Spencer

Spencer Herbert (Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903), English philosopher; belonged to a family of Methodist Quakers, was the son of a teacher who instilled in him self-reliance and independence of thought. S. refused his uncle's offer to send him to Cambridge University and remained self-taught. From 1848-53 S. became co-editor of the "Economist". From that time he wrote many philosophical articles: "Social statistics", L., 1850 (Russian ed., SPB, 1906); "Principles of Psychology", v. I-II, L., 1855 (Russian ed.-Fundamental Principles of Psychology); "System of synthetic philosophy", v. I-X, L., 1862-93; "Education intellectual, moral and physical", L., 1861 (Russian ed., SPB, 1913); "Principles of biology", v. I-II, L., 1864-67 (Russian ed., SPB, 1870); "Descriptive sociology" (Together with Duncan, Schepping and Collier), v. I-VII, L., 1873-1910 (Russian ed., Kiev, 1878) and others. The complete collection of works S., verified against the latest English editions, was published under the general editorship of N. Rubakin (Kiev-SPB, vols. I-II and V-VII, 1899-1900). The philosophy of S. was determined by his time-the era of flourishing capitalism, when the bourgeoisie was still a progressive class. S. attempted to express the idea of progress in a general formula and elevate this idea to a universal law. The strength of his thought lay in introducing the idea of evolution into philosophical circulation, which had just fertilized the natural sciences (Lyell-natural development of the inorganic world and Darwin-organic world). Philosophy offered its hand to the natural sciences and claimed to be unified and possessing the highest commonality of knowledge. S. saw development everywhere-in the developing embryo, in the universe, in the organic world, in human society. Evolution and its law are expressed according to S. in the transition from homogeneous to heterogeneous (differentiation), from disconnected to connected (concentration) and from indefinite to definite. However, along with progress S. also recognized the reverse process of dissolution with absorption of movement and disintegration of matter. In the universe, the predominance of one or the other process alternates. A great merit of S. is that before the appearance of Darwin's work, he published (1852) an article in which he rejected the special creation of organisms and preferred the idea of evolution of organisms, with which the facts of embryology, systematics, morphology and biogeography are in better agreement. S. sharply opposed at the same time Lamarck's explanation of evolution as "striving for progress" inherent in organisms, as explaining nothing, unscientific and unphilosophical. The views of S. are closer to the idea of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, since he emphasized the importance of internal change of the organism in response to changes in the external environment in the form of: 1) direct adaptations (recognizing the inheritance of functional changes) and 2) indirect balancing (natural selection, survival of the most adapted). S. defined life as a mobile equilibrium between internal and external actions, constant adaptation of internal relations to external ones. 'If for lower organisms the idea of natural selection can be considered sufficient to explain evolution, then with respect to higher animals S. considers it unable to explain the emergence of many adaptive features. Rejecting Lamarck's principle of gradation as an explanation for the gradual complication of organization, S. paid much attention to another side of Lamarck's teaching, namely functional adaptations. Admitting their significance for the evolutionary process, S. was forced to recognize the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In the article "Insufficiency of natural selection" (1893) S. criticizes what seemed to him the one-sided concept of Darwinists and proposes to return to the views of Lamarck, as well as Darwin himself, who did not reject the possibility of inheriting characteristics acquired during individual life. Natural selection, in S.'s opinion, cannot explain the emergence of characteristics that are not related to reproduction. Similarly, natural selection cannot, according to his views, interpret the mutual adaptation of organs working together, even if the connection between them is simple enough, let alone in cases of more complex correlations. S. shares with Haeckel the merit of extracting from undeserved oblivion the name of Lamarck-the first evolutionist of the 19th century and shares with him the fate of eclectic evolutionists trying to "supplement" the basically materialist idea of Darwin about the role of natural selection with Lamarck's teaching on the inheritance of functional changes. He in particular owns the term "most adapted", the success of which Darwin recognized. S.'s attempt to build a universal philosophical system ended in failure, since in particular he sought to apply to changes in the inorganic world, as well as to the evolution of organic forms, and to the development of human society the same principle of development without taking into account the qualitative specificity of different forms of motion of matter. The application to the development of human society of the laws of development of the organic world represents the largest error of S. and the grossest error of his teaching. Therefore, now behind the philosophical and specifically biological teaching of S. only historical significance can be recognized.