” It utilized Darwin’s medical experience and knowledge of the British associational tradition to formulate a “theory founded upon nature,” categorizing the known types of disease for the benefit of “legitimate” professional medical practitioners so as to prevent the sick becoming the “prey of some crafty empyric.” Life was more than mere laws of motion, the principles of animal chemistry, or the rudiments of a hydraulic system. As Roy Porter argued, Darwin’s animals (and, to a lesser degree, plants) were capable of “entering into dialectical interplay with their environment.”12 Darwin’s psychophysiology was essentially a physiological rendering of Hartleyan psychology. It involved the action of the “spirit of animation,” an ethereal force of energy acting through the nerves with some properties akin to the actions of electricity on the muscles, a construction that ensured that the trap of environmental determinism was avoided. The spirit of animation acted through four different faculties of motions of the sensorium, defined as irritability, sensibility, volition, and associability. These were the cause of all contractions of the fibrous parts of the body, with irritation being excited by external bodies, sensation by pleasure or pain, volition by desire or aversion, and the highest, association, by “antecedent or attendant fibrous contractions.” The most complex forms of behavior required the capacity of association, which was the tendency of animal movements that had once occurred in succession or in combination to become so connected by habit that they automatically tended to succeed or accompany each other. Association explained the relationship between traits of character and life habits and the propensity for certain diseases, with the transmission of traits underpinning the broader developmental worldview. In Darwin’s view, David Hartley had argued that “our immortal part acquires during this life certain habits of action or of sentiment, which become forever indissoluble” and thus continue in heaven. Darwin secularized this process by applying it to the “generation . . . of the embryon, or new animal,” which partook “so much of the form and propensities of the parent”; as Porter emphasized, this suited his theory that the mind of the father determined the character of the child, a view held against the more common eighteenth-century belief that the contents of the female imagination at conception were impressed upon the embryon.13 11 Ibid., additional note viii, ll. 33–36, 37–38, canto 2, ll. 33–36, 43–44, 163–166; and Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia: or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols., 1st ed. (Dublin, 1794–1796), Vol. 1, pp. 13–14, 244. 12 E. Darwin, Zoonomia, Vol. 1, pp. 1–2; and Roy Porter, “Erasmus Darwin, Doctor of Evolution?” in History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James Moore (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 39–69, on p. 46. 13 E. Darwin, Zoonomia, Vol. 1, pp. 30–32, 49–50; and Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 4 vols., 3rd ed. (1801), Vol. 2, p. 270, quoted in Porter, “Erasmus Darwin,” pp. 52–53. On Darwin’s psychophysiology more generally see Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), pp. 440–441; and Robert M. Young, “The Role of Psychology in the Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Debate,” in Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science and Belief, ed. Colin Chant and John Fauvel (Harlow: Longman, 1980), pp. 155–178.
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The nature of human psychology and the mechanism for progressive mental development and physical inheritance ensured that cosmological development continued on the human plane: the Temple of Nature was originally entitled the “Origin of Society.” In Darwin’s view, cultural and intellectual progress was best demonstrated by the natural philosophers, inventors, benefactors, and industrialists of Enlightenment Europe, the heroes of his pantheon. Their efforts in turn ensured and inspired the progress of human civilization toward greater political freedom, despite the depredations of war and tyranny. New laws had been framed by Isaac Newton; new planets, stars, and satellites had been discovered by William Herschel and others; progress had occurred in the physical sciences, technology, and industry. Thomas Savery had developed the steam engine, later much improved by Darwin’s friend James Watt; and it in turn had been applied to spinning by his other associates, the Strutts and Arkwrights. Darwin described Richard Arkwright as an “uncommon genius” who, by “persevering industry, invented and perfected a system of machinery for spinning” that “by giving perpetual employment to many thousand families has increased the population, and been productive of greater commercial advantages to this country, and contributed more to the benefit of mankind, in so short a period of time, than any other single effort of human ingenuity.”14 Darwin’s cosmological developmentalism provides excellent support for the nebular hypothesis, which argues that astronomy had an important influence on evolutionary biology. While the plurality of life worlds hypothesis greatly increased the number of possible beings in the universe, perhaps threatening the position of humanity at the summit of creation, the nebular hypothesis and Herschelian astronomy, inspired by Linnaean taxonomy, suggested a temporally and spatially vast universe where stars pass through life cycles akin to those of animals and vegetables. Newtonianism and the nebular hypothesis encouraged natural philosophers to accept gradualistic change by arguing that planets had been formed by a combination of gravitational, rotational, and thermal effects. Enthused by Herschel’s work, Darwin was the first thinker with a broad evolutionary philosophy to incorporate a cosmological developmental theory as a major component. Having translated Linnaeus into English, he appreciated Herschel’s analogies between the naturalist and the astronomer and between the life cycles of stellar bodies and those of terrestrial bodies and his evidence for the great age of the universe, as the famous description of the Newtonian cosmos in the Botanic Garden proclaimed. In the Temple of Nature, this grand cosmological vision of progress had a greater cyclical element. After the destruction of the globe by “a general conflagration,” with the sun’s sinking into “one central chaos,” new earths might emerge: “Thus all the suns, and the planets, which circle around them may again sink into one central chaos; and may again by explosions produce a new world; Which in process of time may again undergo the same catastrophe!”15 The simultaneous adoption of developmental theories, such as Darwin’s evolutionary cosmology and geology, across Europe during the 1790s, by philosophers as diverse as 14 E. Darwin, Temple of Nature (cit. n. 10), canto 4, ll. 223–224, 233–236; Derby Mercury, 9 Aug. 1792; and King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (cit. n. 1), p. 274. 15 E. Darwin, Economy of Vegetation (cit. n. 9), canto 1, ll. 103–114; and E. Darwin, Temple of Nature, notes 197–199. On the nebular hypothesis see Philip Lawrence, “Heaven and Earth: The Relation of the Nebular Hypothesis to Geology,” in Cosmology, History, and Theology, ed. Wolfgang Yourgrau and Allen D. Breck (New York: Plenum, 1977), pp. 253–281; Simon Schaffer, “Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1980, 45:211–239; M. Ogilvie, “Robert Chambers and the Nebular Hypothesis,” ibid., 1975, 30:214–232; Stephen G. Brush, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Evolutionary Worldview,” History of Science, 1987, 25:245–278; and Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” in History, Humanity, and Evolution, ed. Moore (cit. n. 12), pp. 131–164.
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Lamarck, Goethe, and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, was encouraged, as Charles Darwin believed, by the progressive model of “Enlightenment” science in tandem with fundamental socioeconomic changes. The clamor for social and political reforms was stimulated by a perception of individual, social, and institutional mutability. Although science, as a manifestation of polite elite culture, could be perceived in certain contexts as a patriotic, public spirited, and utilitarian activity—for instance, through the inspiration it gave to urban and agricultural improvements—it continued to have unsettling associations with political and religious radicalism. Erasmus Darwin and most of the Derby savants welcomed the French Revolution and gave public support to campaigns for limited constitutional reforms through the creation of a local Society for Constitutional Information that sent a delegation to the French Assembly. Writings by Darwin and his philosophical associates that might previously have been tolerated as speculative came to be perceived as dangerous in the fraught political climate of the 1790s. Darwin’s developmental geology was attacked and parodied by political opponents in local newspapers and national periodicals such as the Anti-Jacobin Review as being explicitly associated with political reformism, while the editor of the Morning Chronicle was tried for seditious libel for reproducing an address of the Derby constitutional society thought to have composed by the “greatest poet of the age”—Darwin.16 THE DERBY SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND THE ORIGINS OF HERBERT SPENCER’S EVOLUTIONISM
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was born at Derby into a family with very strong religious nonconformist connections. He lived much of his early life in the town until he moved to London in 1849, excepting periods spent at Bath with his uncle, the writer and campaigner Rev. Thomas Spencer, and working as a railway engineer. In the 1840s, during the period of “railway mania,” he worked mainly in the Midlands, but he also spent much time engaged in abortive career moves, political campaigns, and other projects. (See Figure 3.) The family kept a private academy in Derby, begun by Spencer’s grandfather Mathew in the 1780s and continued by his father William George (commonly known as George), where Herbert helped out. Much of the information on this period in Spencer’s life comes from the Autobiography he wrote as an old man, when the volumes of the “synthetic philosophy” already adorned many library shelves and he had been feted on tours of the United States. It is, therefore, necessary to be cautious about accepting some of the pronouncements at face value. One of Spencer’s habits, with crucial consequences for any interpretation of the origins of his philosophical ideas, was his tendency in later life to disparage the stimulus that he had received from his provincial Derby upbringing. He was equally apt—even when it flew in the face of the obvious, as contemporaries noted—to downplay the importance of other influences, such as those of Auguste Comte and the Positivists, finding it generally difficult to “acknowledge intellectual debts.”17 16 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; Ware: Wordsworth, 1998), pp. 370–377; Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 16 Apr., 23 Apr., 7 May 1798; Thomas Bayly Howell, comp., Complete Collection of State Trials (1816–1828), Vol. 12, pp. 954–970, Vol. 24, p. 1099; and Derby Mercury, 19 Dec. 1793, 13 Nov. 1794. 17 Sydney Eisen, “Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte,” Journal of British Studies, 1967, 7:48–67. Spencer’s unwillingness to credit others certainly does not invalidate the Autobiography as a general source, but it does mean that if there is no corroborative evidence for particular statements then the reader should be cautious about accepting them. Fortunately, there is ample other evidence for the activities of the Derby scientific community that confirms their importance in the development of Spencer’s ideas. The activities of the scientific
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Figure 3. Portrait from a sketch taken by Field Talfourd of Herbert Spencer, at age nineteen, from David Duncan’s Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (1908).
W. G. Spencer’s position as one of the leading scientific activists in Derby, particularly as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, was crucially important in his son’s intellectual development, and for decades, until his father’s death in 1866, Herbert submitted every idea he had to him for criticism.18 (See Figure 4.) The clergyman Thomas Mozley, whose father the printer Thomas Mozley was a member, remarked that the Derby society was “remarkably enduring . . . and uniform” and that “few societies could be called so much the same thing for half a century.” Spencer described the society, when his father was secretary, as “fostered by William Strutt” and consisting of “the most cultured men in the town, chiefly medical and besides a library which it accumulated, mainly of scientific books, it took in a number of scientific periodicals.” These were circulated among the membership, and Herbert was to make much use of the books himself. “Beyond occasional lecturers described in the Autobiography, for instance, accord with the record in local newspapers and other sources. On Spencer’s life and work see Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904) (hereafter cited as H. Spencer, Autobiography); Ann Low-Beer, ed., Herbert Spencer (London: Macmillan, 1969); Peel, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 2); Stanislav Andreski, ed., Herbert Spencer: Structure, Function, and Evolution (London: Nelson, 1972); and Perrin, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 1). 18 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, p. 43. This is corroborated by the evidence of the letters, which reveal that Spencer submitted drafts of his works to his father for his opinions. For examples see David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 64–66, 77, 81, 135. For other information concerning W. G. Spencer see his account book, 1814–1865 (Derby Local Studies Library, MS 9487), from which a list of his pupils and the dates during which he taught them can be constructed.
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Figure 4. Photograph taken around 1860 by the Derby photographer Richard Keene of Herbert Spencer and his father, William George Spencer, now in the collection of Derby Museum.
works of popular kinds, such as books of travel, there were works of graver kinds; and there came habitually the Lancet, the British and Foreign Medical Review, and the MedicoChirurgical Review.” Mozley had much to say of the Spencers—particularly George Spencer, who had been his tutor—and of their evolutionary ideas. Of the other members of the Philosophical Society, he noted the remarkable continuity of the membership, particularly the Strutts and the physician Richard Forester. Mozley referred to the Derby philosophers to advance his thesis concerning the Spencers that “the more the opinions of the original Dr. Darwin are inquired into the more will they be found to comprise all the philosophies emanated from the Association he founded.” Drawing on Mozley’s contention, Peel argued that Spencer was strongly influenced by the theories of Darwin, “mediated through his father and the other Darwinians” of the Derby Philosophical Society, and that this local scientific culture played a crucial role in Spencer’s early education, encouraging him to undertake experiments in electricity, chemistry, phrenology, and electrochemistry. Derby subscription institutions provided courses of lectures on scientific and artistic subjects and a forum for their discussion, with access to libraries, museum collections, and discussion groups where Spencer was encouraged to formulate his early philosophical theories. He read national periodicals such as the Philosophical Magazine, the Lancet, and the Me-
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chanics’ Magazine and was introduced to works such as J. S. Mill’s System of Logic, which in 1843 had just been bought and had not yet circulated among the members, in the Philosophical Society’s library—“a large quiet room in St. Helen’s Street, to which I occasionally resorted in the Afternoon.” Likewise, in the early 1840s Spencer read Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, which he “greatly admired” while rejecting some of their “mystical” qualities.19 The Derby Literary and Scientific Society, created around 1842, was, according to Spencer, “a small gathering of some dozen or so, meeting once a month, reading papers and discussing them,” the members being “mostly of no considerable calibre, and the proceedings were commonly rather humdrum.” However, an account of meetings by Alfred Davis, whose father, the instrument maker John Davis, was treasurer of the society, coupled with the evidence of the public activities of the Derby scientific activists, tends to contradict this somewhat patronizing assertion, revealing the breadth of their concerns. Davis reminisced that Both Herbert, his father and his brother William were frequent visitors at my father’s house. They were, together with father, active members of the Literary and Philosophical Society. Members met informally at their respective houses to read and discuss papers on various subjects. The proceedings were not published, but judging from the papers contributed by my father, namely; “Iron and Steel,” “The Eye,” “William the Silent,” “Water Supply,” “Pneumatics” and “The Great Exhibition of 1851,” it would appear that the deliberations covered a large and comprehensive area.
Spencer’s description of this society as merely a “small gathering” and “humdrum” was part of the general downplaying of his Derby background, which was common at the end of his life. In fact, while at Derby, Spencer seriously considered beginning a periodical to be called the Philosopher, going so far as to compose a series of politico-ethical “Essays on Principles,” which hardly suggests that he received no intellectual stimulus. The Literary and Scientific Society and the Philosophical Society jointly promoted a series of lectures given by influential scholars including George Dawson, the Birmingham Baptist minister; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet; John Nichol, the astronomer; and Thomas Rymer Jones, Professor of Natural History at King’s College, London (who had been a pupil of George Spencer). Indeed, the ambitions of the Derby scientific activists at this time are indicated by the suggestion from Alderman John Barber that the British Association for the Advancement of Science be invited to hold a meeting in Derby soon.20 19 Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences, Chiefly of Towns, Villages, and Schools, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1885), Vol. 2, pp. 171–173; H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp. 87, 87–88 (library), 241 (Emerson); and Mozley, Reminiscences, Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1882), Vol. 1, pp. 172–173. Other members of the Derby scientific community between the 1820s and 1840s included the brothers Douglas, Francis, and Charles Fox, an engineer. Douglas Fox was a surgeon who became president of the Philosophical Society and mayor of Derby, while Francis was a physician and prolific inventor. Charles, who first employed Spencer as a railway engineer, assisted his brothers when young in the lectures they gave to the Derby Mechanics’ Institute and was later knighted for his role with Joseph Paxton and William Corbitt in the design and construction of the Great Exhibition complex. 20 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp. 87–88 (quotation), 239–240 (periodical); and S. Simpson, “Reminiscences of Alfred Davis,” Notes and Queries of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society, [undated], 107:398. On Davis see Maxwell Craven, Derbeians of Distinction (Derby: Breedon, 1998), pp. 68–69; and Craven, Derby: An Illustrated History (Derby: Breedon, 1988), p. 164. On the lecture series see Derby Mercury, 1–29 Sept., 24 Nov., 1 Dec., 8 Dec. 1847; 11 Apr., 9 May 1849; 17 Apr., 1 May, 8 May, 15 May, 22 May, 29 May, 30 Oct. 1850. On Dawson see Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 184–240. Barber’s suggestion is reported in Derby Mercury, 29 May 1850. Barber may have been inspired in part by the knowledge that the British Archaeological Society was due to meet at Derby in Aug. 1851.
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The Spencers continued to undertake scientific experiments in the empirical tradition of the Derby savant community. George Spencer possessed an electrical machine and an air pump, and students would come to see pneumatic and electrical experimental demonstrations in which Herbert participated, on one occasion preparing the hydrogen in an electrical pistol and, in consequence, becoming interested in chemistry. Spencer attended the philosophical lectures given by itinerants, becoming “much interested in chemistry at large.” He saw the chemist John Murray explode the bottom out of a chair “with terrific force” using chloride of nitrogen and read one of his textbooks. This was perhaps the same John Murray, “Lecturer in the Philosophy of Physics and Chemistry,” who spoke to the Derby Philosophical Society in 1815 and presented a work entitled The Elements of Chemical Science to the society’s library. The scientific lectures and experiments helped to stimulate Spencer’s dreams of supporting himself as an inventor, and he had “wild hopes respecting the pecuniary advantages to be obtained.” In the tradition of the Lunar Society and the Derby philosophers, and stimulated by his engineering activities, he worked on the creation of new scientific instruments, including a “velocimeter” contrived at Derby in 1842 for calculating the speed of locomotives and a scale of equivalents for engineering published in 1841. Spencer also worked in 1843 and 1844 on ideas for a universal language that recall Darwin’s speculations on languages and sounds in the Temple of Nature; indeed, George Spencer created a new system of shorthand that his son eventually had published. Darwin had recommended the adoption of a simplified form of vocabulary and the creation of a new system of shorthand for educational purposes in his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education. Spencer also undertook work on clocks, recalling the activities of local philosophers, including Whitehurst and Strutt, various leveling appliances, and a cephelograph—for making phrenological measurements—in 1846. Later, a binding pin designed for holding manuscripts and music sheets was actually manufactured by a London firm, while a new type of invalid bed (designed originally for his own use) was described in the British Medical Journal in 1867, again echoing Strutt’s invention of an adjustable medical bed for the Derbyshire Infirmary.21 Although Spencer’s theory of evolution was not worked out until the 1850s, by which time he had moved to London, there is some evidence of sympathy for developmentalism in his early works, and among the Derby savant community in general, which suggests that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was not forgotten. The members of the Philosophical Society were described as “Darwinians” by Mozley, who, as a pupil of George Spencer, remembered that the latter adumbrated a deistic evolutionary theory with some similarities to his son’s later conceptions. This claim annoyed Spencer, who wrote to Mozley calling for a retraction and later devoted an extraordinarily long appendix of his Autobiography to its refutation. A curious feature of the Autobiography, and indeed all of Spencer’s major works, is the lack of discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theory. That Spencer recognized Darwin to be the suggested source of his father’s views is clear from his comment that his father was only twelve when Darwin died and therefore “knew nothing of his ideas.”22 Copies of Darwin’s works were, of course, retained in the libraries of the 21 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, p. 86, and, for the inventions, Apps. C, D, G, H, I, Vol. 2, App. D. On Murray see “John Murray,” in Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1917–), Vol. 13, pp. 1285–1286; his book is listed in Rules and Catalogue of the Library Belonging to the Derby Philosophical Society, Established in 1784 (Derby: Richardson, 1835), Class 3, Chemistry, p. 60. For W. G. Spencer’s shorthand system see W. G. Spencer, A System of Lucid Shorthand (London: Williams & Norgate, 1894). 22 Mozley, Reminiscences, Chiefly of Oriel College (cit. n. 19), Vol. 1, pp. 146 (“Darwinians”), 173; and H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, App. K, p. 459 (“knew nothing”). Spencer mentions Erasmus Darwin in passing in Herbert Spencer, “The Factors of Organic Evolution,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), Vol. 1, pp. 389–465, esp. pp. 390, 417.
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Philosophical Society—which he had largely been responsible for founding—and the Mechanics’ Institute. His opening address to the society from 1784, which sketched arguments later to appear in the Zoonomia, was reprinted with every edition of the library catalogue. Unless it can be believed that the secretary never read a copy of his own society’s rules and library catalogue, then Spencer’s claim that his father knew nothing of Darwin’s theories must be considered false. It is likely that Spencer’s laborious attempt to discredit the idea that his father was at one time sympathetic to evolutionary views and, by implication, that he had appropriated Darwinian ideas was part of the general paranoia about his own intellectual independence that characterized his later years. In fact, Darwin and his ideas continued to be remembered by the Derby savant community. As Mozley said, the tone of the Philosophical Society was “remarkably enduring, continuous and uniform; few societies could be called so much the same thing for half a century.” Local supporters of scientific culture such as the Derby lawyer and amateur experimenter Charles James Flack, his friend the attorney Nathaniel Edwards, and the Anglican clergyman William Ulithorne Wray kept copies of Darwin’s works in their libraries alongside political and philosophical texts. Erasmus Darwin’s son, the physician and explorer Sir Francis Darwin, who lived near Matlock, remained a supporter of local scientific culture as a member of the Philosophical Society during the 1840s and 1850s, a subscriber to the Derby Mechanics’ Institute, and a donor of specimens to the 1839 and 1843 exhibitions.23 Busts and portraits of his father were prominent at the 1839 Mechanics’ Institute exhibition, among those of other local scientific “worthies,” and the 1843 County Museum and Natural History Society exhibition included two portraits and one bust of Erasmus Darwin donated by Richard Forester, Edward Sacheverell Chandos Pole, and Francis Darwin. (See Figure 5.) According to Mozley, William Strutt, Darwin’s closest scientific friend in his last twenty years, a fossil and mineral collector who had accompanied him on geological tours with White Watson, was skeptical of creationism and sympathetic to evolutionism. At one meeting of the Philosophical Society, when Henry Mozley happened to discuss the Creation as the only account he could give of some natural phenomenon, Strutt “dryly” replied that “we know nothing about that.” On another occasion, writing to his son Edward in 1819, Strutt was pleased to hear that one of his tutors approved of Malthusian theory, remarking, “I supposed his opponents, if the subject were in any way connected with what they call the benevolence of the Deity would controvert the elements of Euclid.” Strutt was here ridiculing William Paley’s form of creationism, which had been a direct response to his friend Darwin’s brand of developmentalism, the “benevolence of the Deity” and the argument from design being, of course, the pillars of Paley’s system. (See Figure 6.) Strutt’s friend the chemist Charles Sylvester, another member of the Philosophical Society, was also highly skeptical of religion and could never “understand why religious persons should be unwilling to have this subject openly and fully discussed.” Sympathy for evolutionary theory probably persisted amongst the leaders of the Derby savant community as part of the developmental worldview and inspired by Darwin’s evolutionary psychophysiology and geological theories. This viewpoint would have been reinforced by Lamarckism and Geoffroyean morphology, which dominated the 23 Mozley, Reminiscences, Chiefly of Towns (cit. n. 19), Vol. 2, pp. 171–173. On the book collections see Derby Mercury, 26 Sept. 1837; Catalogue of the . . . General and Law Library of Mr. Edwards (Derby, 1826); and Catalogue of the Library of Rev. William Ulithorne Wray (Derby, 1808). Edwards, for instance, owned copies of Darwin’s Zoonomia, Botanic Garden, and Temple of Nature. On Francis Darwin’s specimens see Francis Darwin, Travels in Spain and the East, 1808–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1927).
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Figure 5. Painting of the Derby Mechanics’ Institute exhibition of 1839, which was supported by the local scientific community who helped to supply the rich variety of specimens displayed.
medical schools and the journals by the 1830s and fueled the evolutionary debate that has been described by Desmond. The Bridgewater Treatises, which argued against Lamarckism, were being published between 1833 and 1836, while the case for the developmental worldview was made by works such as Thomas Chambers’s originally anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which went through numerous editions. The importance of medical men in the Derby scientific community has already been indicated, and study of comparative anatomy would have featured in the medical education of surgeons and physicians. Furthermore, the Philosophical Society library acquired Lyell’s Principles of Geology just after it was published; although not evolutionary as such, in its uniformitarianism and, paradoxically, by introducing Lamarck to a wider British public, this volume gave some encouragement to the developmentalists.24 The educational methods adopted by the Spencers show evidence of the influence of the Dissenting academies, Darwin, and Enlightenment philosophy. During the 1790s the leaders of the Derby savant community—including Darwin—sent their children to the Spencer school, where they received an education that included the study of natural phi24 Strutt’s extensive fossil and mineral collection was utilized by John Farey in his General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire, 2 vols. (London, 1811, 1813). For the quotations see Edward Strutt, private memoir of William Strutt, p. 40, MSS, Derbyshire County Record Office, Matlock. On the evolutionary debate see Desmond, Politics of Evolution (cit. n. 3), Chs. 2, 3; and Secord, Victorian Sensation (cit. n. 3). Herbert Spencer claimed to have been introduced to Lamarck through Lyell’s book; see Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1833), ed. with an introduction by James Secord (London: Lane, 1997), p. xxx.
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Figure 6. Bust of William Strutt, F.R.S., second president of the Derby Philosophical Society, by Sir Francis Chantrey; now exhibited at Derby Museum.
losophy; George Spencer continued the tradition, tutoring the children of other members of the savant community, including the Fox and Strutt families. Mathew Spencer’s son and grandson, along with Benjamin Heldenmaier, another educationist and member of the Philosophical Society, were also influenced by the philosophy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, like Darwin, emphasized the Enlightenment view that education must conform to the natural processes of mental evolution, to the sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop.25 The second chapter of Herbert Spencer’s most successful work, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861), was originally intended as a review of 25 Craven, John Whitehurst (cit. n. 7), pp. 228, 233; and George Spencer, account book (cit. n. 18). Mathew Spencer owned a set of philosophical instruments that included Erasmus Darwin’s microscope. On Pestalozzi and his influence see Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, ed. Ebenezer Cooke (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915); Roger de Guimps, Pestalozzi: His Life and Work (London, 1890); John Alfred Green, Life and Work of Pestalozzi (London: Univ. Tutorial Press, 1913); Guy W. Trompf, “Radical Conservatism in Herbert Spencer’s Educational Thought,” British Journal of Educational Studies, 1969, 17:267–280; Trompf, “Essays on Education and the Young Herbert Spencer,” in Melbourne Studies in Education, ed. R. J. W. Selleck (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 184–231; and Kate Silber, Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). I am grateful to Ian Inkster of Nottingham Trent University for drawing my attention to Trompf’s work.
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Edward Biber’s Henry Pestalozzi and His Plan of Education (1831), and Pestalozzian ideas are also drawn upon to justify children’s rights in Social Statics (1850). Similarly, George Spencer’s Inventional Geometry, originally published in 1860, used Pestalozzian methods to introduce Euclidean theory to the child. Herbert Spencer adopted the Pestalozzian theory of natural education as the cornerstone of his educational scheme and in 1848 intended to found a school, with the cooperation of his father, that would follow some of Pestalozzi’s principles.26 It was to be modeled on the “Pestalozzian” school founded at Worksop in Nottinghamshire by George Spencer’s friend Heldenmaier. Although he receives only oblique mention in the Autobiography and has been completely overlooked in Spencer scholarship, Heldenmaier is another intriguing possible source for ideas in the Spencer household, in addition to demonstrating the importance of the influence of Continental educational philosophies in England at this time. His early education was with Pestalozzi at Yverdun, where he later became a tutor; he then attended Berlin University, from which he received a doctorate. Heldenmaier was educated in natural history and botany by Heinrich Friedrich Link, in German geography by Karl Ritter, and in natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics by Hegel, before coming to England with his family and some assistants to found the Nottinghamshire school around 1831. With its emphasis on experiential localized knowledge as the foundation for learning, the Worksop school tried to realize the new educational philosophy and became popular with wealthy British Liberal families. There was a gymnasium, a natural history museum, and large quantities of scientific and technological apparatus; specimens were acquired by pupils during extensive field trips in the surrounding Dukeries and further afield. The school, which survived until 1878, attracted much attention, receiving students from Britain and abroad, and through this Heldenmaier came into contact with George Spencer and the Derby scientific community, joining the Philosophical Society in 1835. He remained part of that scientific circle for at least twenty years and in 1857 purchased a copy of the first edition of Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855) from George Spencer before returning to Switzerland. The degree of Spencer’s debt to German idealist philosophy has been a source of scholarly speculation; indeed, Ann Low-Beer has argued that Spencer’s “whole speculative, systematic, universal conception of philosophy is more in the Germanic than the British tradition.” Though he notoriously failed to get through Kant and knew Schelling only via Coleridge, Spencer did acknowledge that he “knew the general nature of Hegel’s and Oken’s cosmogenies,” which “may well possibly have had some suggestive influence” on his system. However, given his remarkable direct connections to Pestalozzi, Ritter, Hegel, and Link, Heldenmaier was abreast of the very latest Continental thought in natural history, geography, and idealist philosophy. Link, for instance, was a botanist, zoologist, geologist, physicist, and chemist and director of the Berlin University botanical gardens, with a special interest in the philosophical foundations of the physical sciences.27 As well as running a model educational establishment, Heldenmaier therefore 26 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; or, The Conditions to Human Happiness Specified (London, 1850), Ch. 17, rpt. in Low-Beer, ed., Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 17), pp. 120–133; W. G. Spencer, Inventional Geometry (New York: Appleton, 1892); Francis Alexander Cavanagh, ed., Herbert Spencer on Education (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932); and Stephen Tomlinson, “From Rousseau to Evolutionism: Herbert Spencer on the Science of Education,” History of Education, 1996, 25:235–254. Education had sold over fifty thousand copies by 1900, had become a basic textbook for teacher training in Britain, and had been translated into fifteen languages. It had gone through thirteen editions in France alone and in the United States had laid the foundations for the progressivist educational movement. See Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (London: Random House, 1961). 27 Low-Beer, ed., Herbert Spencer, p. 11; and H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 2, p. 489. On Heldenmaier in
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provided the Spencers and the other members of the Derby savant circle with direct knowledge of European educational ideas, natural history, and philosophy in the years before Spencer read Coleridge. It was in the 1840s, under the influence of Derby scientific culture and Enlightenment educational theories such as Pestalozzi’s, that Spencer began to adopt a developmental worldview. Spencer’s laissez-faire individualism would come to have an increasingly conservative appearance in the face of late-Victorian government interventionism, but during the 1840s he was, politically, at his most radical. Encouraged by their Nonconformity, both Spencer and his father were committed supporters of local campaigns for political reform. W. G. Spencer, for instance, supported the borough petitions against the Corn Laws and accompanied the Reverend Noah Jones, Unitarian minister of the Friargate Chapel in Derby, in the 1842 deputation arguing for the right of the Chartists to address meetings in the town. His son became honorary secretary of the Complete Suffrage Union, presided over by the Birmingham Quaker Joseph Sturges, in which his uncle, Thomas Spencer, was also involved.28 Despite Herbert Spencer’s misleading claim that he was first exposed to Lamarckian theory through reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1840 and that Lyell’s arguments against Lamarck had converted him to the latter, he appears to have been aware of evolutionary theories earlier. In his Autobiography Spencer admitted that he had “been cognisant of the hypothesis that the human race has been developed from some lower race” prior to 1840. The “Letters on the Proper Sphere of Government” (1842), his first important work, originally submitted to Edward Miall’s Nonconformist, argued against government interference with the “natural” equilibrium of society by drawing on an analogy with “nature.” Every animate creature stood “in a specific relation to the external world in which it lives,” with instincts and organs being preserved only “as long as they are required.” If the “animal species” was placed in a situation where “one of their attributes is unnecessary” and activity and exercise were diminished, “successive generations will see the faculty, or instinct or whatever it may be, become gradually weaker, and an ultimate degeneracy of the race will inevitably ensue. All this is true of man.” Some acceptance of developmentalism is also implied in Spencer’s article on the theory of reciprocal dependence in the animal and vegetable creations, which combined a knowledge of geology with natural history and chemistry. This referred to “a gradual change in the character of the animate creation” that would have resulted from changes in the composition of the atmosphere, such as an increase in oxygen content, that were supposed to have taken place over time.29 As Desmond, Secord, and others have shown, Lamarckian ideas were being much debated during the 1830s and 1840s, and it would be extraordinary if the subject had not Derby see MS account book of the Derby Philosophical Society; and W. G. Spencer, account book (cit. n. 18), p. 180. On Heldenmaier see “Der Pestalozzianer Beat Rud. Friedrich Heldenmaier als Lehrer und Erzieher in Berlin, Worksop (England) und Lausanne,” Pestalozzianum Jahrgang, 1949, 46:907–908. For the school see Donald Leinster-Mackay, “Pioneers in Progressive Education: Some Little-Known Proprietary and Private School Exemplars,” Hist. Educ., 1980, 9:213–217; and Paul Elliott and Stephen Daniels, “Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Nature, Science, and Pedagogy: Pestalozzi, Fellenberg, and Geographical Education in Britain in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” forthcoming. On Link see “Heinrich Friedrich Link,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, 18 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1970–1986), Vol. 8, pp. 373–374. 28 Derby Mercury, 30 Jan. 1839, 14 Sept. 1842; H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp. 217–221; and Peel, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 2), Ch. 2. 29 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp. 175–177; Herbert Spencer, “Letters on the Proper Sphere of Government,” quoted ibid., p. 210; H. Spencer, “Remarks on the Theory of Reciprocal Dependence in the Animal and Vegetable Creations as Regards Its Bearing on Palaeontology,” ibid., pp. 533–537; and H. Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857), in Essays (cit. n. 22), Vol. 1, pp. 8–62.
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been discussed within the Derby scientific community on many occasions. George Spencer was a friend and correspondent of the surgeon and zoologist Thomas Rymer Jones, a former pupil. Rymer Jones had studied at Guy’s Hospital and in Paris, qualifying as a surgeon in 1833. In 1836 he was appointed the first professor of comparative anatomy at King’s College, London, and he was Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution from 1840 to 1842. Though not a supporter of evolution, Rymer Jones would presumably have discussed the currently topical and controversial arguments and counterarguments relating to Lamarck and Geoffroy and their opponents Cuvier and Owen. He was a prote´ge´ of the transcendental anatomist Richard Owen, who was in some ways an opponent of the evolutionists, though he later came to accept some aspects of Darwinian evolutionary theory. That William Spencer had been introduced to Owen, probably by Rymer Jones, is clear from the fact that Spencer wrote to the anatomist from the Isle of Wight in 1841, recounting the capture of a sunfish and suggesting that it might be useful for dissection. On his first visit to London, in 1834, Herbert Spencer had been taken by his father and Rymer Jones to the gardens of the Zoological Society. In the “Filiation of Ideas” Spencer suggested that he had begun to think of animal development in terms of progression from homogeneous to heterogeneous functions, following the German physiologist Karl Ernst von Baer, after reading Rymer Jones’s General Outline of the Animal Kingdom (1838– 1841). He had then “recognised the parallelism between it and the truth presented by low and high types of societies . . . the earliest foreshadowing of the general doctrine of evolution.”30 Rymer Jones gave lecture courses in Derbyshire towns, and George Spencer urged the committee of the Derby Mechanics’ Institute to invite him to give a course in 1841. At Matlock near Derby that year Jones demonstrated the structure and adaptation of fishes to aquatic life, “the transition from aquatic to terrestrial vertebrata,” and “the metamorphosis of the tadpole,” subjects highly susceptible to a Lamarckian interpretation. In 1850, again at the invitation of George Spencer, he gave two lectures “on the curiosities of natural history” to the Derby Literary and Scientific Society, illustrated by specimens provided by the museum of the Derbyshire Natural History Society. Given the “sensational” reception of Chambers’s Vestiges and the fevered debates that it had provoked in 1845 and 1846, the choice of lecturers for the Derby Literary and Scientific Society program in 1847 suggests that there was some sympathy for Lamarckism among the leading savants. The Derby lecture program and the newspaper controversy that it provoked, together with Secord’s analysis of the reception of the Vestiges in the larger Liverpool scientific community, confirm the strength of the debate over evolutionism in provincial towns during the politically turbulent 1840s. They also demonstrate how different sociopolitical and religiopolitical groups tended to align themselves for and against developmentalism, while deliberately misrepresenting each others’ positions. As at Liverpool, so at Derby, evolutionism tended to be received more sympathetically by political reformers and some groups of Dissenters, such as the Unitarians. The evolutionists (who were associated with Combe and Emerson) were accused by the local Tory newspaper of holding to “to the view that all nature, physical and moral, exhibits a law of progressive improvement.” They clung to the “exploded” nebular hypothesis and the “Lamarckian dogma” that “vegetables improved into animal parts; that these became shell-fish (from an innate principle of improvement) gradually acquired fins; that fins enlarged into paddles; that the paddles assumed the shape of legs; that the fore-legs of the Chimpanzee became 30 Herbert Spencer, “The Filiation of Ideas,” in Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 18), pp. 533–576.
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arms . . . and it is in this manner man was introduced to the world, ready to burst with principles and laws of progressive development.” Lamarckism was held to have been “exploded” principally by Richard Owen’s transcendental anatomy, which made use of von Baer’s nonrecapitulatory embryology, later to be utilized along with universal progress in Spencer’s evolutionary theory. The so-called freethinkers were worshippers of man, yet in the view of the editorial, the “ridiculous dogma of progressive improvement in the organic world” had “long since been discarded” by Lyell, Roderick Murchison, Adam Sedgwick, and others “as inconsistent with the . . . tenor of geological discoveries” that exhibited “the same perfection in animal organisation in the days of the trilobite, as in the nineteenth century.”31 PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY AND PHRENOLOGY
The importance of the formative influence of the Derby scientific community in Spencer’s intellectual development is also apparent in the impetus he received from the study of phrenology. David de Giustino and Roger Cooter have argued that, given its emphasis on conceptions of race and development, phrenology facilitated the adoption of an evolutionary psychology, a contention amply supported by study of the origins of Herbert Spencer’s developmental psychology during the 1840s and 1850s, which emerged as remarkably similar to the associational evolutionary psychophysiology elaborated by Darwin in Derby half a century before. Robert Young has concluded that “Spencer’s general theory of evolution and the biological, evolutionary basis of his psychology grew out of the arguments for specialisation of functions which he elaborated in the context of his phrenological interest.”32 Acceptance of the mechanisms of physiological organ development in one lifetime under certain environmental conditions could facilitate an acceptance of augmented evolutionary change through many generations. There is ample evidence that some members of the Derby savant community, particularly medical men, took an interest in phrenology at the same time as supporters of scientific culture in other towns such as Sheffield. By 1815 the Derby Philosophical Society had begun to acquire phrenological texts, and the physician and scientific activist Douglas Fox included a description of phrenology illustrated by an array of skulls at the inaugural lectures of the Derby Mechanics’ Institute in 1825. Phrenologists including William Bally, John Levison, William Henry Crook, J. Q. Rumball, Thomas Beggs, Cornelius Donovan, and Spencer Hall visited Derby prior to 1850, with Hall eventually choosing to settle in the town. A phrenology class was established at the Mechanics’ Institute in 1832, three years before there was a class on chemistry, and many phrenological works were bought for the library, including the junior section, during the 1830s and 1840s.33 The degree of 31 Secord, Victorian Sensation (cit. n. 3), pp. 191–221; and Derby Mercury, 29 Sept. 1847. See also Dov Ospovat, “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryology, 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen’s and William B. Carpenter’s Palaeontological Application of von Baer’s Law,” J. Hist. Biol., 1976, 9:1– 28; and Desmond, Politics of Evolution (cit. n. 3), Chs. 7, 8. 32 David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 51–55; Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 9–10; Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 250–253; and Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 161. 33 Ian Inkster, “A Phase in Middle-Class Culture: Phrenology in Sheffield, 1824–1850,” Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 1971–1977, 10:273–279; Douglas Fox, Notes of the Lectures on Anatomy and Chemistry Delivered by Mr. Douglas Fox, Surgeon, in the Lecture Room of the Derby Mechanics’ Institution (Derby: Richardson, 1826); and Derby Mechanics’ Institute Catalogue of Books Comprised in the Library (Derby: Richardson, 1851).
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support given to the subject is also apparent from the phrenological contributions made to the 1839 Mechanics’ Institute and 1843 County Museum exhibitions by members of the literary and scientific community such as Joseph Strutt. Spencer “became a believer” when he attended a lecture by J. K. Spurzheim at the Derby Lancastrian schoolroom in 1831, and he remembered having to overcome “a considerable repugnance to contemplating the row of grinning skulls he had in front of him.” Spurzheim had already visited Derbyshire in 1829, lecturing at Bakewell and at the Strutts’ Belper schoolroom, when he stayed with Jedediah Strutt, the nephew of William and Joseph. In the 1840s, during the height of his first period of political campaigning, Spencer published three slightly heretical articles on phrenology in the journal the Zoist, which had been established by John Elliotson. These suggested some alterations to the functions of the accepted phrenological organs of imitation, benevolence, and wonder so that they became, respectively, organs of sympathy, sensitiveness, and revivescence. The organ of wonder functioned to revive intellectual perception, while the organ of imitation recalled feelings. This is not the place for a detailed examination of Spencer’s influential evolutionary psychology, except to note three important points: that his mature psychology was indebted to his early study of phrenology, that this interest in phrenology coincided with his earliest active radical political campaigning and the first acceptance of developmentalism in print, and that a debt to associationism was the final major ingredient.34 Phrenology encouraged Spencer to apply the concept of function to mental faculties and to search for the physiological manifestations of environmentally induced development. THE ORIGIN OF THE “SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY”
Spencer’s evolutionary theory and its relationship to Charles Darwin’s work has been well documented before and requires no lengthy discussion here. Influenced by the German physiologists Christian von Wolff, Goethe, and von Baer, Spencer eventually defined evolution as “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”35 This was a universal cosmological law of development applicable to natural history and the evolution of human culture alike, an audacious system, sketched out in essays during the 1850s, that used the terms “evolution” and “progress” interchangeably. The formations of galaxies, the solar system, the geology of the earth, natural history, the evolution of man, changes in forms of government and religion, human political systems, legislation, religious institutions, even language, music, and the evolution of painting and sculpture— all demonstrated the truth of Spencer’s universal law of progress. All proved that, “from 34 H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. 1, p. 200; Derby Mercury, 19 Aug., 26 Aug., 22 Sept. 1829 (Spurzheim’s visit); Herbert Spencer, “A New View of the Functions of Imitation and Benevolence,” Zoist, 1844, 1:369–385; H. Spencer, “On the Situation of the Organ of Amativeness,” ibid., 1844, 2:186–188; H. Spencer, “A Theory Concerning the Organ of Wonder,” ibid., pp. 316–325; George Bion Denton, “Early Psychological Theories of Herbert Spencer,” American Journal of Psychology, 1921, 32:5–15; and Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation (cit. n. 32), Ch. 5. The evolutionary psychology is detailed in H. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 1st ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855), 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1870– 1872). 35 Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 6th ed. (1900), p. 367. See also Edward Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley (London: Richards, 1897), pp. 161–185; and Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 18). On Spencer’s relation to Darwin see, e.g., Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories (cit. n. 32).
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the earliest traceable cosmological changes, down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which progress essentially consists.” He traced the onset of evolution through time using the examples of modern industry and its effects on social development, with increasing differentiation and specialization being represented by the localization of particular industries in the regions of Britain. The increasing subdivisions of labor allowed for greater and speedier production units, while the important role of technology was emphasized and interpreted in terms of his universal postulate, the manifold effects of the growth of steam power being evident from its mushrooming mining and industrial applications—a celebration of the social impact of technology and industry reminiscent of Darwin, the Lunar Society, and the Derby philosophers, all of whom likewise tended to downplay the more oppressive aspects of industrialization. Railway construction, with its process of financing, construction, and economic, technological, social, and intellectual impact, was a good example of these processes of evolution—one Spencer knew very well from the family investments and his own experience as a railway engineer.36 Essentially, the composition of the “synthetic philosophy” can be regarded as an elaboration of the kernel of ideas already formulated by the 1840s and 1850s. In the Principles of Psychology Spencer added to the associationism of Thomas Brown and J. S. Mill a conception of evolution. Here he followed a path already taken by Erasmus Darwin, though with less dependency on the Lockean conception of mind, as for Spencer the human mind was no tabula rasa at birth but already the product of thousands of years of development. In the Principles of Sociology Spencer “naturalized” society, using the organic analogy to understand social development and marrying it to a conception of social function and structural differentiation that was thought to explain the appearance and disappearance of social institutions and organizations. In 1862 (not 1852, as is commonly asserted) he famously coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which was later adopted by Charles Darwin. In his Principles of Biology he argued that nature was red in tooth and claw yet noted that this struggle for existence paradoxically ensured human progress: moral development was born from this competition, while individualism resulted in more social cooperation and greater harmony in society.37 (See Figure 7.) Education was held to be the key to social progress, a position inherited from British and European Enlightenment philosophers and grounded in the teaching experiences of his family. It was “closely associated with change” and served as the mechanism for moral and intellectual improvement. Society, partly through education, was “always fitting men for higher things, and unfitting them for things as they are.” According to Spencer’s evolutionary ethics, already clear in the Social Statics of 1850, the law of progress ensured that human beings were moving toward a state of perfect morality—essentially, toward a state of complete individual harmony with society. Evil would result only from the “want of congruity between the faculties and their spheres of action”—a position Spencer had 36 H. Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (cit. n. 29), pp. 10, 56–58; and Perrin, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 1), pp. 34–37, 43–44. The 1850s essays are “The Development Hypothesis,” in Essays (cit. n. 22), pp. 1–7; and “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” See also Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government: A Reprint of a Series of Letters Originally Published in “The Nonconformist” (London: Brittain, 1843). 37 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, 1st ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864, 1867); the arguments for the evolutionary hypothesis are considered in Vol. 1, pp. 331–475. The social and progressive implications of Spencer’s phrase were obvious, and Thomas Henry Huxley thought that Darwin had made “an unlucky substitution”; see Diane B. Paul, “The Selection of the ‘Survival of the Fittest,’” J. Hist. Biol., 1988, 21:411–424, on p. 419.
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Figure 7. Portrait of Herbert Spencer taken around 1860, now in the collection of Derby Museum.
already made clear in the “Letters on the Proper Sphere of Government” of 1842. Social evolution would ensure that all the human faculties would be molded into a complete fitness for the social state, and immorality would eventually disappear, “so surely must man become perfect.”38 DARWIN AND SPENCER
There are a number of striking similarities and parallels between the evolutionary theories of Erasmus Darwin and Herbert Spencer that are especially interesting given their connections to the Derby scientific community—though of course there are many differences as well, such as Spencer’s desire to create a “science” of society. Both men favored terms such as “progress” and “progressive” to describe developmental phenomena, rather than “evolution” and “evolutionary”: Spencer adopted the latter during the 1850s only because he thought the former were too anthropocentric. Inspired by the progressive, Enlightenment model of natural science, both embraced a developmental worldview, applying it to psychological development, the natural world, and social change, with Spencer holding that “the processes of modification constituting adaptation of organic structures, are rendered 38 H. Spencer, Social Statics (cit. n. 26), pp. 59–60, 341; H. Spencer, Principles of Psychology (cit. n. 34), Vol. 1, pp. 278–288; and Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1983), Vol. 1, pp. 79–82. On the moral basis of Spencer’s evolutionary psychology see Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories (cit. n. 32), pp. 295–313. On education more generally see, e.g., Brian Simon, The Two Nations and the Education Structure, 1780–1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1981), pp. 17– 71; Low-Beer, ed., Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 17), pp. 1–28; and Tomlinson, “From Rousseau to Evolutionism” (cit. n. 26), pp. 235–254.
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quite comprehensible by reference to the analogous social processes.” Darwin applied his conception of evolution and progress both to nature, to explain the changes in plants and animals suggested by fossils and geology, and to society, where, thanks to changes facilitated by education, greater harmony was being created. It is hard not to believe that Spencer was stimulated by Darwin’s psychology, while his exposure to phrenology, prompted by the interest taken in it by the Derby scientific community, encouraged him to develop a system of individualistic psychophysiology remarkably similar to that of Darwin. Both philosophers utilized a conception of cyclical change in addition to linear development to explain the presence of phenomena not obviously progressive in tendency. They used similar arguments to demonstrate the developmental position, pointing to the progress of science, technology, and industry, geological change, the nebular hypothesis, and recapitulationism. Darwin thought that the solar system would eventually collapse in on itself and other systems would then be born, while Spencer argued that gaseous matter and star clusters demonstrated the life cycle of stars and planets. Both saw the evolution of individual organisms as replaying the collective evolutionary experience of other species, and Spencer argued that education should proceed from the simple to the complex because “a child’s mind repeats the unfolding of the mind in the human race.”39 Darwin believed in a somewhat elitist progressive model of scientific development, with advances being led by the high priests of science, the philosophers. As he put it, “some must think and others labour.” Both Spencer and Darwin saw the progress of reason as one great overarching process and believed in the fundamental unity and interrelationship of the sciences. Hence both were fascinated with electricity and electrical experiments, which were explicitly associated with investigations into the nature of biological change or social development. Unlike Charles Darwin, both were mechanical inventors with special interests in the exploitation of technology in manufacturing and industry, as well as experimenters in both the physical and biological sciences, and this was reflected in their evolutionary theories. Hence the problems of biological adaptations were considered to be similar to those posed by mechanical inventions: in each case a number of contrivances had to operate harmoniously to carry out certain functions in the context of particular external environments. This blurring of the boundary between the “natural” and human contrivance was emphasized by Spencer when he referred to his father’s “habit of speculating about causes” and how he learned that “the discovery of cause is through analysis— the pulling to pieces of phenomena for the purpose of ascertaining what are the essential connections among them.” It is also evident in his influential organicist sociology, where parallels are constantly drawn between organisms and social institutions. With his father he had “many times” “assisted in experiments with the air-pump and the electrical machine; so that ideas of physical causation were repeatedly impressed on me,” and these “flourished the more in the absence of the ordinary appeals to supernatural causes.” When discussing the origination of the synthetic philosophy, he specifically referred to “the putting together and the taking to pieces” of ideas, just as he had put together and taken apart clock mechanisms. Both Spencer and Darwin were fascinated by the adaptive mechanisms of living organisms, and, partly as a result of his phrenological studies, Spencer began to consider phenomena in terms of their function. He applied the general concept of function to characteristics of biological organisms and to features of human society such as social institutions.40 39 Perrin, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 1), pp. 34–35 (on the terms); Spencer, “Filiation of Ideas” (cit. n. 30), pp. 557, 554; and Cranagh, ed., Spencer on Education (cit. n. 26), pp. 61–113. 40 E. Darwin, Zoonomia (cit. n. 11), Vol. 2, p. 416, and note xxviii; and Spencer, “Filiation of Ideas,”
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Although phrenology, Enlightenment educational philosophy, and the work of George Lewes were clearly important influences on Spencer’s evolutionary psychology up to the 1850s, it appears likely that—perhaps through his father—Darwin’s individualistic psychology was significant as well.41 Darwin’s philosophy proceeded from the individual to the social, with individual development, a product of personal education and social interaction, being the foundation of society. This also remained Spencer’s position, despite severe opposition in later life, and it too was grounded in an individualistic psychology informed by the British tradition of associationist psychology. For both philosophers, inherited characteristics ensured in part that development would be progressive in nature, and Spencer remained a Lamarckian until his death, despite growing opposition. For both, the pressure of population ensured by competition that development would tend to be progressive; indeed, the problem of population growth fascinated each man. Spencer argued that there was a rough equilibrium between the animal population and the food supply and that fertility would decrease with the advance of civilization. Thus both Darwin and Spencer considered that the evils of natural and social debilitation and death were an unfortunate but necessary component of universal progress, part of the “survival of the fittest.”42 As we have seen, Spencer, his father, and Erasmus Darwin were all educational theorists, recalling the concerns of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Darwin published a work on female education, and Spencer became one of the most widely read educational theorists in the world. Both took a dynamic, experiential view of knowledge acquisition constructed through individual activity, a dialectical process where ideas were not passively imbibed but tested in action in the laboratory or by argument. Both saw science as the key to social advancement and placed special emphasis on scientific education (indeed, members of the Darwin family attended the Spencers’ school). Derby scientific activists were instrumental in the foundation of educational institutions such as the Lancastrian School, the Mechanics’ Institute, the Derby Arboretum, and the County Museum, with their didactic emphasis on “rational recreation”—and especially scientific education—for the laboring and middle classes. Darwin attacked the domination of impractical classicism in education, which should instead promote the “comparison of things with each other” and the examination of “ideas of causes and their effects.” His son Charles had chosen to leave Oxford because “the vigour of the mind languished in the pursuit of classical elegance . . . and sighed to be removed to the robuster exercises of the medical schools of Edinburgh.” Darwin argued that girls should be given an education that included vigorous exercise, study of the natural sciences, and excursions to view the manufactories of the industrial Midlands. Likewise, Spencer, following the methods developed by his father and the Pestalozzians, attacked at length the practice of learning classical languages for the purpose of polite exhibition. Science and mathematics should be learned by experiential means proceeding from concrete examples to the more abstract, with the subjects of education being chosen on funcpp. 534–535, 548. For parallels between organisms and social institutions see esp. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1876–1896), Vol. 1. 41 See also Young, “Role of Psychology in the Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Debate” (cit. n. 13), pp. 155– 178. 42 E. Darwin, Temple of Nature (cit. n. 10) canto 4, ll. 365–410; Herbert Spencer, “A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” Westminster Review, Apr. 1852, 2:32–33; and Paul, “Selection of the ‘Survival of the Fittest’” (cit. n. 37).
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tional and utilitarian terms, through analysis of the requirements of the individual and society.43 Finally, it is certainly possible that Spencer’s early conception of the importance of sympathy by imitation may have been influenced by Darwinian ideas and phrenology.44 According to Darwin’s theory, sympathy was central to social development and individual psychological change, which ultimately saw the progressive increase of wisdom and social happiness. Likewise, Spencer placed sympathy at the heart of his evolutionary ethics, just as it had been central to his early psychology of the 1840s. The harmony of civilization was increasing as sympathy allowed more perfect social congruity. Experience of pain and pleasure was at the heart of Spencer’s psychology and ethics, as it had been at the heart of Darwin’s evolutionary psychophysiology, and these experiences molded individuals into a state of greater social congruity as character structures were molded by society and vice versa. Imitation and sympathy brought greater altruism and harmony, with virtues being naturalized through internalization. The “remoulding of human nature into fitness for the requirements of social life” would eventually make “all needful activities pleasurable,” while all activities at variance with these requirements would become displeasurable. Activities therefore previously engaged in with “dislike” or from “a sense of obligation” would instead “be done with immediate liking, and the things desisted from as a matter of duty [would] be desisted from because they [were] repugnant.”45 Spencer—mindful, as Darwin had been, of the continuing power of war and militarism—was careful to emphasize that such a state would exist only in the far-distant future. But even the most drugmellowed hippie of the 1960s or 1970s could scarcely have framed a more optimistic view of eventual social harmony. CONCLUSION
While providing many valuable details, Spencer’s own account of his intellectual development does not sufficiently acknowledge the debt that he owed to provincial scientific culture and its institutions. His evolutionary philosophy was stimulated in important ways by his association with the Derby philosophical community, for it was through this group that he was first exposed to Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary worldview, which included a model of biological evolution, a developmental associationist psychology, an evolutionary geology, and grand cosmological developmentalism. Darwin’s Derby scientific prote´ge´s— “Darwinians” such as Richard Forester, William Brookes Johnson, and the Strutt brothers—shared his confidence in scientific and industrial progress and his “developmental worldview” while taking the lead in campaigns for political reform and encouraging other members of the group, such as George Spencer, to espouse their own deistic evolutionary worldview. It was also through the libraries, lectures, and institutions supported by the Derby savant community that the Spencers were introduced to phrenology and thanks to 43 Cranagh, ed., Spencer on Education (cit. n. 26), pp. 3–60; Charles Darwin, An Experiment Establishing a Criteria between Mucaginous and Purulent Matter . . . with a Life of the Author [probably by Erasmus Darwin] (London: Codell, 1780), pp. 129–132; and Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (Derby, 1797), pp. 41–43. 44 Spencer claimed that Adam Smith was not his source: H. Spencer, “Filiation of Ideas” (cit. n. 30), p. 537. 45 E. Darwin, Zoonomia (cit. n. 11), Vol. 2, pp. 245–246; and H. Spencer, Principles of Ethics (cit. n. 38), Vol. 1, pp. 183, 184, 242–257. Daniel Dennett, defending an “ultra-Darwinist” position, has accused Spencer of “Panglossianism” in seeking to drive a simple path to altruism from evolution. According to Dennett, “Spencer in our terms was an egregiously greedy reductionist, trying to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in a single step”: Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Lane, 1994), pp. 463–464, 466.
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these predominantly reformist and Dissenting networks that their experimental educational methods could thrive. Hence, for instance, the Spencers’ adoption of Pestalozzian “naturalistic,” experiential methods—an important stage in the development of their evolutionary worldview—was, as we have seen, encouraged by the activities of Heldenmaier, another member of the Philosophical Society. It is only through an appreciation of this provincial scientific community that the analogies between cultural and biological evolution that shaped the “Lamarckian” aspects of Darwin’s and Spencer’s evolutionary theories can be understood. Their status as great naturalists and empirical observers notwithstanding, this transposition between culture and biology is reflected in Darwin’s and Spencer’s roles in a host of other activities—as inventors, artists, poets, political agitators, engineers, urban improvers, and industrial apologists. As Secord and Desmond have shown so well, it was this “Lamarckism” that, through its progressive Enlightenment character, helped to accustom the Victorian public to developmentalism in a way that the “Darwinian” theory of natural selection by random mutation alone would probably not have done.46 Far from being disembodied, placeless, abstract conceptions, the evolutionary theories of Erasmus Darwin and Herbert Spencer, which through the latter exerted a global influence, were rooted, shaped, and developed in the social, landscape, and industrial character of the English Midland provinces and the scientific communities they nurtured. 46 “Lamarckian” here denotes any theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. See Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1989); Roger Smith, The History of the Human Sciences (London: Fontana, 1997); Desmond, Politics of Evolution (cit. n. 3); and Secord, Victorian Sensation (cit. n. 3).