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2006 Optimistic Liberals: , the Brooklyn Ethical Association, and the Integration of Moral Philosophy and in the Victorian Trans-Atlantic Community Christopher R. Versen

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OPTIMISTIC LIBERALS: HERBERT SPENCER, THE BROOKLYN ETHICAL

ASSOCIATION, AND THE INTEGRATION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND EVOLUTION

IN THE VICTORIAN TRANS-ATLANTIC COMMUNITY

By

CHRISTOPHER R. VERSEN

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Christopher R. Versen All Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Christopher R. Versen defended on March 15, 2006.

______Neil Jumonville Professor Directing Dissertation

______Joseph McElrath Outside Committee Member

______Michael Ruse Committee Member

______Albrecht Koschnik Committee Member

______Frederick Davis Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

To my father, Greg Versen, whose example has always lighted my way.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have willingly (and on occasion desperately) grasped a number of helping hands along the way to finishing this dissertation. Though all those people and that provided help should not be blamed for the errors herein, they do deserve credit for encouraging it to a successful conclusion. First among them are my family and friends. Susan and Alexander have been my constant support and inspiration. My parents, Greg and Susie Versen, and my siblings, Jill and Stephen never wavered in their faith that I could finish this thing, and they buoyed me through some tough times. My closest friends, Patrick Alley and Matthew , too, have been constantly supportive and kept me well grounded in the world outside academia. My deepest intellectual and professional debts have been accumulated among the faculty and staff at Florida State University. My advisor, Neil Jumonville, has helped to shepherd me through courses, comps, writing, and defense. Jonathan Grant, though not directly involved in my course work or research, was the most unselfish, helpful, enthusiastic, and wise mentor I had in the program. My work with him in the Preparing Future Faculty Program and time with him personally has been invaluable. Paul Elliott, emeritus member of the Biology faculty, became a good over the years and lent me his wit and wisdom throughout the process. V. J. Connor, Joe Richardson--both now safely retired from the department--and Jim Jones, were wonderful examples of scholars, teachers, and mentors. Several scholars arrived after I had begun the program and lent me their direction as recent graduates, their fresh insights, and their enthusiastic support to my work: Albrecht Koschnik, Fritz Davis, and Michael Creswell. Joe McElrath and Michael Ruse were invaluable to me as both instructors and as dissertation advisors despite the many demands on their time. Lucy Patrick, director of Special Collections at Strozier Library was an ever-helpful resource who ran the best section of the university’s library system. Too often overlooked are the people who make a department run and smooth the way for students. Special thanks go to Chris Pignatiello, Debbie Perry, and Julie Barrett, who took care of this fumbling student far better than he deserved. Faculty members outside FSU also deserve credit for the help and direction that they lent me. The faculty at University, especially Michael Galgano, Lee Congdon, Jack Butt, David Owusu-Ansah, and Chris Arndt, gave me an excellent preparation for my doctoral work. Above all, I thank Henry Myers who directed my master’s thesis and represents the

iv gentleman and scholar I hope to be. I must mention, too, Ron Numbers, whose suggestion that somebody should write a history of Spencer’s influence in led me into this quagmire. I acquired even more debts on my research trips. Susan Abram at the Brooklyn Public Library was knowledgeable, efficient, and remarkably helpful even after I had returned to Tallahassee. Frances O’Donnell, Russell Pollard, and Clifford Wunderlich at Andover-Harvard Theological Library were very accommodating and instructive, particularly regarding the connections between John W. Chadwick, Lewis G. Janes, and Charles Lyttle. The rest of the staff at Andover-Harvard, too, were as professional and efficient as anyone could hope. Finally, without Amy Rupert, director of the archives and special collections at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute library, and her staff I doubt that I could have ever plowed through and copied the Skilton Family Papers that made this dissertation possible. Generous financial support, too, was crucial for my research trips north. The most generous support came from the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana--Bloomington in the form of a Helm Research Fellowship. The Maurice M. and Patricia V. Vance Scholarship in Intellectual History provided an important means of support through my last year of writing. The department of history, though a J. Leitch Wright Dissertation Research Travel Award, provided funds for a preliminary trip to the Library of Congress, and it partially funded a trip to the American Historical Association annual conference in Philadelphia to present my research. Finally, I would like to thank those among my peers with whom I have had most helpful and enjoyable relationships. Eric Tenbus became a good friend in the short time that our paths ran together at FSU and since he left for Central Missouri State University. He and his family have been a pleasure to know. Susan and I have shared the many trials and celebrations of school and family life over the past few years with our new friends Jennifer and Tom Henderson. Karen Spierling and Scott Levi, who have recently settled into life in Louisville, have given me a great deal of useful advice on how to handle the tumultuous final years of graduate school. And a big high five to Lee Willis, my close compatriot in this our ultimate year of education; WOO HOO, were done! My deepest thanks go out to all of these people and organizations for their generous support and guidance through a very difficult process. If I have missed anyone, I am sincerely sorry and my only excuse is that I am doing this at the last minute.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract vii

PREFACE 1

INTRODUCTION 4

CHAPTER 1: HERBERT SPENCER AND SOCIAL : A WRONGFUL CONVICTION 17

CHAPTER 2: HERBERT SPENCER’S INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE, EARLY WRITINGS, AND PROTO- 39

CHAPTER 3: SPENCER’S EVOLUTIONISM AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY 92

CHAPTER 4: BRINGING SPENCER TO AMERICA 154

CHAPTER 5: THE BROOKLYN ETHICAL ASSOCIATION 193

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 254

BIBLIOGRAPHY 257

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 273

vi ABSTRACT The farther history has moved beyond Herbert Spencer’s ideas the harder it has been for contemporary readers to understand either his thought or his striking , particularly in America. As a result Spencer’s ideas and his historical context are badly in need of revision. The work of and his association with the Brooklyn Ethical Association (BEA) offer an excellent subject in which to pursue such a revision. By analyzing Spencer’s intellectual background, the structure and beliefs of the American Unitarian community that offered Spencer’s ideas a welcoming home, and the activities of the BEA between 1881 and 1891, this dissertation arrives at an explanation for Spencer’s popularity and precipitous decline. The explanation has six major components: 1) Spencer’s thought was distinctly eighteenth-century rather than nineteenth- century in its origins; 2) his ideas were part of an optimistic liberal current within the broader flow of post-Enlightenment that was overwhelmed in the twentieth century by pragmatic liberalism; 3) he and his followers and fellows often shared a common Arminian Christian heritage that believed in and looked to progressive human moral development; 4) ethics and human ethical development were at the center of his philosophy; 5) the evolutionism he developed from this background, and which was taken up by the members of the BEA, was based on an a priori belief in a law-bound universal order that was predictable, progressive, and beneficent; and 6) the social and , and the reconciliation of individualistic liberalism and traditional it embodied, failed to resonate in a twentieth century dominated by rising urbanism, industrialism, militarism, and imperialism, in which pragmatic liberalism seemed to offer a better philosophical approach to such modern problems. In addition to providing a reinterpretation of Spencer’s ideas and a history of a key group of supporters, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of the trans-Atlantic intellectual community and traces important connections within it in the Victorian era. It also helps to frame the broader evolution debates by showing how Spencerian evolution was adapted and used by Americans late in the nineteenth century.

vii PREFACE When I began this project, I intended to outline the course of the discussions of Herbert Spencer’s ideas in America, what I call the American Spencer debates. Based on the secondary sources I had read in preparation for the dissertation, I believed that I knew who Spencer was and what he had said. As it turned out, I was wrong about almost everything that I thought I knew. Herbert Spencer was not the man I thought him to be. He was far more human and sympathetic a character than I would have believed. His ideas were not the shallow and predictable apologetics for ruthless competition and reactionary politics I had expected to find. Quite to the contrary, I was surprised to find ethical development at the very core of all his life’s works. A thin line of historiography had warned me to expect his worst features, both personal and intellectual, to have been exaggerated, but nothing forewarned me that his ideas, albeit dated even in his lifetime, would so profoundly resonate with the founding ideas of the . Likewise, I was unprepared for the extensive analysis and development of his ideas by liberal Christians in America that found in the lectures and discussions of the Brooklyn Ethical Association (BEA). The three years I spent researching and writing the history of Spencer’s connections to the BEA led me into a too-often ignored realm of intellectual history--the Victorian trans- Atlantic intellectual community. Once drawn into that intellectual environment, it became increasingly easy for me to see a pattern of personal, social, economic, political, and intellectual connections that had existed since the first English colonization of the Americas. What became particularly apparent in the context of the Spencer debates were the traditions of late-eighteenth- century political and the Arminian heresy in Protestant that Spencer and his Brooklyn followers and fellows shared. I began to see why Spencer was so widely appealing to his American contemporaries. I began to understand how his ideas took on a monumental stature in the nineteenth century. Having discover that the foundations of his enormous ideas lay in a slippery and shifting current of optimistic liberal ideas of a progressive and beneficent universal order, however, it also became clear to me why his presence diminished so quickly in the chaotic opening years of the twentieth century. The mountain that was Herbert Spencer and Spencerism in the nineteenth century eroded quickly as the century closed. Like a crumbling mountain, though, he and his ideas did not disappear. They spread out into the world like an intellectual alluvium. The intellectual tradition

1 from which he came has remained a powerful force in Western thought, though its political success has been somewhat subdued. The religious tradition into which he was born and that was developed by his fellows in America survives among Unitarians and in liberal evangelical churches that focus on the pursuit of individual moral improvement and the search to create heaven on earth. His definition of evolution, though largely discredited by biological and physical science remains in the popular mind as both an object of hope and of derision. His definition of the Unknowable, one of the most controversial points of his philosophy among his contemporaries, is still a workable definition of the distinction between physics and , though few would admit openly to such ultimate ignorance. , particularly , owes its existence as much to Spencer as to any other nineteenth-century thinker, though they often disown that heritage. Sociologists are not alone in their rejection of Spencer, however. They are accompanied by scholars across the academic disciplines. Spencer’s supposed and defense of an unfair economic order and his actual have made him anathema to twentieth-century scholars who have sought to justify the development of the modern social- and to inculcate multi-cultural values in modern . It is unfortunate that all that most people know of Spencer are the jagged and dangerous boulders of so-called Social Darwinism that stand out as the final visible remains of his ideas. Truly, Spencer’s ideas included many that are contrary to current political beliefs and much of the scientific foundation on which he built his philosophy has been disproved, but a reconsideration of what he actually believed and said will do much to correct persistent misinterpretations of his life and work. Seen as a representative thinker of a now untenable social and political condition, but as one who did have the best interests of his fellow human beings at heart, Spencer may yet be instructive to modern readers and thinkers. He does not need to be glorified, martyred, or apologized for. Instead, he needs to be treated as one of the clearest and most outstanding voices of optimistic liberalism in the nineteenth century. Spencer’s followers and fellows, too, deserve to be treated in the context of their optimistic worldview. By and large, they were not the defenders of privilege, militarism, imperialism, and racism of which they have been accused by modern writers. Most were agreed with Spencer that the universe’s constitution was ultimately orderly, beneficent, and progressive. They shared Spencer’s faith in the possibility of human perfectibility and in an individual’s ethics and moral character as the guiding force most in accord with laws of universal .

2 They shared Spencer’s connection to the political radicalism of the American and Arminian Christianity. Wrong though they may have been about ’s direction, human ethics as progressive, and biological inheritance, they deserve to be seen for what they were because they were part of an intellectual tradition in the West broadly and in the United States specifically that has shaped the political, economic, social, and religious forms of the nation. Leaving all these people to lie in unmarked graves among the rubble of Spencerism has made it possible to see them as ghosts haunting cursed ground; for most that is written about Social Darwinism is little better than superstitious tales of goblins and specters. Both the people and their ideas deserve better than to be left in such a place. The arguments they made regarding universal order are still with us, but they no longer have the synthetic consistency of Spencerism. , sociobiology, and neoconservatism are modern embodiments of the optimistic liberal tradition, but none of these offers the same kind of detailed explanation of the workings of universal laws offered by Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy. A greater recognition of what Spencerians of the late nineteenth century were doing and why they ultimately failed would do much to inform current discussions of the recent manifestations of optimistic liberalism. The study of Spencerism also reminds modern readers of the importance of human ethics in any discussion of social and political forms and norms. Science has disproved the inheritance of ethical nature and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but that does not mean that ethics and morality should disappear from sociological and political discussions. Today the discussion of ethics is circumscribed. It is usually related to specific fields such as business ethics, sportsmanship, , and religious ethics. Spencerians saw ethics at the center of all human activities and stressed the need for constant vigilance on the part of both the individual and the community to develop the highest ethical standards possible. They wrongly believed that it would affect the ethics of future generations through the genetic inheritance of improved moral natures. However, educating each new generation through example and instruction to respect equal , self-control, and self-discipline does not seem to be a misguided effort, particularly in , regardless of the laws of biology. There is still much to learn from the optimistic liberal tradition, even as it was embodied by Herbert Spencer and nineteenth- century Spencerians.

3 INTRODUCTION

“Evolution, the word is now on everyone’s lips.”1 So opens the collected volume of lectures and discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (BEA) from its 1888-1889 season. Lewis G. Janes (1840-1901) titled the volume Evolution because that subject was the theme of the year’s lectures before the association of which he was founder, president, and chief publicist during its heyday between 1888 and 1896. Although the idea of evolution had been around for some time before Janes opened the 1888-89 season of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, the term had only begun to take on its modern definition in the proceeding few decades. We generally mark the beginning of the new era with the publication in late 1859 of ’s Origin of . Before that epochal book’s appearance, however, an evolutionary synthesis was already coalescing, and an equally valid birthday of modern evolutionism was marked by the publication of Principles of Psychology, by Herbert Spencer in 1855. The BEA was an interesting actor in the nineteenth-century history of evolutionism because most of its solidly middle-class and professional members were dedicated Spencerians. They viewed Spencer as the great author of evolution and Charles Darwin as the man who magnificently underpinned the universal law of evolution through his special study of biological evolution. They dedicated themselves, as is clear in their writings and even in their articles of incorporation, to the discussion and diffusion of the “evolution philosophy,” which they based primarily on Spencer’s work. Their work shows them to have been fellow inheritors of an optimistic liberal tradition that saw the universe to be orderly, progressive, and beneficent. Their emphasis on human ethical development as the necessary prerequisite for social improvement demonstrates that they shared a common Arminian Christian tradition with Spencer. Their association with Unitarianism--the BEA formed from a Unitarian Sunday school class and most of its members were Unitarians--put them astride paths connecting the intellectual communities of America and Britain, which had been blazed over three centuries before by the Puritan colonists of New and worn ever deeper in the ensuing centuries. Their relationship with leading thinkers, writers, economists, politicians, scientists, , and religionists

1. Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, Publisher, 1889), iii.

4 through correspondence and inclusion in their lectures placed them at the center of late- nineteenth-century debates over the connection between evolution and all aspects of social activity and organization. The BEA’s heyday in the 1890s also showed that even late in the century evolution had not yet taken on its current definition. Quite to the contrary, their published lectures and discussions, and their participation in public debates revealed that Spencerism was still strong in America’s intellectual middle class. As is clear my argument in this essay is based on an essential reinterpretation of Spencer’s ideas, the elements of which deserve some of brief explanation to demonstrate its place in the literature on Spencer and in Western intellectual history broadly. The first point that needs clarification is the relationship between Spencer, Darwin, and evolution as seen by their contemporaries. There was nothing like unanimity of opinion as to which thinker was the foremost evolutionist. In , there was an entire community of scientists, philosophers, and others who were identified as evolutionist unbeholden to either of these figures exclusively.2 A contemporary list of evolutionary thinkers would have included, among others, Thomas Huxley, , Joseph Hooker, A. R. Wallace, Walter Bagehot, Ernst Haekel, , Joseph LeConte, , and . Spencer and Darwin stand out, however, because of what they did. Darwin’s Origin of Species explained how species divided and developed through a process of variation and selection that was familiar to any animal breeder. His epochal work did not, however, use the word “evolution” let alone define it in any comprehensive and universal way. That is what Spencer did. Spencer presented evolution as a universal law of progressive physical and moral development to a receptive Victorian audience with which it was profoundly resonate. It offered a congenial explanation of the world as it then existed with Victorian Anglo-American and political institutions as the pinnacle of human development. It promised a future as much brighter than that day as the late nineteenth

2. Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: Press, 1998), “1: Darwinism and the Dogma of Separate Creations: The Responses of American Naturalists to Evolution,” 24-48, is a good example of the variety of evolutionary theories available to thinkers from the 1860s to the 1880s. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), goes on to highlight the tensions that existed among evolutionists well into the twentieth century.

5 century was brighter than the rude life of the first truly human being living in caves and wearing animal skins. Spencer, of course, did not introduce the idea of progressive human development, but by using the language and forms of science and the articulation of a law as universal as gravity, he presented the idea in a form that both justified the extant faith in progress and created a framework in which to interpret all the scientific work of other evolutionists. His assumptions were so easy to accept and his framework so comprehensive that both his ideas and those of other evolutionists could be integrated and, ultimately, confused with one another. This assertion that Spencer and Darwin were working on different but complimentary projects is nothing new. Sympathetic historians of Spencer’s role are careful to point out his centrality to the evolution debates in the nineteenth century, though they rarely argue that he was the more important evolutionist.3 Historians who treat Spencer as a Social Darwinist, though often ambivalent about the quality of his influence, cannot help but highlight it.4 Most historians, however, focus on Darwin often to the complete or near exclusion of Spencer.5 In a few notable cases, historians who emphasize Darwin and his influence still give credit to Spencer for his

3. See especially Robert L. Carneiro, “Herbert Spencer’s ‘The Study of Sociology’ and the Rise of Social Science in America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118, no. 6 (December 27, 1974): 540-554; Hugh Elliot, Herbert Spencer (: Henry Holt and Company, 1917); J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977); Robert G. Perrin, Herbert Spencer: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993); Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and Jonathan H. Turner, Herbert Spencer: A Renewed Appreciation (Beverley Hills: Sage Publication, 1985). 4. The most important works on Spencer as a Social Darwinist are , Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1955); and Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Social Thought: The Interaction between Biological and (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, Inc., 1980). 5. For a particularly clear example of this see, James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

6 prominence in contemporary debates and his importance as a definer of evolutionism for his times.6 Too often, however, Spencer’s role in defining evolution broadly and comprehensively is minimized in favor of a rather whiggish treatment of Darwin as the great evolutionary innovator with his chief coadjutor and defender, Huxley.7 It is my assertion that Spencer was more than simply a supernumerary in the defining of evolution and that a full understanding of the nineteenth-century idea of evolution is impossible without a consideration of Spencer’s influence. For contemporaries like the members of the BEA, as will be seen in chapter five, Spencer was the great expounder of evolution as a of the universe and Darwin was the man responsible for proving the biological aspect of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. The most controversial element of my reinterpretation of Spencer, but the one I believe to be the most important, is the identification of a distinct strand of optimistic liberalism within the broader movement of post-Enlightenment liberalism, generally, of which Spencer is the greatest representative in the late nineteenth century. I, however, do not wish to have my use of the term “optimistic liberalism” confused with that of Lewis Mumford, who attached it to anti-war liberals in 1940. Mumford’s targets may have shared an anti-war sentiment similar to that of Spencer and the BEA’s members, but I wish to use the term more broadly.8 As Dorothy Ross

6. Peter J. Bolwer, Non-Darwinian Revolution; Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 1 (January-March, 1975): 95-114; and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991); Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology 15, no. 3 (September 1974): 211-237; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1962); Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. (: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). 7. On the whiggishness of the history of evolution see especially, Bowler, Non- Darwinian Revolution. 8. Lewis Mumford, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” The New Republic 102 (April 29, 1940), 568-573.

7 points out, “the liberal tradition has been continually reconstructed ever since” the early nineteenth century, and I intend to reconstruct it yet again.9 In this essay, I consider liberalism as a broad intellectual tradition that emerged from the Reformation and Enlightenment in Europe. Liberalism, as I will use it, is more than politics or political theory, but is a more comprehensive body of ideas that underlay the liberal political forms of the United States, Revolutionary , and democratizing Europe. It is marked most prominently by its , belief in universal natural laws, faith in the necessary or potential progress of humanity, and insistence upon the existence of human rights, be they natural or social. Liberalism looked for its truth in the natural world and in ideal forms rather than in established political, social, and religious institutions. It embraced science over religious dogma, though its adherents did not always reject or even a place for revelation of a sort. It willingly embraced change and was biased against the stability on which the ancien regime insisted. It gave greater credence to reason than to tradition, at least in its . In particular, I will consider the development of the liberal tradition in the English context, which, as Roy Porter demonstrates, formed a distinct if neglected tradition. Like Porter, I do not believe that the Enlightenment should be restricted to French philosophes and German metaphysicians. Though not marked by political revolution, enlightened ideas in Britain were no less liberal. The moderation of the “British Enlightenment” may be seen in the leading figures identified by Porter: “Newton, Locke, Bernard de Mandeville, David Hartley, Darwin, Priestly, Paine, Bentham, Godwin and Wollstonecraft.” 10 That moderation left a deep impression on Herbert Spencer, who despite the radicalness of his thought shared a surprising range of opinions with . It is no accident, either, that Newton, Locke, Darwin, Priestly, Paine, Bentham, and Godwin were important influences on Spencer as a young man, either positive or negative. I address Spencer’s connection to this intellectual community and its effect on the formation of his thought in chapter two in which I draw heavily on the work of J. D. Y.

9. Dorothy Ross, “Liberalism,” in A Companion to American Thought, edited by Richard W. Fox & James T. Kloppenberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher, Inc., 1998), 397-400. 10. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 1-14.

8 Peel who stresses the importance of Midlands culture and middle-class radicalism on the budding evolutionist.11 Within the general flow of liberalism, thus defined, I identify two broad currents that I call optimistic and pragmatic. These so-called currents are not meant to be definitive in any absolute sense, but rather to be descriptive of a general worldview that informed and framed the way in which various thinkers developed and applied the common elements of liberalism. Like currents in a river, too, there is no way to distinguish absolutely between them where they meet and mingle, though their different centers may be discerned. On the one hand, optimistic liberals viewed the universe as essentially progressive and beneficent and believed that if simply obeyed the laws of nature, then a brighter future for humanity was inevitable. On the other hand, pragmatic liberals took a somewhat dimmer view of the natural order and perceived in it the possibility of progress and human perfectibility but only as a result of concerted human effort to overcome an orderly but ultimately uncooperative natural world. To use the imagery conjured by Leo Marx, the one saw the world as a garden to be cultivated and enjoyed the other as a wilderness to be conquered and tamed.12 Identifying a current within the broader liberal tradition, too, helps to avoid another case of whiggish history, this time in the case of liberalism. Rather than seeing a single intellectual tradition in a constant process of linear evolution with the occasional sidelight or aberration, this approach provides a framework that may help to avoid overlooking important traditions that are simply submerged below other more popular forms. For example, in 1974 Eric Voegelin and others wrote that, “today the ideas of autonomous, immanent reason and of the autonomous subject of economics are scarcely alive and fruitful; thus, the of the secularist and bourgeois-capitalist stamp may be pronounced dead.”13 Thirty years later and in the light of the end of the Cold War, the rise of neo-conservatism in America, and the spread of American-

11. J. D. Y Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1971). 12. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 13. Eric Voegelin, Mary Algozin, and Keith Algozin, “Liberalism and Its History,” The Review of Politics 36, no. 4 (October 1974): 520.

9 style into the developing world, the reports of this “stamp’s” demise may seem greatly exaggerated. What I term optimistic liberalism adheres closely to what is commonly known as classical liberalism, the term that embodies the liberal tradition for Louis Hartz and John Patrick Diggins.14 Optimistic liberalism, however, denotes more than the politico-economic framework with which classical liberalism is usually associated. and are good early representatives of this current of liberalism. They trusted to a self-regulating natural order that certainly included political and economic relations. As may be seen in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, however, their optimistic faith extended to something so essential as human character and ethics. Though Spencer does not give credit to Smith for this book--Spencer was notoriously bad about crediting his early intellectual influences--it is hard not to see at least Smith’s indirect influence on Spencer’s own conceptions of moral nature and development. Joseph Priestly, a leading founder of Unitarianism, represents the current in religious thought. In Revolutionary America and were popular and powerful representatives of the tradition. Within the pragmatic current of liberalism one finds thinkers who generally share a commitment to individualism, natural laws, human rights, and progress, though the relative weights they assign may vary considerably. They are distinguished, however, by their unwillingness to trust so much to natural laws as their optimistic siblings. Two early and important figures within this track are and , both of whom left wide latitude for a strong central leader to overcome the ultimate incapacities of citizens. , Jonathan Edwards, and their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century heirs, too, largely adhere to the direction of this current. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, as revealed in The Federalist, reflect the current in Revolutionary America. It is no accident that many of these sources are from the eighteenth century. I believe that what distinguishes Spencerian evolutionism from Darwinism as it developed was the fact that his ideas were rooted in the radicalism of the late eighteenth century and that he created a

14. John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of : Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955).

10 philosophy that fit only awkwardly with the industrial, urban, and centralized realities of the later nineteenth century. More than just distinguishing his ideas, though, this fact does much to explain why his ideas appealed so greatly to Americans, why they failed to resonate more broadly in the twentieth century, and why we have such a damnably hard time understanding just what he was about in his work. Spencer embraced the optimistic current of liberalism broadly, and he synthesized a philosophy that incorporated its political, economic, religious, spiritual, ethical, and personal elements into the single greatest embodiment of the tradition. The fact that he did it in the middle of the nineteenth century through the use of evolution demonstrates in an indirect way, how that aspect of liberalism helped to create the intellectual foundations upon which modernism has been built and why it took eight decades for modern Darwinism to emerge from Darwin’s writings. Looking back from the early twenty-first century, we may be able to see the BEA as a rearguard engaged in a desperate fight against scientific truth, economic reality, and political rationality. For the members and their contemporaries, however, it looked as though they were in the thick of things, and it is in their context that they should be treated. It is now difficult to retrieve, let alone to recreate, that context. Evolution now means Darwinism, which now--after the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s--means the process of speciation through the action of operating on random variations that result from genetic mutations. Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. The universe is not progressive or orderly. We cannot expect to find meaning in the structure and operation of nature. We cannot trust to a beneficent universal order that will guarantee humanity’s and the world’s inevitable progress to a better and higher state of existence. In order to recreate the context of the Spencer debates in America and to place the Brooklyn Ethical Association within them, a number of things need to be done to clarify Spencer’s ideas and the way they were received, perceived, and adapted in America. First, Spencer’s alleged connection to Social Darwinism must be refuted as a valid historical framework for the Spencer debates. Spencer’s ideas, when, traced from their English Midlands roots, share more with late-eighteenth-century radicalism than mid-nineteenth-century industrialism. Spencer’s personal and intellectual development will need to be sketched out to demonstrate these roots, to explain his relationship with leading thinkers of the Victorian world, and to explain the centrality of ethics to his worldview. Spencer’s synthesis of these

11 environmental elements as seen in his early works--those of the 1840s before he solidified them in his mature philosophy--needs to be investigated. Spencer’s place in the intellectual community of the mid-nineteenth century will be revealed by these early steps and will set the stage for the breaking of his ideas upon America. The paths along which those ideas traveled to America should be marked out to reveal the importance of the Unitarians as inheritors of the Puritan intellectual tradition and connections. That will, in turn, suggest that the effects of the Arminian heresy on Protestant Christianity should be considered. With all of this background accomplished, it will be possible to turn to the lives of leading members of the BEA. Finally, it will be possible to explain in some detail the way that the members of the BEA incorporated Spencer’s evolution philosophy into their works. In pursuit of the goals outlined above, this essay consists of six chapters. This first will address the fallacious relationship between Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism. The second presents a biography of Spencer’s first thirty years, from 1820-1851, and will investigate his intellectual background and early works. Chapter three follows Spencer into his life as one of Victorian Britain’s leading intellectuals along with his friends , John Tyndall, and , among many others. Chapter three will also outline his magnum opus, the ten-volume Synthetic Philosophy, the writing and revising of which occupied the last forty-four years of his life, and highlight the central place Spencer afforded in it to ethics and ethical evolution. The fourth chapter uses the lives of two of Spencer’s most prominent American supporters, Lewis George Janes and Edward Livingston Youmans, to investigate the intellectual traditions in America that made Spencer’s ideas appealing and the personal network of relationships by which those ideas made their way into the consciousness of the nation. Chapter five is a history of the Brooklyn Ethical Association from its founding around 1880 through its third published series of lectures in 1891. The chapter, thus, presents only a truncated history of the Association as a whole, but its first three published seasons offer the clearest examples of how its leading members viewed Spencer, evolution, society, reform, and politics. The final chapter identifies the many ways in which this subject needs further development and offers several suggested projects for which resources are available and in which the author is interested. It is a woefully incomplete treatment of its subjects, but this essay does offer some important and heretofore unrecognized aspects of Spencer’s thought, American Spencerians, the

12 Spencer debates in America, and the activities and relationships of the broader trans-Atlantic intellectual community in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, thinkers in Europe and America redefined evolution from its older sense of sequential historical events, when in reference to , or the unfolding of preexisting forms--in reference to biology. The new definition of evolution first came to embody the development hypothesis, and only very late in the century, even into the twentieth century, to become synonymous with the origin of new species as a result of natural selection working on random variations.15 The history of this redefinition between 1852 and 1900 is skewed by the eventual and overwhelming success of Darwinism, and the scientific and philosophical repudiation of Spencerism. Though by the 1920s the terms evolution, natural selection, and Darwinism had become synonymous, for contemporaries of Darwin and Spencer the exact meaning and scope of evolution was still open to debate. For many members of the two generations who thrived between 1840 and 1900, Spencer’s philosophy was the embodiment of evolutionism, and Darwin’s work was a special application and demonstration of the general theory of evolution in the organic world. Considering the way in which most writers treated evolution in the initial debates, it is fair to say that Herbert Spencer was the better representative of nineteenth century evolution. On the other hand, Darwin is the better representative of the idea in the twentieth. Neither Spencer nor Darwin had the final word in the debates, however, since their ideas were adapted by their contemporaries to fit the different worldviews of the many people who were engaged in defining evolution. It is important for us to draw a distinction between the two ideas of evolution--Spencerian and Darwinian--even while noting that neither term designates a perfectly definable set of ideas. The distinction is important because it allows us to track the divergence of two important intellectual trends in the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition in Western thought, generally, and in the United States, specifically: the divergence of the optimistic liberal tradition from the Pragmatic liberal tradition. The former saw the universe as orderly, progressive, beneficent, and the embodiment of good, in which individual human beings need only identify and obey natural laws to live in an ever improving state. The latter saw an amoral universe of chaos and struggle in which human beings had to take control of their own destinies in order to advance themselves.

15. Bowler, “Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution.’”

13 The two men, Spencer and Darwin, arrived at their conceptions of evolution via different paths, though their paths traversed the same intellectual terrain of early nineteenth-century England. The most important differences in approach, method, and the scope of the two men’s works goes far to illuminate the important intellectual changes that fashioned the world of the twentieth century. Darwin’s work was the product of a lifetime of careful study and accumulation of specific data that brought him to a tentative and not altogether happy conclusion. Spencer, on the other hand, cobbled together ideas from a broad, but shallow acquaintance with the world of ideas and with little actual experimental or observational evidence, to form an overarching and all-encompassing philosophy of universal development. The different concepts and representations of evolution presented by Darwin and Spencer reflect different ways in which the liberal mind, that is, a mind steeped in the intellectual culture of post-Enlightenment Europe, perceived the universe. The difference, in fact, is an early signpost marking the division of the Enlightenment tradition that would be widened in the latter years of the twentieth century. Simply put, Darwinism became part of a pragmatic liberalism and Spencerism was a clear embodiment of optimistic liberalism. Darwinism eventually came to embody a worldview in which change was inevitable, but without essential direction; in which chaos dominates order; in which meaning and truth must be judged by each individual based on consequences arising from actions and events. Darwinism is part of the intellectual that includes Pragmatism and Literary , from the early twentieth century, and Post- Modernism, Relativity, and Chaos Theory, from the middle and late century. Darwin’s theory, as he and his followers developed it, is both producer and product of this intellectual trend. Spencerism, on the other hand, is more optimistic, and it harkens back to older, pre- Enlightenment ideas while incorporating them into a liberal universe of individual and radical politics. Spencer saw evolution as essentially linear. It moved inevitably, if not smoothly and evenly, from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from instability to stability, from imperfection to . He believed that truth was real and that the universe would eventually embody it. (He also believed that once the matter of the universe became perfectly differentiated and integrated that it would begin a process of devolution in a continuing rhythm of change, but he and most of his followers and fellows ignored this part of his philosophy.) He believed in the essential order and the universality of knowable natural laws. Ultimately, he believed that the universe was essentially good, and when the ultimate universal

14 order was reached then universal good would be achieved and every individual would be perfectly free and perfectly happy. Where Darwin believed that were necessary to understand some part of the universe, Spencer believed that facts were subordinate to natural laws. Therefore, Darwin worked to create his theory of evolution based on the accumulation of a vast body of facts, while Spencer believed that he need only identify the laws that were apparent in the order of the world around him and in the progress of humanity and the universe to understand the universe. From our perspective in the early twenty-first century, the distinction between the two approaches is clear. Darwin’s is modern, by our standards, and Spencer’s is hopelessly passé, more akin to the thought of the Christian Scholastics of the Middle Ages than to the scientists of the modern era. Both were working solidly within the liberal tradition, however, and the differences we now perceive reflect that tearing of the tradition as it moved into the fin-de-siecle and beyond. It is a division that may help us to better understand the rise of American conservatism in the twentieth century. John Fiske tells us that before Spencer’s synthesizing light of evolution shone upon the world, “students and investigators in all departments, alike in the physical and in the historical sciences, were fairly driven by the nature of the phenomena before them into some hypothesis, more or less vague, of gradual and orderly change or development.”16 Further, he writes, “among the very few men in America forty years ago who were feeling their way toward some such unified conception of Nature as Spencer was about to set forth in all its glory – among the very few who were thus prepared to grasp the doctrine of evolution at once and expound it with fresh illustrations Edward Youmans was the first in the field.”17 Fiske is perhaps extravagant in his assessment of his friend Youmans. However, he does raise the important point that the idea of evolution was not wholly new, original, or unexpected, but only lacked a clear articulation that would capture the human imagination and give structure to an amorphous but broadly held body of thought. Indeed, it was the seeming familiarity of Spencer’s ideas that was in part responsible for their quick acceptance and wide popularity.

16. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1894), 103. 17. Ibid., 104.

15 Fiske, Youmans, Janes, and members of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, along with Spencer’s other disciples argued throughout the remainder of the century that he, and not Darwin, deserved credit for first articulating that vision. Though they were correct so far as timing and so far as evolution came to be seen as an all-encompassing philosophy, it is Darwin’s name that was more often associated even then with the concept by most readers. The difference, and the ensuing confusion, was a matter of timing, style, and method. Though historians of evolution often assume that Darwin’s success was the result of the superiority of his theory, it is anachronistic to make such an argument because at the time the superiority of the one was no more certain than the superiority of the other. The world was in an important period of intellectual transition, a Kuhnian paradigm shift, and the new paradigm was not yet established. The story of the debate is as much a story of intellectual winners and losers as much as a story of correct theories and incorrect theories. The losing side in the debate, Spencer’s, is interesting because it is not fully reported, and because the ideas embodied in his works and defended and developed by his disciples have not entirely disappeared from our .

16 CHAPTER 1:

HERBERT SPENCER AND SOCIAL DARWINISM: A WRONGFUL CONVICTION

A major obstacle to understanding Herbert Spencer’s place in history and the course of the Spencer debates in America is the association between Spencer’s name and the supposed line of fin d’ siecle thought known as Social Darwinism. Whether or not such an intellectual movement even existed may be debated, but by the nature of its use, it is counterproductive to use the term as an historical generalization. The term Social Darwinism is little more than an historical lightning rod. It is usually used to condemn disfavored historical actors or to distance favored actors from distasteful ideas, policies, or actions with which they might be associated. The term is vague, and as such, it is misleading and tends to obscure history rather than to clarify it. The way the term is used does much to highlight the defense of our current pragmatic paradigm and shows how we have tried to distance ourselves and our canonical actors from earlier ideas of inevitable progress, ethnocentrism, Anglo-Saxon superiority, and laissez-faire capitalism that marked late nineteenth- century thought. Although not all historians who use the term would agree that they are rejecting all of these notions, the ideas, policies, thinkers, and writers usually associated with Social Darwinism generally held these ideas to be true.1

1. Social Darwinism is a widely discussed topic, but there are a few leading works that have defined the historiographical argument surrounding it. The first major work studying Social Darwinism as a specific subject is Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Revised Edition (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1955), first published in 1944. The two most important works to follow Hofstadter’s are Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); and Donald C. Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” Perspectives in American History, n.s., 1 (1984), 1-129. Bannister was the first to argue that Social Darwinism was created and used by so-called Reform Darwinists to attack those who would use Darwinism to resist progressive reform measures.

17 Social Darwinism as a fallacious historical framework Before proceeding with this discussion, a working definition of Social Darwinism is in order. As Robert Bannister says in the opening sentence of his book, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Thought, “Social Darwinism, as almost everyone knows, is a Bad Thing.”2 Beyond that, however, the definition is usually pretty vague and broad. The simplest definition is the application of concepts of biological evolution to social and moral development. More specifically, it is social evolution through in a struggle for existence in which the strong prevail and the weak are defeated and disappear.3 The creation of this ideology is usually attributed to men who misread Darwin’s works on biology and then misapplied them to societies. The usual suspects in this supposed violation of scientific integrity vary according to different historians, but Herbert Spencer is generally considered to be its father, grandfather, or godfather. The remainder of the cast includes , the American sociologist who is often called Spencer’s foremost American disciple, and a varying group of others that usually includes Theodore Roosevelt, , and .4 These would-be Social Darwinists are said to have used invalid biological analogies to link social organisms to biological organisms, and in the process corrupted Darwin’s purely scientific investigation and carefully circumspect speculations. Under scrutiny these assumptions prove to be greatly over simplified and in many cases flatly wrong.5

2. Bannister, 3. 3. Merle Eugene Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 576. 4. Hofstadter is largely responsible for this misconception because in Social Darwinism in American Thought, he places Sumner next to Spencer as the founder of Social Darwinism. Contemporary sources do not bear this relationship out, however. Periodical articles from the nineteenth century almost never mention Sumner in connection with Spencer, but usually refer to Edward L. Youmans and John Fiske, and, in the 1890s, Lewis G. Janes. 5. Greta Jones, Social Darwinism in English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (: The Harvester Press, 1980) is particularly clear that Darwin’s work was far from a purely disinterested scientific endeavor without any application to society.

18 Most of these inaccuracies relate to a misunderstanding of the state of science and philosophy in the middle of the nineteenth century. At the core of Social Darwinism is the idea of evolution, which was developing from the intellectual environment of mid-nineteenth century Europe, and which was adapted by people in that environment to meet their own intellectual needs.6 As points out, science is not simply the accumulation of facts and the identification of natural truths. Instead, science is part and parcel of the intellectual environment, develops along lines present in contemporary thought, and answers questions that arise from the extant intellectual structure.7 This in no way detracts from the revolutionary nature of Darwin’s works, but it reminds us that the ideas embodied in them were not wholly original. Because they were products of their intellectual environment, too, they were subject to multifarious interpretations, adaptations, and applications by contemporaries who held very similar ideas from their common intellectual heritage. First, then, we should distinguish between ideas regarding evolution that have now become so convoluted as to obscure what people at the time were discussing and what they believed. We now use the terms Darwinism, natural selection, and evolution interchangeably, and see them as describing a process by which random mutations are “selected” through a process of natural competition. Before Darwinian evolution won out in the early twentieth century, however, these terms were not necessarily concurrent, nor were they defined in this way. Looking backward through the lens of triumphant Darwinism, it is difficult to see important distinctions between various ideas of evolution that are now glossed over by the term Social Darwinism. Particularly difficult to perceive now are ideas associated with a thread of optimistic liberalism that held the universe to be orderly, naturally progressive, and good in its essence; a liberal intellectual tradition that fell into disfavor as the nineteenth century swept to its conclusion. Spencerian versus Darwinian Evolution Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), rather than Charles Darwin (1809-1882), is arguably the most important and representative evolutionary thinker of the nineteenth century, while the reverse is clearly the case in the twentieth. Spencer is now often misrepresented as a follower of

6. Jones addresses this in her opening chapters. 7. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

19 Darwin and as someone who erroneously applied Darwin’s biological principles to human society.8 Quite to the contrary, Spencer developed the basic tenets of his theory of evolution in the decade before Darwin and Wallace published their landmark works on biological evolution through natural selection. Spencer’s ideas were the ultimate synthesis of important threads in western thought bound together by what he believed to be the universal law of evolution.9

8. This misconception is ubiquitous and impossible to document fully outside of a book- length monograph, but a few examples may suffice: Bert James Loewenberg, “Darwinism Comes to America, 1859-1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28, no. 3 (December 1941), pp. 339-368, in which evolutionism is defined essentially as Darwinism, and Spencer is all but ignored in spite of Loewenberg’s frequent references to one of Spencer’s foremost followers in America, John Fiske; William E. Leverett, Jr., “Science and Values: A Study of Edward L. Youmans’ Monthly, 1872-1887,” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University 1963), in spite of his focus on Youmans’ work, Leverett still distinguishes between evolution and Herbert Spencer’s ideas; John D. Molloy, “Spencer’s Impact on American Conservatism, 1870- 1912,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1959), even after identifying the fact that Spencer’s ideas predated Darwin’s, so strong is the assumption of Spencer’s status as a follower of Darwin, that in his conclusion Molloy refers to “the Darwinian message, as interpreted by Spencer”; Merle Eugene Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 567, gives Darwin precedence in the application of evolution to psychology and the human mind and merely notes that “Spencer also contributed to the evolutionary point of view in the study of mental phenomena,” in spite of the fact that Spencer’s work on the evolution of psychology predated Origin by four years. 9. Spencer developed his idea of evolution in two book-length works and a number of journal articles. Social Statics first appeared in late 1850 and presented a proto-evolutionary explanation of social development; it did not explicitly discuss evolution, but in light of Spencer’s next book the connection is clear. In Principles of Psychology, 1855, Spencer discussed evolution explicitly and tied it to the process of development apparent in his previous works. He spent the rest of his life developing his theory of evolution in his Synthetic Philosophy, a ten-volume work, and numerous articles, many of which were eventually combined into books.

20 For Spencer, evolution was a natural process of differentiation and integration of the material universe in a progressive movement toward a perfect state of nature.10 Like gravity, evolution, he believed, was a universal law inevitably driving the process of universal development. He argued that the universe began in a homogeneous state in which all matter was identical. Over time, as a result of the natural law of evolution that matter began to organize into more and more complex compounds, thus the matter of the universe became slowly more differentiated eventually organizing into organic matter, which then evolved to its highest form in mankind.11 Evolution did not stop with the simple creation of human beings, however, it continued on as human societies became increasingly differentiated and integrated in the same way that the physical universe had progressed to that time. Accompanying this broad social evolution was a concurrent and correspondent evolution of human morals that increasingly befitted human individuals for lives in society.12 Ultimately evolution would create a perfectly differentiated and integrated society in which people would not need control because each person would behave in his or her own best interests, and those interests would mesh perfectly with the best interests of humanity as a whole. Societies that did not progress toward this freeing of the individual, and individuals who did not evolve the requisite social ethos would be unable to compete effectively or would be shunned by more evolved individuals.13 Though this process was aided in its early stages by militaristic societies and by a violent nature in individuals, civilized man had moved beyond such ultimately self-destructive behavior. For Spencer, militarism was an aspect of barbarism and primitivism in the human constitution. Any move toward militarism in modern societies, beyond immediate self-defense, would

10. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, International Science Library (Akron, OH: The Werner Company, 1900), 299-300. 11. Ibid., 350-351, 499-502. 12. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), 1:3-12. 13. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), 1:254-280.

21 actually retard individual moral growth, and threatened to cast society back to a more primitive and less free state.14 Because the process was evolutionary Spencer argued that it was impossible to impose progress from above. This belief combined with his opposition to militarism made Spencer a staunch anti-imperialist as well. He believed that civilized nations could aid the evolution of lower societies through education, by engaging them in trade, and by providing an example of advancement. To colonize such lesser people, in fact, would be a moral retardant for both societies because it would lead to the oppression of the lesser and increasing militancy in the greater.15 Likewise in civilized societies, Spencer believed that government interference would act as an obstacle to individual evolution. On this point Spencer is very often misinterpreted. He did not favor the mass starvation of the poor and the accumulation of vast wealth by a few, nor was he opposed to charity, education, or all reform. He was opposed, instead, to government reforms because if the government undertook these functions it would alleviate individuals of their moral responsibilities to their fellow citizens, and thus prevent them from further developing their own moral characters. Because moral character was inheritable like other acquired characteristics, Spencer believed the diminution of morality in one generation would have negative ramifications for generations to come.16 It was this complex of ideas that he embodied in the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ which Darwin eventually adopted and incorporated into the his later edition of the Origin. Spencer’s idea of evolution was not earthshaking in its originality but rather in its synthesis of widely held views in his culture. His philosophy combined notions of English liberalism and citizenship with Arminian Christianity’s emphasis on individual morality, a middle-class work ethic, a faith in universal progress, and a steadfast belief in an orderly and law-bound universe, with a big dash of ethnocentrism and Anglo-Saxon superiority thrown in. Though Spencer’s ideas may not now be valid or palatable, they were the products of the nineteenth century optimism of the Anglo-American worldview. They were popular at the time for that very reason. They told people what they already knew and organized their dearly held

14. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 2:568-642. 15. Ibid., 663-667. 16. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 1:254-280.

22 beliefs into a comprehensive philosophy that explained their past, justified their present, and promised a bright future.17 He was certainly influenced by Darwin’s ideas, as he was influenced by the ideas of many thinkers at the time, and as he influenced his contemporaries, including Darwin. Clearly, however, Spencer was no follower of the . Darwin, too, was a product of the optimistic Victorian world. More than Spencer, though, Darwin was also influenced by the methodology of science. Where Spencer began from premises he felt (rather than deeply considered) to be true and then extrapolated a philosophy using a selective reading of sources, Darwin accumulated a vast amount of data before he compiled his epochal work . Like Spencer he was greatly influenced by Malthus’s argument regarding over population and struggle for sustenance, by Lyell’s geology and , and by the proto-evolutionary ideas of men including Lamarck and his own grandfather, .18 Origin is a carefully circumspect work, particularly in its first edition, which appeared late in 1859. In it Darwin traces the development of new species from older species though a process of natural selection for advantageous variations (what we now refer to as mutation, though Darwin did not think in such terms and did not address the cause of the variations in the first edition of Origin). Although this is now seen as the seminal work in modern evolution, the term “evolution” does not even appear in it. (Spencer used the term in his Principles of Psychology in 1855). This is an important indication of the state of the argument in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the way in which evolutionism was being used and developed at the time. Evolutionism, as stated earlier, is better represented by Spencer in the nineteenth century than Darwin. The ideas bound up in it were more closely aligned with optimistic, inevitable, progressive development as part of a universal order, which were bound by natural laws that may or may not have reflected a divine will. Darwinian development was quickly swept up into the evolution debates, of course, but it would be at least two generations before Darwinism became what it is today: an essentially random process of development contingent upon a boggling

17. Curti notes the pre-existence of notions of historical progress and racial superiority, 568. 18. Jones, 10-24.

23 myriad of internal and environmental conditions that leads to temporary success of a species and holds that the process evinces no clear direction, and offers no path to moral or ultimate Truth. It is ironic but understandable that even at the time evolution was often conflated with Darwinism. Darwin’s book was much clearer than any of Spencer’s, and it certainly broke upon the intellectual scene before Spencer began publishing his Synthetic Philosophy. Darwin’s ideas of biological evolution, which predated Spencer’s explicit treatment of the subject by five years, were also more sensational and controversial. It took no great stretch of imagination to see that Darwin’s theory suggested that humanity, like all other extant species, had evolved from some lower life form. Although Darwin did not specifically address this subject until his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, the inference, along with a few lines at the end of Origin, was sufficient to sensationalize the idea of humanity’s descent from monkeys. Darwin’s circumspection, too, did not provide the comfort of a progressive universal order offered by Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy. Thus we are faced with a confusion of terms and ideas from the beginning of the modern evolution debates. The confusion is not merely our own, however, since participants in the opening debates were engaged as much in defining evolution for themselves and their audiences as proving it and investigating its ramifications. Neither Darwinism nor Spencerism fully embodied or was fully embodied by late nineteenth century Evolutionism. Instead their works were put to a variety of purposes that were more or less, some much less, correspondent to the objectives that Spencer and Darwin had in mind. Social Darwinism in modern textbooks and academia Modern history textbooks, nevertheless, often refer to Social Darwinism as the cause, or at least major justification leading to an increased virulence, of imperialism, militarism, racism, and dog-eat-dog capitalism. This is particularly the case when the emergence of the United States onto the world scene late in the century is the subject. The authors often misrepresent, exaggerate, or simply get wrong the facts of the case. In 1960, ’s history text said that in the Origin of Species, “Darwin set forth his conclusions about the evolution of mankind,” which Darwin, in fact, had been careful not to do.19 Smith went on to separate evolutionist scientists from pseudo-scientific Social Darwinists by noting that “the true scientists regarded the

19. Goldwin Smith, The Heritage of Man: A History of the World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 680.

24 excited applications of Darwin’s theories [to states, classes, and races] as invalid, often downright foolish.”20 Smith’s tacit assumption was that evolution had been defined by Darwin and that any application of evolution to society was a misinterpretation of Darwin. In a failure common to most textbooks, Smith fails to even mention that Darwin’s ideas were not restricted to Origin, that Darwin, himself, addressed the role of evolution in the development of society and morals in The Descent of Man, or that evolution was being defined by a wide range of thinkers at the time. Neither does he note that many people in the nineteenth century saw social evolution and biological evolution as parts of a whole, nor that for people like Spencer and many of his followers the idea of evolution came from the progress of society apparent in history as much as from the progress of species apparent in the geological record. In his 1988 world history textbook, A Global History from Prehistory to the Present, L. S. Stavrianos discussed Darwinism and Social Darwinism very explicitly. Although Stavrianos all but ignored Spencer, he convoluted the ideas of Darwinism, Spencerism, and Evolutionism, and thus presented a poorly defined and misleading use of Social Darwinism. He argued that, “Darwin dominated nineteenth-century science, for he discovered the laws governing the evolution of humanity itself.”21 Darwin’s supporters, according to this history, “held that in politics, as in nature, the strongest are victorious and that warlike qualities decide who will win in the international ‘struggle for survival.’”22 Social Darwinism, in turn, “led naturally to ideas of racial superiority,” and “in the latter part of the century [] became increasingly chauvinistic and militaristic because of [its] influence.”23. In 1995, J. M. Roberts’s text, A Concise History of the World, made a more modest assessment of Darwin’s influence, but the inference was the same. He wrote, that some “people argued that you could deduce from what Darwin said (or what they believed him to have said) that the struggle for survival between nations was like the struggle between natural species for survival; those which were obviously vigorous would come out on top, showing that they were

20. Ibid., 685. 21. L. S. Stavrianos, A Global History From Prehistory to the Present, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 468. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 485.

25 meant to do so by ruling other people.”24 This generalization clearly had the effect of distancing Darwin and his works from the Social Darwinists, and thus insulating Darwinism from an ugly period of American and Western history. In fact, Darwin’s followers far more often than Spencer’s followers were the ones to cast human evolution in terms of a brutal struggle for existence. Spencerians emphasized individual ethical development and the benefits of an industrial society that had moved beyond its militaristic phase. Spencerians were also among the staunchest opponents of militarism and imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In 1997, Stavrianos again addressed Social Darwinism, this time he appeared to distance Darwin from those who misinterpreted his works. In doing so, Stavrianos presented the most contradictory aspect of Social Darwinism’s supposed influence. He began by stating: “Despite the critical reception, a much reduced and simplified version of Darwinism profoundly affected Western society, because the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’ seemed to confirm so exactly the temper (and power relations) of the times.”25 Later on the same page he wrote that, “Darwin’s theories . . . seemed to provide persuasive rationalizations . . . [for ideas and beliefs] that were already in vogue,” like materialism, realpolitik, and racism. Further, “Social Darwinism . . . provided a persuasive ideological underpinning for global political expansion.”26 Stavrianos suggested that Darwinism had been reduced down to a simple catch phrase, and that that simple idea had actually changed Western society. However, he contradicted himself by saying that Darwinism both “profoundly affected” and provided “persuasive rationalizations” that “seemed to confirm so exactly the temper of the times.” If the temper of the times was already established when Darwinism broke upon the scene, then it stands to reason that the cause of that temper lies in the period before. And as for “global political expansion,” a map of the world in 1860 shows that the Americas and most of the world’s coastal areas were or had been already marked by one European flag or another. The African continent and the Pacific Islands were certainly colonized more completely after 1860, but imperialism was well established. Stavrianos does a disservice to the history of evolutionism by giving it too much credit for what it did not accomplish and

24. J. M. Roberts, A Concise History of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 429. 25. L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines From Our Past: A New World History (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 113. 26. Ibid., 120.

26 giving too little attention to the history of the idea itself. It would have been better to ignore the term entirely. The third edition of World History: Comprehensive Volume was also ambiguous about the causes and effects of Social Darwinism. It stated that, “Westerners evolved two influential doctrines to rationalize their domination over non-Western, nonwhite, and non-Christian civilization,” one of which was Social Darwinism.27 This was followed by a very confused passage: “Some misinterpreted Darwin’s theories regarding the survival of the fittest through adaptation to mean that some human groups were intrinsically ‘fitter’ than others. These social Darwinists, typified by the English writer Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), propounded the notion that select human groups would and should flourish and rule over those that were less ‘fit.’” Apparently, then, Spencer intentionally created a justification for imperialism by misusing Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest. In 2000, even, Social Darwinism remained a part of the narrative of World History and of America’s place in it. Michael Mezzano, Jr. wrote that the late nineteenth century in America was “an age of rampant Social Darwinism.”28 The authors of the ninth edition of Civilization: Past and Present argued that, “the most popular social Darwinist was the Englishman Herbert Spencer, who applied Darwin’s theories,” and that he “had a deep influence in both Europe and the United States.”29 The authors, like Stavrianos, made the contradictory arguments that Social Darwinism was “a convenient doctrine to justify the actions and philosophies of the newcomers at the top of the social and political structure,” while at the same time saying that “supported by the new and the belief that Europe alone bore the burdens of progress, Western expansion took on a more blatant and bellicose form.”30 Again Social Darwinism is made to be both reflection of earlier ideas and the cause of actions following

27. World History: Comprehensive Volume, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth, 1999), 572. 28. Michael Mezzano, Jr., History in Dispute, Volume 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress, Robert J. Allison, ed. (Detroit: St. James Press, 2000), 260. 29. Civilization: Past and Present, 9th ed., Priscilla McGeehon, general editor (New York: Longman, 2000), 788. 30. Ibid.

27 that earlier precedent. Here, too, the authors use Social Darwinism to condemn an embarrassing and passé ideology saying that: “The social Darwinists, positivists, and others of their kind followed a simplistic approach to the world based on their comforting belief that humanity is but a cog in a machine and that the possibilities of individuals are predetermined by their place in the larger scheme of things.”31 Thus the authors allude to what is the proper view of history and separate themselves from another aspect of their intellectual heritage, and they do it by labeling the wrong side as Social Darwinism. A quick look around internet web sites at educational institutions also reveals misunderstandings about nineteenth-century Evolutionism, Spencerism, and Darwinism, and they demonstrate the use of Social Darwinism to distinguish between right thinking and wrong thinking. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook entry on Herbert Spencer notes that although “it would be possible to argue that human evolution showed the benefits of cooperation and community. Spencer, and Social Darwinists after him, took another view.”32 The entire thrust of Spencer argument, on the contrary, was that the highest form of social evolution would be one marked by a perfect combination of altruism and egotism in which cooperation between individuals was natural and ensured the greatest happiness to every citizen. Associate Professor of Biology at the College of Du Page, Lynn J. Fancher, writes on her web site that, “actually, Darwin didn’t originate nor use that phrase [survival of the fittest]. It was coined by one of the shapers of Social Darwinism.” Further she argues, “Social Darwinism is the general term which applies to several different ways in which people (not ) tried to apply a distorted and narrow interpretation of the concept of natural selection to human cultural systems. None of these political ideologies is actually part of evolutionary thinking.” Still more, “Darwin knew of--and rejected--the notion that his description of natural processes had any useful application in shaping human culture.”33 Fancher, aside from not having read Darwin’s works very thoroughly (including later editions of Origin), shows how a term now

31. Ibid. 32. Paul Halsall, “Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857,” 1997 (www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/spencer-darwin.html). 33. Lynn J. Fancher, Associate professor of Biology, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL, “Social Darwinism,” 1999 (www.cod.edu/people/faculty/fancher/ SocDar.htm).

28 mostly relevant in history can be used to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable thought though the simple use of a label, regardless of the poor evidence supporting it. Joseph Sciambra, in the English department at Sonoma State University, gives another example of how misleading the term Social Darwinism is. In an essay on “The Philosophy of ,” he writes that “inherent in the theory of Social Darwinism was Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest.’ Borrowing from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Social Darwinists believed that societies, as do organisms evolve over time. Nature then determined that the strong survive and the weak perish. In Jack London’s case, he thought that certain favored races were destined for survival.”34 This is true as far as it goes, but the essay does not address London’s dystopian novel, The Iron Heel. In that book he uses Spencer’s philosophy to prove that a socialist revolution is inevitable, and that the strongest are actually those who are cooperative, and not the robber barons who are taking control of the United States. He may have ignored the book because he had not read it, which is not unlikely since it appears that few people have read it. Or it could be that he could not reconcile London’s use of Spencer to justify egalitarian and anti-capitalistic with a long-established notion of Social Darwinism as survival of the fittest individuals, by which we are to understand the strongest. Even a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Stanley K. Schultz, cannot avoid the stereotypes now attached to Spencer by Social Darwinism. He states that “Herbert Spencer . . . took Darwin’s theories out of the realm of biology and applied them to human society.”35 He goes on to write that Spencer “believed that government intervention in the ‘natural’ process of human evolution . . . helped weak individuals survive and, in the process undermined the health of the entire race.” Technically this statement is correct, but it leaves the impression that the ‘weak’ are those who cannot fend for themselves. Certainly this was a problem, but more important to Spencer was the weakening of individual moral development when the government takes the place of charity, individual decision making, and the consequent

34. Joseph Sciambra, Sonoma State University, “The Philosophy of Jack London,” “Social Darwinism,” 1996 (sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Essays/philosophy.html#A10). 35. Stanley K. Schultz, Professor of History; William P. Tischler, Producer, “American History 102, Civil War to the Present. Lecture 06. ‘The of American Businessmen,” Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, 1999 (us.hist.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture06.html).

29 improvement of the giver’s moral character. Finally, Schultz argues that, “Spencer, of course, never defined what he meant by the ‘natural’ process of evolution.” Considering that Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy alone contains ten volumes with over six thousand pages devoted to defining and extrapolating universal evolution, this is a misleading statement. Schultz’s statement reflects the current notion of evolution, which is far more explicit and biological than the vague nineteenth-century notion of a universal law and the now-defunct notion of the conservation of energy, but a century and a half ago Spencer’s definition, rather than our modern definition, was the more widely accepted. How Herbert Spencer became a Social Darwinist This raft of inaccuracies, misunderstandings, and misapplied theories is the result of over- generalizations in history, a hundred years of neglect of nineteenth-century evolutionists’, particularly Spencer’s, writings, the ascendance of Darwinism, a generations-long battle against evolution by religious conservatives, a paradigm shift in the US toward a progressive national government, and Richard Hofstadter’s book, Social Darwinism in American Thought. Together these things have emptied non-Darwinian evolution of substance, created an ongoing intellectual fight that seems to require the taking of firm sides, and the inappropriate connection of writers to ideas whose meanings have changed dramatically over the intervening decades. There is not room here to undo this tangle, but in the space remaining I would like to make an appeal for a proper consideration of nineteenth-century evolutionism. Richard Hofstadter, a most eloquent and persuasive writer, set the terms of the modern Spencer debates in his 1944 book on Social Darwinism. His worldview was pragmatic, progressive, and Darwinian. Hofstadter saw American history as a struggle between classes, not in a Marxian sense so much as a solid middle-class sense. This struggle, as he saw it, was essentially ideological, rather than strictly economic, and he saw in Social Darwinism a powerful support for America conservatism (i.e., laissez-faire capitalism, to his way of thinking) in the nineteenth century.36 As conservatives meant to Hofstadter the staunch opponents of government reform and of industrial regulation or labor organization, they were a disfavored group for him. Social Darwinism, which he said was first put to use by these men “to reconcile their fellows to some of the hardships of life and to prevail upon them not to support hasty and ill-considered

36. Hofstadter, 5.

30 reforms,” was initially an active retardant to social progress.37 Eventually, and thankfully, a group of clear-minded thinkers recognized that cooperation was the great outcome of evolution. This group, whom Hofstadter named ‘Reform Darwinists,’ ultimately provided the antidote for Social Darwinism and undermined its grip on the American mind. Thus, Reform Darwinism was good and Social Darwinism was bad. It is telling, too, that Hofstadter never gave a specific definition of Social Darwinism, but allowed it to remain a sort of gray and threatening miasma floating through the cigar smoke filled halls of rich men’s clubs. Hofstadter’s treatment of Spencer was generally fair, but it was clear that he disagreed with the Englishman’s view of laissez-faire economics and . He accepted Spencer’s anti-imperialism and anti-militarism, but he did not much develop them. Instead, he identified Spencer as the immediate intellectual forefather of Social Darwinism, and Spencer has never been able to shake that dubious distinction in broad or popular . Hofstadter further complicated Spencer’s place by identifying William Graham Sumner as Spencer’s chief American disciple. Although this was far from demonstrated in Hofstadter’s book, and in fact appears to be completely inaccurate, the association has stuck and many histories of the past sixty years now have obediently repeated this unfortunate relationship.38 The link is unfortunate because Sumner, who does not often mention either Spencer or Darwin, presented social struggle in one lecture as “root, hog, or die.” Like “survival of the fittest,” this has come to define his philosophy, and like Spencer’s phrase, it has been used to smooth over Sumner’s own ambivalence about American militarism and imperialism. If one reads Social Darwinism in American Thought too quickly, it is easy for one to miss the subtlety of Spencer’s thought, the poor evidence of any specific influence of Social Darwinism, and simply to come away with catchphrases and a canon of anti-progressive thinkers. That is what appears to have happened to most of the readers of the book. Although Hofstadter was not the first to write on Social Darwinism, his is the most influential book.

37. Ibid. 38. Contemporary sources rarely list Sumner as a disciple of Spencer. Instead they usually list Edward Livingston Youmans, John Fiske, and Lewis George Janes, and occasionally Benjamin F. Underwood. None of these men shared Sumner’s pessimism.

31 Herbert Spencer was not a Social Darwinist The historiography of Social Darwinism and Spencerism, for that is what we are really discussing, is rather ambiguous about the existence, let alone the influence of a coherent body of ideas called “Social Darwinism.” Robert Bannister argued that Social Darwinism was a myth created by Reform Darwinists to attack their conservative opponents.39 In fact, Bannister said, “the reformers, not their laissez-faire opponents, were the Darwinians in any precise meaning of the term. . . Pre-Darwinian evolutionists, cherishing the Enlightenment faith in beneficent laws of nature, continued to argue that society ought best be left to develop without central direction or controls.”40 Thus, the term Social Darwinism began as a tool in the hands of Darwinians to attack ideological opponents and to disparage distasteful ideas associated with a different worldview. In the terms of my essay, the difference is between pragmatic liberals and optimistic liberals. Repeatedly, careful scholarly studies of the past fifty years have minimized Social Darwinism as a direct influence. Repeatedly, the canon of Social Darwinists has been pared down. In the single best historiography of the term, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” Donald Bellomy suggests that the best thing we can do is to stop using the term entirely. Despite this body of works devoted to Social Darwinism, and the historians who have consistently demonstrated that Spencer, the supposed progenitor of the ideology, was not really a Social Darwinist, the term persists. Ignorance of Spencer’s works is understandable. Spencer lost the evolution debates. He has not had a solid body of followers to keep his works in the public eye, and now they are fairly difficult to find. Once found, they are long and written with the uncomfortable closeness of nineteenth-century philosophical writings. At times clear, his writing is usually tedious and dated. His philosophy is also part and parcel of a now all-but-lost strand of liberalism that looked with optimism on the possibilities of the future, the inevitability of progress, the increasing and order of the world, and placed human ethics at the center of all considerations. Spencer’s idea of evolution has to be understood in spite of current Darwinian thought, rather than as part of it. Darwinism was swept up in an intellectual movement of the late nineteenth century that included relativism and pragmatism, and which saw the universe as

39. Bannister, 9. 40. Ibid.

32 essentially chaotic and without discernible meaning or attainable Truth. Thus, Darwinism is the theory of evolution that became part of the triumphant strand of pragmatic liberalism coming into the twentieth century; it was a pessimistic, chaotic liberalism more Hobbesian than Lockean. Even when one, today, comes to see Spencerian evolution for what it was, one must face the attacks from both the current right and left. Modern fundamentalist Christians will not distinguish between Spencerian and Darwinian evolution, for both contradict the inerrantist view of the Bible. From the left Spencerian evolution is attacked as Social Darwinism by those opposed to laissez-faire capitalism and who support government regulation and the welfare state. Finally, Spencerian evolution is labeled Social Darwinist by Darwinian evolutionists eager to defend science as unrelated to morality and thus untainted by broader cultural arguments. As a result Spencerian evolution is buried beneath intellectual battles of today as well as by the rubble of battles over the past 150 years, and Social Darwinism is the battle flag its opponents have jabbed into the mound over Spencerism. Social Darwinism is not a valid historical framework In addition to historical and historiographical evidence that the influence of an ideology known as Social Darwinism is overstated, a basic consideration of the history of imperialism, militarism, capitalism, and racism will reveal the fallacy that Social Darwinism was somehow their cause. Imperialism was at least two centuries old by 1860, so, in fact, evolution’s appearance at the height of the Victorian era makes it more a product than a producer of imperialism. Militarism has an even longer and more cherished history in Europe than imperialism, one that stretches back to the beginning of recorded history. Capitalism, though younger than either imperialism or militarism, was clearly a strong influence on European and American thought by the beginning of the nineteenth century by which time the industrial revolution was in full swing in the old country. Racism, like militarism, has deep roots that appear almost as soon as writing. Certainly it was much worse during the imperial age, but with seminal dates relating to the entrenchment of Africans as chattel slaves in the seventeenth century, evolutionism was hardly to blame. It seems that any fair history must view evolution to be a product of a culture already steeped in these traditions rather than their cause within that culture. The argument that Social Darwinism was a bad thing because it was a revolutionary support for these deep-rooted traditions is lame, too. Considering the depth of these tendencies,

33 what would have been revolutionary would have been the development in this environment of an idea that contradicted them. This, in fact, is the great irony of the case. Spencerism was a contradiction of two of them, and was ambivalent about the other two. Spencer specifically rejected the need and efficacy of imperialism and militarism in modern society. In fact, he saw any move in the direction of militarism and imperialism as a social retrogression that was certain to hinder society’s evolution and, perhaps, even to forebode its eventual decline and failure. While he was clearly racist, his racism was not the absolute racism of the past; it could not be. He believed that all things can evolve. So, quite contrary to the nineteenth century notion that lesser races, particularly Africans and Pacific Islander, were doomed to ignorance and barbarism for all eternity, Spencer’s philosophy held out hope that they might survive and progress. Spencer saw human society progressing toward a future of seamless egotism and altruism in which actions that will best serve the individual will also best serve society as a whole. To the extent that capitalism was carried on as fair business to the point of altruism, it matched this vision. However, if capitalism created businesses that interfered with the freedom of individuals and led people to behave egotistically without regard for society as a whole, then it did not fit Spencer’s vision of ultimate social progress. Spencer reserves some of his hottest shot in his various writings for selfish and unscrupulous tradesmen. As compared with Spencerism, Darwinism was by far the less hopeful. Darwinian evolution, as it was developed by Darwin’s followers in the decades after the publication of Origin, held the pessimistic view that competition for survival was inevitable and left little room for an ultimately peaceful and harmonious future. Darwinism came to be associated with amoral competition, an essentially chaotic universe, history without natural direction, and thus a world that needed constant direction from human intervention. Yet, Spencer and his followers have been associated with the dread name, Social Darwinism, and their efforts have thus sunken into obscurity, which begs the question: Why? The answer lies in the consolidation of the new scientific and intellectual paradigm of Pragmatism, , and relativism. Spencerian evolutionism was a product of a strain of liberalism that held the universe to be bound by beneficent and progressive laws that pulled humanity naturally and inexorably onward and upward. The paradigm incorporating this line of reasoning was resistant to rapid and revolutionary change and appeared hopelessly ill equipped to deal with a world that was slipping beyond the securing tethers of traditional conservative

34 social controls and conventions. It was a sort of half-way theory that had helped to destroy the old order, but which did not offer effective alternatives to that order as social and cultural conditions changed dramatically in the late-nineteenth-century world. To thinkers who viewed Spencerian evolution from a conservative (i.e., traditional conservatives of the Burkean and aristocratic sort) perspective, it appeared dangerously naïve in its rejection of the old order. To thinkers in the pragmatic branch of liberalism, it was too conservative because it obstructed the establishment of necessary government controls and direction of society; the Spencerian evolutionists’ support of non-governmental organizations over state structures in the name of individual freedom was unacceptable. Therefore, when the term Social Darwinism began being applied to the Spencerians in the late nineteenth century, but most consistently in the early twentieth century, it stuck with all of the group’s opponents. Once they were so labeled, it was fairly easy to associate them with just about any unacceptable idea from which leaders in either of the other two groups wished to distance themselves. Ever since, the term has remained a lightning rod that redirects criticism to the believers in a defunct philosophy. What is important about Social Darwinism, then, is not what it says about the people to whom it is applied, but about the people who apply it to them. The historiography of the term demonstrates that it is of little practical value in describing actual people, groups or events, but it persists. It persists because the intellectual tension between optimistic liberalism, pragmatic liberalism, and conservatism continues to exist, and the label remains a convenient shorthand condemnation of the losers and their idea. In history we often must make broad generalizations in order to bring some sense of order to a hopelessly complex subject, but the term Social Darwinism is not effective in that effort. What is relevant, instead, is the investigation of the various intellectual trends being debated in the transitory years of the fin d’ siecle. In the dynamic years of the late nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century, the old order faded. The two major threads of ascendant liberalism, optimistic and pragmatic, were developed and debated. In the end, Pragmatism won out. As we look both back, however, to history and around the world, today, it is clear that the optimistic thread never wholly disappeared. Its echoes may be seen in socialist utopianism, libertarianism, and neo-conservative political thought. Rejecting the notion of Social

35 Darwinism as essentially meaningless may allow us to more fully consider the effect of liberalism’s worldwide expansion, in all its complexity. The Brooklyn Ethical Association and a Reinterpretation of Spencerism The Brooklyn Ethical Association affords just such an opportunity. Situated as it was in the last years of Spencer’s broad popularity, between 1888 and 1896, it gives insight into how adherents to optimistic liberalism reconciled Spencer’s philosophy with the world in which they lived. Although Spencer became increasingly disheartened in these closing years of his life, his supporters in the BEA continued to believe that his vision of hopeful social evolution was correct and a worthy guide to ethical action.41 The group’s emphasis on ethics showcased an aspect of Spencer’s philosophy that is now largely ignored, though he believed it to be the core of his arguments and the ultimate product of universal evolution. The connection between the BEA and the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, and its pastor, John White Chadwick, also demonstrated the importance of post-Transcendentalist Unitarian community, which shared with Spencer a common Arminian heritage, in the dispersion and popularization of Spencer’s ideas in America. The fact that this group has been so long ignored also reflects a blind spot in intellectual history and historiography. The group existed on the fringes of academia at a time when the center of intellectual life was passing from civic organization and the Chautauqua circuits into the hands of professionals in the nation’s growing universities. The members of the group, for the most part, also did not make it into the canon of early evolutionary writers, except as Social Darwinists. Although lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association are often cited in histories of evolutionism, only Bannister gives any space to a history of the organization, and that is only gives two pages based on Lewis Janes’s history in The Popular Science Monthly.42 This broad neglect is despite the availability of all six of the association’s published volumes, the extant

41. Writings by members of the BEA in the late 1890s and early twentieth century also reflect some of the agitation and hopelessness showed by Spencer. As will be discussed in chapter five, these later writings can be seen as jeremiads against the coming troubles that they were certain would be precipitated by the increasingly martial tone of contemporary politics and the expansion of socialistic political models--they considered the program of the Pragmatists to be socialistic. 42. Bannister, Social Darwinism, 80-81.

36 records of the group’s long-time recording secretary, James A. Skilton, and numerous articles in other periodicals by the BEA’s members. To be fair, though, much of the material would have been extremely hard to find, let alone gather, before the advent of the internet and the extensive digital archives now available for full-text searches. Perhaps this study will prove to be one of a new field of history made possible by these new technological tools. It is a field populated by writers, speakers, and activists who were known to a circle of literate contemporaries, but who have been lost to history because they wrote too little, wrote for the wrong people, or simply because their articles are in minor journals and their papers scattered in obscure archives. They provide a subject for intellectual history that falls somewhere between traditional history and social history. Though they are not the leading minds of their times, they do give us important insights into how ideas were incorporated into the lives of America’s vast intellectual middle class, and thus they may shed light on how great ideas are adapted and put to use by people outside the halls of power or the lawns of the academy. Without a better understanding of Herbert Spencer’s thought, however, the work of the Brooklyn Ethical Association will not make any sense. In order to place the BEA and its members in the broader context of late-nineteenth-century liberalism, therefore, Herbert Spencer and his ideas need to be reinterpreted to highlight the centrality of ethics in his philosophy. A fairly brief history of the first three published seasons of lectures before the BEA, in turn, will demonstrate that such a reinterpretation of Spencer is both necessary to understand the broader Spencer debates in America and a more accurate representation of what Spencer believed he was doing. An important intellectual trend emerges from this study of Spencer’s ideas and those of his followers and fellows in America. What emerges is the ever-growing rift between optimistic and pragmatic liberalism as the combined force of liberalism ascended over traditional conservative political, economic, social, cultural, and religious structures in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rift, it is suggested, was along a fault line that had existed within liberalism since the beginning of the Enlightenment, between people who saw an essentially good and orderly universe and people who saw an essentially chaotic universe without inborn meaning. The difference may even be archetypal and predate liberalism so strong are the

37 convictions on both sides and apparent as it has been the distinction in the history of thought generally. This study also adds to the history of modern evolution in its early stages. I have been much influenced by Peter Bowler’s work on the history of the idea of evolution, and I consider my work to be a mere addendum to his impressive scholarship in this regard.43 My work reinforces Bowler’s argument that the development of the modern idea of evolution was a complex process that no single thinker’s works could wholly embody. My emphasis on Spencer, however, adds some useful context to that side of evolutionism’s early history and places it more clearly in a distinct intellectual tradition with closer ties to Arminian Protestantism, eighteenth- century political radicalism, and early nineteenth-century theories of the conservation of energy than to mid-nineteenth-century biological and geological science and nineteenth-century political economics. My argument is embodied in the four succeeding chapters, which may be divided conveniently into two halves. This first half provides a reinterpretation of Spencer based on his intellectual background, his early works as they foreshadowed his mature philosophy, and the way in which he synthesized his early works into his magnum opus, the ten volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. The two chapters in the second half look at the Spencer debates in America as related to the Brooklyn Ethical Association and its members through it 1890-1891 season. All in all, I hope my reader will find the Brooklyn Ethical Association to be an interesting and wholly unexpected chapter of Spencerism in America.

43. Peter J. Bowler, Biology and Social Thought: 1850-1914 (Berkeley: Office for and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 1993); Peter J. Bowler, Evolution the History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Peter J. Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36:1 (January-March 1975), 95-114.

38

CHAPTER 2: HERBERT SPENCER’S INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE, EARLY

WRITINGS AND PROTO-EVOLUTIONISM (1820-1850)

Introduction Herbert Spencer is now largely forgotten, and when he is not forgotten, he is usually condemned as a corrupter of Darwin’s theory of organic evolution or as a misguided and cranky purveyor of laissez-faire economic philosophy at the expense of the socially disenfranchised. This misplaced criticism very often has led, as noted in the first chapter, to an equating of Spencer’s ideas with Social Darwinism. This misconception is the result of at least four leading causes. The most important cause of confusion is a misunderstanding of Spencer’s arguments. The second is an intentional demonization of his powerful philosophy, which obstructed progressive reformers who were calling for an expanded role for central state in the interest of citizens’ welfare. Third, writers in the twentieth century usually have missed the overriding importance that Spencer placed on human ethics and the fact that ethical evolution was the ultimate focus of his philosophy. The final cause of confusion and misinterpretation is an underestimation of the significant rift appearing in nineteenth century liberal thought between an optimistic worldview and a more pragmatic strain. A fuller understanding of the present condition and direction of American thought may be obtained by a more complete understanding of what exactly Herbert Spencer was saying that made him so widely discussed for half a century. Such an endeavor will also do much to explain his intellectual demise as part of a shift in liberalism in the turbulent latter decades of the nineteenth century. The four causes are inextricably related. Spencer’s ideas have been misinterpreted and misunderstood from the beginning because they were esoteric by their very nature, and because they were contained in an extremely long and often tedious argument that he published over four decades. It appears that as many twentieth-century readers muddled through (or more likely skimmed over) all that writing, they missed the centrality of human ethics in his philosophy. This failure may have been due to both the changing politico-economic situation and intellectual environment of the twentieth century.

39 Spencer produced his works as the political and economic world in which he lived went through dramatic changes that left many of his ideas outdated even before his death. His calls for limited government made him a target for progressive-minded reformers who sometimes labeled his ideas Social Darwinism.1 Also, leading intellectuals were moving away from a belief in universal teleology and necessary universal progress, and increasingly they discounted the notion of a moral order in the universe. It is impossible to identify which came first because all these changes occurred concurrently, and not universally. What appears certain, however, is that Spencer’s ideas embodied a worldview that was falling from favor in the jumbled intellectual environment of the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In an effort to place Spencer’s ideas in context, I have chosen to distinguish two sides of the dividing liberal tradition as “optimistic” and “pragmatic” trends. Current views of the two divisions, however, might identify them as utopian or naïve, on the one hand, and realistic, on the other, but such a definition would reinforce current negative assessments of Spencer’s ideas and the liberalism he embodied. Calling Spencerism utopian or naïve obscures the fact that those who shared Spencer’s worldview were not starry-eyed idealists who ran off to country communes in vane efforts to remake themselves and their society (In fact, members of the BEA often criticized utopian movements and ideologies of all stripes). Spencer and his followers and fellows were neither disconnected from the political process nor cynically defending the privileges of the middle and upper classes at the expense of workers. To apply the current view of what I will call optimistic liberalism by labeling it utopian or naïve would also tend anachronistically to validate the realists’ ideas and programs in the context of the late nineteenth century, when they were still controversial. This utopian/naïve versus realistic division has made it more difficult for historians to treat accurately and fairly the opponents of political and intellectual realism that dominated the twentieth century. A division between optimistic and pragmatic liberalism is also a fair distinction. Pragmatism is an accepted term for the intellectual tradition that has shaped American thought in the twentieth century. Calling one side optimistic and allowing the other, thereby, to appear to be pessimistic may be no fairer than to distinguish between utopianism and realism, but it may help to cast the worldview held by Spencer and his followers and fellows in a more positive light and

1. Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).

40 allow us to better assess their contemporary intellectual environment. Spencerians did not see themselves as utopians or believe that they were on a quixotic quest for social perfection. They believed that they knew how the universe functioned based on the science of the day, and they were confident that their course for social reform was the best one. Naming the thread of liberalism of which they partook as optimistic also squares with the terms used by later historians and their contemporaries to describe their views, particularly Spencer’s views. This division within the liberal tradition reflects a much deeper division in Western thought, and perhaps human thought generally. In Western literature, for example, optimism and pessimism are apparent in differing views of God, humanity, and nature. The Machine in the Garden, for example, makes this difference a centerpiece of its argument regarding the way in which America has been seen since its discovery.2 Literary works in the Utopian, Dystopian, and Anti-Utopian genres also highlight the stark differences held by people in the same culture regarding human nature, the natural world, and the meaning of history. The contrasts between literary Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and literary Naturalism in America provide another telling example of the different views of universal order held in the United States, because these traditions neatly bracket the years of the Spencer debates, and in some cases even engaged in or were used by participants in those debates. Spencer’s upbringing in the English provinces in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century placed him more in the intellectual tradition of late-eighteenth century English radical thought than in the industrializing and centralizing influence of urban Great Britain.3 His connection with this tradition does much to explain the most important elements of his mature philosophy and his peculiar appeal to the liberal Christian community in America, which was the first to welcome his ideas and did more than any other to disseminate, develop, and popularize them. Hugh Elliot, one of Spencer’s first biographers, turned to Spencer in the midst of World War I because of his distinct Englishness and because of his staunch anti- militarism, both themes that Elliot wished to stress in the dark days of 1917. This contemporary

2. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 3. J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers: 1971), develops this connection to eighteenth-century thought better than any other of Spencer’s biographers.

41 nationalism and anti-war sentiment aside, Elliot’s assessment of Spencer was fair when he wrote that Spencer’s “philosophy was wholly English by spirit and descent, save for some resemblances to the Scottish school of Realism.”4 The Englishness of Spencer’s thought was further supported by both contemporaries and later biographers. They noted that his reading in foreign sources was slight, and thus the direct influence of French and German thinkers was very limited. What influence they did have came indirectly through his father’s and uncle’s conversations, which he overheard at home and at the Philosophical society, or through British commentators’ reviews of foreign writers. The provincial influences on Spencer were a melding of both political and religious radicalism. Robert Bannister, Spencer’s first real defender against his indictment as a Social Darwinist, put it: “At the core of his thought was that peculiar combination of piety and practicality, religion and science, that flourished in the English provinces no less than in America.”5 In support of this assertion, Bannister cited J. D. Y. Peel, the historian who did the best job of investigating Spencer’s intellectual background. From this background, Spencer developed a deep appreciation for the importance of ethics to social order and to human betterment. His emphasis on ethics was the element of his thought that has been too little appreciated by most historians, which has contributed as much as anything to our misunderstanding of his philosophy. Most historians of his thought at least have noted his dedication to discovering a scientific basis for ethics, but all too often they have failed to recognize its centrality in his thought and work.6 As Robert Richards said in 1987 of his own

4. Hugh Elliot, Herbert Spencer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1917), 4. 5. Bannister, 36. 6. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) is the most notable exception to this rule, but even he concentrates on Darwin rather than Spencer. It is a notable and telling choice on Richards’s part, because no one in the nineteenth century wrote more on than did Spencer, whose entire Synthetic Philosophy was directed to that end. In his choice, Richards is following the dominant current of history and historiography, which place Darwin at the center of all evolution controversies. Because of this his otherwise useful book tends to continue negative assessments of Spencer and to keep the focus of evolutionism on Darwin, in this case, improperly.

42 work, in which he treated the ethical and moral ideas of both Spencer and Darwin: “No previous investigation has attempted to sound the several main currents of nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of mind and behavior . . . and virtually no effort has gone into restoring evolutionary theories of morals to their context.”7 I hope that my work may do something to extend Richards’s work as regards Spencer and to clarify some of the matters left muddied by Richards. The supreme importance of morality and ethics was highlighted by the Brooklyn Ethical Association’s work, and the facet of the Spencer debates they represented is incomprehensible without it. Human ethics were at the heart of Spencer’s philosophy, from his earliest writings to the crowning volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy. He drew his notion of morality and the moral sense from the moral sense philosophy, radical intellectualism, dissenting Protestantism, and traditional English values with which he was surrounded from his childhood. Finding progressive human ethical development the ultimate aim of universal evolution, he created a philosophy that tied together the often contrasting threads of Christian morality, enlightenment optimism, radical political and , and traditional British social and political values into a comprehensive and universal whole. As such, his philosophy was a bridge between the old order and the new. This reconciliation of Burkean conservatism and post-Enlightenment liberalism, however, was never really accepted by conservatives and could last only so long as the many strands of liberalism remained united in common cause. Herbert Spencer’s life and career seemed to embody all the possibilities that lent Victorian British society its distinctive optimism. From an inauspicious middle class background, Spencer’s name would become one of the most recognized of his time. He would correspond with people from around the world. His works eventually were translated into every major language on the planet. During his lifetime he was called the greatest mind in the West, ever. His name was given to boy children throughout the Anglo-American world. With his friends John Tyndall and Thomas Huxley, he formed the core of evolutionists who changed the way everyone has looked at the world since their day. His ten-volume Synthetic Philosophy is a magnificent achievement by any standard, and its six thousand pages are but a part of his life’s production. This masterpiece defined evolution for much of the world through the nineteenth century. In fact, it is not too much to say that Herbert Spencer is the representative evolutionist

7. Ibid., 7.

43 of the nineteenth century, whereas his contemporary, Charles Darwin, has held that title since the turning of the twentieth century. Yet, before the end of his life, Spencer’s reputation was in decline, and, within a few years of his death in 1903, he had become an object of derision, then curiosity, then hardly an object at all. The story of his rise and decline is the story of an optimistic and pre-industrial thread of liberalism as it separated from its pragmatic sibling and succumbed to the combined forces of conservatism and its more activist and pessimistic twin. Spencer’s philosophy was always a compromise and depended on a worldview that held the universe to be essentially beneficent, orderly, and progressive. So long as people held this view, it would be possible for them to believe that Spencerian evolution would lead inevitably toward a better world for all. Unfortunately for Spencer, conservatives, pragmatic liberals, and revolutionary socialists all rejected this notion of the universe. From the beginning of his work he faced the ire of political conservatives, the Catholic Church, and orthodox Protestant churches. By the end of his life, he found himself under attack from liberals in both the progressive and socialist camps as well. Conservatives could not accept his rejection of truth embodied in institutions and tradition, though his arguments often seemed to affirm that such institutions and traditions did embody the relative truth thus far evolved. His liberal opponents rejected what they saw as his laissez-faire and even anarchic opposition to government-directed reform, since that was a key element of their programs. And all of this was tied to differing views of the nature of the universal. Spencer’s view was quintessentially optimistic, because he believed that the laws of nature had taken humanity--at least in the civilized nations--to a point at which physical struggle was no longer necessary. Instead, individuals would be guided to a better future by their personal moral sense, which would make them increasingly altruistic and cooperative even as they became more individualistic. The ultimate human ethic derived from this process would completely and seamlessly unite altruism and egoism, meaning that any action that a person knew to be best for himself, was also best for society as a whole. In contrast, conservatives, of the Burkean sort, saw a universe forever threatening to cast humanity down into chaos and violence and held in check only by tradition, order, and the rational and moral of a nation’s best men. Pragmatists, on the other hand, believed that progressive reform for all individuals had to be forced over the barriers erected by conservative traditions and powerful but

44 self-serving individuals. Socialists, presenting yet another contrast to Spencer’s optimism, shared the pragmatists’ basic outlook, but their goals were more radically egalitarian and equalitarian, and their methods were more direct and aggressive. These fundamental differences of perspective may also do much to explain the harsh treatment that Spencer has come in for over the past century; conversely, it also may help to explain the periodic efforts to revive his philosophy. Although the worldview to which Spencer appealed has never wholly disappeared, it shone brightly for only a few decades in the middle and late nineteenth century. His supporters in the Brooklyn Ethical Association are important as representatives of this outlook, and their direct role in the Spencer debates in America shows how this worldview was put into action. To more fully understand why Spencer’s ideas were so appealing to this group and others with a common outlook, it is worthwhile to consider the intellectual influences that created Spencer and for which there was a distinct mirror image on the western side of the Atlantic. Herbert Spencer’s Early Years, 1820-1842 Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, in 1820 and followed an irregular path through the first forty years of his life before publishing his Prospectus for a System of Philosophy. He was the oldest son of William George (called George) and Harriet Holmes Spencer, the only child of nine to survive past the age of two, and was himself never “robust.”8 One memorial wrote: “We have it on good authority that, like many great men, he resembled his mother rather than his father.”9 He enjoyed an undisciplined education through his boyhood. In later years he and many of his biographers and disciples would attribute his unconventional and effective approach to problems to his lack of a confining mental discipline. (Spencer’s identification of Thomas Edison as an example of the benefits of such an intellectual life may help to explain the resonance of his own approach in America.10) Hugh Elliot described his ideas

8. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904); 1: 71-74; David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908), 1:10. 9. E. W. Brabrook, “Herbert Spencer: Born April 27, 1820; Died December 8, 1903,” Man, 4 (1903), 10. 10. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:80-81, 95-101, 386-387; John White Chadwick, “Herbert Spencer: A Sermon;” Duncan, 1:1-19.

45 as coming “not from set studies, but from the possession of wide general principles which drew in cognate facts like magnets acting on iron filings.”11 He studied with his father, a local schoolteacher, in his early childhood, but he was rarely pressed because his parents believed his constitution to be too weak to stand the strain of hard discipline. Young Spencer’s beliefs owed much to his father, George, and uncle, Thomas. Their beliefs, in turn, owed much to “the great tradition of eighteenth-century provincial science and radicalism whose finest bloom had been the Lunar Society of Birmingham,” which Erasmus Darwin sought to recreate upon his move to Derby in 1782 in the form of the Derby Philosophical Society.12 The Birmingham intellectual community had in its day connected the likes of Erasmus Darwin, , Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgewood, and Samuel Galton--Francis Galton’s grandfather--into common intellectual relations.13 Peel made special note of this connection in order to explain Spencer’s intellectual background. Though he did not argue in this case, or in others with similar implications, that it might help to explain the eventual resonance of Spencer’s ideas in America, the common ideas and established personal relationships certainly seem to offer one explanation for Spencerism’s popularity on the west bank of the Atlantic. Herbert Spencer’s father was born into the provincial intellectual environment in 1790 and seems to have been influenced by its critical view of authority and emphasis on scientific investigation of all matters.14 As a young woman, George’s mother, Catherine Taylor Spencer, heard John Wesley speak, chose to follow him, and “whose company and conversation she had afterwards frequent opportunities of enjoying.”15 George was thus brought up early as a Methodist, but as he grew older, he gravitated to the Quaker meetinghouse in Derby “not because he agreed with them in their peculiarities, but because it was a course which allowed of free scope to his own views.”16 In fact, all four of Herbert Spencer’s grandparents were

11. Elliot, 61. 12. Peel, 43. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Spencer, Autobiography, 48-56; Peel, 50. 15. Duncan, 1:4. 16. Herbert Spencer describing his father, quoted in Duncan, Life and Letters, 1:7.

46 connected with at one time or another.17 This religious background placed Spencer squarely in the dissenting and non-Conformist tradition, which was shared by many Americans due to their roots in Puritanism. (Dissent and non-Conformity are names under which people opposed to the established Church of England were categorized, and they usually denoted a high degree of opposition to traditional hierarchies and religious orthodoxy.) As will be discussed in chapters four and five, the similar religious background shared by liberal Christians in America and Spencer played an important role in the acceptance of his philosophy in America. Peel noted the important democratic tendency of provincial Methodism at the turning of the nineteenth century. As it developed, Methodism stressed the importance of the individual’s experiences, both corporal and transcendent, which helped to develop the individual’s moral character. There was also pressure in local churches for more popular control rather than the more centralized control of preachers that Wesley envisioned.18 Peel argued that this peculiar background allowed George Spencer to synthesize the apparently conflicting ideas of John Wesley and Erasmus Darwin, and thus he “bequeathed to his son” his moral evangelicalism and intellectual radicalism.19 This upbringing of Spencer’s would prove to be familiar to many of his earliest and staunchest American supporters. Unitarians, another important liberal Christian group in the provinces, played an important role in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and the Derby Philosophical Society counted several among its membership. Although Erasmus Darwin, “Wesleyans and . . . orthodox Dissenters” found Unitarian religious beliefs heretical, they shared a common esteem for and .20 The connection between the Derby and Birmingham societies grew stronger through the latter years of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. In the early 1830s George Spencer served as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society.21 Drawing from “this environment, which so esteemed the creation of useful things and the universal, regular, natural philosophy which made it possible . . . [George] Spencer impressed his son with

17. Peel, 36-37. 18. Ibid., 38-41. 19. Ibid., 50. 20. Ibid., 46. 21. Ibid., 43, 50.

47 his ‘universal consciousness of cause’ and ‘the absence of the ordinary appeals to supernatural causes.’”22 In his autobiography, Spencer noted the important influences of the Derby Philosophical Society and the Methodist Library, to which his father belonged, on his own development. In addition to the conversations between his father and other members of the society to which he was privy, the society maintained a library fairly stocked mainly with scientific books and journals. The books and periodicals “were lying around the house from week to week, and were more or less utilized by [Spencer].” These sources exposed the young man to the latest writings “on all kinds of topics,--mechanical, physical, medical, anatomical, and so forth.”23 At thirteen Herbert Spencer moved to Somerset where, after a halting beginning, he studied with his uncle Thomas Spencer.24 At the age of fifteen, while still living with his uncle, he published his first article in The Bath and West of England Magazine.25 At seventeen, he became an engineer on the London and Birmingham Railway, and by the time he was eighteen “he was put in charge of the approaches to the Harrow Road bridge, with about eighty men under him.”26 At twenty-one, he was out of a job with the railroad because of a falling out with his boss, but he returned periodically to the field over the next eight years.27 During these early years, the young Spencer was exposed to , a popular scientific movement of the time, which Robert Richards effectively argued shaped his later evolutionary ideas and tinged his views on race.28 Spencer’s autobiography mentioned his first acquaintance with and eventual whole-hearted acceptance of this new science for a time. Around 1830, “[F. J.] Gall’s disciple, Spurzheim” visited Derby during a tour of England.29 Richards

22. Ibid., 47. 23. Spencer, Autobiography, 99. 24. Brabrook, 10. 25. Herbert Spencer, letter to his Father, January 1836, quoted in Duncan, 1:25. The article was “on those boats we [Spencer and his father] discovered while I was trying to crystallise salt.” 26. Ibid., 1:28. 27. Ibid., 1:38 28. Richards, Theories of Mind, 251-258. 29. Spencer, Autobiography, 228-231.

48 argued that though Spencer had rejected many of the specific tenets of phrenology by his early twenties, but “several broad features of phrenological doctrine . . . remained . . ., impelling him along the particular path he took in his evolutionary biopsychology.” Combined with his early ideas of natural rights, phrenology strengthened Spencer’s belief that human beings were endowed with a moral sense as real as any of the other five senses. The most important remnant of phrenology that remained was the belief “that character and intellect were . . . subject to natural causation,” and that “the harmonious exercise of the mental and physical faculties, in conformity to physical, organic, and moral laws, produced happiness,” while acting outside this conformity produced pain.30 Richards believed that Spencer drew many of his ideas on phrenology from ’s Essay on the Constitution of Man (1827). Combe, along with other phrenologists, accepted the existence of a moral sense, which later became a central element in Spencer’s theory of human social evolution. Drawing in part from Erasmus Darwin’s works, Combe further believed that by improving their own moral faculties and constitution, parents could pass those improved faculties on to their children. This view of man and nature “resonated with the Methodism that took deep root in Spencer” in its presentation of an essentially beneficent universe in which even “pain and momentary suffering were [but] necessary accommodations that would prepare the way for a progressively better future.”31 Though phrenology is now considered pseudo-scientific, at the time it had a ring of authenticity due to the standards of science and philosophy of the early nineteenth century, at least to the popular mind. As Michael Ruse points out in The Darwinian Revolution (1979), early in the century it was demanded “that scientific work be philosophically adequate,” that is, that it provide a system of law-like axioms from which all the actions of the universe might be deduced.32 Specifically, that philosophical adequacy was most surely based on the science of physics and the perfect laws that appeared to be operative in astronomy, because their scope was universal and their product predictable.33 Phrenology, especially as Spencer found it in Combe’s book, offered just such a system by connecting human behavior to natural processes and to a

30. Richards, Theories of Mind, 251, 259, 251. 31. Ibid., 252. 32. Ruse, Darwinian Revolution, 56. 33. Ibid., 59.

49 notion of ultimate universal progress. The other science books he found at the Derby Philosophical Society library shared a common commitment to identifying universal laws that could be applied broadly to the material, and even mental, world. The political environment of early nineteenth-century Derby also contributed to Spencer’s optimistic outlook. The class tensions already apparent in London and the leading industrial cities of Britain had not yet penetrated into many of the provinces. As a result, the politics by which Spencer was surrounded still treated his society as an harmonious unity in which workers, farm laborers, freeholders, and small local industrialists were united in their opposition to the landed aristocracy and, to a lesser extent, the power of the established church.34 As Ruse puts it, in 1830 “politically and socially Britain remained almost feudal.”35 It was against the older tradition that provincial were united. And though the economic, cultural, and intellectual effects of the early-1830s railroad boom would begin to reveal class rifts in provincial society, it was not until the 1840s that they presented a real threat to social harmony.36 By then, Spencer’s ideas were established and he had begun to gather ideas, magnet- like, and to synthesize them into one of the greatest comprehensive explanatory systems of modern times. In his autobiography, Spencer recognized that his political ideas formed early, but rather than seeing that as a failing or a weakness, he took it as evidence of his intellectual consistency. For example, in discussing an early correspondence with his friend, “E. A. B.,” Spencer referred to a letter in which his friend disagreed with his notion that government was “a national for preventing one man from infringing upon the rights of another.”37 As Spencer then noted, “thus it appears that at twenty I entertained, though in a crude, unqualified form, a belief which much of my energy in subsequent years was spent in justifying and elaborating.”38 Spencer’s first concrete step in elaborating that idea was the series of letters to The Nonconformist, which he later republished as The Proper Sphere of Government.

34. Mark Francis, “Herbert Spencer and the Myth of Laissez-Faire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, no. 2 (April-June, 1978), 324-325; Peel, 55-63. 35. Ruse, Darwinian Revolution, 17. 36. Peel, 51-52. 37. Spencer, Autobiography, 225. 38. Ibid.

50 The Proper Sphere of Government (1842) In 1842, now twenty-two years old, Spencer was drawn back into the orbit of his Uncle Thomas at Hinton, “to whom he owed his interest in economic and social questions.”39 The period was not marked, however, by any concentrated study or steady employment. His Autobiography reveals five years of largely unprofitable dilettantism in drawing, sculpture, , literature, phrenology, and politics, with short, periodic, returns to work as a civil engineer on the railroads. He read broadly if shallowly with a particular bias toward those books that reinforced what he already believed.40 He provided an insight into and an apology for his lackadaisical mental discipline in the Autobiography: “All through life my constitutional idleness has taken the form of inability to persevere in labour which has not an object at once large and distinct. To apply day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of increasing ability, was not in me. But with an important and definite end to achieve, I could work.”41 Later he explained another tendency that compounded this problem: “Being . . . an impatient reader, even of things which in large measure interest me and meet with general acceptance, it has always been out of the question for me to go on reading a book the fundamental principles of which I entirely dissent from.”42 Further, he found that “thinking was always with me more pleasurable than either reading or doing.”43 Far from believing that this habit of mind was a weakness, he argued that it was a strength, which he saw as “a faculty of seizing cardinal truths rather than of accumulating detailed information.”44 For his more recent biographers, particularly those biased against him by his association with Social Darwinism, this lack of discipline has been a point on which to deride him personally and intellectually. It is also often used by his apologists as an excuse for his mistakes and by his

39. Brabrook, “Herbert Spencer,” 10. 40. Elliot, 61. 41. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:215. He reiterates this point throughout the autobiography, often as evidence that he did not draw his ideas from the works of others with whom he fundamentally disagreed and, therefore, never read beyond the opening propositions (e.g., Comte). 42. Ibid., 1:289. 43. Ibid., 1:403. 44. Ibid., 1:385.

51 opponents as and example of his fundamental flaws. James Kennedy, writing in 1978, recognized Spencer’s intellectual background while condemning him as selfish, obtuse, and arrogant: “Absorbing from his Dissenting milieu a militant disaffection for the established order, Spencer did not do to how much he himself depended upon and had learned and received from others.”45 His uncle’s influence and the political agitation by which he was surrounded led him to write a series of letters to The Nonconformist, “a newspaper which had recently been established as an organ of the advanced Dissenters, and which was edited by Mr. Edward Miall.”46 These letters effectively mark the beginning of his literary work on society and politics.47 The essays foreshadowed the remainder of his intellectual career. Beginning in the late spring of 1842, a series of twelve letters from Spencer appeared serially in The Nonconformist, in part because of a favorable letter of introduction from his uncle to Miall.48 The twelve letters reveal a number of threads that became increasingly prominent in Spencer’s works over the next half-century. It was clear from the letters that the young Spencer had been paying attention to the talk in his uncle’s parlor and that his intellectual roots tapped deeply into the stream of opposition in the English dissenting and non-conformist traditions. Looking back in his autobiography, Spencer noted that the political position they presented “was unlike that now displayed by those who call themselves Liberals . . . an attitude of submission to personal rule similar to that shown in France when . . . the people surrendered their power into the hands of Louis Napoleon.”49 Spencer’s articles also reflected his belief in two canons of Enlightenment faith: universal and unequivocal natural laws and the supreme place of the individual. Natural laws of the

45. James G. Kennedy, Herbert Spencer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 22. Kennedy’s biography is particularly notable for the almost personal offense he seems to take from Spencer’s life and work. Though it presents little that is original or useful, this biography is an excellent example of how Spencer has been made the scapegoat for all things unprogressive, or more appropriately for this source, politically incorrect. 46. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:237. 47. Ibid., 1:237-238. 48. Ibid., 1:238. 49. Ibid., 1:237.

52 inorganic and organic worlds, including laws governing human life, individually and socially, led him to turn the old organicist vision of society on its head thus converting a central of conservative thought to the purposes of liberalism.50 It was an important step because it seemed to offer a viable explanation of social stability while breaking the confining bonds of traditionalism. Spencer’s letters were, in short, the letters of “youthful enthusiasm” in their optimism and devotion to a synthesizing principle, overly simplistic and one-sided argument, and their obvious lack of a strong foundation of facts and specific evidence. 51 They trace the outlines of the social and political arguments that ran through the remainder of his work. His later works, however, were marked by a greater degree of moderation and ambiguity. The specific arguments he made in these letters were also worth note because they formed the core of his arguments in Social Statics and, eventually, the Synthetic Philosophy. Many of the arguments he first discussed in these letters remained in his later works and attracted members of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, who used them in their own arguments. Spencer developed a single grand theory of a limited role for government over the course of the twelve letters. His method of argument was the same as he later used in both Social Statics and the Synthetic Philosophy. In his first letter, he began by framing his object with a series of rhetorical questions and then laying out his principles in his first letter. He asked: Why do citizens believe that government should take care of any problem they see facing society? In answer, he cited the influence of custom and habit. “Some few,” he suggested, “imbued with the more healthy spirit of investigation, are not content with this simple mode of settling such questions, and would rather ground their convictions upon reason, than upon custom.”52 As his founding principles, he appealed to natural laws, laws that covered all inorganic and organic, physical and mental, psychical and spiritual forms in the universe. As he reasoned: “We see nothing created but what is subject to invariable regulations given by the Almighty, and why should society be an exception?”53 Social disobedience to such laws, just as with an individual,

50. Bannister, 5. 51. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:240. 52. Herbert Spencer, “The Proper Sphere of Government,” in Herbert Spencer, Political Writings, edited by John Offer (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 53. Ibid., 5.

53 resulted in a necessary punishment, which would push the offending party back into line with those invariable laws. Spencer built his argument upon the premise that natural men combined in their own enlightened self-interest to prevent the predations of the strong on the weak. Thus, he found that government’s purpose was “not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man--to protect person and property--to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak--in a word, to administer justice.”54 Spencer maintained this position on the role of government for the rest of his life. His background and the conditions under which he was writing made it clear that this was no simple defense of robber-baron capitalism but a radical plea for freedom from an established order that he and his provincial allies found oppressive and outdated. Lest it be forgotten, this position was very similar to the one taken by the American revolutionaries during the war and even by the writers of the United States Constitution. Here it was apparent the extent to which Spencer was drawing on the ideas of the late eighteenth century as opposed to the mid-nineteenth century. In his second letter, Spencer continued his argument by defining government, “a description, in which the limits of the thing described [in this case, government] are pointed out.” He rejected out of hand the definition of government “as a body whose province it is, to provide for the ‘general good,’” because such a definition put no limits on government activities whatsoever. In fact, he fairly asked, “is it probable that any government, however selfish, however tyrannical, would be so barefaced as to pass laws avowedly for any other purpose” than the “general good?”55 To avoid allowing “Justice” to become a term as slippery in meaning as the ‘general good,’ Spencer defined it as comprehending “only the preservation of man’s natural rights.”56 Having set this foundation, Spencer dove into an attack on the Corn Laws and other interferences with commerce, the established Church, and the Poor Laws as violations of natural rights. His argument regarding the Poor Laws, in particular, can appear to be evidence of his Social Darwinism, albeit a bit early to be called such. He certainly did not allow much leeway for people who had failed due to personal shortcomings, but he did allow for private charity, and, in

54. Ibid., 6-7. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. Ibid.

54 his later works, he granted greater consideration for those who failed through no fault of their own. He may have taken this harsh position from his uncle, whom he later cited in his autobiography for having had too little sympathy for victims of misfortune until misfortune found him. Knowing that the readers of the Nonconformist would be much more likely to take issue with his position on the Poor Laws than on the Corn Law or the Church, Spencer used his third letter to develop his attack on such state charity. It was essentially a libertarian argument for and government non-interference. His first complaint was that the burden of the Poor Laws fell more heavily on laborers than anyone else, because it raised the costs of production, which were passed on to consumers.57 It was an argument that made sense in light of the efforts of provincial radicals to maintain a harmonious relationship among members of nascent classes. The Poor Laws also demonstrated the extent of corruption in the system. They only provided temporary relief from the pain of systemic problems, rather than a solution that allowed for a healthier nation and people. It forced a rate-payer to support someone whom he believed to be unworthy of charity. Tying his argument to the beliefs of dissenters, the primary audience of the Nonconformist, he asked how they could be opposed to an established religion and not to an established charity. It was inconsistent that they should demand “independence in the article of faith . . . [but] look for extraneous aid in the department of works.”58 This, then, he connected to “the moral effect of a poor law upon the rate-paying portion of the community,” by arguing that “the payment of poor rates will supplant the exercise of real benevolence, and a fulfillment of the legal form, will supersede the exercise of the moral duty.”59 Put another way, the Poor Laws undermined individuals’ morality because “moral vigor cannot co-exist with moral inactivity.”60 Spencer maintained this view of charity and moral obligation through the rest of his life, and when he came to believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, including the inheritance of moral nature, he found the retardant effects of public charity to be even graver because they hurt future generations as well as the current generation.

57. Ibid., 11. 58. Ibid., 14. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 15.

55 The fourth letter extended Spencer’s argument against the Poor Laws by developing the idea of an individual’s right to subsistence from the soil.61 He argued that to the extent an individual labors, that individual has a right to the product of his labors. Those who did not work did not deserve sustenance, and those who did work had a right to the product of their labor. Thus, the government had no right to take their produce from them. The fourth letter, too, gave would be evidence of Spencer’s nascent Social Darwinism, though he offered passages that belied such an assumption. It was in this letter that he argued that “distress and destitution . . . in nine cases out of ten…result from the transgressions of the individual or his parents.”62 Blending biblical example with a kind of proto-evolutionary form of phrenology, Spencer wrote: “We are told that the sins of the wicked shall be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. That visitation may either exhibit itself in mental derangement, bodily disease, or temporal want. The parent may transmit to the child bad moral tendencies, a constitutional taint, or may leave it in circumstances of great misery.”63 Ultimately, poverty was the cure for this “moral disease.”64 These passages, when taken out of context, seemingly would be solid proof of Spencer’s hard-hearted philosophy; however, he made two important qualifications. First, he continued to make room for private charity. When charity was freely given it did not represent an infringement on natural rights, and it was more likely to be directed to those who deserved help because of unfortunate and unexpected trouble. Second, he said that this was the ideal system “under a healthy social condition . . . Let not this be misunderstood: it has no reference to the present distress of the people; it only applies to the few cases of individual destitution, which would occur in a well-governed country.”65 By “well- governed country,” he meant one in which the government did not interfere with natural rights to sustenance or free commerce and did not protect unfair social and economic relationships. In this fourth letter, Spencer also addressed the expediency philosophy and showed his preference for Paley’s long-ranged view of social good. For Spencer, expediency “does not here mean that which will best serve present purposes, but that whose effects, both present and future,

61. Ibid., 16-22. 62. Ibid., 17. 63. Spencer Ibid., 17-18. 64. Ibid., 18. 65. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

56 direct and collateral, will be most beneficial.”66 He, of course, went on to argue that government charity was not in any way expedient. What is of more importance, however, was the presence of this idea in his 1842 work. In Social Statics he greatly extended and developed this idea of expediency, in contrast to the Benthamite notion of the utilitarian philosophy, and harnessed it to a proto-evolutionary framework. Later, in his explicitly evolutionary works, he justified his conclusions according to this definition of expediency. It was again clear that Spencer’s ideas as they developed after 1860 were adaptations and expansions of ideas he held in the early 1840s. Letters five and six opposed war and colonization on the grounds that they were patently unjust, expensive, and corrupting politically, economically, and morally for both sides.67 He denied the argument that war “invigorates the ,” and found that even if it “produces temporary good, it infallibly inflicts a more than equivalent injury.”68 He called on those who claimed war was a profitable endeavor to “turn their attention to the sufferings experienced by the lower orders . . . rather than to the aggrandizement of the trading classes.”69 Spencer further called on people to realize the moral evils of war and to “remember that it is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity--that it unduly encourages the animal passions--that it exalts brute courage into the greatest of human virtues--that it tends greatly to retard the civilisation of the world--that it is the grand bar to the extension of that feeling of universal brotherhood with all nations, so essential to the real prosperity of mankind.”70 True to his radical roots, Spencer connected this warlike and expansionistic tendency to the aristocracy and the feudal spirit.71 Spencer found colonization wanting in justice and expediency on three heads: “the interests of the mother country, of the emigrants, and of the aborigines.”72 He began by citing the

66. Ibid., 19. 67. Ibid., 22-26, 27-32. 68. Ibid., 23. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 24. 71. Peel, 60, notes that “Cooke Taylor, the ‘tame historian’ (or rather mythologist) of the Anti-Corn Law League, wrote . . . in 1843 of ‘the long struggle between the industrial spirit of the Saxon race and the military despotism of the Normans.” 72. Spencer, “Proper Sphere,” 27.

57 case of the United States, which as a colony “was a burden to us; . . . but since it has become an independent kingdom, it has been a source of great gain.”73 He found that Canada and Hindostan (India) provided similar examples of colonies that were a net drain on national coffers. In all these cases, he held that trade without empire would be profitable and would avoid colonial expenditures. Emigrants, too, suffered because the government could not provide them with the same protection that it provided to residents of the mother country; Spencer again cited the United States as an example and quoted from the Declaration of Independence.74 Since did provide some protection to emigrants, however, aborigines duly suffered more at their hands than would be the case if the colonists arrived without such support and were required to make their own way with the previous residents. Further, the power of the colonists necessarily infringed on the natural rights of the aborigines. As his evidence, Spencer marshaled brief examples from North America, Australia, Hindostan, and Affghanistan [sic].75 Influenced by his Quaker neighbors, Spencer cited the major Quaker colony in America: “ affords an admirable example, of a colony originated, and carried out, solely by private enterprise; a colony in which the claims of all parties were duly respected--where natives met with honourable treatment, where strangers as well as friends could obtain justice; a colony that long stood pre-eminent for its prosperity, and which may even now be said to feel the benefits of the liberal conduct of its founders.”76 Spencer’s repeated citation of American examples was no accident. The sympathy between the founding principles of the United States and his own provincial radicalism was extensive, personal, and as argued above, documented. The seventh and eighth letters concerned education; the former condemned government in the social institutions, the latter attacked the unifying and conservative influence of classical education. He believed that both were social evils because they undermined the diversity of ideas necessary for healthy and progressive intellectual conflict.77 State education, as one would expect based on Spencer’s earlier letters, did not fulfill the state’s one role in the administration of

73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 30. 75. Ibid., 31-32. 76. Ibid., 32. 77. Ibid., 33-38, 38-43.

58 justice. Further, it was dangerous because “national education assumes that a uniform system of instruction is desirable.”78 He based his opposition on an indelible aspect of his optimistic liberal philosophy: “Almost all men of enlightened view agree that man is essentially a progressive being--that he was intended to be so by the Creator--and that there are implanted in him, desires for improvement, and aspirations after perfection, ultimately tending to produce a higher moral and intellectual condition of the world.”79 Further, “the grand facts of history, both sacred and profane . . . all go to prove that, notwithstanding the oft-repeated falling back . . . the grand and irresistible law of human existence, is progressive improvement.”80 This progress was necessarily the product of natural laws as in the inorganic world, so it was reasonable to assume that “the Almighty has given laws to the general mind, which are ever working toward its advancement.”81 Since it was clear from conditions in the world that uniformity of mind was not a part of God’s plan, the imposition of such uniformity must necessarily contradict natural laws, and thus result in the pain attendant on such violations.82 Though studies of the classical works of the Greeks and Romans allowed thinkers to get out from under the “deadly shade” of Catholicism’s “ecclesiastical dominion” and to awake from their slumber in its “dark and debasing ignorance,” the utility of those texts faded with the rise of modern science and philosophy.83 Veneration of the classics had a similar conservative effect to that of state education by distracting students from the liberating influence of science and diverse new ideas, particularly if the power of conservatism were combined with “the protection of law.”84 Throughout the rest of his life, Spencer maintained his opposition to such conservative forces as the Catholic Church, classical education, and national schools. Though the last of these proved troublesome for his American followers and fellows, they generally were in hearty agreement with him on the former two.

78. Ibid., 34. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 35. 83. Ibid., 38. 84. Ibid., 39.

59 Spencer spelled out his opposition to public health efforts in the ninth letter, arguing that individuals and their doctors could decide better for themselves what treatments were appropriate.85 As in his third letter on the Poor Laws, Spencer appealed to his audience’s dissent from an established church by stating that there is no real difference between allowing a state church to minister to an individual’s morals and allowing the government to minister to an individual’s health. Allowing the state to begin to regulate public health would be allowing the camel’s nose under the tent and open the way for yet another state monopoly, the likes of which plagued Britain at the time, according to Spencer. Here, too, Spencer warned that such a state establishment would quickly be taken over by the aristocracy, who would saddle the whole people with this system for their own benefit. Ultimately he rejected the assumption “that men are not fitted to take care of themselves.”86 Up to this time, Spencer’s life had been limited to the English countryside and provincial towns, and he had not yet seen life in industrial cities. Even after witnessing those conditions over the years before writing Social Statics, and recognizing poor sanitation as a problem, he did not change his mind regarding public legislation but continued to hold out faith in the solutions of the market place. Following this was a short letter condemning government for not providing justice for all. In his tenth letter he berated the English system of justice for being open only to those with the resources necessary to move through the expensive and overly complex legal system.87 In this he portrayed the government as a lap dog of the rich that took from the middling and lower classes for the benefit of the upper classes. It was a recurrent theme in provincial radicalism and, as noted above, a recurrent theme in these letters. Finally, in letter eleven, another short one, he called for enfranchisement of the working classes.88 Here he presented a negative argument rather than a positive one. Instead of explaining why workers should be given the vote, he took it as a given and launched into a discrediting attack on the notion that government was too complicated for a worker to understand. His point was fairly simple: if you do what I tell you to and establish a government devoted simply to the administration of justice, then it will not be too complicated for a working man to understand.

85. Ibid., 44-50. 86. Ibid., 47. 87. Ibid., 50-52. 88. Ibid., 52-54.

60 For several years his call for universal suffrage expanded as he extended his principles to cover all citizens and then contracted in his later life as he saw universal suffrage as a major cause of in the increasing tendency toward socialism late in the century. In his last letter, Spencer summarized and reiterated the points in the previous eleven. Ultimately people must decide on a definition of state duty, and there were but two alternatives: “the everything and the nothing with which a government might be entrusted.”89 Spencer’s letters to The Nonconformist were the overture to Social Statics and the Synthetic Philosophy; they presented the essential notes of his thought and contained many of the themes played out in those later works. Spencer made this clear in his own assessment of the letters’ meaning in his autobiography.90 Their immediate purpose was to oppose the role of government in society for anything other than to ensure justice for individuals. He consistently defended this position for the rest of his career. More striking, and telling, however, were the logical and a priori assumptions upon which he built his propositions and the style of argument he used to support those propositions. His assumptions were quintessentially liberal and democratic, though they bent strongly to only one side of a dividing liberalism. He rejected blind adherence to custom as a retardant to human progress. His faith rested, instead, with the reasoning individual who was endowed by his creator with natural rights. Throughout the letters he showed his belief that this universe of diverse individuals was bound by a divine plan and by natural laws that would lead to progress if only they remained unfettered by human institutions. Because such institutions inevitably were based on a profound ignorance of the plan and the laws, they could do nothing more than interfere.91 In later works he distanced himself from specific references to God or God’s creation, but the essence of his beliefs remained the same. Although he did not state it explicitly in these letters, there was a tacit assumption of universal unity and order, which he strengthened in his later works. The harmony of these themes gave Spencer’s works their peculiar nineteenth century tone, a style that would fall out of fashion by the end of his life as the liberal tradition tore in two and the optimistic, more

89. Ibid., 57. 90. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:237-241. 91. Spencer, “Proper Sphere,” 3-7.

61 deterministic, progressive thread was overwhelmed by the more relativistic, chaotic, and pragmatic liberalism ascending to preeminence. A number of things were apparent in these letters that foreshadowed the philosopher’s later work and hinted at why it initially shone so brightly only to dim quickly as the century closed. The most obvious element of his was his adherence to principles once he had accepted them. In his letters to The Non-Conformist, he was adolescent in his strict adherence to principles without significant evidence to support them and in some fairly obvious contradictions that he either did not notice or that he ignored.92 In later works he marshaled greater evidence, if often uncritically, and showed somewhat greater wisdom and conservatism in his application of principles. His principles were heavily based on his Christian background among English Dissenters. Although he later declared himself to be an agnostic, the essentially Christian principles remained, which made his ideas popular among many American churchgoers, particularly Unitarians and other liberal Christian, who either ignored his , apologized for it, or even embraced it. His principles were essentially liberal and democratic and marked by a faith in moral, reasoning individuals, social progress, and a knowable, predictable, unified, and orderly universe. Although he believed human moral character was inheritable, it was but a glimmer of the guiding light of evolution and the centrality of evolving ethics that were at the core of the Synthetic Philosophy. These elements of rational Christian philosophy and evolutionary ethics were of the greatest interest to the members of the Brooklyn Ethical Association in later years. Political and Literary Career from 1842 to 1848 and the Refinement of His Philosophy Although Spencer returned periodically to work as an engineer over the next six years and dabbled in radical politics, he had found his true calling in the letters he had written to The Non-Conformist. In these years he published several articles developing both his philosophy and his proto-evolutionism. He worked as a subeditor of where he learned much about economics and politics. At the end of this literary and political apprenticeship, Spencer was ready to his first vision of a new social science.

92. makes special note of this youthfulness in the opening paragraphs of his article, “The Political Ethics of Herbert Spencer,” Annals of the American Society of Political and Social Science, 4 (Jan., 1894), 90.

62 In the autumn of 1842 he became the honorary secretary of the Derby branch of The Complete Suffrage Movement, toward which he had been drawn by editor Miall.93 He found the politics exciting. Spencer also revealed the limits of his political radicalism. Though he supported The Complete Suffrage Movement, he was opposed to the Chartists, to whom he referred as “fanatics” with “passionate attachments to their shibboleths.”94 He saw the Chartists’ shibboleth--“universal suffrage, triennial parliaments, vote by ballot, payment of members, no property qualification, and equal electoral districts, embodied in a formal document”--as “revolutionary” because “the drift towards Socialism, now becoming irresistible, has resulted from giving to the masses not a due proportion of power but the supreme power.”95 It was to this variety of limited that he held throughout his life. Having decided it was time to be “getting on” with his life--he was now in his early twenties--he moved to London in the May 1843 and resolved “to adopt a literary career.”96 In his writing, both published and rejected, he struck upon a number of notions that he developed over the remainder of his career. He began “reading Bentham’s works, and [meant] to attack his principles shortly,” which he eventually did in Social Statics.97 An article on “Benevolence and Imitation,” which was eventually published in The Zionist in January 1844, led him to consider more deeply the ideas of benevolence, justice, and sympathy. This interest led him to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which had a strong influence on his ideas regarding the evolution of human morality.98 It was also in his early months in London that he published his letters to The Nonconformist as the pamphlet, “The Proper Sphere of Government,” in the naïve belief that he might be able to sell them for at least the cost of printing (he could not).99 His efforts led to no steady literary employment, however, and after six months Spencer returned home to Derby.

93. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:249. 94. Ibid., 1:251. 95. Ibid., 1:249, 252. 96. Ibid., 1:257, 258. 97. Ibid., 1:260. 98. Ibid., 1:261-263. 99. Ibid., 1:264.

63 Back in Derby he continued his unprofitable dilettantism, writing phrenological articles for The Zionist and eclectic reading in scientific, medical, and mechanical journals until the late summer of 1844. Among his readings of interest were those of Emerson. Though Spencer was initially unimpressed with Emerson’s work because it was “too mystical,” he “greatly admire[d] the spirit of the man,” and upon further reading, he “raised [his] estimate of Emerson.”100 In a letter to his father in the autumn of 1845, Spencer showed that his opinion of Emerson had grown. Referring to his uncle and his uncle’s traveling companions on a temperance and anti- slavery lecture tour in the United States, he wrote: “They have seen Emerson and do not like him at all. I am not altogether surprised at this information, for it seems to me that my uncle has not a sufficiently liberal spirit to understand all the kinds of great men.”101 He suggested that “broad philosophical views . . . and mystical views uttered in detached aphorisms” did not suit his uncle’s concrete mind.102 In 1846, his father wrote to Spencer’s uncle, that “he was a good deal concerned as to the notions [Herbert] appears to be deriving from the reading of Emerson.”103 Spencer, as was usually the case when someone tries to credit a specific influence on his thinking, denied his father’s “over-estimation” of Emerson’s influence. Still, he admitted that “such writings as those of Emerson and Carlyle served simply to present to me my own convictions under other aspects.”104 Spencer did not identify specific passages from Emerson’s works that impressed him, but he did remark that “there occasionally came one which impressed me and remained.”105 Upon reading one passage from Emerson aloud to a friend, the friend replied that “the feeling produced in him [by it] was like that produced by distant thunder.”106 Though the two young men could not have foreseen it, the storm that produced that “distant thunder” was, at that moment, affecting liberal Christians in New England and helping to pave the way for Spencer’s arrival.

100. Ibid., 1:278. 101. Ibid., 1:338. 102. Ibid., 1:338. 103. Ibid., 1:358. 104. Ibid., 1:359. 105. Ibid., 1:278. 106. Ibid., 1:279.

64 From August through October 1844, Spencer was in Birmingham working as the sub- editor of The and living with Mr. Joseph Sturge and then Mr. James Wilson. Sturge, with whom Spencer had been corresponding since his work with the organization, was the president of the Complete Suffrage Union. Sturge was interested in starting a more radical paper than had hitherto existed in Birmingham. He recruited Wilson to be its editor and Spencer to act as subeditor. The result was The Pilot.107 In Wilson’s home, Spencer found Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, read its opening pages, disliked its premises and put it down. However, it got him thinking about “mental philosophy” outside of the phrenological context he had been working in. His work on the magazine gave him further writing experience and, more importantly, editorial experience that he would use in his job at The Economist. Spencer left The Pilot in December 1844 for another stint as an engineer, which lasted until the spring of 1846. His reports of these years in his autobiography revealed few elements of his developing philosophy. They did, however, note several instances in which friendships and acquaintances were strained or even broken due to his rationalism, which was too much for his devoutly Christian friends and acquaintances.108 These incidents may seem minor, but they have been part of the case used by historians to treat Spencer as an atheist and a materialist. His rationalism presented some problems for his American supporters later in the century. Although, for liberal Christians, like those in the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, his rationalism was not absolutely incompatible with their Christianity, and he gave them cause to believe that his atheism was not so complete as it may have appeared.109 Following the end of his work in early 1846 and a few months of failed work as an inventor, the twenty-six year old Spencer made his way into a life of letters for good. He

107. Ibid., 1:283-287. 108. Ibid., 1:297, 303, 316-317. 109. In the Autobiography, 1:170-173, Spencer discussed his declining faith in Christianity. He stopped short of rejecting religion, per se, however. What he rejected was “the creed of Christendom,” rituals of worship, supernaturalism, and “the supposition that the Cause from which have arisen thirty millions of Suns with their attendant planets, took the form of a man, and made a bargain with Abraham to give him territory in return for allegiance.” As will be clear in chapters four and five, Spencer’s position was not incompatible with the liberal theology of Unitarianism.

65 published two articles in early 1847, “Justice before Generosity,” in The Nonconformist and “The Form of the Earth, &c.,” in The Philosophical Magazine, and had begun collecting “together a large mass of matter for my moral philosophy . . . [which] is beginning to ferment violently;” this was to become Social Statics, and ultimately, the Synthetic Philosophy.110 In the late spring of 1848, Spencer again traveled to London in search of employment. He had no luck finding engineering work since the railroad mania, as he called it, had collapsed. In search of literary work, he visited James Wilson, editor of The Economist, with a letter of introduction from his uncle in his hand. Wilson, now owner and editor of the weekly paper, had begun as an occasional writer for it when it was a propaganda journal for the Anti-Corn Law League. He had since bought it as its fortunes declined and turned it into a profitable mercantile newspaper. Spencer met with Wilson twice, gave him a copy of “The Proper Sphere of Government,” and did not hear from him again until November 15, at which time he was invited to become sub-editor for The Economist.111 Although the pay was low, Spencer accepted the job because he would be able to live at the offices, and because it would afford him more time to work on the book he had begun haltingly as early as 1846.112 He described his duties as “decidedly light,” and only on Fridays was he forced to work to midnight or later. He had the option of writing leading articles for further remuneration, but he chose instead to work on his book during his free hours from seven to midnight.113 He spent much of his social time talking with his Uncle Thomas, recently removed to London after a financial disaster in Bath, with Mr. Hodgskin, who wrote reviews and leading articles for The Economist, and at Mr. Chapman’s house, where he met many people

110. Ibid., 1:362-363. 111. Ibid., 1:378-383. 112. Spencer said in his Autobiography, 1:406, that he “commenced early in the autumn of 1848,” but the letters he quoted in chapter twenty referred to his work on “the book” or “my book,” which must have been Social Statics. It was common throughout the text of that book for Spencer to say that were it not for his letters, he would have completely forgotten some specific events and failed to remember the dates of others. Most historians repeat the date of late 1848 for Spencer’s beginning work on Social Statics, but I believe the previous letters extend this date back to before his position as sub-editor of The Economist. 113. Ibid., 1:393.

66 from the English literary establishment, and some Americans with whom Chapman was acquainted.114 Historians have noted the strong effect that Spencer’s interaction with Hodgskin, in particular, had on his later views, though they differ somewhat on what that effect was. J. D. Y. Peel, Mark Francis, and Robert Richards all note that Hodgskin carried with him the radicalism of provincial England before the rise of the big manufacturers. Peel connects Hodgskin to writers like Paine and Godwin whose ideas were formed “not [in] a world dominated by factory production, but one of small masters.”115 Peel suggested that Hodgskin’s “Richardian socialist and individualist” influence, which was part of the diffuse radicalism of provincial culture, “cleared the way to Social Statics” for Spencer.116 In the environment of The Economist, therefore, Spencer was exposed to “extreme laissez-faire,” but not the pessimistic sort found in “the preaching of American social Darwinists like Sumner . . ., but in a mood of aggressive optimism which made light of social problems.”117 Francis largely agreed with Peel’s facts, but disagreed that Spencer was a supporter of laissez-faire philosophy or economics. Instead, he followed Elie Halévy’s argument that Spencer was an anarchist, based on Halévy’s work in the no longer extant papers of The Economist and the Hodgskin family papers.118 He highlighted the “natural harmony” doctrine in the works of radicals like those with whom Spencer interacted at The Economist. Natural harmony philosophy, he noted ironically, “has been ascribed to Tory radicals such as Richard Oustler, though Tory radicals would doubtless have had difficulty with the radicals’ demands for equality.”119 Francis also discussed the effect of this sort of radicalism on Spencer’s optimistic “anti-Malthusian argument” that population increase had actually led to greater human sociability, social unity, and individual happiness.120 Spencer’s ideas, already leaning in this radical direction, were further burnished with the sense of optimism he found at The Economist,

114. Ibid., 1:398. 115. Peel, Herbert Spencer, 81. 116. Ibid., 76. 117. Ibid., 78. 118. Francis, “Spencer and the Myth of Laissez-Faire,” 320. 119. Ibid., 325. 120. Ibid.

67 and retained their color even as he became less and less hopeful of the possibility of social perfection in later years. It was held even more strongly by his American supporters in the Brooklyn Ethical Association. Richards’s assessment of The Economist’s influence on Spencer was less developed than Peel’s and Francis’s works, but he cited it as a turning point as well. He suggested, in line with Peel on the journal’s economic outlook, that “the laissez-faire philosophy of [James] Wilson and the radical socialism of his coeditor nurtured [Spencer’s] own social evolutionary thought.”121 He also argued, perhaps with some exaggeration of Wilson’s influence, that “Wilson’s view of society as an organism with each part efficiently performing its particular functions, a conception that formed the bloodline of the Economist’s pages, likely predisposed Spencer to be receptive to the idea when he rediscovered it in the anatomical work of Milne- Edwards in 1851.”122 Richards also believed that it was Spencer’s work with the editor and lead writer that led him to reject utilitarian social theory.123 The different assessments of The Economist’s influence on Spencer reflect a fundamental problem in any history of Spencer’s ideas. They all agree to Spencer’s optimism and see it in the journal’s editor, too, but they do not suggest that it may be a product of a distinct liberal tradition that the men shared rather than taught to or learned from the other. They also agree that his ideas were drawn from a pre-industrial intellectual tradition. The differences regarding Spencer and laissez-faire demonstrate the problem of anachronistic definitions creeping into historical analysis, because our modern usage does not include a strong moral self-restraint confining the called for by laissez-faire economics. Instead, Spencer’s views of the world were conditioned by a body of ideas that were optimistic, synthetic, and progressive, and which were drawn from political economics, science, and religion. Without question, though, the most important product of his time as sub-editor of The Economist was his first book, Social Statics. Spencer’s writing habits, as he recalled them in his autobiography, showed him to have been a deeply self-critical perfectionist obsessed with every detail of his thought and style. He remarked looking back from those later years that he did not know how he had been able to write late into the night and then fall asleep. The rest of his life

121. Richards, Theories of Mind, 257. 122. Ibid., 257. 123. Ibid., 258.

68 was plagued by insomnia following any effort to write into the evening. He managed to finish Social Statics with his health intact, but his obsessive effort to complete The Principles of Psychology in the following years led to a breakdown in his health that he revisited with increasing frequency during the remainder of his life.124 Social Statics, 1848-1851 According to a letter in March 1850 to his father, Spencer intended to title his first book “A System of Social and Political Morality.”125 Being talked out of that title by his friends, he then considered Demostatics, his “intention being to suggest what I considered the subject-matter of the book--how men’s relations may be kept in a balanced state: my belief being that the conforming of social arrangements to the law of equal freedom, or to the system of equity deducible from it, insured the maintenance of equilibrium.”126 He eventually settled on Social Statics as meaning the same thing, unaware that the term had already been used by Comte, whose specific work he claims to have been completely unaware.127 The title of the book also reflected Spencer’s intention to treat society scientifically by first identifying the “statics” of society, that is, those absolute and undeniable aspects of nature as related to society and of society, itself. With this foundation of facts it would be possible to address the dynamic elements of societies. The ideas Spencer had condensed into The Proper Sphere of Government and the effect of publishing them thus became the seeds of his first book, Social Statics.128 This first book introduced the important elements of moral sense, moral law, ethical development, and his movement toward the form of evolutionism that became the hinge of his remaining works. As such, the book was a sketch for the Synthetic Philosophy.

124. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:407. 125. Ibid., 1:412. 126. Ibid., 1:414. 127. Ibid. 128. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970). This is a reprint of the original 1850 edition. It includes Spencer’s original and second prefaces from 1850 and 1877.

69 The themes of limited government, non-conformism, individualism, and liberal social apparent in The Proper Sphere of Government were repeated and amplified in Social Statics. The all-important role of human character, in the form of a natural moral sense and ethics, was developed and applied. The final and most controversial element of the larger argument, evolution, remained unnamed, but all its elements were present and the process of human and social adaptation were clearly recognizable. By blending human character and a self- restraining moral sense with the keystones of optimistic liberalism through a proto-evolutionary system of progress, Spencer created a sort of bridge between liberalism and conservatism in an age when liberalism was ascending to supremacy. This bridge is crucial to understanding Spencer’s thought, his international reception generally and his American reception specifically. Spencer’s Optimistic Liberalism Spencer’s object of and his basic assumptions revealed an essential liberalism in his approach. The individual was his immediate object of study and he believed in an individual’s free will. He had unyielding faith in universal progress, progress that must be measured by the expansion of personal . He assumed that natural rights existed and that those rights were shared equally by everyone. He proved, to his satisfaction, that democratic government was the only morally acceptable government. Finally, he held that personal ethical standards, what might have been called republican virtues in previous generations, were the only true and effective social restraint. Bannister, in fact, argued explicitly that “in Social Statics Spencer attempted nothing less than a restatement of the assumptions and principles of Enlightenment liberalism in the face of the developments in science and society that seemed to threaten them.”129 He goes on to argue that “Social Statics was a halfway house in Spencer’s development and in the transition from Enlightenment to post-Darwinian evolutionary social thought.”130 Though correct that Spencer was restating liberalism, he was wrong to assume that Spencer saw developments in science and society as threats. Instead, Spencer embraced science as providing the explanatory framework for his view of social progress and his society as the greatest evidence of that progress. By looking back on Spencer’s work through the lens of Darwinian evolution, too, Bannister wrongly identified the historical rift as between Enlightenment liberalism and post-Darwinian thought.

129. Bannister, Social Darwinism, 35. 130. Ibid., 39.

70 Rather than such a horizontal rift across history, the tear is vertical, along the line of liberalism’s history, itself. Bannister, like the rest of us, cannot help but stand on the Darwinian side of the rift because of that tradition’s victory at the beginning of the century. What he misidentified as “Enlightenment liberalism,” of which Darwinism was equally a product, was actually an optimistic tradition of the Lockean type. The essential intellectual connection between Spencer’s thought and post-Darwinian science was clear in his argument in Social Statics. Spencer began his argument with the premise “that a complete knowledge of the unit, man, is but a first step to the comprehension of the mass, society,” because “there is no way of coming to a true theory of society but by inquiring into the nature of its component individuals.”131 His focus remained on individuals throughout his work in every consideration of cause and effect in social interactions. When he spoke of “greatest happiness,” he rejected the Benthamite idea that it should be measured as the greatest happiness for the greatest number by substituting instead the greatest happiness for every individual. In the first section, “The Doctrine of Expediency,” of the “Introduction,” he rejected the notion of the greatest happiness, or greatest good, to the greatest number as unworkable because it was impossible for any one person to arrive at a fair assessment of so broad a value (3-16). The remainder of the book sought to explain how each individual could gain his greatest happiness from a process of personal development over generations, which was both producer and product of social development. The key to that development, and the measure of its extent, was the freedom of an individual “to exercise his faculties,” both physical and intellectual (69- 72). This basic truth of human behavior “necessarily presupposes freedom of action,” so individual free will was absolutely necessary to Spencer’s argument (68). The development of individual and social natures allowing greater exercise of personal liberty was the mark of human progress, which was a product of the necessary process of universal progress. In looking at the past, both of humankind and of the earth, he said that “we find this same ever-beginning, never-ceasing change” (31). Knowledgeable people could not see this change as random, because “accumulated evidence is gradually generating the conviction that events are not at bottom fortuitous, but that they are wrought out in a certain inevitable way by unchanging forces” (39). Further, he wrote, “progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a

131. Spencer, Social Statics, 13, 17. Hereafter cited in text.

71 necessity”(60). These “unchanging forces” work according to universal law “and that in virtue of that law [change] must continue until the state we call perfection is reached” (59). The perfect state, at least in terms of social relations, was one in which “each man may perfectly fulfill his own nature” (63). In fact, chapter four, “Derivation of a First Principle,” was devoted to proving the necessity and limits of individual liberty. This may have seemed contradictory, but to Spencer’s mind, the only just and effective restraint on an individual’s liberty was that individual’s moral conscience. The first principle he identified and developed in chapter six, following the two derivations of the proceeding chapters, was the “law of equal freedom” (95-96). Faith in personal liberty and a progressively changing universe -- physical, social, moral, and intellectual -- were at the core of Spencer’s liberalism. His conclusions were democratic to the point of , though with some important individual self-constraints. Spencer devoted his nineteenth chapter to explaining “The Right to Ignore the State,” which opened with the following assertion: “As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he will, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state--to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support” (185). He recognized that such an act would lead to anarchy in insufficiently developed societies (193). It would not become a problem, though, because “in the majority of men, there is such a love of tried arrangements and so great a dread of experiments that they will probably not act upon this right until long after it is safe to do so” (194). Bearing the law of equal freedom in mind, he went on to argue in the following chapter that “a purely democratic government is the only one which is morally admissible--is the only one that is not intrinsically criminal” (195). In line with his liberal assumptions regarding individual liberty, Spencer also believed that everyone had equal natural rights that must be considered in any assessment of social progress. The fifth chapter of the book, “Secondary Derivation of a First Principle,” was an extended defense of the equality of natural law. He argued that, “in all ages . . . men perpetually exhibit a tendency to assert the equality of human rights” (84). The advance of social equality, as would be expected from his view of personal liberty, was social progress (85). Spencer further demonstrated his liberalism by rejecting those who argued that rights exist only within legal,

72 social, and political structures, whom he believed delude themselves because they, too, inadvertently gave voice to their fundamental belief in the existence of natural rights. (He specifically identified Bentham, though he easily could have cited Edmund Burke as well [86- 87]). To this end he continued the attack begun in The Proper Sphere of Government against the conservatism of mindless adherence to custom, classical education, and of government-directed education. Of particular interest with regard to the Brooklyn Ethical Association later in the century, were three points that Spencer clarified and amplified considerably: the land question, charity, and opposition to war and government-led colonization. The first consideration caused problems for Spencer because he continued to change his position on the question throughout his life, though he always denied any inconsistency, and it eventually led to a minor but interesting near- controversy with in 1893. The latter two points, regarding charity and colonization, were interesting because they belie some of the common assumptions made about Spencer and his followers because of their association with Social Darwinism. The Land Question. In his 1843 pamphlet, Spencer had accepted the right of individuals to subsistence from the soil as a general right, but he qualified it in terms of individual labor; he went to great pains in his first book to clarify the relationship between land, individuals, and the state. His conclusion was that private ownership of land was contrary to the law of equal freedom and justice under all conditions (103-113). Not only was the private ownership of land unjust theoretically, but historically, possession of the soil was the product of “violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, [and] the claims of superior cunning” (104). A sample of his argument will demonstrate his logic and his approach to problems of society in 1850: “Whether it may be expedient to admit claims of a certain standing is not the point. We have here nothing to do with considerations of conventional privilege or legislative convenience. We have simply to inquire what is the verdict given by pure equity in the matter. And this verdict enjoins a protest against every existing pretension to the individual possession of the soil, and dictates the assertion that the right of mankind at large to the earth’s surface is still valid, all deeds, customs, and laws notwithstanding” (105). He rejected any compromise on this point or, for that matter, on any of his points, because “ethical truth is as exact and peremptory as physical truth” (109). He further supported his argument with the right of eminent domain with which he became familiar with while

73 working on the railroads. Ignoring the seeming contradiction with his position on the role of government, he argued that as the government represented the people, and the government could take possession of land for the public good, so must the people as a whole have legitimate claim to all land (110-111). The solution, therefore, was to compensate current landowners and then for the state to charge rents in the name of the people in a sort of joint-stock company. He recognized that fairly compensating current landowners would be difficult, “but with this perplexity and our extrication from it, abstract morality has no concern” (112). Obviously, the strict adherence to principles, once established and regardless of seeming contradictions with other principles, remained a part of Spencer’s style in 1850. It was not surprising that Spencer tried to distance himself from this notion of land nationalization. It did not fit with his developing notions regarding society and government, though it always squared with his notion of justice. Even in Social Statics, it appeared out of place; it was an awkward remnant of his anti-aristocratic upbringing that required some significant refinement before it could fit smoothly into his developing philosophy. Spencer tried to smooth over this glaring contradiction in his theory later by recasting it in terms of absolute and relative ethics and thus putting off land nationalization to the indefinite future. The clarification he offered did not prevent this from becoming a point of contention later, when he was condemned by Henry George, a leading advocate for the single-tax that he hoped would eventually lead to land nationalization, for assailing Spencer in his scathing 1892 book, A Perplexed Philosopher. Charity. Because of his association with Social Darwinism, critics of Spencer often assumed wrongly that he was opposed to charity or any other action that might interfere with the survival of the fittest. On the contrary, as was clear throughout his writings, including both The Proper Sphere of Government and Social Statics, Spencer believed private charity was the only way to help people beset by bad luck. Such charity both obeyed the law of equal freedom and improved the character of the giver. For example, he greatly favored the ethic of charity in modern Christianity over the bloodier Christianity of the Crusades: “We translate this same religion into peace, into philanthropic effort of all kinds, into missionary enterprise, into advocacy of temperance, into about ‘labor and the poor?’” (34). Unlike state aid, private charity was an act of sympathy that improved the donor and was most efficient because it would only be given to people who were deemed worthy by their peers. As Bannister noted in

74 rejecting Spencer’s views on charity and state aid as evidence of his Social Darwinism, this position allowed free range for the growth of human sympathy and altruism, which was more important to social progress and stability, as well as individual wellbeing.132 In this way justice, human improvement, and Christian ethics were all served. This view of charity, according to Richards, harkened back to the phrenologist Combe’s “principle that natural laws . . . must be obeyed for man’s happiness.”133 For Francis, it also comported with Spencer’s view that while “government” was essentially an evil when it move beyond the protection of individual , “society” was a good to the extent that it improved the lives of everyone, both to those giving and to those receiving aid without coercion.134 Opposition to War and Colonization. Still present in the longer work, as it would remain throughout his works, was a flat rejection of aggressive war and government colonization. He equated war with inequality within societies and described it as a violation of the first rule of morality.135 As he put it: “The doings of the battlefield merely exhibit in a concentrated form that immorality which is inherent in government and attaches to all its functions. What is so manifest in its military acts is true of its civil acts, that it uses wrong to put down wrong” (242). Spencer’s position was not one of non-resistance, but only of non- aggression, because non-resistance would allow less moral and more violent people to take away the rights of more moral people (244-245). There should be no surprise that such a position on warfare would resonate in the United States where militarism was consistently justified as defensive and as a last resort to protect American freedoms. Spencer did not fully develop his ideas on war and militarism until later works, but in Social Statics he provided an entire chapter arguing against “government colonization” as detrimental to societies on both sides of the relationship. Colonization overburdened the citizens of the mother country economically through taxes that violated their right to equal freedom by forcing them to pay for something that neither extended nor secured their individual rights (319- 320). It violated the equal freedom of individuals in the colony who were governed without their consent or participation (320-321). He found that “all colonizing expeditions down to those of

132. Bannister, 40. 133. Richards, Theories of Mind, 254. 134. Francis, “Spencer and the Myth of Laissez Faire,” 326. 135. Spencer, Social Statics, 144-145. Hereafter cited in text.

75 our own day . . . have borne a very repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers,” which clearly violated any sense of equal freedom (321). He believed that because it was dawning on people that “territorial aggression is as impolitic as it is unjust,” it would soon be destroyed by public and political opposition (322). He cited America and the Declaration of Independence as evidence of the wrongs of government colonization (325). Combined with his ideas regarding war, it is clear that Spencer rejected imperialism out of hand. Spencer argued that there was no need for government colonization anyway, because natural colonization worked more effectively and justly. Natural colonization was, essentially, the colonization of areas by individuals who pursued economic goals. Here, again, Spencer cited an American example, the same one he cited in “The Proper Sphere of Government:” “to William Penn belongs the honor of having shown men that the kindness, justice, and truth of its inhabitants are better safeguards to a colony than troops and fortifications and the bravery of governors. In all points Pennsylvania illustrates the equitable, as contrasted with the inequitable, mode of colonizing” (330). He also left space for the kind of colonization practiced by the United States under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, though he did not mention it by name. He said, “in one way, however, legislative union between a parent state and its colonies may be maintained without breach of the law [of equal freedom]; namely, by making them integral parts of one empire, severally represented in a united assembly commissioned to govern the whole” (320). The distinction he drew was essentially one between “militant” and “industrial” societies, which “was already commonplace among . . . provincial radicals” in the 1840s.136 It was a distinction that became the centerpiece of his work on social evolution in the Synthetic Philosophy. Though he did condemn recent “American annexations” alongside other mid-nineteenth century European colonial ventures, his work present a position that might be very attractive to Americans, particularly those opposed to such imperialistic moves.137 Nothing in his early writings made it appear that he was pandering to an American audience, or that he even considered that he might have such an audience at some time in the future. Instead, his use of American examples reflected a common set of beliefs that he drew from his radical background and was shared by the United States whose institutions and laws were based on a very similar

136. Peel, 76. 137. Spencer, Social Statics, 321.

76 intellectual heritage. Again, as Spencer worked to synthesize the ideas of his time and to reconcile the tensions he felt in his political world, he was working to resolve tensions that Americans would come to feel acutely for themselves in the latter decades of the century. Spencer’s Reconciliation of Liberalism and Conservatism. Although Spencer was decidedly liberal, there is a consistent conservative undertone in his works, particularly in Social Statics. A consecutive reading of Social Statics and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France present to the reader a clear distinction between conservative assumptions about society, social organization, human nature, and the value of history and the liberal assumptions apparent in Spencer’s work. Unexpectedly, however, it also reveals some strikingly similar principles that were held by both the eighteenth century politician and the nineteenth century philosopher.138 Such a reading highlights the importance of Spencer’s proto- evolutionism to the reconciliation of the strains of liberalism and conservatism he carried in his mind. This similarity holds more than just a passing interest for anyone who wishes to understand Spencer’s American popularity. As argued above, Spencer’s thought was closely tied to late eighteenth century thought, the period in which the documents of the were produced, and when Burke wrote his assessment of the revolution in France. Because Spencer’s project provided an intellectual bridge between these philosophical assumptions using the passion for science in his own age, it is not surprising that common threads should be apparent, and that his ideas should have special resonance in the United States. Spencer felt uneasy about the potential gulf that lay between the rational products of his liberal ideas and the reality of the world around him. The sensation must have been one of apprehension rather than comprehension on the part of Spencer, because he never specifically identified such a gap and certainly would not have claimed to be a defender of Burke or any other of that sort of conservative. But, rather than simply calling for the radical overthrow of the existing order and all of its structures that stood against the laws of nature though perfect justice

138. Hofstadter briefly compared and contrasted the views of William Graham Sumner and Edmund Burke in Social Darwinism in American Thought, page 8, in order to show the similarities between Social Darwinism and traditional conservatism. The treatment was light and did not refer directly to Spencer, however, and it is here that I believe that a more important comparison can be made.

77 may have called for it, he exhibited the very spirit of conservatism that Burke had claimed for all worthy Englishmen sixty years earlier. Spencer’s limited formal education, particularly at a university, probably contributed to his choice to bridge the gulf rather than simply to choose one side or the other as correct. Had he been steeped in classical education, he might have followed Burke’s lead in accepting things as he found them to be the products of history, and, as such, to be essential to stability, liberty, and happiness. Had he, on the other hand, been a trained philosopher and logician, he might have simply disregarded established structures as fundamentally flawed and in need of immediate reform. Since he pursued his own education and drew inspiration from his environment, he continued to be heavily influenced by his family’s strong religious views and an inherent love of order, while at the same time seeking grand unifying principles that he could substitute for a detailed and painfully acquired knowledge of history and institutions. In a mind as eager, powerful, and synthesizing as Spencer’s, such a conflict could not exist. The idea of the “moral sense,” and Spencer’s proto-evolutionism were essential elements of his reconciliation of traditional conservatism, as represented by Burke, and optimistic liberalism of the dissenting and non-conformist traditions of his own upbringing. The Moral Sense. In The Proper Sphere of Government, Spencer only hinted at that part of human nature that made society possible; in Social Statics, he made it clear that the foundation of human society was the “Moral Sense” and the ethical development that arose from it. Spencer’s idea of moral sense or sympathy, as he often termed it, both in its existence and importance, came from his personal background and his reading. Richards argued that “Spencer’s explanation of sympathy generally followed the account in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he had read in preparation for reanalysis of certain phrenological hypotheses.”139 Peel notes that Spencer’s explanation of moral sense followed a typical pattern of logic for the philosopher. He began with conclusions, nominally derived from first principles but seen more rightly as “the moral residue of evangelicalism” in his upbringing.140 Spencer would then “show how the conclusion is supported by empirical .”141 This logical pattern came

139. Richards, Theories of Mind, 259. 140. Peel, 85. 141. Ibid., 89.

78 from his intellectual background. He followed “a long line of political moralists who grounded their prescriptions ultimately in a divinely implanted moral sense.”142 The members of that line are telling: Priestly, Godwin, and Hodgskin. Peel also neatly contrasted Spencer’s heritage with “a parallel tradition running from Hobbes through Hume to Bentham, which grounded public morality on force, self-interest, or mutual need.”143 (Peel did not trace the divergence of the parallel traditions as an explanatory device, but the implications were clear.) In the absence of such self-conscious and irrevocable restraint, society would collapse, thus progress could not be assumed to be inevitable. Though it made room for improvement and was far more hopeful about human potential, it was a more pessimistic view of the world. History and individual reason seemed to be the only brakes on social retrogression. Spencer, on the other hand, drew from a tradition that depended on a natural progressive tendency in the universe that created its own obstacles to retrogression in the form of a constantly-improving moral sense. Interestingly, the historian Mark Francis used Spencer’s reliance on the moral sense to demonstrate that he was not, in fact, a supporter of laissez-faire; rather, Francis “places him in the realm of natural harmony theorists who are basically anti-individualist in that they replace the individual’s reason with an intuition or faculty which revolves around a group ethic.”144 Not only did Francis make an interesting and compelling argument regarding Spencer and laissez-faire, but he hit upon an important point of confusion regarding Spencer’s thought. Spencer’s individualism, as noted above, was not hedonistic and chaotic, but restrained in a most Victorian sort of way. By constraining individual actions by an innate moral sense, he provided a mechanism for smooth social functioning without active state control. It was, in essence, a compromise between liberalism and conservatism, which caused confusion among both contemporary and later commentators. The confusion became worse as such “evolutionary ethics, which thus began their career as the instruments of ‘the party of humanity’, of liberals, pacifists and Dissenters, came to be used, in the 1880s, in support of imperialist ‘might is right’ policies of the kind which Social Statics is particularly directed against.”145 That is to say,

142. Ibid., 83. 143. Ibid. 144. Francis, “Spencer and the Myth of Laissez-Faire,” 326. 145. Peel, Herbert Spencer, 100.

79 opponents of imperialism and might-is-right philosophy failed to distinguish between Spencer and later writers who used rhetoric similar to Spencer’s despite the fact that Spencer was vehemently opposed to such ideas throughout his life. The second section of his introduction in Social Statics, “The Doctrine of the Moral Sense,” defined this sense, explained how it affected human behavior, and how it developed over time. Compelled by their natural desire for society and by increasing population human beings congregated into larger and larger organizations. Within these rising societies order existed only because there was “a certain in mankind for ruling, and being ruled.”146 More specifically, “the moral law of society . . . originates in some attribute of the human being” (18). The moral law acted upon human beings in the same way and toward the same objectives as other natural laws. Individuals fed themselves and cared for their offspring in accordance with “some prompter called a desire; and the more essential the action, the more powerful is the impulse to its performance, and the more intense the gratification derived therefrom” (19). This natural guide was far more effective and wiser than would be the arrangement of the utilitarian philosophy by which people would eat, rear children, and interact socially according to “some reasoned code of rules” (19). The duty of Moral Sense, then, “is to dictate rectitude in our transactions with each other, which receives gratification from honest and fair dealing, and which gives birth to the sentiment of justice” (20). Neither the moral sense nor reason had the upper hand in humanity, though. Spencer argued that reason alone could not be used to guide men’s actions, but neither could the Moral Sense “supply the place of logic.” Instead, reason must be used to work out the best way to act in accordance with the feeling of rightness and wrongness of actions supplied by the Moral Sense. “While the decisions of the moral sense upon . . . complex cases . . . are inaccurate and often contradictory, it may still be capable of generating a true fundamental intuition, which can be logically unfolded into a scientific morality” (30). The moral sense was essential to Spencer’s identification of social “statics” and to his explanation of social development. Proto-Evolutionism. Like any philosopher who wanted to explain human society, Spencer had to face the fact that over time societies and standards of behavior and justice had changed. Where the ancients may have seen cycles, the church saw the hand of God, and Enlightenment philosophers saw either reason or chaos, Spencer saw something a little different,

146. Spencer, Social Statics, 17. Hereafter cited in text.

80 but with bits of all of these other views. He saw historical as the working out of a divine plan through the orderly, but not perfectly regular, influence of natural laws on individuals. Spencer did not use the term evolution and he did not articulate evolution, per se, but all the elements of evolutionism were present in Social Statics: inevitability of change, the influence of environment on behavior, individual adaptation, inheritance of parental characteristics, fitness to social conditions, natural penalties imposed for being unfitted to conditions, differentiation of races based on levels of civilization, and the existence of the “Social Organism.” He presented these first principles in the introduction before he built an argument based on them; it was the same organizing method he would later use in the Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer incorporated ideas he encountered in the works of Lamarck and Lyell as he groped for an understanding of and explanation for a changing universe. These were ideas that did not require him to forego his belief in an essential universal order and divine plan. He said: “It is a trite enough remark that change is the law of all things: true equally of a single object and of the universe. Nature in its infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development” (31). He traced the change of the earth’s surface through the geological ages and spoke of the birth, life, and death of stars in an infinite universe before turning to a consideration of mankind. “Strange indeed,” he wrote, “would it be if in the midst of this universal mutation, man alone were constant, unchangeable. But it is not so. He also obeys the law of indefinite variation. His circumstances are ever altering, and he is ever adapting himself to them” (32). Faith in universal progress combined with deep ethnocentrism led to his belief that “between the naked houseless savage and the Shakespeares and Newtons of a civilized state lie unnumbered degrees of difference.” Further, in writing, “the contrasts of races in form, color, and feature are not greater than the contrasts in their moral and intellectual qualities. . . [and] mankind varies indefinitely, in instincts, in morals, in opinions, in tastes, in rationality, in everything,” Spencer believed progress was marked upon the physical and moral character of peoples (32-33). He supported this moral superiority of modern white races by comparing modern European beliefs and customs to past European customs and to foreign customs, both historical and contemporary. Unwilling to leave anything in nature up to chance, Spencer argued that human moral character, on which social development depended, must develop and adapt over time according

81 to natural laws as real and as unyielding as any physical law. He argued that “in the moral as in the material world, accumulated evidence is gradually generating the conviction that events are not at bottom fortuitous, but that they are wrought out in a certain inevitable way by unchanging forces” (39). All of the “secondary laws” that and philosophies recognized either explicitly or tacitly when directing human behavior toward good and away from evil, must be based on primary law. Thus, “there is no alternative either society has laws or it has not.” Spencer believed that without such a law there could “be no order, no certainty, no system,” but since order is apparent, then a law, “sure, inflexible, ever active, and having no exceptions,” must exist (40). Here, then, was Spencer’s great innovation, the one that was to make his philosophy wildly appealing to many nineteenth century people in search of understanding and order beyond religious orthodoxy. Here, too, was the fatal germ that eventually killed his philosophy when the idea of a universal moral law was rejected by the proponents of a more chaotic and relativistic liberalism ascendant at the fin d’ siecle. Spencer accepted a sixth human sense, the moral sense, and placed it in the same relation to the universal moral law as the five better known senses were to the laws of the physical universe. In like manner, obedience to the laws, both moral and physical, produced positive results, which led people to adapt their behaviors to meet the laws’ demands. Such adaptation, in turn, led to greater fitness to contemporary conditions, and thus to greater happiness. With the advantage of hindsight, evolutionism was clearly present in the book. In the mind of anyone living in a world before the Origin of Species and Spencer’s explicitly evolutionary works, however, it was far from obvious. Spencer and Burke. The term ‘conservative’ is often used now, as it has been since the late eighteenth century, as an epithet for those who mindlessly defend the status quo, stand in the way of necessary progress, and defend the privileges of social or economic elites. Although this has often been the effect of conservatives’ actions, it is overly simplistic to define them thus and to ignore their core ideas and beliefs. Therefore, the argument that Spencer held conservative principles is not an effort to condemn him, as is done by those who paint him as an apologist for the robber barons and imperialists, or as the father of Social Darwinism. Instead it is intended to highlight an important strain of his thought that led to his unique view of evolutionism and to point out why his philosophy was appealing to people grappling with the dramatic economic, social, and intellectual changes of the nineteenth century.

82 Conservatism, of course, has been around since at least the beginning of human society, but it was not until the challenge of liberalism embodied by the French Revolution that it began to be clearly articulated. Intellectual historians generally agree that Edmund Burke’s scathing indictment of the excesses of the French revolutionaries in his letter to a Frenchman titled, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, is among the opening passage of that articulation.147 Burke’s work is not blind opposition to change, defense of monarchy and privilege, and sanctification of the status quo. Rather, it is a defense of order, regulated liberty, moderated change, and inherited organization and mores that he believed were the foundation of a stable and prosperous British society. Burke did not recognize the supremacy of natural laws, which is almost impossible for our generation of readers steeped in such a faith to understand. He did not deny the existence of such laws, of course, but rather than looking to them to provide definition and meaning to the world and to human society, he looked to history and the inheritance of contemporary society from past society (148, 195-197). The fact that he spoke very little about such laws is but one indication of their marginal importance to him compared to established order, which is the product of historical interactions. When he did speak of them it was usually with derision under the head of what he called “metaphysical abstraction,” “metaphysic sophistry,” or some such name (148, 161). Another indication is his rejection of “the rights of man,” which the French revolutionaries (and their British sympathizers) took as their battle cry and as the natural law justifying their complete destruction and rebuilding of the social order in France (171, 195-199, 202, 275, 353). To such a mind as Burke’s, the revolutionaries’ claims were dangerous beyond all reckoning, because they had no substance and contained only the seeds of chaos and not order. Burke saw human beings as unequal in all but access to morality (176). He thought it obscene and dangerous to lead people to believe that they were all the same, or could all become the same. Inequality in humanity was as natural as it was in the rest of nature (187). For

147. Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France in a Letter intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris,” in Edmund Burke, On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord, edited by Charles W. Eliot, Harvard Classics, v. 24, (New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1909), 141-378. Hereafter cited in text.

83 philosophes to confound moral equality with real equality was as ridiculous a thing to do as for a farmer to equalize all farm livestock as “animals” and to then treat them identically regardless of their need for shelter, grooming, and fodder (317). Such misguided efforts would only lead to disorder as the hopes of less capable people were inevitably frustrated, and the leadership of society’s upper ranks was undermined and corrupted by the demands for equality coming from lower ranks (175-176, 186-187). Society, he believed, functioned as well as it did because each person took up his place in the order, did the work for which he was best suited, and built a love of country up from his love of family, friends, associates, and class (174, 185). He was thus an apologist for classism, but he did not support caste. He believed that those people with exceptional abilities would naturally rise in society, and that this process of social vetting would ensure that the best men became the leaders of government (188). Inheritance, he believed, played a crucial role in social order, stability, and progress. He made limited use of biological analogy in his letter, but he did not think of inheritance in modern biological terms, which were a product of the that was still only nascent during his life. Instead, it was like an inheritance within a family, a kind of property inheritance. It was an inheritance of civil and social manners, liberty, civil rights, property, and social structures. As he put it: “We . . . wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original plant”(170, emphasis in the original). Inheritance was important because it tied the present to the past and to the future in a single timeless whole (172- 173, 232-233). It was the chain that bound and defined a nation. It was the process by which effective habits and institutions survived the deaths of individual citizens and ensured the fruits of civilization to each newborn generation. Instead of having to recreate itself anew in every generation, society provided stable guiding structures in the form of habits of social interaction, trade, business, familial and extra-familial sociability, and governing structures to guide men’s secular and religious development. Burke combined these conservative principles under the overarching idea of “constitution.” It was not a constitution in the American sense of a written document acting as the basis for legal and governmental decisions. Burke, rather, spoke of the term in its British sense, that is, as a body of legal, social, and intellectual traditions and precedents that guided

84 current behavior. His sense of the word also included the now archaic idea of a body’s constitution, that is, its health and vitality. Burke did not explicitly make the biological analogy of a social organism in his letter, but the idea underlay his argument and was clearly reflected in his analogies (170). It was also clear that he believed his views to be perfectly in keeping with the natural order of the universe (172- 173). His biological analogy was cyclical; it held that “the method of nature” was “in a condition of unchangeable constancy, [and] moves on through a varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression” (172). Liberty, a well-regulated liberty, and civil rights were the inheritance of all Englishmen. Burke said, “I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman,” though he saw it as the product of history and inheritance rather than natural laws (147). This foundation, he believed, gave to liberty greater meaning and stability than metaphysical arguments about rights because it was defended by the weight of history, tradition, laws, and institutions (171-172). He also believed it was superior to the rights-of-man argument because it included a tradition of regulation not possible according to absolute laws of nature. He believed that unregulated liberty was chaotic and anarchic, and that only if liberty were well regulated could it be beneficial and allow the existence of civil society (173). Such a regulated liberty was the growth of ages that could not be torn down overnight by either those who sought to extinguish liberty or by those who sought to extend it boundlessly. Regulated English liberty, thus, allowed men an appropriate range of action for their abilities that kept them from treading upon the liberty of others and from destroying the institutions upon which all Englishmen depended for the maintenance of their liberty. The logic may appear circular, but that is the point. Liberty, like all other ideas embodied in society, was both product and producer of society, bound up in it by an historical process that encompassed the whole of social development. It was illogical from this perspective to try to render individual ideas from the social whole and to study them in isolation. More than illogical, it was dangerous because such a study ignored the process by which such an idea came into existence and embodiment in the first place. Inheritance of property was as important to social stability as the inheritance of rights and liberty, for property was the foundation of social prosperity. The hereditary transfer of property, according to Burke, “is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to

85 [property], and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself” (189). Because property “is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic,” it should continue to be held according to law and custom (190). Property, particularly large masses of property, benefited society by allowing the existence of a class of men who could be virtuous because they did not want, who could be benevolent with their wealth, and who provided a natural body of leaders who protected the property of others. Burke believed that in the case of property, as in cases generally, inheritance gave a sense of gravity and dignity, “which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction” (173). Besides, history showed that property rightly governed nations, so it would be foolish to simply ignore the evidence of history and the direction of tradition (189-191). Burke extended inheritance to cover the succession of the throne, as well. This foundation for the hereditary right of the monarchy rejected the notion of the divine right of kings, but was perfectly consistent with his principles of inheritance. In his view, the monarchy was the product of the history of England, and thus the crown owed its existence to that history and not to some absolute mandate of God. To his mind, such a claim would be little different from the atheistic claims based on natural law. In this way, too, he held that the king’s position rested on the same foundations as the people’s liberty, and thus it precluded the king from usurping that liberty at his whim. Such a monarchy, bound by tradition and expectations, provided necessary leadership and stability that could not be expected from something so unpredictable and unstable as pure democracy (165-166). Inheritance of the crown also clearly separated the monarchy from the claims that the ruler served at the people’s will. In looking back to the Revolution of 1688, when Charles II was replaced on the throne by William and Mary, and on which those who claimed the monarch to be subject to popular vote, Burke saw instead a specific rejection of such democratic principles. The leaders of the revolution, he believed from his study of history, acted under extraordinary circumstances to reestablish the order that Charles threatened with his apparent return to Catholicism. Had the revolutionaries intended to subject the crown to democracy, Burke reasoned, they would have done so at that time. However, they chose to simply replace one monarch who was corrupting the government and the nation with another monarch who would not do so (169-170).

86 Burke did not reject the notion of revolution out of hand, as one might expect. He did say, however, that “a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good” (170). He restricted its just role, as with any act of arms, to the correction of a government that “must be abused and deranged indeed” (169). Even in such times, though, to be just and truly effective, the revolution must be led by men of quality who sought to revive the ancient order corrupted by the government (156, 170, 179-181). He did not accept “the very idea of the fabrication of a new government [, which] is enough to fill us with disgust and horror” (170). In this way Burke was able to accept the American Revolution as just while rejecting the French Revolution as excessive and misguided. Progress, a term not normally associated with conservatism, was a part of Burke’s worldview as well. It was not a powerful and directing principle, but rather a product of the slow, orderly, well-sustained development of society (302). As he put it, “a State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (161). As he believed was the process in nature, cited above, the correction of immediate problems in order to maintain those good and ancient elements of society was part of the process of “decay, fall, renovation, and progression.” Progress should not be confused with “innovation,” for “innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views” (172). Instead, “inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without excluding a principle of improvement” (172). This moderate and sensible progress was marked and “confirmed by the solid test of long experience, and an increasing public strength and national prosperity” (196). He showed the philosophical limits of progress when he bragged of Englishmen that “we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born” (222). Burke believed in the perfectibility of society but only in a vague and temporary sense. He told his would-be French correspondent that “your constitution was suspended before it was perfected” (174). In contrast to the French system, the British “political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world” (172). He seemed to hold that the English constitution was perfect, but because he also believed it could change, his concept of perfection as contingent was very different from the absolute perfection seen in liberal philosophy.

87 Burke accepted the idea of but only to demonstrate that it was not a contract of the everyday sort. Instead, he argued that “as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (232). In making this argument he revealed his vague notion of social perfectibility in some unspecified form at some distant future date. It, presumably, was to be the perfect embodiment of the principles of government and social order that were already apparent, but it was not a clearly defined goal and, therefore, was not an object to motivate current decisions. He believed that progress should be slow and “well-sustained,” and it should be the product of “that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at” (302). Throughout his letter the state was clearly superior to all individuals; it was more than the sum of its parts. In his view, meaning and power descend from the state down through the population, rather than up from individuals to the state as a whole (161). “We are afraid to put man to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages” (223). Clearly there was much in Burke’s and Spencer’s thought that would have led to an unpleasant carriage ride were such an event possible in spite of time and . Burke supported the established church (238-243). He opposed dissenters, reserving space in his letter to attack Dr. Richard Price specifically for calling on dissenters and non-conformists to form their own churches (152). He rejected democracy as the foundation of English society, though he accepted the role of the House of Commons as essential to England’s government and success (152-153). He defended the traditional educational systems and foundations of England that were at base ecclesiastical and classical (235-237). One of the sharpest points of contention between the two would be the relevance of natural rights. Burke accepted their existence, but held that “in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false,” because they cannot be perfectly enacted (199). He believed, therefore, that natural rights were essentially irrelevant to human institutions. In fact, to pursue these rights would inevitably lead to social disorder as men sought to enjoy the perfect liberty they promised.

88 Spencer, of course, good liberal that he was, could not envision a world without natural rights. He could not accept, as Burke argued, that rights existed only as they were embodied in social structures and maintained by the social inheritance of which he spoke. For Spencer they were a part of God’s creation, and thus to deny them was to run against God’s will and plan. It is interesting to note at this point, that by placing rights as absolute and inextricable parts of a universal order created by God and granted to man as part of the creation, Spencer basically was recreating Burke’s argument. By removing the seat of rights from the mundane to the spiritual world, he was simply working with ultimate causes demanded by the logic of liberalism, which required a uniform and immutable foundation of the physical and psychical universe. Even as an agnostic, Spencer needed to fit liberal first principles into his Christian worldview, which was an inextricable part of his intellectual background. Interestingly, both men thought that a purely metaphysical consideration of natural rights was dangerous. Burke thought such endeavors irrelevant because they ignored history. Spencer disagreed with a purely metaphysical approach because it did not take into account the plasticity of man, and it failed to consider the dominant law of universal change and progress. For Spencer, this kind of metaphysics was dangerous because it led to revolutions, which were unsustainable because the revolutionaries overreached their own moral development. After a few--probably vocal--hours the two might have come to realize that they shared a number of common beliefs. Spencer’s philosophy, in fact, bridged the gap between Burke’s conservative disregard of natural rights and the excesses of the metaphysic sophists of the French Revolution by turning to proto-evolutionism. Perfect rights could not exist in the contemporary world, he would agree with Burke, but only because man’s nature was not yet perfect. When man’s nature was perfected, that is, when his moral sense was perfectly tuned to the law of equal freedom, then natural rights would be adhered to naturally and unconsciously by everyone. This result of universal progress would obviate the need for violent and unsustainable revolution, justify the status quo as a temporary necessity, and save natural rights from Burke’s argument that they could not be perfectly enacted. Thus, the law of universal progress, the basis of Spencer’s proto- evolutionism, must overcome any temporary obstructions to the enactment of God’s will on earth. Burke and Spencer would have agreed on the natural inequality of men’s abilities and in the dangers associated with misguided efforts to level society. For Burke it was a matter of

89 history. History taught Burke that had always existed and that in all societies there were those who led and those who followed. Since it was a natural part of society, and since it added to the stability and order of society, it was a good and permanent thing. Spencer, on the other hand, saw the inequality in terms of unequal development. Since there was a range of human social development around the world, and because the nature of progress was such that advance up the spectrum took time, it was only natural that there be differences between individuals. Unlike Burke, however, he did not accept this state of affairs as good or permanent but rather as an indication of the incomplete development of individuals and societies. Though both agreed that inheritance was important, their different notions of inheritance led to different conclusions. The difference lay in the location of inheritance: for Burke it was an external process, as a gift given to an heir, both actually and symbolically. For Spencer it was an internal process by which individuals inherited the moral character of their parents. The distinction was a product of the changes brought on by science. Where Burke’s ideas of inheritance were complete when he wrote in 1790, however, Spencer’s were still not fully formed when he finished Social Statics in 1850. The difference also marks an important distinction between conservative and liberal thought. Because conservative philosophy held that social structures were prior to and superior to individuals, the order was handed down to them. Whereas liberal philosophy held that the foundations of all social forms arose from characteristics in individuals, therefore personal, even internal, inheritance was all important to the maintenance of society. Considering the importance of inheritance, it is not surprising that both men used biological analogies to support their arguments. Particularly interesting were their different views on the nature of organisms. Burke believed nature to be cyclical and essentially unchanging. Spencer, quite to the contrary, saw nature as plastic and progressive. Thus Burke’s social organism continued through its life cycle with only superficial changes, while Spencer’s slowly progressed through a process of adaptation until it inevitably achieved its perfect form. Both Burke and Spencer believed in the need for a regulated liberty, but the means by which liberty was best regulated varied. Burke depended, as history demonstrated he should, on the habits, social mores, and institutions of society, as enforced through government and the expectations of peers to properly regulate men’s liberty. Spencer accepted these mechanisms as

90 valuable in contemporary society; he even accepted the combination of aristocracy and democracy that ruled during his lifetime, but he thought they were imperfect. The only effective means of regulating individual liberty must arise in the individual. He found a thoroughly developed moral sense to be the best guide to proper conduct, and thus the best regulator of liberty. Because that sense developed over time to perfection, the need for government would slowly disappear until it was no longer needed at all. Spencer thus shared many of Burke’s conservative beliefs, at least as regarded the superiority of British society and the necessity of the social norms and forms he found extant during his life. He also wholly accepted the fundamental beliefs of the ascendant liberalism that pervaded much of the English middle class in the nineteenth century, and that was an important element of the dissenting and non-conformist religious tradition in which he was raised. His reconciliation of these two apparent extremes through the use of the twin ideas of moral sense and the law of universal progress were apparent in Social Statics. Since he had not yet articulated a specifically evolutionary framework for his philosophy, his argument must be viewed as proto- evolutionary, but all the elements of evolutionism were there. By the time he put forth his Program for a System of Philosophy in 1860, the elements had coalesced into a complete philosophy of evolution that would take the world by storm. His reconciliation of conservatism and liberalism would also provide many people, particularly Americans in the case of this essay, with a powerful means of reconciling themselves to their own changing intellectual environment.

91

CHAPTER 3: SPENCERS EVOLUTIONISM AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY

Introduction Social Statics was a turning point in Herbert Spencer’s life. It was fairly well received and more often reviewed than the later books of the Synthetic Philosophy, and it gave him notoriety as an intellectual and a philosopher. It also convinced him that he not only could make a living writing, but that he had something of real value to share. Thus, at the age of thirty he had found his calling. Between 1851 and 1855 he refined his proto-evolutionary ideas into a complete, if not yet fully elaborated evolutionism.1 In his Principles of Psychology (1855), the idea of evolution was specifically developed, but Spencer had not yet extended it to be coextensive with the entire cosmos. That latter half of the decade saw him produce a series of

1. J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1971), 133, argues that “Spencer became an evolutionist in the early 1840s, [when] he combined two ideas which were at the time generally regarded in scientific circles as irreconcilable: uniformitarianism, and the theory of descent or the ‘development hypothesis.’” Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 268, argues that “by the time Spencer began Social Statics in 1848, the evolutionary hypothesis had taken firm hold.” Spencer’s contemporary, E. W. Brabrook, noted that while writing Social Statics, Spencer “did not yet recognise evolution as a process co-extensive with the cosmos, but only as a process exhibited in man and in society.” (“Herbert Spencer: Born April 27, 1820; Died December 8, 1903,” Man, 4 (1902), 10). Although all the necessary elements were present in Social Statics for an evolutionary philosophy, such a philosophy was not yet elaborated, and the process of evolution was not yet spelled out in the work. It is notoriously difficult to define when a mind first grasps a concept, and it is in general merely an academic exercise. The more important question to answer is, When does the idea make its appearance in a way that can influence others? In the case of Spencer and evolution, I believe that moment came with the publication of The Principles of Psychology, in 1855.

92 essays and articles developing evolutionism into a universal law, and in 1860 he published a Prospectus for “The System of Philosophy” at the heart of which was his mature evolutionism. His life as an essayist in the 1850s also brought him into increasing social contact with leading thinkers in mid-nineteenth century Britain and thus created the connections that would make him one of the most important thinkers of not just his generation, but of the century. In retrospect, Spencer wrote: “Naturally some social effect resulted from that measure of success-- an effect, however, which, with my habitual want of tact, I took but little advantage of.”2 In spite of this, and though he had “ever been apt, by criticisms and outspoken differences of opinion to give offence,” he managed to find a group of friends with whom he could enjoy spirited discussions without the loss of intimacy, with one notable, if short-lived exception.3 No later than 1858, Spencer had decided to write what he originally called “The System of Philosophy,” which he later renamed, and which is better known as, “The Synthetic Philosophy.” Following the logical method of Social Statics, Spencer proposed a multivolume work that would link all knowledge through a universal process of evolution. The idea of evolution, or the as it was often called at the time, was not new, but Spencer was to use it in a far broader and more comprehensive way than had heretofore been envisioned by any other writer. Spencer’s interpretation of evolution as synthetic was born of the liberal tradition he inherited from his provincial upbringing and had a broad effect in the world because of its magnitude and profundity. In early 1860, Spencer finalized a prospectus of his work and circulated it among his friends and acquaintances in the intellectual community to which his first book and the ensuing essays had introduced him. He hoped to accrue subscribers to the series in order to defray the cost of publishing the successive volumes. Once a list of over four hundred subscribers had been attained, he published the prospectus with the names of those subscribers appended in order to generate yet more interest. Over the next four decades he produced the ten volumes of The

2. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), 2 volumes, 1:422. 3. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:345. The exception referred to is the break of several years in the early 1890s with Thomas Henry Huxley, which will be discussed more fully later in the chapter.

93 Synthetic Philosophy, and thus defined the scope of evolution for many of his contemporaries and the generation that followed. Unfortunately for the longevity of his influence, but fortunately for later readers, the works embodied in a most revealing form a liberal intellectual tradition that was fast retreating before the press of Euro-American modernization.4 Because of this essential rendering of optimistic liberalism, it is worth a few moments to consider the constitution, intent, and method of The Synthetic Philosophy in its final form, as will be undertaken in the second part of this chapter. Spencer’s objective in all his works of the 1850s was not simply to give guidance for social and governmental reform, but also to speak to truth in an absolute sense. He believed that science could define and explain the world in all its material, social, intellectual, and ethical manifestations. He believed that with those definitions in mind his contemporaries, whom he still believed to be rational, could carry out effective governmental and social reforms. He believed his generalizations were particularly insightful because they allowed social conditions to be considered both at a single moment in time and in relation to ideal forms by showing them to be the products of a natural progressive process, that is, evolution. The ability of Spencer’s philosophy to relate both specific conditions and ideal forms highlighted an essential element that made it so compelling for his contemporaries and so difficult to understand for more modern readers: it gave a perceptible sense of motion to universal forms that was able to account for both statics and dynamics, stability and instability, apparent chaos and ultimate order, a visible multitude and an inescapable unity. He argued that only the universal laws themselves remained unchanged. His works increasingly incorporated this sense of motion into their logic and argument. The relative ethics he discussed in Social Statics provided the framework in which he cast the remainder of his arguments. This allowed him to address current conditions even as he identified and called for ideal social forms. In this

4. Spencer has often been treated by later historians as the summarizer of his intellectual age. More often than not these writers treat it as a weakness or even an embarrassment. For example, Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1969), 32, writes: “Although its influence far outstripped its merits, the Spencerian system serves students of the American mind as a fossil specimen from which the intellectual body of the period may be reconstructed.”

94 way he was able to be an idealist without abandoning the reality of the material world, and he could be an optimist without being a utopian. Friends, Influences, Essays, and Ideas, 1851-1860 Between 1851 and 1858 Spencer, now in his thirties, refined his ideas regarding the proper social organization and his theory of evolution. Spencer opened the second volume of his autobiography with a quick summary of the evolution of the idea of evolution in the essays he wrote through the 1850s, particularly after his abandonment of his editorship at The Economist.5 He had become increasingly anxious to leave his editorial post because he believed it was hindering his ability to write essays. But he could not afford to take such a chance financially, so he was forced to stay on until 1853, when his fortunes turned on a family tragedy. Spencer was not idle, however, in the intervening months. Though not directly relevant to his writings, Spencer’s reaction to the Great Exhibition in 1851 gave an insight into his character, humanity, and ethics that are too often left out of his story. As an editor and a journalist he had free access to the Exhibition, which was housed in the Crystal Palace at Prince’s Gate, London. Though that free admission extended to the opening ceremonies to be presided over by Queen Victoria, Spencer stayed away, “neither then nor at any time caring to be a spectator of State-ceremonies or royal pageants.”6 Over the course of the Exhibition he invited his relatives and friends from the countryside to stay with him and to allow him to be their guide through the halls. He was careful to suggest that not everyone should come at once, since they had different interests and one was liable to be bored by the tour that interested another. When the Exhibition ended, he supported preserving “the iron and glass

5. In the first volume Spencer followed a more or less chronological narrative of his life during the 1850s, which included the writing of the various essays of the decade. His summary at the beginning of the second volume served as an introduction to the development of The Synthetic Philosophy. It also reiterated his claim that his ideas of evolution preceded Darwin’s and Wallace’s presentations of their papers on natural selection. Most historians appear to turn to this summary of the process rather than the narrative provided in the first volume. This may help to explain why Spencer is so often treated as a prickly defender of his evolutionary priority, and why so many historians overlook the important and deeply felt friendships that Spencer showed to be a part of his life in the body of the narrative in the first volume. 6. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:432.

95 building . . . [that] it should be retained as a winter-garden,” which would also be “a charming promenade in wet weather at all parts of the year.”7 Local residents blocked the plan, though, and Spencer was left to lament that when “the building was pulled down . . . millions of people were deprived of refining pleasure.”8 He saw it as a demonstration of the superior power of a small group, in this case local residents, who were able to cooperate over a much larger but less organized group. Spencer referred to the months following the publication of Social Statics in December 1850 as “An Idle Year.”9 Although he did not do any major writing, he did go to the Great Exhibition, worked on revising Social Statics for a second edition, developed his friendship with George Henry Lewes and Marian Evans (), whom he introduced to one another, attended Professor Richard Owen’s lectures on modern animal skeletal structures, and cogitated. Spencer found walking to be a useful way to get exercise and to think. He often in 1851 revised Social Statics by taking proof sheets in his pocket on a walk and “lying down in some sheltered or shady place and castigating a few pages.”10 Spencer has ever had a reputation as an invalid, in no small part due to his own ubiquitous complaints about his health. It is easy for modern readers, who are products of a most lethargic society, to assume that such invalidism would have made Spencer sedentary. Quite to the contrary, Spencer walked frequently and far. His ambulatory escape from his uncle’s home as a youth was but one example. His letters in the Autobiography and in David Duncan’s biography are full of references to his long walks, both alone and with friends. In fact, some of those walks covered a dozen miles over rough country to go fishing, and in one case, he covered thirty miles in the Scottish highlands in a single day. He

7. Ibid., 1:433. 8. Ibid. 9. Robert G. Perrin, Herbert Spencer: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 145: “Note: This book is alternately dated as 1850 or 1851 in the literature [and even by Spencer himself]. This is because the book was published in December 1850 but imprinted with 1851 as the publication date.” Perrin’s bibliography, which is as comprehensive as could be hoped, not counting the letters contained in the Skilton Family Papers and the Lewis G. Janes Collection, lists only a single article from Spencer’s pen in 1851: “Lyell and Owen on Development,” The Leader 2, no. 82 (18 October 1851), 996-997. 10. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:426.

96 might now walk carrying manuscripts, some other time with a fishing pole to some loch, and occasionally with a shotgun along country hedges. He also found vigorous rowing to be beneficial, but he did not appear to have had much love of horseback riding. He believed that such recreation was essential to anyone’s health, as he pointed out in his farewell address after his visit to the United States in 1882. George Henry Lewes, The Leader, and the Haythorne Papers, 1851-1854 One of the people with whom he was fond of walking in 1851 was George Henry Lewes. Lewes was born in London in 1817, and briefly followed his father into the theater in the early 1840s. At one time he had studied to be a physician, but “was compelled to give it up owing to his dislike of witnessing physical pain.”11 From 1841 to 1854 he was married to Agnes Jervis with whom he had two sons. Long before he met Spencer, Lewes had become a devotee of Comte’s Positive Philosophy, to which he had been introduced by in 1841.12 Following a similar intellectual track to Spencer, but directly influenced by Comte, Lewes was already an evolutionist of sorts, and an advocate of a scientific basis for history. In “The State of Historical Science in France,” published in the British and Foreign Review in January 1844 (six years before he met Spencer), he hoped that “the day is not far distant when the art of history will be thoroughly dependent on the laws of social development.” He went on to say “with a deep sense of gratitude we here record our conviction that the fundamental law of human evolution has been discovered by M. Comte, and that therefore the science [of history] is now rendered comparatively easy. History has had its Newton.”13 In the spring of 1850 Lewes and Spencer met for the first time at the home of their mutual friend Dr. , from which they walked home together and discussed the development hypothesis, then best known as presented in Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation. It is another moment that one can only regret was not recorded. It would be fascinating to hear what the two near contemporaries had to say. Spencer was almost thirty and Lewes almost thirty-three, both came from similar intellectual backgrounds and both were to play leading roles in late- Victorian thought.

11. R. E. Ockenden, “George Henry Lewes (1817-1878),” Isis 32:1 (July 1940), 69. 12. Ockenden, 72. 13. Quoted in Ockenden, 74.

97 Chapman’s home was a place of much socializing according to Spencer’s recollections. Chapman entertained leading literary, scientific, and political figures from both sides of the Atlantic. On one visit to England, Emerson stayed with Chapman, though Spencer did not meet him. It was a near miss, but it is an example of the interconnection of intellectual circles in which ideas like Spencer’s were discussed. Spencer did, however, meet Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune.14 Neither man could have foreseen it, but in coming decades Greeley would be converted to Spencer’s philosophy by Edward Youmans and become an important publicist for the philosopher’s works in America. Spencer’s friendship with Lewes dated from the year following their first acquaintance and is widely cited as an important turning point in the lives of both men. In 1850, the year of their introduction, Lewes became co-editor of The Leader. As editor he gave Spencer’s first book a positive review and the two became reacquainted in the weeks that followed. “As [they] had many tastes and opinions in common, the intimacy grew rapidly.”15 And as summer broke, the two men began to take “Sunday rambles” together, at first in nearby parks, and later across “a wider range” sometimes spanning multiple days.16 Two of these longer, multiple-day rambles were particularly important for their mutual intellectual development. Late in the summer they took a four day tour up the Thames valley. On this walk, Spencer’s “observation on the forms of leaves set going a train of thought which ended in [his] writing an essay on “The Laws of Organic Form.”17 William Baker suggested that Spencer probably benefited from Lewes’s knowledge of “current German researches in the field” of organic evolution.18 This certainly seems possible since Lewes had already declared his support for evolution as developed by Comte. For Lewes’s part, their conversations rekindled his own love of science. Thinking back on the trip, he wrote: “I owe him a debt of gratitude. My acquaintance with him was the brightest ray in a very dreary, wasted period of my life. I had given up all ambition whatever, lived from

14. Autobiography, 1:399. 15. Ibid., 1:435. 16. Ibid., 1:436. 17. Ibid. 18. William Baker, “Herbert Spencer and “Evolution” -- A Further Note,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38:3 (July-September, 1977), 476.

98 hand to mouth and thought the evil of each day sufficient. The stimulus of his intellect, especially during our long walks, roused my energy once more, and revived my dormant love of science.”19 The ideas and beliefs the two men brought to one another not only shaped their later thought, but drew them into a deeper friendship. In the autumn of 1851, they took another long trip in Kent. On this trip Lewes introduced Spencer to Milne-Edwards’s discussion of “the physiological division of labour” that helped Spencer to coalesce similar ideas he had presented in Social Statics, and which would become an important part of his evolutionism.20 This event is often cited by later historians as a turning point in Spencer’s ideas.21 Their relationship led Spencer to contribute a series of articles to Lewes’s journal, though he published them anonymously because he did not want his name associated with the journal’s socialist leanings. The first article, “Lyell and Owen on Development,” appeared in October 1851 and was the result of a series of Owen’s lectures that Spencer attended early in the year hoping it would help him write on the development hypothesis.22 He eventually contributed an additional nine articles, known collectively as the Haythorne Papers, between January 1852 and May 1854.23 In a letter of September 22, 1851, Spencer explained the choice of the essays’ collective name, writing that: “As they will be very miscellaneous there has been some hesitation about the title; and it has been decided to choose one which means nothing, but will draw attention.”24 Among the Haythorne Papers was “The Development Hypothesis,” published in March 1852. In that brief essay, Spencer argued the superiority of the development hypothesis over the idea of special creation as the source of modern skeletal forms. He built the argument by means of logical inference rather than specific facts, to which he only alluded. He began by attacking

19. Ockenden, 79, quoted in . W. Crops Life of George Eliot, 1886, v. 2, 61-62. 20. Spencer, Autobiography, 436. 21. Richards, Theories of Mind, 268, in particular, argues that “In Henri Milne-Edwards’s Outlines of Anatomy and Physiology . . . Spencer discovered that his leading principle of political economy was also recognized as a principle of physiology.”; Peel, 137. 22. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:426. 23. Perrin, Bibliography, 170-181. 24. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:447.

99 the idea of special creation as lacking any support in nature and as essentially unexplainable. In contrast to this unimaginable event, he presented the argument that by infinitely small gradations the most diverse things could be shown to be related. From geometry he used the circle and the hyperbole by showing that a slice of a cone taken parallel to the base will produce a circle, but by slowly rotating the slice the circle will become an ellipse and eventually a hyperbole. From botany he used the transformation of a seed into a tree by such small changes that at no point is it possible to tell when the seed ends and the tree begins. Similarly, the growth of an infant from an ovum proceeded by such tiny increments that it was impossible to draw clear distinctions between the forms. These evidences showed not only that the development of new species from a single cell was possible, but the only imaginable process by which they could have come into being.25 In a purely biological sense, “The Development Hypothesis” is a statement of evolutionism, but it should be seen as but one step in his move from proto-evolutionism to full blown evolutionism rather than its first enunciation.26 The essay was very incomplete even as regarded biological evolution. It did not address the universality of the idea that was at the heart of Spencer’s mature philosophy, and in it Spencer did not use the term evolution. Although this article is often cited as the first place where Spencer used the term evolution, as Perrin noted,

25. Herbert Spencer, “The Development Hypothesis,” in Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), 365-371. 26. In his Autobiography, Spencer says of “The Development Hypothesis:” “For a long time entertained, and becoming gradually more confirmed, my belief in this was now avowed.” (p. 448). He seemed to limit that avowal to biological evolution, however. Peter Bowler, one of the most careful students of Spencer’s use of the term ‘evolution,’ and the meaning he attached to it, writes: “It now seems more than certain, though, that “The Development Hypothesis” was not an attempt to incorporate the theory of the into a general philosophy of progress. Only a few years later did Spencer elaborate the law of development proposed by K. E. von Baer and supported by Carpenter into a general conception of universal change, and this is when he began to use the name ‘evolution’ in earnest.” in “Herbert Spencer and ‘Evolution’ -- An Additional Note,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (April-June 1975), 367.

100 however, when it was published in 1857 as part of Spencer’s collected essays the phrase “theory of Lamarck” was replaced with the phrase “the Theory of Evolution.”27 In looking back on the Haythorne Papers while writing his autobiography in the early 1880s, Spencer highlighted the evolving definition of evolution apparent in them. In actions such as this, he is often seen by historians to be struggling to maintain his priority as the definer of evolution. Though this may certainly be part of his motivation, more important motivations were his defense of his particular theory of evolution as correct and all-embracing, and an honest effort to give a history of his own intellectual development.28 Personally Spencer and Lewes remained close, though they often differed in their opinions, both in conversation and in print. It was Spencer who introduced Lewes to Marian Evans, who later took the pen name of George Eliot. Evans appears to have been in love with Spencer in the early years of their friendship, but he never returned so deep an emotion. Evans, however, found in Lewes a life-long companion who left his wife for his talented and fascinating new love in 1854. As she matured emotionally and intellectually, Evans was less overawed by Spencer, but she too remained a friend, and in his letters and in his autobiography Spencer recalled fondly his visits to their home.

27. Perrin, Bibliography, 172. Bowler catches himself making the same mistake in his article for the Journal of the History of Ideas (1975): “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution’,” 104, corrected by “Herbert Spencer and ‘Evolution’ -- An Additional Note,” 367. 28. Spencer readily admitted the importance of Darwin’s discovery and enunciation of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, as Spencer (and eventually Darwin) preferred. He regretted that he had not realized such a mechanism, himself, since he was so very close in these writings of the early 1850s, but he did not attempt to claim more than his due in this regard. It is important to remember, too, that he firmly believed that his definition of evolution was the superior one, and that Darwin merely provided a narrow, albeit important and even epochal definition within the broader theory. Seen in such a light, rather than a cranky attempt to remain important, Spencer’s work appears to be one of conceit, based on a complete certainty that his own work is the more important, and thus worthy of careful documentation. (Autobiography, 1:451)

101 “A Theory of Population” and Spencer’s Acquaintance with Huxley and Tyndall John Chapman did more for Spencer than simply provide him with a social outlet and allow him the chance to meet G. H. Lewes, though. As the new proprietor and editor of , he gave Spencer one of his most important literary outlets over the course of the 1850s. From the very beginning, Spencer’s contributions to the quarterly journal led him further to develop and to refine his evolutionism. Chapman acquired the quarterly journal from Mr. Hickson at the end of 1851, after negotiating for its purchase in the early months of the year. In May, Chapman had begun lining up contributors for the first number under his direction, which was to appear in January 1852.29 Spencer and George Eliot were among the writers he approached as potential contributors. It was through this mutual relationship that Spencer and Evans had been introduced and had become intimate. Unlike Lewes’s journal, The Westminster Review matched Spencer’s political beliefs. His description of it was a neat summary of its history and position, and of his definition of liberalism: “In its early days, while directed by [John Stuart] Mill and aided by [Sir William] Molesworth, The Westminster Review had been an organ of genuine Liberalism--the Liberalism which seeks to extend men’s ; not the modern perversion of it which, while giving them nominal liberties in the shape of votes (which are but a means to an end) is busily decreasing their liberties, both by the multiplication of restraints and commands, and by taking away larger parts of their incomes to be spent not as they individually like, but as public officials like. . . .this traditional policy Chapman willingly continued.”30 Not surprisingly, then, this journal became the venue for some of Spencer’s most important articles from the decade of the fifties. Spencer’s first assignment for Chapman was to review William B. Carpenter’s Principles of Physiology, General and Comparative. He said that it was here that he first “came across von Baer’s formula expressing the course of development through which every plant and animal passes--the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity.”31 It was an important revelation for Spencer because it “awakened [his] attention to the fact that the law which holds of the ascending stages of each individual organism is also the law which holds of the ascending grades

29. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:431-432. 30. Ibid., 1:487-488. 31. Ibid., 1:445.

102 of organisms of all kinds.”32 He was still thinking in terms of biology and not universal development, but this definition of evolution as a transition from homogeneity to heterogeneity was one of the most important early steps that his thought took.33 Spencer’s first major article in Chapman’s review, “A Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” appeared in April 1852.34 As far back as May 1851, Chapman had been after Spencer to prepare an article on the topic for the first number of the quarterly, but Spencer had still intended at that time to publish a small book on the subject separately. By the end of 1851, however, Spencer had changed his mind and decided to publish his essay in the review, though it would have to wait until the spring. In light of his later work in the Synthetic Philosophy and the direction of biological science under Darwinism, this essay has taken on great significance to historians and commentators. For Spencer the article was a reinterpretation of Malthusian population theory showing that in contrast to Thomas Malthus’s contention, population pressure was an incentive to positive social development. Spencer’s argument in this extended essay exemplified a number of elements of his thought that were apparent in Social Statics and would become even more

32. Ibid., 1:446. 33. In fact, there are few other intellectual events in Spencer’s life that are so widely recognized as definitive as this one. Commentators from 1904 on cite it. Peter J. Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution’,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36:1 (January-March, 1975), 100; John W. Chadwick, “Herbert Spencer. A Sermon,” Sermons, Series 29, Number 6 (March 1904) (Boston: George H. Ellis Co., Publisher), held at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, 84; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1962), 224; Thomas Munro, “Evolution and Progress in the Arts: A Reappraisal of Herbert Spencer’s Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18:3 (March 1960), 295; Richards, Theories of Mind, 269. 34. Herbert Spencer, “A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” The Westminster Review, 57:112 (New Series, 1:2) (April 1852), 468-501, transcribed in: The Victorian Web: literature, history, & culture in the age of Victoria, transcribed by Joachim Dagg, Arbeilung für Entomologie, Institute für Phytopathalogie und Pflanzenschutz, Göttingen (http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/spencer2.html). Hereafter cited in text.

103 manifest in the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Methodologically he argued that broad generalizations embodying universal truth could be arrived at “by comparing the alleged truth,” in this case Malthus’s assertion that population growth would always outstrip food supply and lead to an aggressive struggle for survival, “with other truths, and discovering that it is not congruous with them” (469). When Spencer considered universal order as he saw it, his method proved to him “the inherent tendency of things toward good.” Further, if a man looked fairly at the natural world around himself “he everywhere sees at work an essential beneficence” (469). This optimism and methodical use of a kind of common sense comparison of ideas to judge truth was carried over from his previous essays and his first book. In the passage that followed, Spencer revealed his movement toward a broader conception of evolution, as yet unnamed, that included human ethical development: “Equally in the attainment of fitness for a new climate, or a skill in a new occupation--in the diminution of a suppressed desire, and in the growing pleasure that attends the performance of a duty--in the gradual evanescence of grief, and in the callousness that follows long-continued privations--he perceives this remedial action” (469). Spencer’s examples in the essay showed that his developing notion of evolution was a product of both biological and social inferences. He began with references to plants, then moved up to animals, then to human society. Finally, “after recognising this throughout the whole organic world, he finds that it extends to the inorganic also” (469). Clearly Spencer was well on his way to his broad generalization of the law of evolution, but he was only beginning to grasp its magnitude. Liberal religion remained still a part of Spencer’s argument in this article. He chose as his foil the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Whately. Whately had dismissed as “instinctive” Doubleday’s argument in “True Law of Population” that Malthus was overly pessimistic in his conclusions (468). Instead, Spencer argued, Doubleday was right in being optimistic about the course of universal development. In chiding Whately he wrote, “Faith in the essential beneficence of things is the highest kind of faith. And considering his position, a little more faith would have been by no means unbecoming in the Archbishop of Dublin” (470). In a footnote to the article, Spencer further acknowledged a place for religion that anticipated his section titled “The Unknowable” in First Principles: “It may be needful to remark, that by the proposed expression it is intended to define--not Life in its essence; but, Life as manifested to us--not Life as a

104 noumenon; but Life as a phenomenon. The ultimate mystery is as great as ever; seeing that there remains unsolved the question--What determines the co-ordination of actions?” (475). It was ideas like this that he carried over into his later works and similar sentiments expressed in his correspondence that drew members of the liberal Christian denominations in America to him in the decades to come. Besides presaging his own grand theory of evolution, “A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” has been used by historians and later commentators to compare Spencer’s and Darwin’s theories of evolution. Spencer is reported by many historians, including prominently J. D. Y. Peel, to have coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in this 1852 essay. Were this the case, then Spencer clearly would have anticipated Darwin’s pronouncement of the theory of natural selection, which even he came to call by Spencer’s phrase in the later editions of the Origin. In fact, however, as Perrin points out, Spencer did not use that phrase in print until he began releasing his Principles of Biology serially in 1864 and it was added to the essay when it was republished later in a collected volume.35 But even Spencer admitted that though he should have arrived at that theory based on his line of reasoning, he failed to notice it because he believed that “the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications suffices to explain the facts,” and because he “knew little or nothing about the phenomena of variation.”36 Even without the now famous (or infamous) catchphrase, the article presented arguable if controvertible evidence that Spencer did anticipate Darwin. In 1916 I. O. Howarth asked, “Did Spencer Anticipate Darwin?,” in an article in Science. Citing Spencer’s “Theory of Population,” Howarth argued “that as early as 1852 . . . Spencer presented with a clearness not since surpassed, the evolutionary hypothesis . . . But evolution and Darwin’s discovery . . . are quite

35. Perrin, Bibliography, 174. Perrin also reports that the error appears in the works of Robert Bierstedt, A. G. N. Flew, John H. Goldthorpe, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Richard Hofstadter, Calvin J. Larson, D. R. Oldroyd, James Allen Rogers, Cynthia Eagle Russett, and even himself, in earlier works when he was “naively drawing on Peel’s biography and other secondary--instead of original--sources.” (p. 173) 36. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:451, 452.

105 different things.”37 Bowler saw evidence in the essay on population that Spencer “openly supported transmutation as early as 1852, after which this belief gradually became incorporated into his general philosophy of development known as the ‘Synthetic Philosophy.’”38 However, Bowler continued, Spencer “did not think of natural selection until he read the Origin of Species.”39 Robert Richards, who did not make the mistake of attributing “survival of the fittest” to the essay, said that “the principle of natural selection arose and then subsided in Spencer’s early thought.”40 Ruse wrote that in the essay Spencer “recognized the significance of the struggle for existence for human population development . . . that could lead to permanent biological changes,” while pointing out that he remained “somewhat ambiguous . . . about natural selection.”41 One notable writer argued that Spencer’s essay on population was not even evolutionary. Greta Jones wrote that “although Spencer’s article has been seen as anticipating Darwin, it perpetuated the notion . . . that elimination through struggle preserved the ‘type’ of the species. Spencer argued only that the struggle, by eliminating the impure specimens of a race, led to constantly improving type.”42 Though Spencer’s evolutionism was not yet fully developed in his own mind, let alone fully articulated in print, he had certainly moved beyond the notion of types. In a letter to his friend Edward Lott of April 23, 1852, only a short while after writing the essay on population, Spencer wrote: “For myself, looking as I do at humanity as the highest result yet of the evolution of life on the earth, I prefer to take in the whole series of phenomena from the

37. I. O. Howarth, “Did Spencer Anticipate Darwin?,” Science, n.s., 43, no. 1109 (March 31, 1916), 462. 38. Bowler, “Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” 106. 39. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 39. 40. Richards, Theories of Mind, 272. 41. Ruse, The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates, (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 73, 75. 42. Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, Inc., 1980), 6.

106 beginning as far as they are ascertainable.”43 That same letter also revealed the coalescing notion of universal evolution in Spencer’s mind, for the next sentence read: “I, too, am a lover of history; but it is the history of the Cosmos as a whole.”44 Because of the debates surrounding the relationship between Spencer, Darwin, and evolutionism it is worthwhile to consider the importance attached to this early evolutionary article of Spencer’s. The very question, Did Spencer anticipate Darwin?, indicates the overriding bias in most studies of Spencer’s work. A fair counter question is, Does it matter if Spencer anticipated Darwin? One might even ask, considering how much Darwin’s ideas were transformed in the twentieth century, Did Darwin anticipate Darwin?45 Rather than attempting to establish the priority of one thinker over the other as regards the enunciation of natural selection/survival of the fittest, it is more important to understand what Spencer was doing at the time that he was doing it. He was synthesizing a world view that could accommodate stability and change, universal order and apparent chaos; that could promise an ever-improving future while demanding self-discipline today; and that allowed for free will even as he annunciated natural restraints on human action. He did not view biological evolution as an independent discipline within a pantheon of independent scholarly disciplines. He did not see a fundamental separation between organic and inorganic matter any more than he did between the physical and intellectual self. To his mind the unity of Creation was just as true and real as the independence and responsibility of individuals. His background threw him across an intellectual rift between the essential ideas of traditional, conservative society, and post-Enlightenment liberal thought. In truly esoteric terms, he was attempting to reconcile the dilemma of the One and the Many that has dogged Western thought since at least the days of ancient Greece. “A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” should be seen as a remarkable first step toward reconciling what would turn out to be fatally contradictory elements of Western thought as it transitioned into the twentieth century.

43. David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908), 2 volumes, 1:81. 44. Ibid. 45. Though Bowler does not ask this question so provocatively, in The Non-Darwinian Revolution he makes a strong argument that modern Darwinism is strikingly different from the corpus of Darwin’s ideas as a whole.

107 On a personal level, the article on population led Spencer into a friendship of great importance both to himself and to the course of evolutionary thought, a friendship with Thomas Henry Huxley.46 As part of the compromise to publish the essay in the Westminster Review rather than as a separate volume, Spencer and Chapman agreed to publish a “few” copies of essay as pamphlets. Spencer gave one of these to Huxley because the latter’s lecture on Hydrozoa, which he had studied as the assistant surgeon on board the Rattlesnake, “appeared to support the arguments contained in the ‘Theory of Population.’”47 Huxley, after reading the essay, visited Spencer at the editorial offices of The Economist, and Spencer returned the favor, visiting Huxley at his home in St. John’s Wood, London. Thus the two men, yet largely unknown to the world, but destined for international fame, commenced an often misinterpreted friendship. Their relationship is often treated by later writers as an antagonistic one, with Huxley presented as a leading critic of Spencer and a most devastating adversary. Quite to the contrary, with the exception of a few years late in life, and despite their public disagreements about specifics regarding evolution, the two were warm friends until Huxley’s death fifty-two years later. The friendship revealed aspects of Spencer’s character that are often overlooked by later writers, in particular his love of companionship and his attractiveness to others as a friend. Spencer’s own writings about himself help to explain why this aspect of his personality has been overlooked. As David Duncan noted in his biography, “while not trying to hide his shortcomings, Mr. Spencer, like all the finer natures, shrank from parading the more attractive and loveable aspects of his character--thus permitting an apparent justification for the opinion that he was ‘all brains and no heart.’”48 A testament to Spencer’s attractive qualities was reflected in the assessment Leonard Huxley made of his father in Thomas Henry Huxley: A Character Sketch. In that brief biography, Leonard declared: “The first passport to his [T. H. Huxley’s] friendship was entire sincerity. Whatever other claims might be advanced, he would

46. Richards, Theories of Mind, notes this as an important outcome of the essay’s publication, 273. 47. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:466. 48. Duncan, 1:viii.

108 shut out any approach to intimacy those whom he found to be untruthful or not strait forward.”49 According to his son, Huxley’s two closest friends were John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Joseph Dalton Hooker.50 Spencer, too, quickly became an intimate of Huxley and a regular visitor and walking companion of the renowned botanist. Beginning in the 1860s, these four men (Huxley, Tyndall, Hooker, and Spencer) became a leading force in the development, popularization, and diffusion of modern science and evolutionism throughout the world. In 1853, Huxley introduced Spencer to Tyndall “in the rooms of the Royal Society, Somerset House.” To Tyndall, Huxley playfully described Spencer as “Ein Kerl der speculirt.”51 The use of Goethe to introduce Spencer to Tyndall was particularly apropos because in his autobiography Spencer placed Tyndall and Goethe next to one another as men of science able “to take the poetic view” as well as the scientific view.52 He also admired Tyndall’s interest, like that

49. Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley: A Character Sketch, Select Biographies Reprint Series (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969) (originally published in 1920), 110. 50. Ibid., 100. 51. Duncan, 1:85. The passage should read: “ein Kerl der spekuliert,” which means, ‘a chap who speculates.’ The quote is from verse 1830 of Goethe’s Faust. Huxley must have taken immense pleasure in this introduction, for it allowed him to voice the words of Mephistopheles while gently jabbing his new friend. In the passage, Mephistopheles is talking to Faust about the latter’s search for knowledge and understanding. Faust asks: “What am I if I strive in vain/ To win the crown of all mankind which, though afar,/ All senses struggle to obtain?” To which Mephistopheles replies: “You at the end -- are what you are.” Faust then complains, “I feel that I have made each treasure/ Of human mind my own in vain,/ And when at last I sit me down at leisure,/ No new-born power wells up within my brain./ I’m not a hair’s-breadth more in height/ Nor nearer the Infinite.” Mephistopheles then declares, in part, “Quick, then! Let all reflection be,/ And straight into the world with me!/ A chap who speculates--let this be said--/ Is very like a beast on moorland dry,/ That by some evil spirit round and round is led,/ While fair, green pastures round about him lie.” (Johann von Goethe, Faust, Parts One and Two, tr. George Madison Priest, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Editor in Chief, Great Books of the Western World series, v.47 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 43. 52. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:485.

109 of Huxley, in “the relations between Science at large and the great questions which lie beyond science . . . [and] the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe; and the humility it teaches by everywhere leaving us in the presence of the inscrutable.”53 As when describing anyone of importance in his life, Spencer’s description of Tyndall concentrated on the quality of his character. Tyndall, who did much original work on the constitution of glaciers, was a renowned climber, which Spencer mentioned. He also noted Tyndall’s “deep-seated resolve to keep the lower nature with all its desires and fears, subject to the commands of a determined will. Joined with his Irish warmth, this may be an element in his chivalrous tendency to take up the cause of any one he thinks ill-used.”54 Spencer’s assessment of his friend went far to demonstrate the great importance he placed on moral character, a deep sense of justice, and well-guided self control as elements in the evolution of human beings and human society. Spencer quickly became a regular visitor in the Huxley home, and when he returned to London in 1856 he took a home in St. John’s Wood, in part to be near his friend.55 For the next twenty years he usually spent his Sunday afternoons at Huxley’s home and with but one exception in those years, every New Years Day, at which Leonard Huxley included him among the “two or three intimates who were bidden here, having no domestic hearth of their own.”56 G. W. Smalley, another of Huxley’s intimates, described the conversations held on those Sunday evenings: “Here people from many other worlds than those of abstract science were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in any world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without offense; political even, and still not commonplace, and, when artistic, free from affectation.”57 Considering the considerable role played by men like Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Hooker in nineteenth century science, it is regrettable that no record of those probably boisterous, certainly interesting conversations exists.

53. Ibid., 1:486 54. Ibid., 1:487. 55. Ibid., 1:584. 56. Leonard Huxley, 105. 57. Quoted in Leonard Huxley, 88.

110 In the early days of the gatherings, Huxley was yet unconverted to evolutionism and Darwin’s epochal theory was not yet annunciated. At those gatherings and especially on walks in the 1850s, Spencer recounted that the topic of organic evolution “not unfrequently cropped up in our talk, and led to animated discussions in which, having a knowledge of the facts immensely greater than mine, he habitually demolished now this and now that argument which I used.”58 The primary point of disagreement for Huxley was Spencer’s reliance on logical deductions from broad principles rather than inductions from hard evidence. Later, obviously, Huxley became a supporter of evolutionism, but “he continued to differ with Spencer on matters of substantial issue in biology.”59 Later, when their arguments did extend beyond ear shot of the perambulating pair and into the public domain, their controversies did not lead to any loss of friendship, with the exception of several months in 1893 and 1894 (an incident that will be discussed in greater detail in chapter six).60 At the Sunday and New Year’s gatherings, “some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of singing was ever a matter of concern for Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself a great lover of music.”61 Throughout his autobiography Spencer mentioned pleasant evenings spent with friends in playing and singing music, and even regretted that George Eliot did not make greater use of her attractive voice. In fact, Spencer noted only three things that produced for him the sentiment of awe: “the sea, a great mountain, and fine music played in a cathedral.”62 The pantheon of Spencer’s quoted is laden with ponderous and seemingly calloused references to survival of the fittest and government non-interference. The addition of one regarding music might go far to lightening the mood of the collection and to providing an insight into his personality; it might also be worthy of our own consideration: “When I go to a concert, I do not go to hear gymnastics on the violin.”63

58. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:591. 59. Richards, Darwin and Theories of Mind and Behavior, 313. 60. Leonard Huxley, 108. It is notable that in Leonard’s biography of his father he does not even mention the controversy and temporary breach in intimacy surrounding the Romanes Lecture delivered by T. H. Huxley in 1893. 61. Leonard Huxley, 88. 62. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:500. 63. Ibid., 2:49.

111 A decade later, five years after the thunderclap of Origin had resonated around the world and as Spencer was releasing the installments of the Principles of Biology, Huxley led the intimates from those Sundays to form “a small dining club of scientific friends and allies,” the so-called .64 The original members included Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, Hooker, George Busk, Sir John Lubbock, Edward Frankland, Thomas Arch Hirst, and William Spottiswoode, most of whom were members of the Royal Society. For the convenience of the members of the Society, they scheduled their dinners to coincide with the Society’s monthly meetings and arranged to eat at a hotel near the meeting site. They held their first meeting on November 3, 1864 and met regularly through the 1880s, despite Spottiswoode’s death in 1883. In the 1890s, however, the meetings became less regular as the members moved away from London and after Hirst died in 1892. In 1893, the controversy between Spencer and Huxley culminating in the Romanes Lecture of that year, also led to Spencer’s withdrawal.65 Huxley’s death in 1895 was the final blow to the club, but for almost two decades it provided an important node of scientific and evolutionary thought that has been too little studied. Thomas Spencer’s Death and Herbert Spencer’s Release from Editorial Work In January 1853 Spencer’s fortunes turned on a tragic family event; his uncle Thomas died. Having been fond of young Herbert, Thomas made him co-executor of his will and left him five hundred pounds. The money gave Spencer the wherewithal to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to stop working as an editor and to devote himself full time to his own writing. To this end he gave notice to James Wilson and left the Economist in June of 1853.66 Two comments made by Herbert Spencer in his autobiography regarding his uncle Thomas were illustrative of his personal philosophy and may do something to fill out his views regarding what we now call Social Darwinism. The first deals with his uncle’s painful discovery that virtue and hard work are not perfect inoculation against financial failure in the face of accident and unfair and dishonest dealings by others. The second has to do with his uncle’s deleterious devotion to work and ignoring of relaxation. In 1848 Thomas Spencer left his pastorship in Hinton. In rearranging his finances, he invested his and his wife’s money in shares of a developing railway that promised a better return

64. Leonard Huxley, 89. 65. Ibid., 89-91. Leonard does not mention Spencer’s withdrawal. 66. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:480-481. Hereafter cited in text.

112 than they were currently accruing. As the railroad industry declined, he was induced to buy more shares on margin, and when the shares continued to fall and margin calls were made on Thomas, he had to sell shares at a loss. Ultimately he “lost a large part of his property” (1:373-375). Reflecting on this unfortunate incident, Herbert Spencer denied the myth of an inevitable connection between virtue and success. The trait, common to children’s stories and fictions of ancient type, the characters in which, positively good or positively bad, are represented as eventually reaping the rewards of goodness and the punishments of badness, is a trait pervading nearly all ethical speculations, as well as current conceptions about life at large. Always we hear dwelt on the evils which vice brings, while the evils which virtue often brings are practically ignored. The tacit assumption is that “poetical justice” will in one way or other be done; notwithstanding daily proofs that the wicked often thrive and meet with no reverses, while the worthy often pass their lives “in shallows and in miseries,” and occasionally bring on themselves disasters by their righteous conduct. (1:372)67 His uncle was one who held “this crude notion that merit and demerit always bring their normal results,” until he was misled by the secretary of the South Wales Railway (1:372). Herbert Spencer did not deny “the multitudinous cases in which misconduct and distress stood in the relation of cause and consequence,” but he did “recognize the truth that in the social world, as in the physical world, there occur catastrophes for which the sufferer is not responsible, and other catastrophes implying no greater defect in him than misjudgment or lack of experience” (1:373). Though these statements may appear to contradict his position that people should not be shielded from their folly, the lesson Spencer drew from his uncles’ experience was perfectly consistent with his philosophy. Spencer said that his uncle was much improved by the experience. Not only had he finally gotten experience, albeit painfully, regarding business, but he

67. Theodore Dreiser was influenced by Spencer’s works, but his connection with Literary Naturalism seems to place him in a different intellectual stream. On this point, however, Dreiser’s story, Sister Carrie, presents a similar opinion of the non-connection between virtue and success. In this, as in most cases, it is extremely difficult to determine exactly what Spencer’s influence was and why certain aspects of his thought were accepted and certain others ignored.

113 had received an important and broadening lesson in sympathy. Spencer noted that “a marked change of attitude was the consequence” of his uncle’s experience, which produced a “striking effect” in his preaching (1:396). His sermons, when he was filling in temporarily-vacated pulpits, were marked by “increased fellow-feeling” and “their morality was warmed by sympathy” (1:396). The result of his improved preaching was that Thomas drew larger audiences than he had before his misfortune, thus demonstrating that he had been strengthened by his experience and that he was more effective in his work and found by other members of society to be more congenial. It was this development of sympathy and moral evolution that lay at the heart of Spencer’s philosophy, and which informed all of his work, including his political and economic statements. The second incident Spencer related regarding his uncle refuted what Spencer saw as another deleterious Protestant myth. In Thomas, he said, “religious belief, current opinion, and personal habit, united to confirm the tacitly accepted notion that life is work” (1:480). As a result he did not relax enough, which was both a detriment to his own health and kept him from social relations that would have improved the lives of others as well. As Herbert Spencer put it, “due participation in the miscellaneous pleasures of life, would have made his existence of greater value, alike to himself and to others” (1:480-481). Again Spencer placed the life of the individual side by side with society, or more aptly, the other individual constituents of society, unwilling to separate the two. Thus, far from claiming a right of extreme individualism as we often interpret it today, Spencer showed the individual to be an inextricable part of society to whose welfare the individual should look, as well as to his own. It is in the light of this notion of relaxation and sociable interchange that his earlier comments about the “refining social pleasures” of walking in the Crystal Palace should be seen. Herbert Spencer, using the money left to him by his uncle, devoted himself to developing his ideas through a series of articles and a second book over the next seven years. After he served notice to Wilson early in 1853 that he would leave the Economist in June, Spencer worked to expand his connections in the leading journals and quarterly reviews like the Review, The British Quarterly Review, and The North British Review, which was a “quarterly organ of the Free Church” (1:481). Of course he maintained his relationship with Chapman and the Westminster Review, too, where he continued to publish some of his most important essays. In

114 these and other journals, Spencer published two dozen articles. Between 1853 and 1860, he also completed the last of the Haythorne Papers and his second book, Principles of Psychology. The Principles of Psychology and the Enunciation of Evolution, 1855 Looking back to Social Statics, Spencer recognized in his treatment of the moral sense “that the tendency to mental analysis had become pronounced” in his work (1:439). Not until his focus was sharpened on philosophy and psychology by his friend Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, however, did he make “the phenomena of mind a subject of deliberate study” (1:439). Having thus had his attention turned to this new field of thought, Spencer first began considering an “Introduction to Psychology” in December 1851. In the spring of 1852 he began reading on the subject, and by October he had outlined the “Universal Postulate,” which became a founding element of his argument in the book (1:452-453). Freed from editorial responsibilities in mid-1853 by his uncle’s bequeathal, Spencer was able to work without interruption. “The Universal Postulate” appeared in the October 1853 issue of the Westminster Review, and it eventually became the second chapter of the Principles of Psychology. The article, and the chapter for that matter, addressed “the ultimate test withstood by those propositions which we hold to be unquestionably true” (1:482). Spencer argued that the universal postulate explained reasoning, which was ultimately the search for truth, and was derived from and based upon belief. He began his argument by establishing his first principle regarding facts, in this case: “belief is the fact which, to our intellects, is antecedent to, and inclusive of, all other facts.”68 This was a fundamental fact because to deny it “is to utter a belief which denies itself,” which is fundamentally illogical (15). In fact, in analyzing psychology there were but three assumptions that could be made by anyone regarding any thing or idea: its “existence, its correlative non-existence, and a cognition of the difference, that is--belief” (16). Thus, all beliefs could be classified as those that “invariably exist” and those that “do not invariably exist,” which allowed beliefs to be quantified and analyzed (16). Since “an invariably existent belief is, by virtue of its being one, incapable of being replaced by any other,” such beliefs are the foundation of all other beliefs (17). As such,

68. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology (?London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 15. The book I used is held at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. The title page and publication information is missing from it, and the citation above is drawn from the university’s catalog. Hereafter cited in text.

115 any search for truth must be pursued by reducing any given belief to these fundamental, invariable beliefs, the negation of which was absolutely inconceivable (26). By allowing these fundamental and invariable beliefs to be the product of either experience or innate ideas, Spencer laid the logical foundation for his argument and opened the door to evolutionary psychology. In this, Richards noted, Spencer was able to reconcile Mill’s argument “that all laws come out of inductions from experience” and Whewell’s argument that there were necessary and contingent truths recognized by everyone.69 Along the same lines, Peel asserted that having “become properly acquainted with Mill’s ,” which he combined with the ideas he had drawn from phrenology, Spencer was able to create his evolutionary psychology.70 The key to understanding Spencer’s psychology, and thus his entire philosophy, was the fact that he identified all grades of intelligence, even to the highest human intelligence, as a result of the physical interaction between organisms and the environment. At the end of “Part II” of the Psychology, he reasserted the fundamental connection between mental and physical processes and identified them as adaptive responses of organisms to their environments. In this way he justified his logical foundation in invariable beliefs, which he placed just behind physical sensations in their proximity to absolute truth. In this way he also opened the way for the final two parts of the book, which hypothesized the process by which life gradually became more complex and intelligent. It was here, in the latter two parts of the Principles of Psychology, that Spencer enunciated his theory of evolution in a way that was both comprehensive and had an effect on his readers; it was the work that best can be called his first truly evolutionary work, as opposed to proto-evolutionary as in Social Statics. In fact, Spencer said that it was while writing the Psychology that some time around the beginning of 1855 he arrived at the essence of his definition of evolution.71 The definition of evolution Spencer was developing combined the idea

69. Richards, Theories of Mind, 277. 70. Peel, 114. 71. Spencer, Autobiography, 538. According to Richards, Theories of Mind, 282: “The ‘General Synthesis,’ with which Spencer began, displays clearly the evolutionary framework in terms of which he conceived his project.” Brabrook, 10, argued that Principles of Psychology “indicated that evolution was the key to all the problems of organic life, and thus prepared the

116 of the conservation of energy from physics and Lamarckian use inheritance from biology. He did not try to identify the precise mechanism by which inheritance occurred, but like his contemporaries, simply accepted inheritance as a fact of life and a natural law. He began with the proposition that “though we commonly regard mental and bodily life as distinct, it needs only to ascend somewhat above the ordinary point of view, to see that they are but sub-divisions of life in general; and that no line of demarcation can be drawn between them, otherwise than arbitrary.”72 He demonstrated this fact by first presenting a comprehensive definition of life, introduced the notion of progressive adaptation of organisms to their environment, and explained how the rise of the senses and the development of increasing intelligence expanded the environment to which an organism must adapt. Spencer defined life as “the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.”73

way for the Origin of Species.” Bowler, who presents the best analysis of the development of the modern theory of evolution, in The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 64, points out that in the Psychology Spencer “took the gradual development of human faculties for granted.” Though Bowler prefers Spencer’s “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) as the point at which he first “clearly outlined his whole philosophy of progressive evolution.” Outside of these notable exceptions, however, this first edition of Principles of Psychology is very rarely treated as a step in the development of Spencer’s philosophy. More often historians and other commentators focus on his later books, including The Principles of Psychology as it appeared in its two-volume form in the Synthetic Philosophy. So far as Spencer’s use of the term “evolution” is concerned, Bowler again notes in “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution’,” 107, in the Psychology, Spencer used the term in reference to the unfolding of an innate structure in an organism. Spencer, according to Bowler, used the term ‘progress’ or ‘universal progress,’ to denote what he would later mean by the term ‘evolution.’ In making this distinction, Bowler follows Spencer’s own lead. In the Autobiography, 1:585-586, Spencer notes that he had used ‘progress’ rather than ‘evolution’ until he had “recognized the need for a word which has no teleological implications.” According to the Autobiography, 1:588-590, he made the terminological transition in “The Ultimate Laws of Physiology,” National Review, October 1857. 72. Spencer, Psychology, 1855, 349. 73. Ibid., 368.

117 Further, life was marked by a “continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations . . . so that not only does the definition . . . comprehend all those activities, bodily and mental, which constitute our ordinary idea of life; but it also comprehends, both those processes of growth by which the organism is brought into general fitness for these activities, and those after- processes of adaptation by which it is specially fitted to its special activities.”74 His definition presupposed a slow process of adaptation by individuals, and thus species, that explained “the hackneyed truth . . . that there is invariably, and necessarily, a certain conformity between the vital functions of any organism, and the conditions in which it is placed--between the processes going on inside of it, and the processes going on outside of it.”75 He had not yet coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” but clearly he was thinking in terms of adaptation as a process that increased individual fitness. The version of progressive adaptation he here presented was a natural product of a self-stabilizing universe. It was not the product of fierce competition between individuals, but rather the individual’s struggle against the external environment. Though competition grew in his estimation after Darwin published the Origin of Species, Spencerian evolution continued to be more this kind of benevolent self- regulatory process than one of unbridled competition.76 An important part of biological development, according to Spencer, was the rise of sensations in organisms. Even the most primitive perceptions of sight and touch had the effect of increasing the environment to which an organism could and had to react. This extension of the perceived environment forced the organism to come into internal conformity with that more complex environment, making the organism more complex, and thus better able to survive. The continual pressing of the environment on the organism caused a corresponding refinement of the senses, which led to further internal complications, and so on until we arrive at the superior senses of the higher animals. Along with the development of perception through the senses came a development of cognition. Cognition grew from mere perception, into instinct, then into memory, emotion, and finally to reasoning. Each of these categories, artificial as they are, Spencer argued, merely

74. Ibid., 374-375. 75. Ibid., 367. 76. This distinction in Spencerian evolutionism is particularly noted by Bowler, Biology and Social Thought.

118 represented increasingly complex internal adaptations to an ever expanding external environment. Each was also inheritable, which had driven the progress of life on earth until it had reached its summit in man. But even in mankind the process was still evident as could be seen in the dramatic superiority of Europeans over members of primitive societies.77 It was thus by infinitesimal steps that human thought was connected to the most basic and simple, that is primitive, life forms on earth. As such, no distinct line of demarcation was possible, and all levels of life were thereby connected through a single universal process of progressive development.78 Evolutionary psychology, as we now call it, allowed Spencer to overcome the chief indictment against his logical method, namely that individual or collective ignorance could lead to beliefs that proved to be untrue as people gained more knowledge. Since knowledge was a product of experience, experience became the driving force toward truth.79 As experience accumulated in the race, its members came ever closer to the truth as earlier false beliefs were shed. And, since the experiences of each member of a race resulted in physical and mental adaptations that could be passed on to progeny, the race as a whole had ever broader and more accurate perceptions of the universe around them. Following this line of reasoning, Spencer believed that the grand synthesis of ideas he was presenting, and that he would later more fully develop, was the capstone of universal evolution to date. After addressing “Reflex Action,” “Instinct,” “Memory,” and “Reason” in succeeding chapters, in the final two chapters Spencer turned to “The Feelings” and “The Will.” In these concluding chapters of the volume, he connected the moral sense and self-control to his evolutionary philosophy and briefly demonstrated their role in continuing human progress. His

77. It is for good reason that Spencer is condemned as a racist by later writers. At the time, however, he was working well within the mainstream of scientific and anthropological thought. 78. Spencer developed this argument in hair-pulling detail in the Psychology, 1855, 360- 583. 79. Spencer took issue with Mill’s assertion that the simple inability to imagine the negation of a belief is no absolute test of truth. Spencer retorted that even if the search did not yield absolute truth, which he agreed was ultimately impossible, the universal postulate still held, for it was the only valid method of testing beliefs. Psychology, 1855, 20-22.

119 social philosophy, apparent in his writings since the 1840s, also found its way into his vision of universal progress. Spencer argued that “Feeling becomes nascent at the same time that Memory and Reason do,” and that it, too, developed in increasing correspondence with the environment.80 Emotions, in short, were a reaction to an object or idea as agreeable or disagreeable, and they became more complex as experience expanded. Feeling was a kind of complex sensation; that is, feelings were aroused by physical sensations that reminded an individual of a group of motor actions and other subsequent sensations. For example, for a predator, the scent of its prey would induce a feeling that at once included the memory of the chase and the taste of the prey’s flesh. Another example Spencer used was a beautiful landscape: an infant does not have a strong emotional response to it because it produced no connections of sensations and ideas in the little one’s mind, whereas an adult could appreciate the view because it brought together a group of sensations relating to trees, streams, mountains, past adventures, and the like.81 In all cases there was the conditioning presence of past experiences in the race. Among human beings the increasingly complex and abstract relationships represented by feelings came to include the sentiment of affection, admiration, respect, friendship, reverence, love of others, love of approbation. Still higher in the process of development, Spencer saw the love of possession, “the love of liberty, [and] the sentiment of personal rights . . . [which], answering to certain highly complex relations in which men living in a society stand to each other--being a gratification in the maintenance of such relations with other men as admit of an unrestricted activity--is manifestly far more abstract and more general in its scope than any other.”82 As mankind continued to progress, Spencer believed, “ultimately the sentiment of personal rights will yield to none in strength.”83 With this Spencer brought the moral sense and individualism in Social Statics and his other early writings up to date in his philosophy. Spencer also hinted at the importance of self-restraint in those who love their liberty. In the chapter on “The Will” that followed, he made the mechanism of that self-restraint plain. He argued that free will, as usually understood, did not exist. He accepted “that every one is at

80. Spencer, Psychology, 1855, 585. 81. Ibid., 584-601. 82. Ibid., 604. 83. Ibid., 605.

120 liberty to do what he desires to do (supposing there are no external hindrances), . . . but that every one is at liberty to desire or not to desire . . . is negatived . . . by the internal perception of every one . . . [because] all actions whatever must be determined by those psychical connections which experience had generated--either in the life of the individual, or in that general antecedent life whose accumulated results are organized in his constitution.”84 What that meant was that human beings were bound by the experiences of their race (Spencer’s use of the term race tended to be a bit loose and to include both the human race as a whole and the specific race from which an individual was descended, e.g., Anglo-Saxon, and he did not carefully distinguish between culture and biology since the two were inextricably joined in his mind). Further, “free-will, did it exist, would be entirely at variance with that beneficent necessity displayed in the progressive evolution of the correspondence between the organism and its environment.” For if it existed, “the harmony at any moment subsistent and the advance to a higher harmony, would alike be interrupted to a proportionate extent: there would be an arrest of that grand progression which is now bearing humanity onwards to perfection.”85 In reality this did not prove to be a particularly short leash, but it was an essential element of his argument regarding higher and lower human races. More important still, it was the ultimate restraint on individuals in civilized societies that made them love their liberty and jealously defend it both for themselves and their compatriots. Only through such a device could Spencer defend his belief in an ideal society that did not need the restraints imposed by a central government. Spencer worked on the Psychology from August 1854 to August 1855. Freed from the confines of a job and allowed greater mobility by his inheritance, he traveled and worked at various locales during those months. He began in Tréport, France and spent some time in Wales and Scotland before finishing work at his parents’ home in Derby. The effort of writing the Psychology proved to be too much for Spencer, though. We might now call his ailment a nervous breakdown. He referred to “head-sensations” and later to “brain congestion.” 86 He clearly suffered from insomnia, which may have been a product of an unhealthy obsession with his work that bordered on being compulsive.

84. Ibid., 617. 85. Ibid., 620. 86. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:529-530, 540-544.

121 His troubles seemed to be psychological rather than physical, though, since he continued to seek relief in vigorous exercise. In the year and a half that followed his completion of the book, Spencer did little intellectual work, but he did travel. He toured the Channel coast of France with his friend Edward Lott and even visited Huxley, who was on his honeymoon at Tenby. On the advice of a doctor he tried country life. He stayed with friends in the English, Scottish, and Welsh countryside, but he was slow to recover his ability to begin serious work. In the meantime, his book was selling very poorly, and it was meeting with a mixed reception. By April 1856 only two hundred of the 750 copies printed had been sold.87 The Nonconformist, for which Spencer had previously written essays, condemned the Psychology as “materialistic and atheistic.” 88 R. H. Hutton, making a similar argument, reviewed the book for the National Review in an article titled, “Modern Atheism.”89 Spencer rejected these assessments as neither his intention nor reasonable deductions that could be drawn from the work. On the other hand, Huxley, who did not yet accept evolution and thus rejected many of Spencer’s specific arguments, still said after reviewing the latter two parts of the book prior to publication that “there are grand ideas in it.”90 Lewes and Dr. J. D. Morell--Morell who later would become one of Spencer’s friends--both received the book favorably.91 It was Morell’s review of the book in the London Medico-Chirurgical Review, in fact, that first attracted Edward Youmans, Spencer’s future champion in America, to the book. But that is a story for the next chapter. Before coming to it, a review of Spencer’s completed philosophy is in order. The Synthetic Philosophy A Brief Review and Preview Spencer’s writings from the 1840s onward revealed a remarkable consistency in both the methodology and the conclusions of the works even as the ideas broadened and became more sophisticated. Beginning from his dissenting, non-conformist Christian roots with a strong bias in favor of extremely limited government, equal rights, individual self-control, and the importance of individual ethics, Spencer’s eclectic self-directed education led him to science by a

87. Ibid., 1:546-565. 88. Duncan, 1:105. 89. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:546. 90. Duncan, 1:106. 91. Spencer, Autobiography, 1:546. Hereafter cited in text.

122 meandering path through mathematics, engineering, phrenology, amateur botany and paleontology, and Scottish moralism with a strong dose of philosophical naturalism and a stout faith in the beneficence of universal order. His thought was a distillation and, as he clearly recognized, a synthesis of the ideas that had surrounded him throughout his life. He believed that the human mind naturally and automatically sought truth through ever higher generalizations and that it was the fault of misguided education that forced minds to conform to mental discipline at odds with this natural path to enlightenment. The “Universal Postulate” he presented in Principles of Psychology, was as much an honest depiction of his own logical method as a scientific conclusion regarding human thought generally. Untrained in the disciplines of science, Spencer’s works were eminently egotistical. This fact does much to explain why he was so confident in the truth of his conclusion--he could not very well disbelieve what he so deeply believed. It also lends credibility to the assertion that his works summarized the thought of his period. The fact that it was controversial proves that it was not a universal ideal, and the fact that it quickly fell even from the mainstream of thought shows that it was not the sole embodiment of truth. However, as one looks at Spencer’s ideas, it is equally clear that much of what he said is still held to be true today. Also, the modern presence of a political and economic philosophy (libertarianism) that can very easily be underpinned by Spencer’s works shows that much of his philosophy touches deep in the post-Enlightenment tradition in the West. In its spanning of the growing breach between liberalism and conservatism, as well as within liberalism, too, Spencer’s works reflect an essential tension between the notions of freedom, liberty, responsibility, order, and tradition that is present in any society based on liberal principles. From the beginning of his literary career, Spencer’s extended arguments followed the same methodology. In “The Proper Sphere of Government,” Social Statics, and Principles of Psychology, he began by asserting first principles and then followed with an argument based on those principles through what he believed to be the logically necessary stages to arrive at his conclusion. In each case, his conclusion, which he held before he began writing, was the purpose for writing the argument. In this his work was more reminiscent of the medieval scholastic theologians than the scientists of his own generation. The liberal and naturalistic assumptions embodied in those works were anything but those of the scholastics, however. Again, he embodied elements from both an older conservative tradition and a younger liberal tradition.

123 Those extended arguments revealed the progress of his thought from 1842 to 1855. He began, in “The Proper Sphere of Government,” with the assumptions that a limited government was better than an intrusive one, that people should take responsibility for their actions, and that the world was governed by beneficent natural laws. In Social Statics he added to his growing argument the ideas of a moral sense in human beings, a moral law governing the universe, and the progressive development of human ethical constitution through history. His first book also presented a proto-evolutionary philosophy that hinted at the interconnection of all aspects of human individual and social development through a process of successive adaptations to an increasingly complex social environment. Finally, in Principles of Psychology, Spencer incorporated psychology and into his philosophy by creating a specific and elaborate evolutionary theory that connected the human mind to all animal life, and showed it all to be progressive and adaptive. By the age of 35 in 1855, then, all the elements necessary to his mature philosophy were present, and his thought was supersaturated with them. He wanted only a seed-grain for his “Synthetic Philosophy” to crystallize. The seed-grain dropped in late 1857. While compiling essays for republication as a book under the title Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, he was struck by the growing idea of evolution he found in them. Evolution seemed to fit neatly with the ideas he found in Sir William Grove’s book, The Correlation of Physical Forces, which he was reading at the time (2:14-15). After Spencer recovered from his nervous breakdown and began working again in 1857, he began to sketch out a grand program to uncover the law of progressive universal evolution as it was manifested by all kinds and all grades of life. In the autumn of that year he moved back to St. John’s Wood in London, this time only two-minutes walk from Huxley’s home. Thereafter the two men “had a standing engagement for Sunday afternoons: a walk of a few miles into the country” (2:3). Other companions during the years 1857-1858 included John Stuart Mill, --a former Member of Parliament and author of History of Greece (1846-1856), and --author of History of Civilization (1857-1861) (2:22).92

92. Authors’ full names and the dates of their major works are taken from: Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc., Publishers, 1988).

124 Articles, 1857-1860 Spencer began writing again and published eight articles between April 1857 and October 1858. In these articles he continued to develop and refine his idea of evolution and to explain and justify his political beliefs. The first of the articles, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” completed the extension of evolution to include everything in the universe in a process of progressive development toward heterogeneity, differentiation, and integration. In October 1857, “The Ultimate Laws of Physiology” argued “that numerous facts show that ‘acquired peculiarities’ both result from the ‘adaptation of constitutions to conditions’ and are ‘transmissible to offspring.’”93 A year later, emboldened by Huxley’s rejection of Owen’s views on the origin of modern animals’ skeletons, Spencer suggested that evolution was a better explanation for the current animal forms than was Owen’s theory of archetypal ancestors, elaborating on his own earlier criticism of Owen’s work. In “Moral Discipline of Children,” Spencer said that though moral training might provide some short-term social benefits, the real force improving individual morality was the forced adaptation of character through the experiencing of negative consequences from wrong acts, because this would result in a fundamental and transmissible adaptation in the individual. In “Representative Government--What Is It Good For?” and “State- Tamperings with Money and Banks,” Spencer continued his assault against state interference, but in these two articles ideas connected to biological evolution helped to underpin the argument. On January 9, 1858, Spencer sent a letter to his father with an outline of what was to become the “Synthetic Philosophy.” He wrote, in part, “Many things which were before lying separate have fallen into their places as harmonious parts of a system that admits of logical development from the simplest general principles. . . . In process of time I hope gradually to develop the system here sketched out.”94 The outline he included, dated January 6, is remarkably similar to the final product, though he intended to cover inorganic evolution before beginning his study of organic evolution. Otherwise the steps remained the same as the final product. First, he would address first principles, then study biological principles of evolution, followed by psychological and sociological principles, and he would end with principles of individual and social rectitude.95

93. Perrin, Bibliography, 186. 94. Spencer, Autobiography, 2:19-20. 95. Ibid., 2:16-19.

125 When in October 1858, therefore, Huxley first told Spencer about the joint papers read by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace before the Linnaean Society in July introducing the idea of natural selection, Spencer had already developed his own theory of evolution. From this point on, however, things got very complicated and far more interesting. It appears that Spencer recognized the importance of random variation and natural selection in biological evolution very quickly, and he foresaw the importance of the idea to social as well as scientific development. In retrospect he regretted that he had not come to the same conclusions himself, but he did not in any of his writing attempt to deny Darwin his place as the discoverer of this important evolutionary mechanism. But it would be strange if he had felt the need to. Spencer recognized his own limited knowledge in any of the specific fields in which he dealt--geological, biological, or psychological. The experts in each of these fields, of whom Spencer considered Darwin one, provided him with the raw material for his own synthetic generalizations. He saw Darwin’s work as a compliment and guide to his own, not as a threatening counter-theory. By January 1860, Spencer produced eight more articles and reviews for British quarterly reviews and journals. Among them “The Laws of Organic Form,” “The Morals of Trade,” and “The Social Organism” did much to advance his evolutionary ideas. The first of these, “The Laws of Organic Form,” was the final result of one of his walks with Lewes back in 1851. In the article he argued that biological forms, both internal and external, animal and vegetable, “are determined by the relations of the parts to the incident forces” in the environment.96 “The Morals of Trade” began with a lengthy indictment of the immorality of businessmen, which Spencer then connected to the baser qualities of Englishmen in general, particularly their love of and undue respected toward mere wealth. Instead he suggested that approbation of individual virtue over individual wealth would better guide adults and better train children to be more moral and thus assist society’s evolution. Spencer noted that the increasing focus on fraudulent business activities was a sign of improving ethics that needed only to be encouraged to promise a brighter future. The last of these three articles, “The Social Organism,” is easily taken out of context by later historians who do not carefully consider the definition of organism that Spencer was using. For Spencer, who believed that the essence of organized life was four-fold--1) it grew in size through time, 2) it grew increasingly complex, 3) its independent parts became more and more

96. Ibid., 2:33-34.

126 mutually dependent, 4) as a whole it long outlived its constituent parts--the parallels between societies and organisms were unmistakable.97 Having already determined that universal material diversification and integration had led to the rise of life, and that the process had then created a spectrum of life from low to high marked by a greater measure of that diversification and integration, society seemed a natural continuation of the process. The same thing that distinguished animate from inanimate, animal from vegetal, and higher animals from lower animals, also distinguished more advanced human beings and human societies from lesser ones. What this meant to Spencer, then, was clear: human societies were driven by the same laws of universal progress to adapt to their environment by maintaining and perfecting the equilibrium between internal and external conditions. Contrary to the organic analogies of and Hobbes, however, the social organism was not parallel to the human organism, which was a very high evolution indeed, but to the lower organic forms. Individuals in society continued to be relatively independent and flexible entities, and society provided just the rudimentary aspects of higher life such as a circulatory system (commerce) and, more particularly, a nervous system (government). Again Spencer was straddling the widening gap between a conservative worldview and a liberal one. He was attempting to explain the role of government as an organic product of human social evolution, which was similar to Burke’s views on government less the evolution stuff, while defending his fundamental belief in the natural and inevitable independence and rights of the individual, which was at the core of late-eighteenth century radical political thought. He saw the limit of the analogy of the social organism at the point that it suggested that human beings must eventually become as mindless and subservient to the social body as are the cells of a higher organism. He continued to believe that evolution would work on both the individual members of society and the society itself, but in different ways. What this meant was that society would integrate through a process of increasing division of labor, but that because of the increasingly refined moral sense evolved in human beings, social evolution would mean a decline in the need for government. This allowed him to believe that increasing diversification and integration of the society would raise individual freedom ever higher, and that this process

97. Spencer, “The Social Organism,” in Illustrations of Universal Progress; A Series of Discussions (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), 379-380.

127 would be facilitated by the moral evolution of the individuals concerned. Proving this seeming contradiction was the main goal of his Synthetic Philosophy. Prospectus for the Synthetic Philosophy All through the last years of the decade, Spencer was trying to figure out how to support himself while he completed the vast project he had outlined in January 1858. He tried unsuccessfully to find a sinecure either in the Indian administration or in the prison administration in England. Having failed in this endeavor, he decided to issue the various parts of what eventually became the Synthetic Philosophy by subscription on a quarterly basis. Having settled on this approach, Spencer began seeking weighty names to append to the syllabus of his project in order to garner greater interest as he finished the outline itself. By January, Spencer’s friends, most notably Huxley and Tyndall, were reviewing the prospectus and helping to create interest in British intellectual circles. Huxley, in particular, helped in this regard, having been converted to full support of evolutionism by Darwin’s work.98 When Spencer finally released the Prospectus for “A System of Philosophy,” as he originally called it, on March 27, 1860, it included the names of some five dozen notables, including Huxley, Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, J. S. Mill, Lewes, George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, , and Goldwin Smith.99 In February, before he began officially circulating it in England, Spencer sent a copy of the prospectus to his friend E. A. Silsbee of Salem, , through whom it found its way into the hands of John Fiske and Edward L. Youmans, among others. Back in Britain, once the official version began circulating, it accrued a total of some 400 subscribers by the end of the spring of 1860. Believing that because of this subscription list he could count on at least £120 a year, Spencer began. Ultimately, he believed, this new synthesis was to be found in the universal process of “Evolution and Dissolution.” He had been developing this idea from the beginning of his work in the 1840s and it was now coming to fruition. As has been shown above, the idea of evolution grew slowly in his thought until it was clearly in place in 1855 and more fully developed by 1860. The ten volumes he projected in his prospectus would fully elaborate this philosophy and demonstrate its basic operation in all aspects of organic life.

98. Spencer, Autobiography, 58-60. 99. Ibid., “Appendix A,” 2:557-564.

128 Overall, the Synthetic Philosophy was to follow the method of Spencer’s earlier books. He began by defining the terms he would use, demonstrated the necessity of his founding principles, and alluded to the conclusions that each of the succeeding installments would prove. He then pursued his argument in what he thought to be a logical order of ascending relationships. In the pursuit of organic life he saw this process as beginning with the lowest forms of life then ascending through the evolution of intelligence, societies, and finally human ethical nature. Taken in isolation each of the five parts is interesting and provocative (at least to anyone interested in Victorian thought). To take any one element or even combination of elements out of the context of the whole, however, is to invite great misunderstanding of Spencer’s ideas and purpose. In particular, to ignore the fact that the whole project was capped by and worked toward a demonstration of proper human ethical development is to miss Spencer’s point entirely and to attempt to cast him in terms that only make sense in a post-Darwinian and Pragmatic world. In First Principles he laid out the foundational ideas on which the remainder of his argument would be built. He also introduced what turned out to be the most controversial part of his philosophy. In attempting to distinguish between ideas that could and could not be considered scientifically, Spencer defined those things that were knowable and those that were unknowable. He used this great division between the Knowable and the Unknowable to explain why he could not identify first causes, and he used it to reconcile religion and science. Many commentators struck upon this distinction as evidence that Spencer was an atheist and a materialist, which of course was an assertion Spencer had heard leveled against him before and against which he had already defended himself repeatedly. The Synthetic Philosophy, 1860-1896 The Synthetic Philosophy took Spencer thirty-six years to finalize. He continued to write other essays and books, but they were all secondary to this, his life’s work. The history and complete treatment of its development over time is worthy of a separate treatise and is beyond the scope of my work here. Instead I will try to summarize the organization and primary arguments Spencer made in the ten volumes constituting The Synthetic Philosophy in order to give an overview of the ideas that were being debated by people like the members of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, who are the focus of the second half of this essay. For this purpose, too, I will use the final editions of the various books, which is appropriate since the BEA was most active in the 1890s when most of Spencer’s works were in their final iterations.

129 Even this brief treatment, however, will highlight the ultimate emphasis that Spencer put on ethics and so point out why many previous writers have failed to appreciate Spencer’s true intent and philosophy. Methodologically, Spencer proceeded with his argument in a logical manner from his first principles to his highest generalizations. The whole is a magnificent logical construction even if many of his principles and ultimately his conclusion proved to be false. It was a powerful argument that was both plausible and attractive to many of his liberal-minded contemporaries. With modern scientific biology still only in the making, and in lieu of more recent scientific findings in other fields, it was difficult to contradict Spencer’s ideas convincingly. First Principles, 1860-1862.100 Spencer started writing at 18 Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, on May 7, 1860. He worked with an amanuensis, as had been his habit since he had dictated the last half of “What Knowledge is of Most Worth” to his father in early 1859. It was slow going because he could only work for few hours each day.101 After another relapse of invalidism, which he sought to correct through long walking tours and by occasionally changing his accommodations, he finished the first installment in mid-September 1860.102 In spite of his uncle William’s death in November 1860, Spencer was able to complete the second and third installments by March 1861 before, as he put it, “my head gave way again, and I had to desist.”103 This time he sought relief from the “cerebral congestion” in rowing, which he did at

100. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, International Science Library (Akron, OH: The Werner Company, 1900). This late edition was a reprint of the sixth edition and included the prefaces for the sixth, fourth, and first editions. The first preface was a reprint of the original prospectus for “A System of Philosophy,” less the names of subscribers. A complete and accurate narrative of the development of Spencer’s ideas from 1860 on would demand that the first edition of each successive volume be used. However, since I intend in this section to summarize the final iteration of Spencer’s evolutionism, I have chosen to use the later editions of his works. Spencer did not make major revisions to these ten volumes, but rather refined his language and updated his information. The basic philosophy and evolutionism remain the same throughout. 101. Spencer, Autobiography, 2:40. 102. Ibid., 2:69-70. 103. Ibid., 2:74.

130 Regent’s Park. He would “row vigorously for 5 minutes and dictate for a quarter hour,” alternately.104 He also took up “racquets” on the advice of Mr. J. F. McLennan, again alternating between exercising and dictating.105 Finally, in June 1862, Spencer completed the last installment of First Principles.106 When Spencer spoke of a “New System of Philosophy,” or later “The Synthetic Philosophy,” which he introduced in First Principles, he referred to a grand generalization that would bring structure and clarity to all objects of thought. Spencer saw philosophy as the “knowledge of the highest degree of generality.”107 Further: “Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; Science is partially-unified knowledge; Philosophy is completely-unified knowledge” (119). He also saw two important divisions of philosophy, “General Philosophy” and “Specific Philosophy.” General Philosophy was the consideration of “universal truths,” and Specific Philosophy began with those universal truths and used them to interpret “particular truths” (120). The book had two parts: “The Unknowable” and “The Knowable.” The former was a refinement of the epistemological arguments of the first edition of the Principles of Psychology. It also sought to reconcile science and religion by granting that both were legitimate pursuits of truth, but that their spheres of study were separate. The latter half, “The Knowable,” can be divided into two subsections, though Spencer did not do this. The first eleven chapters of Part II defined aspects of knowledge and demonstrated the under general synthetic laws. The twelve chapters that followed introduced the law of evolution and developed it in detail. The Unknowable, which proved to be one of Spencer’s most controversial assertions, was his attempt to define those aspects of the universe that could not be the object of science. In essence, the Unknowable was that which human beings could not help but apprehend, but which they could not comprehend because of the fact that knowledge was necessarily relative. Easily confused with the relativism of a post-Einstein world, Spencer meant something different. He

104. In a letter to his father, June 14, 1861, in Spencer, Autobiography, 2:75. 105. Spencer, Autobiography, 2:75. Spencer does not mention the names of his amanuenses, but one can only image what they must have thought of their eccentric employer. 106. Ibid., 2:84. 107. Spencer, First Principles, 117. Hereafter cited in text.

131 asserted that human knowledge was limited by our ability to relate objects or ideas to other objects and ideas with which we have experience, thus absolute knowledge was impossible. In the case of the universe as a whole and the first cause of the universe, the things discussed were not only inconceivable in their entirety, but they were beyond the ability of human thought to compare them to anything else. As a result, the universe and its cause were essentially unknowable. Spencer’s definition of the Unknowable was not nihilistic or self-contradictory, however. He accepted that through our senses, through the perceptions that had evolved from the senses, and the symbolic ideas through which we perceive the universe, the existence of the universe and universal causes are undeniable. He simply argued that human perception, because it was bound to relational understanding, could not comprehend, that is know, these ultimate entities. In this line of epistemological reasoning, Spencer was following the path laid down in his Principles of Psychology, since all intellectual activities were products of a steadily evolving organism and the extension of the environment in which the organism lived. In the case of human beings, ideas in the form of symbolic representations of reality were growing toward the ultimate truths and were not descended from them. Each mind, then, was but a part of the whole and had nothing with which to compare that universal whole. No mind could ever do more than create a symbolic understanding of the whole. This was in contrast to Plato, for example, who asserted that the physical world was merely a corruption of the Ideas, to use his example from the Republic, but shadows of the reality of the Ideas. Plato’s idealism, therefore, encouraged thinkers to see through the corruption of the material world and to perceive the Ideas that their minds could be trained to perceive through the dialectical method. Spencer saw the Unknowable as the point at which religion and science could be reconciled. He argued that only that which was knowable could be the subject of science. Science, therefore, was forever barred from proving or disproving the First Cause of the universe. On the other hand, whenever religion denied the findings of material science simply because those findings contradicted ancient documentary sources, it overreached its proper realm. Religion was the contemplation of the universal unity and mystery based on the apprehension of the human mind. Science was the compilation, analysis, and synthesis of ideas based on experience and the identifiable relationship between things in the universe.

132 This Knowable universe was the subject of the bulk of First Principles. Spencer asserted that the knowable universe was the manifestation of the “Power” that he defined as unknowable. As a result, “though persistently conscious of a Power manifested to us, we have abandoned as futile the attempt to learn anything respecting that Power, and so have shut out Philosophy from much of the domain supposed to belong to it. The domain left is that occupied by Science” (117). One might easily misunderstand this to mean only the physical universe, but since Spencer believed that all aspects of intelligence and sociability were also natural proceeds of evolution, they too were a manifestation of that power, and thus proper objects of philosophy. Having thus defined philosophy as expanding on science, Spencer identified three foundational laws of the physical universe upon which his philosophy would rest. The ultimate law was “the persistence of force,” by which Spencer meant the eternal existence of the “Absolute Force” that is the ultimate cause of everything, “an Unconditioned Reality, without beginning or end” (176). Derived from this ultimate law were the other two fundamental laws “the indestructibility of matter” and “the continuity of motion.”108 From these basic laws he deduced that the cosmos was intimately related and formed an interactive whole, in which force was manifested through a process of evolution and dissolution. In evolution, motion is dissipated as mass becomes integrated. Dissolution was the contrary operation during which motion increased and unity dissipated.109 These three laws fit neatly with the ideas he had held since youth, and in the process of evolution that he was defining, he found a mechanism whereby these physical laws could support the conclusions toward which he had been working since the 1840s. Evolution was Spencer’s great philosophical innovation because it allowed him to combine a belief in static universal truths and a dynamic perceived universe. To the elucidation of evolution as a “General” philosophical concept, Spencer devoted fully one third of First Principles. The concept as he developed it was different both from anything before and from the modern definition of evolution. Unlike earlier definitions of evolution, Spencer’s definition

108. Spencer addressed these three laws in succeeding chapters in Part II of First Principles: Chapter IV, “The Indestructibility of Matter,” 153-159; Chapter V, “The Continuity of Motion,” 160-169; and Chapter VI, “The Persistence of Force,” 170-176. 109. Spencer proceeded with this argument through chapters VII to X: “The Persistence of Relations Among Forces,” “The Transformation and Equivalence of Forces,” “The Direction of Motion,” and “The Rhythm of Motion.”

133 meant a good deal more than the simple unfolding of a predetermined form, as in the case of embryos growing into adults.110 And unlike the modern neo-Darwin definition of evolution, Spencer saw evolution as a universal law of development affecting the whole material universe and not restricted to organic evolution, though organic was among its highest physical results. In First Principles, Spencer elaborated the definition of evolution he had developed throughout the 1850s. He also added some new twists. One of the most unusual was his discussion of “dissolution” as a counterpart of evolution. It was a concept that seemed strangely out of place in the rest of his work, since he did not make more than passing reference to it again, but he saw it as necessary to complete his philosophy. It is important to note, though, because Spencer was always careful to deny that his philosophy was teleological (though it is hard to see it otherwise), and his discussion of dissolution helped to show why he believed his system was not. He argued that “an entire history of anything must include its appearance out of the imperceptible and its disappearance into the imperceptible,” because nothing has or can exist for all eternity in a concrete and perceivable form.111 Based on his idea of “The Rhythm of Motion,” which he had addressed in the chapter before turning to “Evolution and Dissolution,” Spencer asserted that all things were constantly both integrating and disintegrating--acquiring and shedding mass, absorbing and radiating heat--and that whether a given entity was evolving or dissolving was simply a matter of which process was the more active (257-260). Spencer returned to dissolution in a separate chapter late in the book and noted that “when an aggregate has reached that equilibrium in which its changes end,” forces in the environment would cause its constituent parts to increase their relative motion and thus for the object to disintegrate (475). He argued that this process applied equally to social as well as material objects, as when the motion of the component parts of a society was increased by a foreign invasion and the society broke up and much of its material-former citizens, for example--was acquired by the conquering

110. Bowler, “Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” 95-114, presents a good history of the transition of the meaning of evolution from this original usage to the modern definition. Because Bowler’s goal was to explain the modern definition of evolution, he did not tarry over Spencer’s definition, but treated it as a part of the definitional transition in the late nineteenth century. 111. Spencer, First Principles, 253. Chapter XII, “Evolution and Dissolution,” 253-261, is where he introduces the idea. He further discusses dissolution in a separate chapter, XXIII. Hereafter cited in text.

134 force (475-477). Spencer believed, however, that “Dissolution . . . has none of those various and interesting aspects which Evolution presents,” so he confined its discussion to one and a half chapters and spent the remainder of the book, and indeed the Synthetic Philosophy and his career discussing the latter (474). In defining evolution, the subject in which he was really interested, he began by dividing it into two large types of evolution, “simple and compound evolution” (262-279). The former was the law of evolution dominating the inorganic universe. It was marked by the concentration of a diffused and unstable homogeneity of matter to an increasingly integrated heterogeneity, as seen in the transformation of star systems from gaseous nebulas to stars, and finally to full planetary systems. It involved the loss of motion and the increase of mass as the progressively differentiated materials of the Cosmos integrated into perceivable objects. In this he followed astronomical and physical science of his day; again, he saw his role as synthesizing the evidence used by and laws identified by the various separate scientific fields. According to the outline of January 1858 that he had mailed to his father, and to his Prospectus, he had hoped to write a volume on “Inorganic Nature . . . but this great division it is proposed to pass over: partly because, even without it, the scheme is too extensive; and partly because the interpretation of Organic Nature after the proposed method, is of more immediate importance” (xii).112 Thus, compound evolution, which was exhibited particularly in organic nature, was the real subject of the Synthetic Philosophy. In speaking of compound evolution, Spencer was speaking of a process of change that took place in a given body due both to internal and external interactions. Where simple evolution involved a relatively rapid loss of internal motion as the molecules of a substance adhered more closely until they form a solid, as in a crystal, in organic objects, “in which Evolution becomes so high, [we] shall see that this peculiarity consists in the combination of matter into forms embodying enormous amounts of motion at the same time that they have a great degree of concentration” (272). In other words, organic objects reflected that complexity of arrangement, increasing differentiation of elements, and their necessary integration into a cooperative whole that for Spencer marked the ultimate physical form of universal evolution. Even as the highest

112. The Preface to the first edition is the prospectus for “A System of Philosophy,” and Spencer included the quoted note between his description of First Principles and The Principles of Biology.

135 form of evolution, however, organic evolution was not a separate form of evolution, but only a conventional division to aid the study of the cosmos. In fact, evolution was a single process going on everywhere in the universe and manifested in everything (502). Having, so far as he was concerned, fully proven the law of evolution and demonstrated how it related to everything in the universe, Spencer returned in his “Summary and Conclusion” to the purpose of his book, namely the establishment of a better foundation for philosophy. Since he believed “that Philosophy is completely unified knowledge,” that the “Knowable” universe was the purview of science, and that the law of evolution synthesized all the branches of science, In his “Summary and Conclusions,” Spencer argued that this highest generalization was the only proper foundation for philosophy (494-510). Now, Spencer had only to sketch out the four most important conventional divisions, or as he called them, “special applications” of evolution, to complete his philosophy. He began with biology, moved to psychology, through sociology, and finally to ethics. The process of writing and revising these nine volumes of material occupied the next thirty-seven years of his life. The Principles of Biology, 1862-1867.113 Spencer began his argument without any introduction and dove right into a consideration of the physical characteristics of organic matter that made it peculiarly capable of evolving. Organic matter, he argued, was uniquely pliable and able to be shaped by and react to external forces. Thus, he began with the smallest possible object of study and demonstrated how the supreme law of the persistence of force, with its concomitant relations between matter and motion, played out in organisms. As he put it, “the constitution of organic matter specially adapts it to receive and produce the internal changes required to balance external changes” (1:95). Spencer also updated Part III of the Principles of Psychology (1855) and placed it in the opening chapters of his Biology. He believed it had been necessary in the earlier book, but now that he had set upon a course that would treat each aspect of evolved life in order, his discussion of life’s definition and the correspondence between an organism and its environment was better placed at the beginning of the volumes on biology. It is interesting to note how Spencer saw Darwin’s theory in relation to his own. While discussing the various divisions and subdivisions of the science of biology, Spencer said that

113. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 2 volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). Hereafter cited in text.

136 “inquiry into the action of structure on function as displayed in successions of organisms, introduces us to such phenomena as Mr. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” deals with” (1:101). Thus, Spencer saw his contemporary’s work as relating primarily to the development of structural aspects of a given organism; it was a far cry from a competing definition of evolution, as he saw it. In the first volume of The Principles of Biology, Spencer distinguished his theory of evolution from teleological theories of organic development or order. “While the explanation of the teleologist is untrue, it is often an obverse to the truth; for though, on the hypothesis of Evolution, it is clear that things are not arranged thus or thus for the securing of special ends, it is also clear, that arrangements which do secure these special ends, tend continually to establish themselves--are established by their fulfilment [sic] of these ends” (1:234). He was splitting a fine hair when he said that the process did not have an established end in sight, but continued to assert that he knew the direction in which evolution was heading. Always devoted to his belief in progress, which he had reflected from his earliest writings on, he was never able to accept natural processes as truly chaotic. In this we again find a clue to his great popularity and eventual fall. Few people, even today, are really comfortable with the notion of a directionless and meaningless universe, but everything that science has shown us supports this fact. And though Darwinism is now seen to have been an important step in demonstrating this chaotic order, at the time such was not its necessary interpretation.114 Spencer took special pains to explain the relationship between heredity, variation, and use inheritance. He recognized that Darwin “while ascribing almost wholly to ‘natural selection’ the production of those modifications which eventuate in differences of species, nevertheless admits the effects of use and disuse” (1:246). In this discussion, Spencer also revealed his essential racism and the confusion of the fields that we now distinguish as biology and sociology, or heredity and culture. Having established to his own satisfaction the facts of organic life and the evidence that life adhered to the laws he had established in First Principles, Spencer turned explicitly to “The Evolution of Life” in Part III of his Biology. The first step was to determine which made more

114. As several historians have noted, even Darwin was reluctant to give up the idea of progress in nature. See especially: Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought and Richards, Darwinism and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior.

137 sense in light of the laws he had established for the development of the myriad organic forms apparent today and from the past: special creation or evolution. Before beginning his engagement against the “Special-Creation-Hypothesis,” Spencer reiterated his position regarding the ultimate cause of life. Either the multitudinous kinds of organisms that now exist, and the still more multitudinous kinds that have existed during past geologic eras, have been from time to time separately made; or they have arisen by insensible steps, through actions such as we see habitually going on. Both hypotheses implied a cause. The last, certainly as much as the first, recognized this cause as inscrutable. The point at issue was how this inscrutable cause had worked in the production of living forms. This point, if it was to be decided at all, was to be decided only by examination of evidence (1:332). This sort of qualification of his work meant that Spencer’s philosophy could still be acceptable to Christians, so long as they were not bound to an inerrantist faith in Biblical creation, and provided them with a means of reconciling science and their faith. Spencer obviously came down on the side of evolution over special creation. In fact, he said the hypothesis of special creation was “worthless--worthless by its derivation; worthless in its intrinsic incoherence; worthless as absolutely without evidence; worthless as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless as not satisfying a moral want” (1:345). This last condemnation is worthy of particular note because it must be borne in mind that Spencer’s entire philosophy and the process of universal evolution on which he based it ultimately had a moral outcome. It also reflected his own liberal Christian background. Spencer traced the history of the developing idea of organic evolution before his own time. In particular he credited De Maillet, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck for first developing the idea and bringing it to wider consideration. He quoted extensively from the latter two thinkers with a definite preference for Lamarck. In the second volume of the Biology, Spencer demonstrated how evolution provided a better explanation for various aspects of organic forms. In three parts, consisting of between ten and seventeen chapters each, he considered “Morphological Development,” “Physiological Development,” and “Laws of Multiplication.” His conclusions supported his initial assertion that evolution was marked by “that universal re-distribution of matter and motion which hold throughout the totality of things, as well as in each of its parts” (2:213). Organic evolution had also been marked by progressive integration and differentiation, which he found to be a

138 fundamental aspect of evolution, and which he would trace through psychology and sociology to its product in human morality. In the final chapter, Spencer considered the direction of future human evolution. Improving technology meant that human strength was unlikely to increase. Increased swiftness and agility would not be so necessary in the future because as societies more perfectly organized themselves wars would become unnecessary, and so these physical attributes would prove to be unnecessary and would do nothing to maintain the moving equilibrium of form that marked evolution. “Thus, looking at the several possibilities, and asking what direction this further evolution, this more complete moving equilibrium, this better adjustment of inner to outer relations, this more perfect co-ordination of actions, is likely to take; we conclude that it must take mainly the direction of higher intellectual and emotional development” (2:497). “The peaceful struggle for existence in societies ever growing more crowded and more complicated,” would result in declining fertility rates, since an excess of fertility was both a waste of individual resources and detracted from mental development, and in increasing nervous and moral development, which better fitted an individual to compete in a complex society requiring greater intelligence and self-control (2:501).115 These concluding remarks paved the way for the remaining installments of The Synthetic Philosophy by introducing the importance of mental, social, and moral development. The Principles of Psychology, (1855) 1867-1872.116 Spencer more than doubled the original Psychology’s length when he published it as the third section of The Synthetic Philosophy and he rearranged the order of the original four parts while adding five more. As already noted, he moved his discussion of biological evolution, which had been part of the

115. As evidence of the detrimental effects of excessive fertility, Spencer was wont to cite the Irish, whom he believed to be mentally inferior to Englishmen. Aside from a learned racism against the Irish, Spencer also saw commitment to an orthodox religion, particularly Catholicism, as an intellectual and moral failing. Their poverty, too, reinforced his prejudice. Scientifically, he believed that fertility and intellectual development competed with one another for limited nutritional resources in the body. On this point Huxley, a married man with children, took particular issue with his and presumably celibate friend. 116. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2 volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897).

139 original edition to the Biology. Also, aside from brief prefaces to the second and third editions of the work, he did not provide any sort of introduction. Having intended The Synthetic Philosophy to be a single grand work and assuming his audience to be keeping up, he again dove right into his argument as he had done in the Biology.117 Spencer, as always, proceeded logically using a truly impressive mass of evidence drawn from the original work of others. In “Part I.--The Data of Psychology,” he explained the structure and operation of nervous systems in animals from the lowest to the highest to demonstrate their adherence to the laws of evolution. Beginning with physiology of nerve structures also allowed him to demonstrate the connection between mental and physical life, which was a necessary component of his argument that thought, emotion, and ethics were as much a product of universal evolution as any physical structure. Throughout the remainder of the two volumes of the Psychology, he developed in greater detail the same argument he made in the original edition of the book, namely that thought was a process by which internal and external relations were brought into ever greater and more perfect equilibrium. In human beings, of course, that equilibrium had achieved its high point. Human thought, emotion, and morality were the marks of highest psychological development. They were the results of evolution that allowed human beings to form into societies, and it was human sociability that had made them such a successful species. Spencer’s next logical step was clear; he must address human society as the manifestation of human psychology in the continuing process of universal evolution.

117. An interesting and perhaps representative observation may be made of my personal copy of this work. It is the third edition, published in 1897. The previous owner appears to have read only the opening pages of the first couple chapters, based on those pages being cut and the rest still uncut almost eleven decades later. I have found this to be the case with many of the volumes of Spencer’s works I have handled, even library copies. Though Spencer anticipated his readers following his arguments step by step, I suspect that many readers were overcome by tedium and at best skimmed the works, reading the opening pages of some chapters and then skipping to the conclusion of each part.

140 The Principles of Sociology, 1874-1896.118 Of all the parts of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, the three volumes of The Principles of Sociology are the best known. Though First Principles got more attention from contemporary reviewers, in no small part because of the doctrine of the Unknowable, since then Spencer has been recognized more as a sociologist than anything else. These books have also proven to be the least esoteric, since theirs is a subject more easily understood than the other grand divisions of his philosophy. As one of the founders of modern sociology, too, Spencer’s work on the subject has garnered particular interest, even if that interest was to refute his ideas. On this score, too, his reputation has been more badly damaged by his association with Social Darwinism than in any other aspect of The Synthetic Philosophy. It is important to bear in mind, however, that these three volumes are not the capstone of his work, but merely the penultimate division which provided the final step to his Principles of Ethics. Many sociologists and anthropologists seem to take special pains to disassociate themselves and their discipline from Spencer. Truly, his racism is abhorrent to modern sociology, but one might guess that the spikiness of recent scholars has been heightened by some rather embarrassing skeletons in their early twentieth-century closets. Regardless of the cause, too often Spencer is treated with broad and decidedly negative strokes. In 1950, Robert Faris, writing in a collection on the impact of evolution on American thought, followed Hofstadter’s lead by tying Spencer’s “policy of noninterference with harsh evolutionary competition” to the law of the jungle and Social Darwinism.119 Faris referred only to government intervention and did not mention Spencer’s insistence on individual charity or the fact that Spencer believed government charity actually debased the natures of those who were obligated to provide charity. Faris’s work and mistakes were fairly representative. He attributed Spencer’s interest in social evolution to Darwin’s having established evolution as a science, which is patently false to anyone who has studied Spencer’s early writings. Faris’s misinterpretation of Spencer stemmed

118. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3 volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898). 119. Robert E. L. Faris, “Evolution and American Sociology,” pp. 160-180, in Stowe Persons, ed., Evolutionary Thought in America (New Haven: Press, 1950), 162. I am left to assume that he was following Hofstadter, because his essay is completely devoid of citations.

141 from a mistake made by many critics: he fails to apprehend the centrality of ethical development and individual responsibility that Spencer carried from his childhood into his philosophical writings. Faris also failed because he bought into the belief that Origin of Species ushered in a new age from the moment it appeared late in 1859. He was also a partisan in the early post-New Deal battles over the role of government in American society. Spencer, as a representative of government non-intervention who was still fresh in the minds of some older partisans, was a likely target in the battles.120 The September 1974 issue of Current Anthropology provided a window on the state of the argument regarding Spencer in this field of social science.121 It included an article by Derek Freeman and a series of comments by other authors in the field. This debate in miniature revealed that although some few authors were working to treat Spencer according to his own

120. Bannister takes this intellectual and political contest as a central theme in his book, but there is not yet a detailed history of the backgrounds of the leading partisans of this fight in the 1930s and 1940s. I suspect that Spencer’s influence, at least as an icon of free markets and laissez faire, was pervasive among the older generation engaged in the fights, but I am also sure that few of those partisans had actually read very deeply into Spencer’s voluminous writings. Thomas Childs Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York: Macmillan, 1942), who thanked Hofstadter and Merle Curti among others, wrote that “from the Civil War to the New Deal, businessmen explained themselves to the ‘public’ in [Spencer’s] terms; and during the decade of the 1930’s his thought, or textbook variations upon it, formed the basis for conservative attacks upon the reforms of Franklin Roosevelt.” (120). Over the succeeding pages, these two authors took Spencer to task without ever directly explaining his thought or even why it should be more economic than ethical. This source, of course, is from the very heart of those debates. 121. Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology, 15, no. 3 (September 1974), 211-237.The other commentators, in the order they appeared in the text, were Carl Jay Bajema, John Blacking, Robert J. Carneiro, U. M. Cowgill, Santiago Genoves, Michael T. Ghiselin, Charles C. Gillispie, John C. Greene, Marvin Harris, Daniel Hayduk, Kinji Imanishi, Neven P. Lamb, Johannes W. Raum, Ernst Mayer, and G. G. Simpson. At the end of the collection, Freeman answered his critics.

142 work and in context, the negative ideas regarding him and his associations had hardened to what appeared to be a dogma. Freeman’s primary objective in the article was to distinguish between Darwin’s correct science and Spencer’s incorrect speculation and clearly to separate the two thinkers from one another. He felt compelled to write his article as a corrective to a then recent historiographical movement that lumped Spencer and Darwin together into an “evolutionary synthesis.” The leading writers and works of this misguided movement were Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968); S. Andreski, Herbert Spencer: Structure, Function and Evolution (1971); R. L. Carneiro, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (1967); D. MacRae, “Introduction,” in The Man Versus the State (1969), J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (1971); and R. M. Young, “The Development of Herbert Spencer’s Concept of Evolution,” (1967), and Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970). In pursuit of his objective, Freeman oversimplified both Spencer’s and Darwin’s work. He reduced Spencer’s entire philosophy to . On the other hand, he reduced Darwin’s work to natural selection. He bound Spencer tightly to the ideas of his time. He defended Darwin as having transcended his time through the careful consideration of a massive accumulation of real biological evidence. Further, he distanced Darwin from ideas of universal progress and the biological inheritance of acquired characteristics. Freeman was supported by a number of commentators. Heyduk, while supporting Freeman’s separation of Spencer and Darwin, pointed out that the argument demonstrated that in fact Spencer had a far larger direct role in the development of social science while Darwin’s, although important, was indirect.122 Ernst Mayer “agree[d] totally with Freeman’s superb analysis,” and only suggested he could have further distanced Darwin from Malthus by pointing out the long history of “struggle for existence” in the intellectual community back into the eighteenth century.123 Raum congratulated Freeman for going against “a deplorable tendency to misrepresent nineteenth-century intellectual history by lumping together . . . antithetical theories,” which Raum held Spencer’s and Darwin’s to be.124

122. In Freeman, 226. 123. In Freeman, 228-229. 124. In Freeman, 228.

143 Freeman’s greatest mistake in his approach, one that was called out by Carneiro, Greene, and Harris in their comments, was that he took nineteenth-century evolution out of context.125 He engaged in a debate about the meaning of evolution from the perspective of the latter twentieth century and with a rather whiggish defense of the established scientific order. It was important first to note that evolution and the origin of species were not coextensive ideas in 1860, and it was the confluence of these ideas that may properly be seen as an “evolutionary synthesis.” When John Blacking suggested that Darwin had worked out his evolutionary ideas before Spencer and Marx, he applied a term that Darwin did not himself apply to his theory in the first edition of Origin (i.e., “evolution”).126 This tendency to treat Spencer and Darwin too strictly in terms of their theories of evolution was corrected by a number of scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. As noted in the previous chapter, Peel had already shown that Spencer’s ideas were largely a product of his childhood intellectual environment. Especially notable in this later group were Robert Richards and Robert Perrin. Richards extensively treated the component of ethics in Spencer philosophy, which gave much greater texture to his influence than when he was seen as simply as a misguided biologist, or even exclusively as a sociologist. Perrin, working as a sociologist, extensively documented Spencer’s works and demonstrated his broad influence in sociology and other social sciences. The actual installments of The Principles of Sociology were preceded by and based on a vast collection of sociological data, which were partially published in a series of volumes titled the Descriptive Sociology. This was a series of large volumes (20” X 15”) containing tables that presented the development of various societies through time. The copious information was gathered and complied by three men working for Spencer: David Duncan, Richard Sceppig, and James Collier. Spencer classified and arranged the material into sixty tables in the original eight volumes between 1867 and 1881. He discontinued the project in that year because he had lost $16,000 in its publication. A further nine were published after his death by his trustees. It was on the information in part presented in these volumes that Spencer developed his argument for social evolution.127

125. In Freeman, 222-226. 126. In Freeman, 222. 127. Perrin, 129-132.

144 Before beginning the release of the installments of the Sociology, Spencer published serially a sort of sociological primer, The Study of Sociology. He was urged to produce this book in part by his American friend, Edward Youmans, who believed that American readers needed a brief explanation of sociology, its subject, method, and conclusions. The monthly installments began appearing in May 1872 in The Popular Science Monthly, which Youmans had begun in large measure to popularize Spencer’s ideas. In addition to coming first, The Study of Sociology was far more readable than The Principles of Sociology, so it proved to be more popular and influential. It was this brief volume that created the controversy at Yale between William Graham Sumner and president Noah Porter in 1879. It was also this book that was taken as a text for the Brooklyn Ethical Association in 1885 as it began to turn its attention to Spencerian evolutionism and ethics. In the larger work, Spencer divided his study of sociology into eight parts following the same methodology of the preceding parts of the Synthetic Philosophy. The first volume, which was the last volume of the Synthetic Philosophy to be published as installments, included “Part I.--The Data of Sociology,” “Part II.--The Inductions of Sociology,” and “Part III.--Domestic Institutions.” The first two parts presented the principles on which the remainder of the work was based. The final eight parts, including Part III of the first volume and occupying the remaining two volumes, explained the rise of and relationship to one another of the various institutions manifested in human social development: Domestic, Ceremonial, Political, Ecclesiastical, Professional, and Industrial. Each one was a further progressive step in the diversification and integration of the social organism. Sociology, as Spencer explained at the beginning of the work, was the first step in studying the third kind of evolution that he identified in First Principles, “super-organic.” The first type, in logical order, was inorganic evolution, about which he had decided not to write so he could get to the more important and interesting types of evolution. The second type and the one with which he began his application of the evolution philosophy was organic evolution in its two primary divisions, physiological and psychological. Societies, human societies in particular, represented the first stages of super-organic evolution. He believed that the relationship between sociology and ethics in super-organic evolution were analogous to the relationship between biology and psychology in the more simple organic evolution. Therefore, his treatment of sociology demonstrated the structures that demanded and produced ethical adaptation in the

145 same way that biological development had demanded and led to psychological development. As Spencer wrote, “be it rudimentary or be it advanced, every society displays phenomena that are ascribable to the characters of its units and to the conditions under which they exist.”128 In summarizing “The Factors of Social Phenomena,” the second chapter of volume one, Spencer neatly connected the inorganic, organic, and super-organic influences on individual human, and thus human social development. It also showed that his premises and conclusions were not so far out of line with modern sociology as might be expected. As such it is worthwhile to quote extensively from it. Recognizing the primary truth that social phenomena depend in part on the natures of the individuals and in part on the forces the individuals are subject to, we see that these two fundamentally-distinct sets of factors, with which social changes commence, give origin to other sets as social changes advance. The pre- established environing influences, inorganic and organic, which are at first almost unalterable, become more and more altered by the actions of the evolving society. Simple growth of population brings into play fresh causes of transformation that are increasingly important. The influences which the society exerts on the natures of its units, and those which the units exert on the nature of the society, incessantly co-operate in creating new elements. As societies progress in size and structure, they work on one another, now by their war-struggles and now by their industrial intercourse, profound metamorphoses. And the ever-accumulating, ever-complicating super-organic products, material and mental, constitute a further set of factors which become more and more influential causes of change. So that, involved as the factors are at the beginning, each step in advance increases the involution, by adding factors which themselves grow more complex while they grow more powerful.129 Spencer’s assumptions about primitive versus advanced society may be inferred from this passage, which foreshadowed what he believed to be the direction of social evolution. To the modern reader, Spencer’s reference to “the natures of the individuals” may be misunderstood or even slipped over without notice. However, as has been pointed out repeatedly

128. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 1:8-9. 129. Ibid., 1:14-15.

146 in this reinterpretation of Spencer, the individual’s nature is the key to understanding his argument. Everything in his works built up to the nature of the individual: how it had come to exist, why it was susceptible to evolution, and the necessary direction of its development, from the first operations of the law of evolution on homogeneous matter to the development of Victorian morality. In the process of making the connection, too, he produced his most sophisticated philosophical contribution by reconciling the notions of the One and the Many, the individual and the society. It is here, in short, that he most obviously began to bridge the growing chasm between a passing conservatism and a rising liberalism. Here, too, it is easy to see that he was pitching his tent on the optimistic side of the dividing liberal tradition. The Principles of Ethics, 1879-1893. Spencer opened the concluding part of his Synthetic Philosophy with an explicit discussion of the relationship between the individual and the whole of which the individual was a constituent element. “Beyond the primary truth that no idea of a whole can be framed without a nascent idea of parts constituting it, and that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some whole to which it belongs, there is the secondary truth that there can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole.”130 The more complex the whole, as when it was dynamically related to its parts, or even more so when the relationship was organic, the more important was a correct understanding of both. “This truth holds not of material aggregates only, but of immaterial aggregates--aggregated motions, deeds, thoughts, words,” and even conduct (1:4). Having already demonstrated the necessary connection between physical, biological, psychological, and social aggregates through the universal law of evolution, it remained only for Spencer to know correctly both the specifics of ethical actions and the whole of ethics as the end result of that universal process.131 He injected the Many into the One and subordinated individual parts to a greater unity through his innovative application of universal progressive motion to all aspects of the cosmos.

130. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, 2 volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), 1:3. Hereafter cited in text. 131. In succeeding chapters in The Principles of Ethics, chapters five through eight, Spencer demonstrated that his conclusions regarding moral evolution were consistent with physical evolution, biological evolution, psychological evolution, and sociological evolution, respectively. (1:64-149)

147 Evolving conduct served more than one end in the process of human development. In its most basic form, evolving conduct marked a more perfect adjustment of an organism’s acts to the ends necessary to prolong its life. The next step, particularly apparent in human beings, involved adaptation of conduct that increased the “quantity” of life, what we might call “quality of life” and what Spencer referred to as “breadth” of life (1:14). This breadth was to be found most conspicuously in modern social and intellectual intercourse. The highest societies, if they wish to act most perfectly in accord with the broadest life, must be peaceful. Societies could not be peaceful merely within themselves, however, because “the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression of individuals on one another. Hence the limit of evolution can be reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies.” The greater adjustment of actions to environmental necessities in an increasingly dense social environment were those actions that maintained the individual, reared new individuals, and did so “without hindering others from effecting like” actions (1:19). A perfectly and permanently peaceful society had been Spencer’s ideal since youth, it had been the object toward which all his earlier writings directed his readers, and it was the aspect of his philosophy that most clearly belied any connection between him and the Social Darwinism with which he is too often associated. More important for our current purposes, it was this vision of social evolution’s goal that explains why he was so appealing to liberally-minded but conservatively-grounded Americans like those in the Brooklyn Ethical Association. Afraid that he might die before completing his Ethics, Spencer published its first part out of order; it came out in 1879 after only one volume of the Sociology had been published. In the preface to the first installment of the Principles of Ethics, titled “The Data of Ethics,” Spencer explained that this work was the one toward which he has been working his whole life. “Written as far back as 1842, my first essay, consisting of letters on The Proper Sphere of Government, vaguely indicated what I conceived to be certain general principles of right and wrong in political conduct; and from that time onwards my ultimate purpose, laying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large, a scientific basis” (1:xiii). The body of this work, “Part I” of The Principles of Ethics, embodied the crux of his ethical speculation and the summary of his views on ideal ethics, which was why he was so anxious that it be completed before his death. As such it is worthy of some consideration. The remaining five parts of this ultimate division of The Synthetic Philosophy

148 further developed and refined the ideas here set forth, but they are ancillary to the conclusions presented in “The Data of Ethics.” Spencer demanded a scientific basis for morality because religion, which had heretofore provided ethical guidance, was based on dictate rather than complete understanding of the goals of human conduct. Religiously based morals, he argued, tacitly admitted that the definition of good behavior was that which increased happiness, be it now or in a future life. However, because religion did not recognize the changing and progressing condition of humanity, it was prone to become staid and orthodox, which could make it more a hindrance than a help to human ethical evolution (1:47-63). He did not reject religion out of hand, though, because he believed it to provide at least a part of the whole truth of ethical behavior. “The theological theory contains a part. If for the divine will, supposed to be supernaturally revealed, we substitute the naturally- revealed end towards which the Power manifested throughout Evolution works; then, since Evolution has been, and is still, working towards the highest life, it follows that conforming to those principles by which the highest life is achieved, is to further that end” (1:171). As will be apparent in the next chapter, Spencer’s view of morality and religion fit well with the views held by liberal Christians in America, who had been influenced by German higher criticism and, more importantly, the Arminian tradition within Protestantism. Other essential data of ethics that Spencer had to consider were egoism and altruism. That is, he had to determine what the evolutionary relationship between selfish and selfless behavior must be before he could continue to develop a scientific ethics. First he addressed “Egoism Versus Altruism” and highlighted the need for people to take care of themselves as well and as broadly as possible. Because Spencer believed acquired characteristics were inheritable, a person who failed to maintain his health, to enjoy life broadly, and to improve his appreciation of gratifying activities would pass on a poor constitution and a debased nature to his offspring. Further, a healthy and happy person, being one who did these things, was a positive influence on his or her companions, which improved their lives, and thus those of their offspring as well. Finally, “the adequately egoistic individual retains those powers which make altruistic activities possible” (1:194). Thus, altruistic behavior could only grow out of egoistic behavior. In this chapter, Spencer was not referring directly to material definitions of egoism, though material wellbeing was certainly a necessary concern of the individual. It is easy for a reader coming to Spencer’s works over a century later to misunderstand what he meant when he argued that

149 egoism must come before altruism. It was not the selfishness, particularly the materialistic selfishness, of recent libertarians or their fellow travelers. It was a selfishness that also encompassed a deep concern for humanity as a whole, an idea that drew from the springs of pre- Enlightenment civic virtue (with even a hint of noblesse oblige) and post-Enlightenment republican virtue. When comparing “Altruism Versus Egoism,” as the following chapter was titled, Spencer again found primordial roots of altruism as deep as those of egoism. The clearest example for him was parental sacrifice in aid of offspring, be it the fission of a single-celled organism or the provision of milk by a mammalian mother. In fact, Spencer found that “altruism has been evolving simultaneously with egoism. . . . [And] each higher species, using its improved faculties primarily for egoistic benefit, has spread in proportion as it has used them secondarily for altruistic benefit.” Supporting his argument for a “moving equilibrium” in the process of evolution, Spencer suggested that “every species is continually purifying itself from the unduly egoistic individuals, while there are being lost to it the unduly altruistic individuals.” This balancing of egoism and altruism began with the progenitor-progeny relationship but had advanced to “social altruism” (1:203-204). As evolution had proceeded into its highest forms “we . . . observe that throughout the latter stages of the progress . . . increase of egoistic satisfactions has depended on growth of regard for the satisfactions of others” (1:205). Spencer built his reconciliation of his liberal individualism and his regard for social stability and Victorian self-restraint on this foundation. As societies grew larger and more integrated, members of those societies gained greater “recognition of others’ claims” to the benefits of society. That recognition grew slowly, at first forced by a powerful leader, but slowly inculcated into proceeding generations until the recognition of others’ claims became a part of the inherited nature of a society’s citizens (1:206-208). This evolutionary process was helped along by the fact that increasing altruism led to greater social organization, which led to more survivable societies, which provided greater opportunities for living a broader life, which increased happiness, which reinforced the behavior that had led to survival and increasing happiness. This meant that more evolved citizens would find the ill health of their neighbors distressing, because it impinged on their own happiness. Citizens would reproach stupidity, weakness, and “unskilfulness” because it “raises the price of commodities.” So they would encourage greater intelligence and better training.

150 Before Spencer is mistaken to be a latter day Progressive, I will clarify what he thought of government-sponsored altruism. “I do not mean such altruism as taxes ratepayers that children’s minds may be filled with dates, and names, and gossip about kings, and narratives of battles, and other useless information, no amount of which will make them capable workers or good citizens; but I mean such altruism as helps to spread a knowledge of the nature of things and to cultivate the power of applying that knowledge” (1:210). For Spencer altruistic responsibility lay with each individual in his or her relations with others and in the work that he or she did. Rather than envisioning a nation of potential criminals who needed the strong direction of a powerful government, a barbaric and anachronistic holdover in Victorian Britain as he saw it, he looked to a nation of self-regulating, responsible, honest citizens who innately knew what was good and right and behaved accordingly. Again, I believe this to be an example of his essential optimism compared to many of his liberal contemporaries who believed government was the only way to control citizens’ behavior. The evolving relationship between egoism and altruism was not limited to any given society, however. It “ranges beyond the limits of each society, and tends ever towards universality.” The economic integration of nations demonstrated that failure in one decreased the happiness in all, so such failures should be avoided. Even more important than peaceful economic relations were the detrimental effects of imperialism, which diminished the egoistic satisfactions of both the object of aggression and the aggressor. Spencer saw this to be particularly the case in “the unscrupulous greed of conquest cloaked by pretences of spreading the blessings of British rule and British religion,” which was hurting the economic condition of the home country (1:217-218). This was precisely the same argument he had made a quarter century before in Social Statics. Before concluding “The Data of Ethics,” Spencer turned to “Absolute and Relative Ethics,” the penultimate chapter of this part of The Principle of Ethics. In Social Statics he had briefly discussed relative and absolute ethics in regard to an ideal society, but now he was in a better position to address the subject in the context of his evolutionary philosophy. He began by asserting that “the absolutely good, the absolutely right, in conduct, can be that only which produces pure pleasure--pleasure unalloyed with pain anywhere. By implication, conduct which has any concomitant of pain, or any painful consequence, is partially wrong; and the highest claim to be made for such conduct is, that it is the least wrong which, under the conditions, is

151 possible--the relatively right.” Therefore, in any social state and corresponding ethical state short of perfection, one could only talk about relatively right actions and relative ethics (1:261). Absolute ethics had to be sought in the same way that science sought truth, “by eliminating perturbing or conflicting factors, and recognizing only fundamental factors” (1:268). Once “ideal ethical truths, expressing the absolutely right” had been established, they could be applied “to the questions of our transitional state in such ways that, allowing for the of an incomplete life and the imperfection of existing natures, we may ascertain with approximate correctness what is the relatively right” (1:271). For Spencer, absolute ethics had remained the same since the 1840s: perfect equity between all individuals and perfect justice for all actions based on the perfectly adjusted, self-restrained, egoistic and altruistic behavior of citizens. Spencer did not condemn relative ethics, however. In fact, the most perfect individual in the moving equilibrium of evolution was the one most perfectly adapted to life in a given society. Therefore, an ideal ethical nature was only a part of the perfect individual in an ideal society. Relative ethics, then, provided a means for judging acts in an imperfect society without blindly condemning imperfect behavior. It was thus relative ethics that were the proper object of ethical discussion (1:281-284). Interestingly, this form of relativism was picked up by some members of the Brooklyn Ethical Association when they discussed Jesus’s life and his divinity. Conclusion Ethics, a scientifically founded and valid ethics in particular, had been the object of Spencer’s work since he was a young twenty-something writing his articles for the Non- Conformist in 1842. In retrospect, it is strange that although Spencer repeatedly said that the study of ethics was his ultimate goal, that the final outcome of evolution as he saw it was ethical development, and despite the obvious connection between his conclusions in Social Statics in 1850 and The Synthetic Philosophy, the importance of ethics has been overlooked for the past century or more by most writers. Any number of factors are surely to blame, but a few appear to be particularly culpable. First, on a grand scale the rise of Pragmatic liberalism has left Spencer’s thought without a home. Hofstadter, very much a product of pragmatic liberalism, actually calls Social Statics “ultra-conservative,” which was a mind boggling inversion of terms in the twentieth century that would have left Spencer and his contemporaries completely baffled. Second, in science the ascent of a neo-Darwinian synthesis has focused later writers on the patent errors made by Spencer in his definition of evolution. Looking backward through

152 whiggish lenses, recent writers cannot distinguish between the ideas of “evolution,” “natural selection,” and “Darwinism.” As a result Spencer is thought to have applied biological evolution to society, when it was not an application of one to the other, but the creation of a mechanism for universal progress to fulfill what he believed to be the ultimate development of the cosmos and humanity. Third, after being labeled as a Social Darwinist, Spencer has become anathema to most people in the social sciences. His reputation firmly established as a racist, a supporter of vicious individual competition, a defender of robber-baron capitalism, and an apologist for militarism and imperialism, he could simply be erected as a lightening rod to protect other more culpable founders of social science. As such an iconic figure there has been no need to read carefully what he actually wrote or to seek out anything of value in his philosophy. Finally, perhaps, the absence of serious ethical studies broadly in American education has eliminated the field in which Spencer’s writings rightly belong. Discussions of right and wrong continue, but they have become as compartmentalized as the rest of our society. Moral absolutes are discussed in churches and philosophy departments, but pragmatic morality is the subject of most of our discussions elsewhere. We still grapple with the same things that Spencer engaged-- greatest happiness, egoism versus altruism, self-control, social obligation, ideal behavior, temporally and socially acceptable norms, and justice--but we have lost any faith in a secular scientific process by which to define right and wrong. In such an environment, as the historiography of Spencer demonstrates, we are not only unwilling to see his work as ethical, but unable even to recognize it as such. The Brooklyn Ethical Association and liberal Christians in the late nineteenth century, to which I will now turn, could view Spencer in these terms. And, if we are to understand their role in the broader Spencer debates, it is essential that we too see him as such.

153

CHAPTER 4: BRIGING SPENCER TO AMERICA

Introduction Richard Hofstadter credits “transcendentalism and Unitarianism in breaking up old orthodoxies and liberating the minds of American intellectuals” and thus preparing the way for Spencerism in post-Civil War America.1 Though this broad effect may be true, it is a very difficult thing to demonstrate. What is demonstrable, and certainly more relevant, is that the Unitarian tradition was open to grand unifying ethical systems. It was open to and to the idea of evolution that embodied optimistic universal progress. Rather than seeing the spread of any given idea as an amorphous force pouring into the remains of a shattered intellectual bowl, one should look to the individuals who took up the idea and how they propagated it. Unitarians do not represent the American mind, but they certainly held the levers of a number of machines that informed minds in America. They heavily influenced a leading university, Harvard, and they published a number of the most influential intellectual journals in the country, including the Atlantic and the North American Review. They held a strong place in the center of American publishing, which was concentrated in Boston and New York, and they were disproportionately represented among literary figures. The specifics of Unitarian development in the nineteenth century and the personal network that offered a ready conduit for Spencer’s ideas, therefore is worth of some note. Any attempt to place a person or group in the broader Spencer debates must demonstrate some connection to Edward Livingston Youmans and The Popular Science Monthly. In the case of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, the connections are both intellectual and personal. The timing is particularly interesting as well. Youmans was connected to the Brooklyn intellectual community beginning in the 1830s and remained so through the rest of his life. Though he lived in --what is today the borough of Manhattan--he often visited friends across the East River. His personal connections, as we shall see, put him into direct and indirect contact

1. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition, (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1955), 32-33.

154 with the people at the center of this essay. He and John White Chadwick shared a mutual acquaintance with Richard H. Manning and knew each other through visits to his house. Youmans’s journal, The Popular Science Monthly, was read by Chadwick and members of the BEA. His brother and sister, Youmans and Eliza Ann Youmans, participated in BEA meetings and the BEA memorialized Youmans in its second season of published lectures and discussions. In Brooklyn the various threads of this story--science, Spencer, Youmans, and liberal Unitarianism--all come together and form the backdrop of the Brooklyn Ethical Association’s place in the Spencer debates. The Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and John White Chadwick (1840-1904) On April 16, 1853, Samuel Longfellow, brother of the famous American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, preached his first sermon before the Second Unitarian Society of Brooklyn. He remained the minister of the fledgling church for seven years and provide the congregation with it first steady minister since it had split from its parent church almost exactly two years before.2 The transformation of Unitarianism in Brooklyn, and the intellectual and religious track that the Second Church followed under Longfellow and his two successors reflects a broader trend in nineteenth century American culture. It was a liberalizing and opening trend that made an accommodating space for the new scientific and optimistic philosophies that were bubbling to the surface in America and flowing across the Atlantic. The story of this church under the leadership of its most important pastor, John White Chadwick, and its role in the intellectual debates in which Spencer’s thoughts played so large a role is revealing in both its history and in its disappearance from history. It is easy to forget today that Brooklyn has not always been but one of New York City’s boroughs. In 1850 Brooklyn was an independent city, the third largest in the country behind New York and Philadelphia. The seceding members of the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and other Unitarians who condoned the creation of a second society in Brooklyn cited that fact as an important consideration in their decision. There was also a tension within the denomination between conservative and liberal elements traceable back to Emerson’s 1838 Divinity School Address and the ensuing transcendentalist controversy. That does not appear to have been a

2. Olive Hoogenboom The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years (New York: The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, 1987), 46-47.

155 prime mover in the split, but the new church counted more liberals than conservatives among its members, and in the years to come that tendency would grow more apparent.3 In the two years before Longfellow’s first sermon the members of the Second Church had been searching for both a minister and a permanent home. The list of ministers they called and hosted is a litany of mid-nineteenth-century Unitarianism’s leading lights: O. B. Frothingham, Robert Collyer, Ezra Stiles Gannett (turned them down), John F. W. Ware (a temporary replacement for Gannett), Andrew Preston Peabody (declined), James Freeman Clarke (backed out when his wife got sick), Horatio Stebbins (accepted and then back out before beginning), Thomas Starr King (rejected the offer), and Samuel Johnson.4 Johnson was a notorious liberal partisan in the transcendental and post-transcendental debates. Though the church had been becoming more liberal over the two preceding years, Johnson’s sermon met with a mixed reception, and not wanting to cause friction he offered up an alternative.5 Samuel Longfellow had been his classmate at the , and though he, too, was of a more liberal bent he proved to be acceptable to the members of the church, and he was made the permanent minister on October 26, 1853.6 The Sunday following Longfellow’s first sermon the church found a semi-permanent home at the Brooklyn Athenaeum where they remained for five years.7 Under Longfellow’s leadership the Second Unitarian Church took up a position on the liberal side of the Unitarian debates of the mid-century. When in October of 1853 “the American Unitarian Association had smuggled some sort of creed into its annual report,” Longfellow led the church in adopting “a series of resolutions declaring that the fundamental principle of Unitarianism was character distinguished from belief, and that any creed adopted by the

3. Ibid., 45-47. 4. W. C. Gannett, “John White Chadwick. Preacher,” Unity, 55, no. 1 (March 2, 1905), 4, Unitarian Universalist Association Inactive Minister File, bMS 1446-27, Andover-Harvard Theological Library. This entire number of Unity (55, no. 1) was dedicated to memorializing Chadwick. Hoogenboom, too, recounts the various men whom the church called and hosted. 5. Angus deMille Cameron, “John White Chadwick,” Bachelor’s diss., Meadville Theological School, (Chicago, 1937), 24. A microfilm copy of this thesis is available at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. 6. Cameron, 25. 7. Hoogenboom, 46-47, Cameron, 24.

156 Association could only express the creed of individuals voting for its adoption.”8 This was in keeping with the church’s constitution, which read in part, “no subscription or assent to any formula of faith shall be required as a qualification for church membership.”9 After four years in the Athenaeum, the Longfellow’s congregation built themselves a new church building. Their new building was at the corner of Clinton and Congress streets on the ridge above the East River on land leased from the Catholic Church, and it was under construction from June 1857 to March 1858.10 “The church building was small and unpretentious, quaint of architecture, and seeming to have the front in the rear. The interior was correspondingly simple, and apart from the rather unusual treatment of the ceiling woodwork, there was not much to attract the eye.”11 The church was a small building with a low-pitched roof that gave it a striking resemblance to a turtle, and as a result it was popularly known as “turtle church.” Longfellow had “The Truth Will Make You Free” inscribed in gold letters over the door.12 He preached the dedication sermon of the new chapel on March 2, 1858. The text of that sermon eventually made it into the hands of a young John White Chadwick and changed the course of his life. John White Chadwick (1840-1904) John White Chadwick’s name is not one that is widely known today, even among historians of Unitarianism, let alone among scholars generally. Chadwick, however, was at the center of the intellectual controversies within both the Unitarian church and the United States as a whole in the last half of the nineteenth century. His lifetime as a minister and member of the American literati gave him a voice in the broad ranging debates over literature, theology, society, science, and ethics that tinge every aspect of American culture between the Civil War and the

8. Cameron, 26. 9. Gannett, “John White Chadwick,” 4. 10. Cameron, 27. 11. Ibid., 36. 12. Gannett, “John White Chadwick,” 4.

157 end of the century. That life’s work also left a sizeable body of writings that are worthy of an independent study in their own right.13 Apparent in Chadwick’s sermons is his own intellectual journey from conservative Unitarianism through Transcendentalism to naturalism. His naturalism was very heavily dependent upon Spencer’s optimistic ideas of evolution rather than the more pessimistic evolutionism derived from Darwin’s works that informed what we now call literary naturalism. Chadwick was able to meld Spencerian evolutionism quite easily with his own emphasis on Christian ethics. In this he was not alone, though he stands out because of his intimate relationship with the Brooklyn Ethical Association, and because of the prominent role that he played in the liberalization of Unitarianism in the 1880s and 1890s. Chadwick was a member of the generation that came of age along with evolutionism. The previous generation, which included people like Darwin, Spencer, and as we shall see, Edward L. Youmans who were born in the first two decades of the century, were the ones who first broached the modern definition of evolution or were converted to it in adulthood. A large cohort of men and women born between 1838 and 1850--many of them in the six years from 1838 to 1844--form the backbone of the evolution debates in the nineteenth century. For them the ink of On the Origin of Species and Spencer’s various works on cosmic evolution was still wet when they were teenagers in search of understanding but still not staid by a lifetime of habits of thought. This generation included Chadwick (1840-1904), Lewis George Janes (1844-1901), John Fiske (1842-1901), (1838-1901), Henry George (1839-1894), Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913), William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), and Henry Brooks (1838-1918), to name just a few of the most prominent and/or better known participants in the debates of the period. This younger generation is the one that largely decided the fate of evolutionism. It was they who debated whether the evidence of science proved that the universe had an essentially orderly and progressive nature or if it was chaotic and directionless. John White Chadwick’s Life, 1840-1861 Chadwick was born on October 19, 1840 in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His father was a shipmaster who guided fishing ships to the Grand Banks each year. When he was not at sea,

13. To date, the only monograph on Chadwick’s life and work is Cameron’s work. It is a good piece of scholarship, but is now dated and could be greatly expanded upon using the archival and periodical sources now more widely available than in 1937.

158 Captain Chadwick earned extra money making shoes, the work that his son John took up at thirteen after “leaving school to sell buttons in [his father’s] dry goods store.”14 Therefore, “there were no guiding precedents in his family which could predispose him to the life of a scholar and writer,” which he would later pursue.15 He was, however, raised a Unitarian, “to the manor born,” as he would later put it.16 His father “was one of the pillars of the Unitarian church in Marblehead, steadfast, conservative and yet sympathetic to the most extreme forms of radicalism,” and his mother, formerly Miss Annie Horton Hathaway, had also been raised Unitarian.17 Chadwick’s religious background, and the date of his birth, meant that his earliest church experiences were during the hottest period of the Transcendentalist controversy in the church. Indeed, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, Theodore Parker, and all spoke in or near Marblehead, and their preaching influenced young John’s intellectual development.18 In 1857, after the economic crash had driven his father’s dry goods store out of business and led him back out to sea, John decided to go back to school. With the support of his sister, who was working as a teacher, and the blessing of his father when he returned from sea, he left for the Normal School in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.19 It was here in a boarding house that Chadwick received, in “its lilac-tinted covers,” the dedication sermon that Samuel Longfellow preached in the new chapel of the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn.20 He said of the

14. Cameron, 1-2; Gannett, “John White Chadwick,” 4. 15. Bradley Gilman, “John White Chadwick. Poet, Biographer and Preacher of Liberalism,” December 14, 1904, newspaper clipping without the title of the paper, Unitarian Universalist Association, Inactive Ministerial File, bMS 1446-27, Andover-Harvard Theological Library. 16. Cameron, 4. The quote is from John White Chadwick, “American Unitarianism: A Sermon,” Sermons, series 9 number 2, November 1883 (Boston: George H. Ellis, Publisher), 16, held at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. 17. Cameron, 4. 18. Ibid., 4-5. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Chadwick, “Anniversary Discourse,” Sunday Morning April 16, 1876, quoted in Cameron, 5.

159 sermon: “It was unlike any sermon I had seen before. Coming to me at a time when I was singularly sensitive to receive such an impression, I doubt not that it had a vast determining influence upon my thought and life.”21 Apparently it was this sermon that led the teenaged Chadwick to pursue a degree in divinity.22 He soon transferred to Phillips Academy, Exeter, for two years to prepare to enter the Harvard Divinity School.23 American Unitarianism (a very brief history) The denomination for which Chadwick intended to become a minister, though related to a European tradition stretching back to the sixteenth century and across the continent to , had a distinctive Anglo-American tradition. In particular it had its roots in the English dissenting tradition, which found its way to America most coherently in the Congregationalism of the Puritans.24 Its initial formation was a kind intellectualist reaction against the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening in the 1740s. During the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century it again stood against emotional excess, and many of its believers leaned further toward a rationalist faith. Unitarianism gained an institutional foothold when, in 1805, Henry Ware was named to be the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard College. The formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825 gave it a formal structure for the first time. That structure was

21. Ibid. 22. Cameron, 5. This is also supported by an obituary, “Recent Death. Rev. Dr. John W. Chadwick, Well-Known Brooklyn Clergyman, Lecturer and Author,” December 1904, newspaper clipping without title or page number (the date is handwritten), Unitarian Universalist Association, Inactive Ministerial File, bMS 1446-27, Andover-Harvard Theological Library,. 23. Gilman, “John White Chadwick,” Cameron, 6. 24. Conrad Edick Wright, “Preface,” in Conrad Edick Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 1805-1865, (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989), viii-ix: “the new scholarship on the history of American Unitarianism has placed the denomination squarely within the tradition of American Puritanism.”; Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism inn America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), 5-6 notes that “there was a tendency at one time to begin the story of Unitarianism in Transylvania and Poland, and to assume a widening influence and a continuous tradition which eventually reached the Low Countries, England, and America,” but he argues that the traditions are parallel rather than consecutive.

160 soon tested, however, by the transcendentalist controversy that erupted following Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. By the 1850s the sect was rife with divisions between so-called orthodox Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and a growing group of naturalists who sympathized with the Free Religious Movement. This essay, of course, is most interested in the latter period, but a brief overview of Unitarianism’s history is in order to better understand the intellectual context of many of Spencer’s partisans late in the century. Throughout its history, Unitarianism has been in a general process of liberalization in the sense that it more than any other major religious sect had come increasingly to embody the Enlightenment ideas of individualism, humanism, and naturalism. That Charles H. Lyttle, a notable Unitarian scholar and the posthumous son-in-law of Lewis G. Janes, titled his book about the Western Conference of Unitarians, “Freedom Moves West,” gives a sense of the ideas attached to Unitarianism in the nineteenth century.25 The process had not been uniform or absolute in any way, for there have always been opponents within the sect against further liberalization. Nevertheless, seen from a distance its progressive development is clear. By the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially in the final quarter of the century, Unitarian leaders of Chadwick’s generation were emphasizing individual ethical and moral development even more than their predecessors. In the environment of increasing individualism, naturalism, and humanism, particularly in light of the ideals of the American Revolution that still resounded in the New England of their youth, Chadwick and his fellow travelers found Spencer’s evolutionary ethics particularly meaningful and appealing. Unitarianism and the Arminian tradition. In The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, Conrad Wright “is concerned with the liberal movement which developed within the congregational churches of New England in the eighteenth century, emerging as Unitarianism in the nineteenth.”26 He identifies three major tendencies that mark the liberal movement:

25. Charles H. Lyttle, Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference, 1852-1952 (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952). Jane H. and William H. Pease, “Whose Right Hand of Fellowship? Pew and Pulpit in Shaping Church Practice,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 182. 26. Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 3. Though now a half-century old, Wright’s book continues to be one of the standard works on the development of Unitarianism and has been through at least four editions. David M. Robinson, himself a leading writer on Unitarianism, cites

161 Arminianism, supernatural rationalism, and anti-Trinitarianism. As he works his argument out, though, it is clear that the major trend is a developing Arminianism27 that incorporates the two later tendencies. Regardless of such classifications, by the time Arminianism became Unitarianism late in the eighteenth century it had taken a direction that would lead many of its members to an easy acceptance of Spencerian evolutionism a half century later.28 Wright begins his coverage of the controversy within American Puritanism in 1735, “the year of the outbreak of the Great Awakening.”29 He connects it with a broader religious, social, and political movement on both sides of the Atlantic, which produced “Pietism in Germany and Methodism in England” (30). Jonathan Edwards, leader of the Great Awakening, was reacting against a fading of the religious fervor in his own generation of Puritan descendants, and sought to reconnect his contemporaries with a deep emotional connection to God and an awe of His supreme power. The Arminians and, the Unitarians that grew out of that earlier liberalizing movement, were unwilling to accept what they saw as the emotional excesses of Edwards and his followers (58).

only one source for eighteenth-century Unitarian history in his article on Unitarianism in A Companion to American Thought, Wright’s Beginnings of Unitarianism in America. David M. Robinson, “Unitarianism,” in Richard Wrightman Fox & James T. Kloppenberg (eds.), A Companion to American Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998), 695-696. Citations of Wright’s book are also ubiquitous in articles and books on Unitarianism and I have not found a major published revision of his work. 27. Wright notes that, “The New England liberals were called Arminians, not because they were influenced directly by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1690), the Dutch Remonstrant, but because their reaction against Calvinism was similar to his. They were descended spiritually as well as biologically from the settlers of the Bay Colony, and to a very significant extent, their Arminianism was a development out of Puritanism under the pressure of social as well as intellectual forces.” Beginnings of Unitarianism, 6. 28. I have no evidence of Wright’s sympathy with Herbert Spencer and no reason to suspect that he has any, but his arguments could not be better fashioned and worded to demonstrate a common intellectual heritage and culture between the eighteenth-century founders of Unitarianism and Spencer’s nineteenth-century background and culture. 29. Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 3. Hereafter cited in text.

162 Through the remainder of the eighteenth century they furthered the process of rationalism that had led to the covenant theology and the “half-way covenant” among the New England Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the process that had alarmed and inspired Jonathan Edwards and the first Great Awakening in the first place (11-14). Theologically the most important contribution of the Arminians was the replacement of an inscrutable, unpredictable, and vengeful God with a God who was benevolent and lawful (10). It was a further development of covenant theology, which had asserted that God had entered into a pact with humanity for each individual’s salvation. Were any individual to keep the covenant by living up to God’s moral standards, then that person would receive salvation. God condescended to make the covenant lawful and comprehensible for even so base and blind a creature as a human being. Though the Edwardsians and Arminians argued about human free will, Wright shows that “it is a blind alley,” because at base they agreed to its existence. Their differences were in regard to its origin and the origin of the restraints on it (94). “Most New England Calvinists asserted that man is a free moral agent,” and they “agreed that man’s actions are governed by moral necessity--that is, by a necessary connection between acts of the will and the greatest apparent good” (92, 103). The difference was in the essence of human morality and human nature. On one hand, Edwardsians believed that original sin, and the innate and total depravity in human beings that resulted from it, was certain to lead them to make bad decisions. On the other hand, Arminians rejected original sin and believed that because God was perfectly good, He would not create creatures, let alone human beings, with an absolute incapacity for good. Thus, both sides believed that man’s free will was constrained by his moral nature with the liberals arguing that it was “seldom wholly good or wholly evil,” and that “moral character is the product of training and experience.” This faith in the plasticity of human moral nature made room for reason and education in the betterment of humanity (112-114). In turn, this emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to develop his or her on moral character meant that one could look to a better future in this world as well as the next, but it only through “a process of trial and discipline” that was not “easy or automatic” (90). Arminians also adopted “supernatural rationalism,” which was only a short distance from the that was also appearing in the middle of the eighteenth century. It, like naturalism, held that the application of reason to the facts of the natural world could lead a person to find the

163 essence of religion and a fair guide to a proper moral order in self and society. Unlike pure naturalism, however, “it insisted that natural religion must be supplemented with a special revelation of God’s will” (3-4). This supernatural rationalism is apparent in the writings of Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. For Chadwick’s generation, even this updating of supernatural rationalism proved to be too limited, and he and others like him slipped further toward naturalism, as I will discuss below. Anti-Trinitarianism, the last element that Wright identifies with the liberal movement in New England congregationalism, often but not always accepted by Arminians, also paved the way for an easier acceptance of Spencerian evolutionism a century later. Basically, the anti- Trinitarians questioned the place of Jesus in relation to God. One early heresy was Arian, which held that Christ was a superior being that had been created before the creation of the universe, but that he was not coterminous with God. A second early heresy, Socinianism, made Jesus a man, but one made perfect by God; this was the position held by Joseph Priestly--a cofounder of the Derby Philosophical Society, intimate of Erasmus Darwin and the Midlands dissenting community, and late eighteenth-century emigrant from England to the United States. Arianism dominated the eighteenth century in America, and Socinianism spread in the nineteenth (200- 210). As Jesus became increasingly humanized over the course of the nineteenth century, following the track laid down by the Arians and the Socinians, Christians like Chadwick had to find a way to reconcile his divine inspiration and their own growing naturalism. As we shall see, Spencerian evolution gave them a means to do this. Because Spencer focused on moral evolution, the descendents of Arminianism were able to use his scheme to trace God’s plan in history and to place Jesus within it. Jesus was a perfectly moral person--the cause of that perfection was ambiguous enough to leave room for traditional Christian beliefs--and that both made him an appropriate guide and explained why he had been killed by people in a most imperfect society. Jesus was an example of Spencer’s survival of the fittest and relative ethics. Perfect morality only befits a person in a perfectly moral society. As it happened with Christ, he was a man too far ahead of his own time. His ethics did not fit with the broader society’s ethics, so he was killed, and in the process martyred to the cause of moral perfection. The Arminians based their position on the writings of John Locke, Daniel Whitby and Samuel Clarke, and on Newtonian science (95, 136). Those ideas were still current in the

164 generation before Spencer and they would have been available through the talk of his elders and in the Derby Philosophical Society’s library. As I argued earlier, Spencer’s thought was more a product of the radical late eighteenth century than the industrial nineteenth. It was this religious agitation that helped produce his intellectual environment--both sides of Spencer’s family were connected to Methodism and his father later joined the Unitarian church in Derby--even as it was creating a similar one in America. In both England and America, Arminianism had a strong influence (17).30 In reading Wright’s description of the intellectual development of Arminianism into Unitarianism between 1735 and 1805, one who has recently read Spencer’s writings is struck by the similarities between the founding ideas of the philosopher and the sect. Writing from the other side, Wright makes this point specifically: “In their ethical theory, the New England liberals were very eclectic, borrowing at times from every one of the well-known British moralists” (142). Given these facts, it is not surprising that there were similar ideas regarding the natural order and the importance of moral development in both Spencer’s English Midlands and in Unitarian New England. Quite to the contrary, it would be a surprise to find that there were not similar cultural environments on both Anglophone sides of the Atlantic. Coalescence and organization of Unitarianism in America. The year 1805 was a seminal year in the history of Unitarianism because in that year it gained a foothold in Harvard College and precipitated “the Unitarian controversy.” At the same time that Henry Ware was changing the culture of Harvard College, was providing Unitarianism with it most clear and coherent theological statements. By 1825 the denomination had organized itself into the American Unitarian Association and was moving toward consolidation. The deep- seeded opposition to creeds inherent in this liberal development of Puritanism soon led to fissures in the newly poured foundations. By 1838 the cracks had allowed an even more liberal religion to grow up, Transcendentalism, even as the Unitarian controversy was coming to a close.31 Just as Unitarianism had its roots in a reaction to the Great Awakening, Unitarianism organized itself in the context of the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the

30. “Ever since the days of Archbishop Laud, Arminianism had been common in the Church of England; by the turn of the century, it was wholly dominant there.” 31. Robinson, “Unitarianism,” is an excellent short summary of the development of Unitarianism from its nascent growth in Puritanism to its late-twentieth-century form.

165 nineteenth century. Joseph Conforti argues, in fact, that it was their cultural memory of the first awakening that informed the reaction of Unitarians to the second. This later group continued to fear and to reject the emotional excesses of revivalism that they saw in the preachers of the so- called burned over district and their southern counterparts in favor of a more rational appreciation of God’s will as known through reason and His creation.32 For a young Andrews Norton, “Calvinism was an intellectual construct demolishable by rational alternatives.”33 Similarly, David Robinson argues that, “the liberal movement was prone to stress human capacity, a view that ultimately stressed works as fundamental to religion. The centerpiece of Unitarian theology thus became the doctrine of probation, which . . . stressed that life was a ‘state of preparatory discipline’ . . . a testing ground for the cultivation of character.”34 Edward Caldwell Moore, explaining Unitarians to his early twentieth century contemporaries, said “the initial conviction of the liberal movement was that religion is belief and consecration. It is not a ritual. It is not a particular type of organization.” As a result, the Unitarians of the early nineteenth century did not see themselves as rejecting Christianity, instead, “they thought themselves to be but interpreting their [spiritual] inheritance in the light of intellectual and ethical movements of their time.”35 As Conrad Wright argues, the most important outcome of the Unitarian controversy was the collapse of the Standing Order--the old system of Puritan-descended church organization in New England--in the 1820s and 1830s and the organization of two new sects, Congregational and Unitarian.36 The taking of Harvard, so to speak, was no small part of this reorganization, and as E. C. Moore puts it, Unitarianism “gathered no small part of its prestige from Harvard

32. Joseph Conforti, “Edwardsians, Unitarians, and the Memory of the Great Awakening, 1800-1840,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 31-50. 33. Lilian Handlin, “Babylon est delenda--the Young Andrews Norton,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 54. 34. David M. Robinson, “Grace and Works: Emerson’s Essays in Theological Perspective,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 125. 35. Edward Caldwell Moore, “A Century of Unitarianism in the United States,” Journal of Religion 5 no. 4 (July 1925), 345-346. 36. Conrad Wright, “Institutional Reconstruction in the Unitarian Controversy,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 4.

166 College.”37 Because Harvard was an important source of ministers in New England, its shift to Unitarianism gave the movement a training ground from which to send out its emissaries. Orthodox Calvinists, unwilling to accept this shift established the Andover Theological Seminary in order to train their own preachers. In response, in 1816, Harvard established its Divinity school.38 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist controversy in Unitarianism. It was at the Divinity School in 1838 that Emerson delivered the lecture that effectively marks the beginning of the Transcendentalist controversy within Unitarianism. In that lecture, before a graduating class of seven students, Emerson presented an optimistic and unified vision of the world, humanity, and God.39 He combined a reverence for science and the natural world with a deep and transcendent piety that showed the human soul to be bound to an overarching and intimately united whole of the universe. He spoke of ethics and individual character, of an innate knowledge of what is right and wrong, of a natural tendency for the good to congregate with the good and for evil people to seek out evil. In soaring poetic language he stitched together a tapestry of nineteenth-century optimism, natural science, divine order, humanistic ethics, individualism, and even bits of Calvinistic predestinationism. More controversial, however, was his suggestion of Jesus’s simple humanity and God’s embodiment in the natural order as seen in a perfectly law-bound universe.40 In “Self-Reliance,” as David Robinson notes, Emerson asserted the “unity of the individual self with a universal or abstract Self underlying it[,] . . . and possession of the self is thus a universal rather than a private act, a confirmation of principles rather than an assertion of mere selfishness.”41 In this Emerson reflected the constant focus of Unitarianism, personal

37. Moore, “A Century of Unitarianism,” 342. 38. Ibid., 343. 39. Gary L. Collison, “‘A True Toleration’: Harvard Divinity School Students and Unitarianism, 1830-1859,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 211. 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 73-92. 41. Robinson, “Grace and Works,” 127.

167 ethics.42 Of particular importance was the development of ethical standards that fit with the Jesus’s command to “do unto others as you would have then do unto you.” For Emerson and the rest of the Transcendentalists, “the concept of an active or developing soul was central,” because it was a necessary antidote to original sin and complete human depravity.43 Such personal restraint based on a strong foundation of personal ethics was essential to the liberal worldview, because if one wished to see a world of free individuals, then some force was necessary to prevent a socially destructive anarchy. In lieu of government coercion writers like Emerson and Spencer, who were unwilling to accept social disorder, believed a powerful self-restraint was necessary. Aside from his emphasis on the ability of the individual simply to perceive truth through a deeply personal transcendent experience of universal truth and God’s will, his arguments were similar to those Spencer proposed two decades later. John White Chadwick’s Life, 1861-1864 Chadwick embraced Transcendentalism in his early teens, and took it with him to the Harvard Divinity School. Influenced in his childhood, as noted above, by Emerson, Parker, Johnson, and Longfellow, it would have been surprising if he had not. When he entered Harvard Divinity School in 1861 science, particularly evolution was the hot intellectual topic in the halls.44 Chadwick and his classmates had to decide how to integrate these new scientific ideas with the ones they brought from their childhood and the Transcendentalism many of them had adopted in their young adulthood. In this they were continuing a general liberal trend in the Divinity School that is traceable back to its beginning and back into the history of the denomination itself.

42. Moore, “A Century of Unitarianism,” 347. In referring to Unitarianism in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, Moore writes: “A Strong ethical sense went hand in hand with their religious feeling. In some cases, it took precedence of this.” Lawrence Buell, “The Literary Significance of the Unitarian Movement,” in Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 164-165, writes: “For Unitarians, the pat to salvation was the growth and maintenance of Christian character, rather than a special conversion experience that marked the individual off from the rest of the world as the recipient of grace.” 43. Robinson, “Grace and Works,” 122. 44. Collison, “‘A True Toleration,’” 211.

168 The Divinity School had seen a decline in its enrollment in the 1830s, which had accelerated in the early years after Emerson’s address.45 In those last years of the decade, “all hints of social or religious conservatism disappeared among the students as Transcendentalism swept Divinity Hall.”46 Through the 1840s and well into the 1850s the school continued to attract small classes, often as few as seven students. By 1857 the numbers of students began to increase and within ten years the school was again prospering. Though “conservatism did reappear among the student body” in the lean years, the school remained liberal, and as a leading producer of Unitarian ministers its ideas spread to the broader community.47 Chadwick arrived in the midst of the school’s renaissance and was one of a large number of entering students, “often among the brightest and most articulate members of their classes,” who had been influenced by Emerson and Parker.48 At school Chadwick learned from Convers Francis, George R. Noyes, and most importantly, from Frederic Henry Hedge. Francis had “succeeded Henry Ware, Jr., as professor of pastoral care, bringing sympathies with new ideas and movements perhaps even more wide-ranging than Ware’s.” Noyes, from 1840 to 1868, was the professor of critical studies who taught “divinity students how to be impartial intellectual explorers.”49 Hedge was the professor of Ecclesiastical History. These three men, members of an earlier generation, did not lend their support to Spencer’s evolutionism, but they helped to create graduates unbound by orthodoxy and open to new ideas. In later years, Chadwick singled out Hedge as “one of our leaders, one of our greatest men, one of the principal actors in a great drama of progressive thought.”50 Hedge became a friend to the young Chadwick, and it was he who recommended that the newly minted pastor take the open position at the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn. For the remainder of

45. Ibid., 211. Collison’s history of the Harvard Divinity School between 1838 and roughly 1860 effectively addresses the years between the two major controversies within the school, Transcendentalism and naturalism. 46. Ibid., 223. 47. Ibid., 226-231. 48. Ibid., 212-213. 49. Ibid., 214-215. 50. John W. Chadwick, “Frederic Henry Hedge,” October 5, [1890], Sermons, series 16 number 2, (n.p.), 14.

169 Hedge’s life the two remained friends and Chadwick continued to seek his old mentor’s advice and criticism on his sermons and lectures. Chadwick’s “disuse of the word ‘Christ’ as a synonym for Jesus was always an offence” to Hedge (it was a habit which Chadwick had taken up on Samuel Longfellow’s advice).51 Chadwick became a vehement anti-supernaturalist, too, which did not match perfectly with his mentor’s views. On the question of Spencer and his ideas, the two men were always on different sides. As Chadwick puts it, in his criticisms Hedge “did not spare what seemed to him my faults of thought and style, my distrust of metaphysics, my liking for Spencer, a certain polemical habit (which I am not conscious of possessing), my subjection of Christian history to ideal standards, my political independency, and so on.”52 The theological and intellectual differences between the two men are indicative of both the fissures within mid- nineteenth-century Unitarianism and the open debate that the denomination allowed. It also begins to give a sense of what Chadwick believed. The intellectual road Chadwick traveled from a youthful supernaturalism through Transcendentalism to a scientific worldview in adulthood while maintaining his staunch belief in Christianity reflects a general trend among liberal Unitarians in the nineteenth century. It also helps to illuminate the way he was to direct his Brooklyn church for the last four decades of the nineteenth century. In Thinking Back: A Discourse at the Conclusion of Twenty Years in Charge of the Second Unitarian Society, Brooklyn, N. Y., Chadwick took some time to discuss his intellectual transformation. The words he used in this 1884 address were heavily laden with evolutionism, which was both a tool for explaining the growth of his ideas and an indication of where he had ended up.53 He began the discussion: “I see that there has been steadily going on in me a process of adjustment between one great central conviction and various related matters. The great central conviction is that of the entire and perfect adequacy of the natural order of the universe for every possible good. The negative corollary of this positive conviction is the denial

51. Ibid., 16. 52. Ibid., 16. 53. John W. Chadwick, Thinking Back: A Discourse at the Conclusion of Twenty Years in Charge of the Second Unitarian Society, Brooklyn, N.Y. (New York: W. W. Green’s Son, 1884). This copy of a very hard to find work may be found at, Unitarian Universalist Association, Inactive Ministerial File, bMS 1446-27, Andover-Harvard Theological Library. Hereafter cited in text.

170 of any supernatural element in Christianity, however represented by the Bible, Church, or the man Jesus” (17). Though he had begun his conversion to this way of thinking by the time he left Harvard, he said that when he “first came to Brooklyn my mind was not unlike a frankly modern house filled with a lot of old rococo furniture,” old florid and unsubstantial furniture of supernaturalism (18). Between supernaturalism and naturalism Chadwick found Transcendentalism to be a halfway home. He began his Christian life as a supernaturalist, a believer in a personal, active, and intervening God who structured and maintained the universe according to His will and whim. He had been exposed to Transcendentalism in his youth, and it was his early “inspiration.” In his own poetic biblical language he writes, “that I could rest for a while in this when turned out of my supernaturalist Eden and prevented by the flaming sword of my own personal conviction from going back into it was a piece singular good fortune. The transition from supernaturalism to naturalism would have been much more painful if, from the first, naturalism had presented itself to me with the Experiential Philosophy as its ally” (20). Chadwick had found Transcendentalism, “itself a modified supernaturalism . . . which made the preaching of Theodore Parker as little tentative as that of Jonathan Edwards,” comforting, and in later years “in hours of weakness and depression, when the pulse of thought is feeble, I sometimes wish that I could retain it” (20). Chadwick said that accepting naturalism over Transcendentalism was “the most painful intellectual ordeal I have ever had to undergo” (20). The new system of belief seemed to rob him of certainty; it demanded much more of him and his faith. He “could not affirm God and Immortality and the Moral Law as ineradicable intuitions of the individual mind,” instead they were at best “intuitions of experience . . . of race-experience: products of an infinite series of hereditary transmissions . . .[that] must be tested by reason, and according to the amount of their intrinsic rationality they must stand or fall” (21). It is little wonder that if a convert to this philosophy like Chadwick had to struggle with it, that it would appear to be a barren and hopeless philosophy for others. Clearly Chadwick did not remain long mired in these dark foreboding regarding his new philosophy. After “a period of darkness and dismay . . . the light began to dawn, and such a happiness and peace as I had never known before came in and took possession of my soul.” He “found an infinite element implied in every step of evolution; . . . an Everlasting Better than our

171 best of thought or hope . . . divinity in the atoms.” “Matter and spirit were not the opposite poles of a conflicting dualism but the two sides of one impervious shield, the two expressions of one all-pervading unity” (21-22). Chadwick found in nature and in Spencer’s interpretation of nature what he had been seeking and what Spencer, too, had sought: the One. Once unhitched from older Catholic orthodoxy and dogma, as the dissenting and non-conformist Christian communities in both Britain and America had done, the followers of the new sects were left to redefine cosmic order. Ideas coming out of the Enlightenment put a premium on individuals, both self-regulating human individuals, and individual things as the object of study; in short, it made the Many the object of its study. Chaos, though, is generally unpleasant to the human mind, and besides there is everywhere around us order of one sort or another. An essential element of optimistic liberalism, as discussed above in relation to Spencer, is not just a faith in natural order, but faith in the benevolence and beneficence of that natural order. Chadwick’s background, an inheritance of the Enlightenment through the Puritan divines, the Transcendentalists, and the growing naturalism of the early nineteenth century, well prepared him to seek some new explanation for order and to find unity in nature. He was too good a theist to find a universe devoid of God, though, and the optimism of Transcendentalism reinforced the notion of a good and orderly God. With this intellectual baggage, Chadwick set off for Brooklyn where he shaped one church and played a role in shaping the larger denomination. The Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and John White Chadwick, 1858-1904 Chadwick’s immediate predecessor at the Second Unitarian Church was the Rev. Nahor Augustus Staples of Milwaukee. Longfellow had preached his farewell sermon on June 24, 1860. The church interviewed and hosted several pastors over the next year and a half, including Staples. On November 6, 1861 Octavius Brooks Frothingham preached the sermon at Staples installation as the permanent minister of the church.54 Where Longfellow “was a thoroughgoing transcendentalist,” Staples took up a position midway between transcendentalism and science. “His two favorite authors were Fichte and Herbert Spencer.” Thus, he introduced the new ideas of evolutionism to the Brooklyn congregation before Chadwick’s arrival, and at the same time that the young man and the rest of the intellectual community were coming to grips with the new philosophy. Staples was not long

54. Cameron, 28.

172 for the Brooklyn pulpit, however. He was ill when he arrived and he got steadily worse, until November 15, 1863 when he preached his last sermon. He died three months later.55 Through the spring of 1864, the church searched for a new pastor. Hearing of their search, and probably considering the similar intellectual disposition of the Second Unitarian church and his young apprentice, Frederic Hedge suggested that they call Chadwick for a trial ministry. The congregation accepted Hedge’s suggestion and called Chadwick for a three-month trial to begin on September 11, 1864. After less than two months they offered him the post permanently, and he accepted. On December 21, 1864, the day Savannah surrendered to General Sherman, Robert Collyer and Samuel Longfellow presided over Chadwick’s installation. Chadwick would remain the pastor of the Second church until his death almost exactly forty years later.56 During his tenure in Brooklyn, Chadwick emphasized ethical matters above all others. This, of course, was a solid part of his Unitarian heritage made all the more important by his acceptance of Spencerian naturalism as an important influence on his theology. In his twenty- fifth anniversary sermon, he noted that “the character of my preaching has been almost entirely ethical . . . what you might call ‘life-sermons.’”57 At the same celebration, a poem by Dr. Minot J. Savage credits this aspect of Chadwick’s preaching and service. It reads in part: “Then, more than preacher, poet more,/Thou’rt built upon a plan/As broad as earth, as high as heaven,/A rounded, noble man!/Let human nature those revile/Who at man’s lot repine;/But thou art one of those who trust/That human means divine!”58 Chadwick’s approach was one that allowed him to be a preacher of the future to the present, to preach an optimistic message for life in modern society. As another attendee of the anniversary celebration put it: “It seems to me that, if one could sum up in a word the mission of your minister to you and to us all, it is that he has been the prophet of the religion of to-day, of

55. Ibid., 28. 56. Ibid., 29. 57. John W. Chadwick, “Twenty-Five Years Together,” December 1889, Sermons, series 15 number 2, 42. 58. Minot J. Savage, a poem, in Chadwick, “Twenty-Five Years Together,” 56-57.

173 this primitive faith of Enoch, the religion of the poet-prophet, the man of God who believes with his whole soul that no time is holier than now.”59 Edward Livingston Youmans (1821-1887) and The Popular Science Monthly Introduction Though Edward Livingston Youmans was not a member of the Unitarian intellectual community, his role in the Spencer debates in America is crucial. In fact, it is not too much to assert that he was the effective center of the Spencer debates from 1872 when he began editing The Popular Science Monthly until his death in 1887. His influence carried on through the remainder of the century in the work of his siblings, William Jay and Eliza Ann, and in the journal he founded. His childhood and early adulthood intellectual development is not unlike that of Spencer’s, and his life followed a circuitous and fortuitous path that led him to his central position in the debates. This is not the place to fully investigate his life and role, and there is not nearly enough room to recount in any detail the place of The Popular Science Monthly, but since he and his journal constitute the center of the debates, some account of them must be given. It is intriguing that Youmans and his journal have dropped into relative obscurity considering their former place. Their decline is in part, at least, a product of the same intellectual movement that submerged Spencer as anything more than a symbol of outdated ideas and obscured those of his followers who did not fit the standard Social Darwinist mold. Certainly Youmans and his journal are mentioned in every worthwhile account of Spencer’s ideas in America; as will become apparent, it would be nearly impossible not to mention them. Yet, to date the only book-length biography of Youmans was written by his friend John Fiske, and the only monograph of any length on The Popular Science Monthly is a wholly inadequate dissertation from 1963.60 Unlike the Brooklyn Ethical Association, which arrived fairly late in the debates and engaged in a rather limited discussion on the scientific side of things, the side that has since defined the history and outcome of the debates, Youmans was at the very center. He was responsible for making the Appleton’s publishing house into the premier scientific publishers in

59. “Address by Rev. Theodore C. Williams of All Souls Church, New York,” in Chadwick, “Twenty-Five Years Together,” 67. 60. William E. Leverett, Jr., “Science and Values: A Study of Edward L. Youmans’ Popular Science Monthly, 1872-1887,” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1963.

174 America. He was responsible for bringing not just Spencer’s works, but also the works of all the leading European scientists to America, including those of Darwin and Huxley. The Popular Science Monthly published articles by almost every leading intellectual in the scientific field in the last quarter of the century, including the leading Pragmatists like Charles Saunders Peirce and . This journal and its editor, more than any other single contemporary source, presented the whole range of discussion on the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century when an ever-increasing number of journals are digitized and available because of their importance to the development of thought, it is inexplicable why it is difficult even to find a complete copy of this journal on microfilm, let alone in book-form. Edward Livingston Youmans’s Early Life, 1821-1843 Edward Livingston Youmans was a sort of freelance man of letters. He was not a man of independent means, and he neither held a position on a university staff nor claimed the support of a wealthy patron. Though he did teach at Antioch College for one year, and eventually held steady employment as a magazine editor, during the first half-century of his life he cobbled together a living from teaching and tutoring, bits of journalism, textbook writing, and tours on the lyceum circuit. In the middle of the nineteenth century this not only was still possible, but it was even a respected livelihood. It was among a sort of intellectual middle-class of largely self- educated men and women, of whom Youmans is a representative, that Spencer found his greatest support for roughly two generations. As the ranks of this group diminished in the increasingly professionalized age marked by Progressive Era business, government, and educational reform, so too did Spencer’s chief constituency, and thus his popularity. The only major source for Youmans’s life is the biography written by John Fiske, who worked closely with Eliza Youmans on the book.61 Fiske became a devoted follower of Spencer in the 1860s as a young student at Harvard University. He followed the contemporary style of biography by way of commemoration, and which usually lead to assessments that were often saccharin and sycophantic. It is no surprise, then, that his book was both a glowing treatment of Youmans’s life and a tract devoted to the defense of evolution and Spencerism. If these biases are held in mind, however, Fiske’s biography provides excellent insights into Youmans’s life and

61. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1894). Hereafter cited in text.

175 into the intellectual atmosphere of the Spencer debates. Its extensive reprinting of letters to and from Youmans make is an excellent primary source for his life and thought. In fact, my research has been unable to turn up Youmans’s papers anywhere, so this book is the only broad collection of his correspondence still available. In many ways Edward L. Youmans’s life was similar to Spencer’s. His parents, Vincent and Catherine Moore Scofield Youmans, named their first son Livingston Youmans when he was born in Coeymans, New York June 3, 1821. He was the oldest of seven children. His maternal grandmother named the boy after her minister, Robert Livingston, but he later took the name Edward for himself, and it was how he was known to all but his mother (4-11). Late in the 1821, Vincent moved his young family to Greenfield, New York where he bought a three-acre place. The family set up housekeeping, the father re-established his wagon making business and opened a tavern. Because of the influence of the nation’s first temperance society in the family’s Congregational Church there in Saratoga County, and in spite of the fair income the tavern generated, Vincent swore off dealings in liquor. He poured out his stocks, and fell back upon wagon making and smithing to provide a meager income for the family (10). In the fall of 1831, Vincent moved the family again, this time to a ragged eighty-acre farm of poor fertility in Milton, New York In their new home the family was able to provide food and shelter for themselves while Vincent continued to make wagons and Catherine maintained a dairy and poultry yard to earn cash (19). When the family moved to Milton, Edward was ten years old and had four siblings. With remarkable regularity the three children who were his immediate juniors, Warren, Earle, and Eliza Ann, respectively, had all born between December 13 and 17.62 The youngest brother at the time of the move to Milton, Addison Beckwith, had been born in February of the preceding year. As the oldest, and with his parents deeply involved in trying to make a go of their somewhat dilapidated new home, Edward took up much of the responsibility for raising his brothers and sister. Apparently they all held him in great affection, but he and Eliza established a particularly close bond that was to last throughout Edward’s remaining 57 years. The relationship would make Eliza a most interesting woman in the history of science in America in her own right, though her story is now all but lost.

62. Warren Youmans (December 15, 1822), Earle S. Youmans (December 13, 1825), and Eliza Ann Youmans (December 17, 1826).

176 Thus, from his earliest years Edward had to take on responsibility for the family farm and his siblings, as well as for himself. His family’s limited means taught him frugality, which would stand him in good stead through the decades of freelance intellectualism that lay ahead of him. They also resulted in his learning to make things for himself, giving him a love of tinkering and the skills necessary to build apparatuses for the chemical experiments and demonstrations he would present on the lyceum circuit. Though relatively poor, his parents did not begrudge him books, however, and they contributed to a circulating library in Milton and occasionally bought volumes for Edward who developed a voracious appetite for books. Like Spencer, therefore, Youmans was exposed to the latest ideas of the early nineteenth century without the formal structure of a proper education. Unlike his future friend and intellectual master, however, Youmans read broadly in pamphlets, newspapers, literature, and science. Both geographically and intellectually Edward grew up on the edges of the Burned Over District of Upstate New York. His parents were products of the Puritan tradition in the form of Presbyterianism. Young Edward experienced on a small scale his own version of spiritual rebellion that the Unitarian sect experienced on a larger scale. His father’s interaction with the local temperance league brought Edward into contact with the evangelicalism of the later years of the Second Great Awakening. He did attend at least one Baptist revival around 1833 or1834, and was greatly excited by it and spent some time in the “anxious seat.” His excitement waned, however, and when the preacher came around to the house to talk with Edward, he hid until the preacher was gone (30-31). After that experience, however, Edward appears to have tended toward an increasingly liberal view of Christianity, which was to draw a steady stream of worried letters from his mother for the rest of his life. John Fiske described Edward’s father, Vincent, as an outspoken freethinker who often engaged in theological debates with guests in his home and with friends and neighbors in town. Vincent’s Christianity was never as devout as his wife’s. According to Fiske, who had learned it from Eliza, Vincent gradually moved away from a literal interpretation of the Bible and toward the position that was being staked out by liberal Christians such as the Unitarians. Like the youthful Spencer, Edward was often privy to these sometimes-boisterous conversations and was influenced in the same direction as his English contemporary.

177 Presaging his later naturalistic views of religion and the universe, Edward followed more his father’s than his mother’s mind and largely rejected biblical miracles and church symbolism. Even as a young man he was already coming to believe in an ancient earth. By the middle of the 1830s, Youmans and Spencer were coming to similar conclusions regarding religion and the universe. In this tendency they were not alone, and it is one of the most important broad trans- Atlantic intellectual trends in the development and acceptance of Spencer’s philosophy. Youmans received a limited formal education in local schools, but he was an avid reader, a tinkerer, and, like Spencer, a natural-born student of the world (Chapter 2). Youmans did have fond memories of his early schooldays, though. His fondest memories revolved around a man he and his classmates called Uncle Good, Jeremiah Goodrich. Uncle Good appears to have been one of those rare instructors who could inspire students to learn on their own, to challenge themselves intellectually beyond the schoolhouse walls, to work together in the process, and to do it all by commanding their love and respect without resort to humiliation or corporeal punishment. As Edward saw it, Uncle Good taught thinking rather than rote learning; it was the model that guided Youmans’s approach in lecturing and writing in later years (22-23). By combining the inspiring lessons of Goodrich with his own reading, tinkering around the farm, and simple experiments he found in science books, Edward developed an understanding of natural interactions and interrelationships. He, like Spencer, grew to appreciate the apparent unity of all things through natural laws. During his intellectually active teen years Edward was struck by a disease that, though painful and devastating, proved to be a blessing in disguise for himself and for the course of American history. Beginning in the autumn and carrying through the winter of 1835-1836, he suffered from inflammation of the eyes, which he exacerbated by continuing to read and write. His sight grew worse over the next four years. It was the beginning of a lifetime of blindness and near blindness, which would act as a particularly fateful guide over the following decade and a half (28). Edward’s most intense, though ultimately abortive, period of formal education outside Uncle Good’s one-room school began in the summer of 1838--about the same time that Herbert Spencer was being put in charge of the approaches to the Harrow Road bridge. Youmans began taking classes at the academy at Galway, in Saratoga County, New York. He and his parents hoped that his studies would lead him into the legal profession. In his first semester, however, he

178 over-strained his eyes and had to leave the academy twice for home to recuperate. He managed to complete the fall 1838 term, but his sight had become so poor that he could not go on (35-40). Beginning that November he took a teaching position in the one-room schoolhouse in North Greenfield, New York. After six weeks of teaching in the drafty schoolhouse and walking between it and the various homes in which he stayed through an upstate New York winter, Edward became quite ill and his eyesight very poor. He quit his position and put himself under the care of an oculist at Ballston Spa. The doctor did more harm that good, and by the end of his treatment Edward had permanently lost sight in his right eye and was all but blind in his left. Thus ended any hope he had of attending college or going into law (40). It was a great disappointment and he suffered bouts of deep depression over the following years. From this tragedy, however, was to come a string of fortune and unforeseen events. Returning home in early 1839, Youmans found consolation in books, though now they had to be read to him. His favorite novel, according to Eliza, was Don Quixote, and it was probably she who most often read to her oldest brother (27, 42). (Interestingly, this was also John Chadwick’s favorite novel as a young man, and there is no small irony in this fact and their later defense of Spencer.) According to Fiske among the books Eliza read to Edward over the following eighteen months or so was the newly published and controversial Vestiges of Creation- -since the book was not published until 1844, this is probably a product of Eliza’s confusing dates a half-century later, but they must have read it together at some point (42). In the autumn of 1840 Edward went to New York City with a family friend in search of effective treatment for his eyes. He spent a fruitless six weeks under the care of Dr. Delafield before his case was pronounced to be hopeless. He and six companions who all had received such a verdict or had lost faith in the doctor, set out in search of better treatment. With Edward acting as their spokesman, and a one-eyed companion as their leader they set out as a blind- man’s chain, hand on shoulder, into the winter streets of Manhattan. Eventually they found Dr. Samuel M. Elliott who agreed to treat them. Near Elliott’s office they found lodgings in Mrs. Cook’s boarding house at the corner of Pearl and Hague Streets. The seven of them were given a basement room to share. Edward’s companions soon left, but Youmans stayed and Mrs. Cook was drawn to the polite and charming young man and moved him to a better upstairs room (42- 45).

179 Thus Edward Youmans, defeated in his effort to acquire a college education and to enter the legal profession, stumbled into two important personal relationships. First, in Elliott he had found a willing, capable, and sympathetic doctor with important personal connections. Elliott refused final payment from Youmans until his sight was healed, and thus treated the young man for twelve years free of charge. In return, the recently removed farm boy helped the doctor by supervising work on his Long Island estate from time to time. Elliott, like Mrs. Cook, was impressed by Edward’s intelligence, charm, and manners, introduced him to his friends, and through them to the larger intellectual community of the New York City area, including the budding suburban city of Brooklyn (43-46). The second fortuitous meeting resulting from Edward’s removal to Mrs. Cook’s house was of a fellow boarder. The boarding house was home to a number of “bright young printers” with whom Youmans would talk in the evenings. One in particular with whom he struck up a friendship was the still unknown Horace Greeley. In later years, Edward would use his friendship with the future editor of the New York Daily Tribune to get writing work for himself, to review the scientific works of English writers, and to publicize the works of Herbert Spencer (44-45). In early 1842 Youmans met Mr. Benjamin Flanders in Dr. Elliott’s office. Flanders was a prosperous sail maker who took a liking to Edward and befriended him. He had the young man out to visit his home in Brooklyn, and introduced him to his friends. Flanders was a member of the North American Phalanx of Fourierists, a group that included William H. Channing, Horace Greeley, and Richard H. Manning. In the company of Flanders and his friends, Youmans attended the social gatherings of Brooklyn’s social and intellectual elite (46-47). Also in early 1842 Youmans moved to a new boarding house, that of Mrs. Chipman on Chambers Street. He did not reside there long, but while there he made another important acquaintance: Walt Whitman. The acquaintance eventually gave Edward access to The Aurora, which Whitman edited, as a writer. He published several articles under the pen name of the “Saratoga Correspondent” (46-47). From 1846 to 1848, Whitman was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he kept in touch with the major goings on in that city. Quite by accident Youmans had slipped into America’s literary and intellectual center of gravity and into personal relationships with participants in the Unitarian intellectual community. Youmans’s residence in Mrs. Chipman’s was short-lived, however, as another near tragedy proved to be another blessing in disguise. One winter day while walking along the river,

180 he saved a drowning man. Though he could not see him, he grabbed a mooring chain and swung into the cold water following the man’s voice. He held the man’s head above water for several minutes until others pulled the two of them out. The shock of the water and the fever that followed put Edward in the hospital for three months. Soon after he was released, he visited the home of Mr. James Ketchum, a watchmaker whom Youmans had met the previous year. Seeing his friend’s condition, Ketchum insisted that Youmans stay in his home. At a loss for a better alternative Youmans agreed and came under the care of the Ketchum household for the next 18 months of near total blindness (48). Edward Livingston Youmans as a Science Lecturer, 1843-1862 When his sight somewhat improved, Edward returned home to Milton for the late summer and early fall of 1843. There he and Eliza returned to a cooperative study of literature and science; she did all the reading. (This is probably when they read Vestiges together.) He also began expanding his professional writing by producing anti-slavery tracts, book reviews, and technical citations of scientific works. Unfortunately, though, it produced thin returns. Eliza, inspired by her work with Edward, and in an effort to better help him while improving herself, took a course of lectures on chemistry given by Professor Mather in Fairfield, New York (54). Eliza’s role in the Edward career remains somewhat obscure in Fiske’s biography, and without the discovery of some treasure of primary sources it is liable to remain that way, but it is clear that she was more than a simple helpmeet for her brother. Hoping to improve himself, and eventually to improve his income, in 1844 Youmans studied the mnemonic system of F. F. Goureaud. After completing the course with Goureaud, he became an instructor of the system. He returned to Milton where Eliza and his brothers helped him to memorize the list of dates accompanying the system, and began teaching the course in towns around Saratoga. He found the system effective and useful, but he disliked the subjects prescribed for memorization: major ecclesiastical and political dates, people, and events. He began to create his own list of dates devoted to discoveries and inventions, which led to an interest in the progress of knowledge and science (53). Edward was particularly interested in the importance of recent discoveries in geology, in the , the ancient origins of the Earth, and in the notion of unified laws of nature. Again, he was following a similar intellectual track to that of Spencer, who had no use for such history and much preferred the truths of science to the memorization of such dead and irrelevant facts.

181 After frequent illnesses further impaired his vision, Edward quit teaching the mnemonic courses, but he continued to compile his list of scientifically important dates. He returned to the Flanders’s home in New York and began work on a history of scientific progress. In the summer of 1846, two of Benjamin Flander’s young relatives who had been assisting Youmans left home. Thus, at Edward’s request, Eliza moved into the house to help her brother complete his project. Together they attended the series of lectures presented by at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the summer of 1846. Afterward they continued to study the transcripts that had been published in the New York Tribune. Together Edward and Eliza worked on “a history of progress in discovery and invention” for a year before their work was preempted by the publication of George Putnam’s The World’s Progress (58). Their work was not in vain, however, as their research led the pair to the handful of libraries in the city, but more importantly, into some of the bookshops in the neighborhood. One of the shops they visited was that of Daniel Appleton on Broadway, where they met William H. Appleton, the manager of his father’s store (58-59). In addition to the bookstore, the Appleton’s family had a small press with a limited number and range of books in print. The meeting between the younger Appleton and the Youmans siblings proved to be a most fortuitous for both themselves and the world. In 1850, after two years of sporadic but deep depression and limited work as a writer, Edward’s life turned the corner for good. Eliza, who appears to have remained in New York in spite of her brother’s entreaties for her to go home and leave him to his fate, found a well-paying teaching position in the city. Their brother, Earle, who had removed to California some years earlier, had made a success of himself and sent his siblings some much needed financial support. A recent Irish refugee, Dr. Antisell set up shop as a chemistry teacher and took Eliza as one of his students. Edward’s physician, Dr. Elliott, gave Youmans lodging in his office, which provided Eliza with apparatus for the experiments she conducted in accompaniment to her classes with Antisell. And in talking with Eliza, who excited him with her experiences in chemistry, Edward struck upon an idea for facilitating the teaching of chemistry in schools without scientific apparatuses or knowledgeable teachers: a colored chemical chart presenting the interactions of chemicals and their basic properties. One of the men for whom Edward had been doing commercial writing, the druggist Mr. J. R. Burdsall, was so excited by the idea of the chart that he gave Youmans $500 to get it published in exchange for a 20% stake in any profits.

182 Once completed, the chart was well received at the American Institute Fair in 1850, and Youmans was encouraged to publish an accompanying textbook, which he did (60-63). Daniel Appleton, owner of the bookstore, published Youmans’s book, The Class-Book of Chemistry, when he completed it in 1851, the year after Spencer’s Social Statics appeared in Britain (68). The success of the textbook and the chemical chart drew Youmans onto the scientific lecture circuit, which was to occupy much of his time for the next 17 years and to provide him with a substantial income (71-72). The publication of the book corresponded with an improvement in the vision to clear myopia. He kept this limited level of vision for the rest of his life, which allowed him to move about unassisted (71). At last, after almost two decades of struggle with blindness and eight years of cobbling together a living from miscellaneous writing, the thirty-year-old Youmans had found his groove. All the unexpected and apparently tragic turns of his life now led Youmans into a life in which he was to become an important and well- known figure in the international science community. But first, he had nearly a decade of lecturing and studying before a fateful February night in Brooklyn in 1860. Beginning with a series of lectures on organic life and the atmosphere given in Dr. Elliott’s office, Youmans’s success soon led him to larger venues and far from New York City. John Fiske notes the early success and topics of the fledgling lecturer. At the end of the series [of lectures in Elliott’s office] a general wish was expressed that the lectures should be repeated in a larger audience-room. Among his first topics were the chemistry of organized bodies, of vegetable growth, of food and digestion. He subsequently discussed the sources and nature of alcohol, and its effect on the human system. Then came a series on the sunbeam, explaining the varied influences of the solar ray, with an analysis of its forces; the relation of the sun to life on our planet; the chemistry of the sun and the stars; the links uniting the realms of matter and mind. In two lectures on Ancient Philosophy and Modern Science he set forth the debt due by chemist and astronomer to alchemist and astrologer; and here he took occasion to point out how the guesses of Democritus and Lucretius had been barren, notwithstanding their shrewdness, from their not having married experiment to speculation. In his Masquerade of the Elements he presented in glowing outline the phenomena of protean chemical transformation. His New Philosophy of Forces was the first

183 popular exposition of the correlation of forces given in America. In every discourse it was his custom to give ample graphic and experimental illustration; the seen proof riveted the spoken thought. . . . Sympathy, not less than enthusiasm for science, made him one of the most impressive lecturers of his time. One other characteristic never failed to broaden every discourse he delivered – a philosophic spirit which passed from detail to generalization, from a fact to the law of universal sweep whose manifestation and proof it was. To his mind a part always suggested the whole (72-73). During the Lyceum season, during the winter months, Youmans traveled extensively by train in an ever-expanding circuit as his popularity increased. In 1859 his tour took him throughout the Midwest, and as far afield as Wisconsin. He often lectured for several nights in one city and, according to Fiske, often found repeat attendees in his audience. He lectured in music halls, theaters, churches, and any room large enough to hold the audience. His audiences ranged, in turn, from a few dozen to over one thousand. His reception, too, varied from ebullient praise to righteous condemnation. By 1859 he could command as much as $200 per lecture, no small sum at a time when Fiske was paying $65 a year for a 13x15 room in Cambridge and $2.18 for 1/8 ton of channel coal and a box of kindlings (83).63 Over seventeen years as a lecturer, Youmans visited major cities, as well as “hundreds of little towns with queer names,” where he introduced science and the leading ideas of science to people who received no other instruction in the subject. Fiske said the Youmans gave “many a young man in many a town . . . the first impulse that led him to seek and obtain a university education” (78). Fiske gave Youmans credit for preparing the way for Herbert Spencer’s unifying theory of evolution, almost casting him as a latter-day John the Baptist of science. Though Fiske may have overstated Youmans’s importance as an individual, in a world without broad scientific education, mass media, or a broad acceptance of scientific explanation over Christian revelation, the work of circuit lecturers like Youmans must be considered as most important. Youmans continued to work as a writer when he was not on the lecture circuit. Between the publication of The Class Book of Chemistry, in 1851, and his letter to Spencer in 1860,

63. Ethel F. Fisk (ed.), The Letters of John Fiske (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 37-38.

184 Youmans wrote three more books: Alcohol and the Constitution of Man (1854), Chemical Atlas (1856), and The Handbook of Household Science (1857). He published all of them with D. Appleton and Company, with whom he cultivated an increasingly close relationship. Taken together his first four books showed Youmans to be a man concerned with scientific education and the improvement of mankind through the application of science to everyday life. Alcohol and the Constitution of Man is a particularly interesting case because it reflects Youmans’s thinking before his conversion to Spencerism and shows his ties to the reformist environment of his youth on the edges of the Burned Over District. His parents, of course, had been temperance people, and Edward carried their opposition to alcohol into his own adulthood. He wrote an article in support of state prohibition of alcohol for his friend Horace Greeley. Greeley, by now the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, agreed with Youmans’s prohibitionist position and devoted a whole page of his paper to the article. The article soon led to the publication of the book. After his conversion to Spencerism in later years, Youmans decided that state action would not be a sufficient solution and thus renounced his position (92). He also found, after a visit to see Spencer, that beer was not quite the evil he had once thought it to be. (Anyone who has sampled the better English ales will not find this conversion entirely surprising.) The Chemical Atlas was an extension of The Class Book of Chemistry and the chemical chart. Like those works it was intended to help students to understand chemistry through relationships and through guided experiments rather than through rote learning. In this Youmans was continuing the tradition he had learned from Uncle Good, and which he perpetuated in his lectures on the Lyceum. The Handbook of Household Science, too, presents science in a popular and applicable style intended for use in the classroom as well as the home. Beyond its practical utility, Youmans’s introduction to the book clearly presents his and the need to apply its lessons to the betterment of human life. The Handbook was a point of discussion between Youmans and his friend Manning, who consulted its author while building his home in Brooklyn (94). It is worth noting here that by 1857 Manning was a member of the newly formed Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and as such a parishioner of Samuel Longfellow. It was also in these years between 1851 and 1859 that Youmans first encountered Herbert Spencer’s writings. Unwittingly he had run across Spencer’s unsigned articles in quarterly

185 reviews, either in or drawn from the Westminster Review, where many of Spencer’s important essays were initially published. In 1856 he read Dr. J. D. Morell’s article in the London Medico- Chirurgical Review on Spencer’s newly published book, The Principles of Psychology (133).64 Edward ordered the book and it arrived some weeks later when he was busily working on his Handbook of Household Science. He started the book, but he found it too difficult to devote time to at the moment. Eliza, ever ready to study on her own, picked up the book and followed the advice Spencer offered in the preface to readers unacquainted with such subjects to skip first to section three of the book. She read the book and helped Edward to understand it. Fiske asserts in his biography of Youmans that Edward had been steadily moving toward a conception of evolution on his own, and that Spencer’s books simply brought all the strands of thought together. After reading Spencer’s Psychology, Youmans ordered a copy of Social Statics. Where Spencer’s ideas in Social Statics were proto-evolutionary, The Principles of Psychology discussed evolution explicitly, and for a reader approaching them in reverse order, the ambiguity in the earlier book might not be noticeable. These books also made Youmans suspect that Spencer had been the author of the articles he had been reading in the quarterlies. He was trying to work up the nerve and to think of the best approach to contacting Spencer though his publishers when he visited his friend Manning on February 22, 1860. Samuel Johnson, the Unitarian minister and friend of Samuel Longfellow, was also at Manning’s house the night of February 22. He was down visiting from his home in Salem, Massachusetts. During the evening’s conversations, Youmans mentioned that he had been reading Spencer’s works. The comment reminded Johnson that he had in his pocket a brief prospectus from the English philosopher that he had gotten from his friend Edward Silsbee before leaving Salem. Silsbee, of course, was one of Spencer’s earliest American friends, and Spencer had sent the prospectus to him to see if he could drum up any American support. From Spencer to Silsbee, from Silsbee to Johnson, and from Johnson to Youmans that thin sheaf of

64. According to a letter from Edward to his sister Eliza of September 25, 1862, after meeting Morell with Spencer in London, Morell was asked to write the review by Martineau for the National Review, a Unitarian journal. Martineau paid for the article, but refused to publish it in his journal because it was too materialistic.

186 papers passed through the hands of an intellectual community that was ripe for Spencer’s philosophy. Inspired by the prospectus and by Johnson’s second-hand description of Spencer, Youmans wrote a letter to the English philosopher the next day. The letter was the beginning of a life-long friendship between the two men. More important, it was the beginning of a close intellectual and business relationship that eventually made Youmans and his publishers the most important conduit for European scientists’ work into the United States. Spencer had sent his prospectus out in order to attract subscribers to his series of books that were to be released serially. He was working with Edward Silsbee to arrange for the series’ publication in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. Youmans initially offered any assistance he could in attracting subscribers. When Ticknor and Fields chose not to publish a compilation of Spencer’s essays on education and showed some reluctance to publish the Synthetic Philosophy, Silsbee contacted Youmans to see if he might have better luck getting Spencer published in New York. Youmans sent a letter on October 5, 1860, proposing that the Appletons should publish Spencer’s philosophic series as well as his essays. Even as the nation was torn asunder by the elections in November of that year and by the secession of the Southern states in the ensuing months, the relationship between Spencer and his new American publishers was consummated (105-115). In arranging the contract with Spencer, Youmans also had moved himself into an important advisory position with the Appletons. Over the ensuing two decades he was their lead advisor in scientific publishing matters, and made himself invaluable by attracting the most important scientific writers of the world to his patrons. As the nation went to war, Youmans went about his work of popularizing science in America and courting European writers. On the personal side, in 1861 his courting of Catherine Scofield Lee, the widow of William L. Lee, succeeded and they were married. Soon afterward they set out for Britain and Youmans’s first personal meeting with Herbert Spencer (116-117). Already by the time they left on the Great Eastern on July 26, 1862, Appleton’s had published Spencer’s essays on Education and First Principles, the first volume of the proposed ten in the System of Philosophy. Youmans, the Appletons, and the Scientific Community , 1862-1872 On this first trip to Britain, Edward and Kitty (as Edward refers to her in his letters) Youmans met Spencer for the first time. They met him in Glasgow on his annual vacation to

187 Scotland. Of their first meeting Youmans wrote to his sister on August 24, 1862, “Spencer has come forth from his realm of abstraction, and is a living, breathing, and in many ways very human specimen of human nature.” Youmans briefly related the four-day tour of Scotland on which Spencer acted as their guide, at which he apparently was fully adept. He also mentioned Spencer’s poor health, but that appears to have been restricted to insomnia and an inability to deal with people and stressful situations (121-129).65 In the letter Youmans gave his sister some descriptions of Spencer that are revealing of the man. He noted Spencer’s ability to dismiss panhandlers, a group with whom Youmans appears not to have been well acquainted despite his years in the city, “dealing sharply with importunate or outrageous claimants.” Along the same lines he said that, “Mr. Spencer is a man who lives his philosophy. He applies his principles in the proper phraseology to the criticism and consideration of all questions which arise,” and that “evidence of the complete mastery of his themes, that they are part of his mind’s nature, crops out constantly.” He upbraided people who tried to smoke on the train or in coaches, not because he was opposed to smoking, but, Youmans quoted him, “it is against the law, and the law is a wholesome and proper one. You have no right to break it, and you shall not do it; and if you do not desist I will call the guard.” “With porter, cabby, or steamboat captain he was ever ready to do battle for the cause of justice; but he deprecates the tendency to fault-finding.” He held up Carlyle as one who too often finds fault, describing his conversation as “one long damn” (121-129). Once the three travelers returned to London, Spencer introduced Youmans to leading scientists who were both his friends and fellow evolutionists, including Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, and J. D. Morell. Youmans also was introduced to the broader intellectual community of Britain by way of the British Association meeting. Interestingly, Silsbee was in London at the time and appears to have socialized with both Spencer and Youmans both together and separately (130).66 These encounters were not merely social, though, as Youmans’s task was to find scientific writers who were interested in having their works republished in the United States- -a bit of a misnomer in 1862--by Appleton and Company. The trip led directly to the reprinting of works by Alexander Bain, Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, “and other men of mark.”67

65. Letter from Edward L. Youmans to Eliza Ann Youmans, August 24, 1862. 66. Letter from Edward L. Youmans to Eliza A. Youmans, September 25, 1862. 67. Ibid., 147.

188 Youmans spent the next nine and a half years, from late 1862 to the spring of 1872, popularizing science and evolution in the United States, developing the Appleton’s connections with scientific writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and turning it into the premier scientific publishing house in America. He used his personal and professional connections with magazine and newspaper editors to get his reviews of major scientific works broadly published. In his reviews he couched science in terms of Spencerian evolution, which helped to set the mold for many people to understand science in that way among a general readership. Youmans was also hard at work drumming up support for an American edition of Spencer’s works, which aside from his Education and serial volumes of First Principles, were only available from his English publisher. In a letter to Spencer on November 23, 1863, Youmans gave the author an update on his progress in gathering support for American editions. He highlighted the people whom he said had shown great support for Spencer’s works: Rev. Charles Carroll Everett (a Unitarian minister from Bangor, Maine), Rev. Horatio Stebbins (a leading Unitarian minister who had at first been reluctant to accept Spencer’s ideas), Rev. Mr. Alger of Boston, Charles Sumner (American politician), and Wendell Phillips (a prominent reformer of the pre-Civil War years). Youmans’s early connections with the intellectual community in New York and Brooklyn, particularly with reformers and Unitarians, gave him a natural connection to the large body of leading religious, political, and intellectual figures in the Northeast and New England. Through these efforts and the positive response he received, Youmans was able to convince the Appleton’s to undertake republication of Spencer’s works even before the Civil War had drawn to its conclusion (141-179). In addition to gathering support for Spencer’s works, Youmans also worked to bring more European writers’ works to America though the Appleton’s. To this end, Youmans took two more trips to Britain and the continent in 1865 and 1866. On his 1865 trip two of his siblings, Eliza and William, joined him. Youmans’s objective in having them come along was to improve their education. Even after he and Kitty returned to America, Eliza and William stayed in London. Eliza studied botany with , and William studied physiology with Thomas Henry Huxley. Both of these sibling were to render their older brother great service over the remaining twenty-two years of his life. As for the Appleton’s, they continued to increase their stable of European scientific writers to include Walter Bagehot, Alexander Bain, Henry Thomas Buckle, William E. H. Lecky, and Sir John Lubbock.

189 The success of such European works in the American market convinced Youmans that it would be possible to produce a series of popular scientific works to broaden even further the reading audience for science. To this end he convinced the Appletons that he could get leading scientists on both sides of the Atlantic to write relatively short, easy to read introductions to and overviews of their areas of specialty. It became The International Scientific Series. In the middle of 1871 he traveled to Europe to begin the process of organizing this vast undertaking that would eventually result in popular scientific texts being written by the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, and published simultaneously in multiple countries in several languages, and all with a standardized remuneration for the authors; all this was done in a time before international copyright laws. On the eastern side of the ocean, Youmans recruited three important and influential friends to act as the managers of the project: Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and John Tyndall (266-294). The project was a tremendous success, and by the end of the century the series included at least seventy-nine volumes. At home, too, Youmans was working to bring science to the people in a popular form. Beginning late in 1868, he set out to try his hand as a journal editor. He wanted to devote the journal to science, but the Appletons did not think such a specific project would pay, so they convinced him to make the periodical a more inclusive one. What they eventually produced beginning in April 1869 was Appletons’ Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art. The weekly format was exhausting even for the tireless Youmans, and such a broad magazine never found an effective niche. It lasted only a year. Youmans’s next editorial adventure, however, was vastly more successful. The contacts that he had made in Europe, the success of scientific books in America, and the successful beginnings of The International Scientific Series, along with the failure of the too-broadly defined Appletons’ Journal, convinced the publishers to give Youmans what he really wanted--a journal dedicated to the popularization of science. The first issue of The Popular Science Monthly appeared in May 1872 and has continued, albeit with some significant editorial changes, to the present day. The pages of that monthly were certainly the center of the Spencer debates in America, and it was one of the most important points in the evolution debates broadly, but even more, Youmans used the magazine to promote science generally. The fifty-six volumes of the journal that were published under Edward Youmans’s and his brother, William Jay Youmans’s, editorship presented works by almost every leading scientist or thinker who wrote on science in

190 the last three decades of the century. Its circulation extended across the American continent and its articles were reprinted and reviewed in journals around the world. Through it all, it gave Spencer’s ideas a comfortable home and friendly editorial pen. I would love to spend more time on the journal, in fact I had intended to write a dissertation on it, but alas I cannot. The subject is too huge for such a preliminary essay as a dissertation, and the necessary archival materials are not easily available. The Youmans’ papers appear to be lost, and the Appleton’s papers may have been destroyed in a late-nineteenth century fire. The papers that still exist in the collections of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana include almost none of the documents relating to the all-important years between 1872 and 1900 at the Popular Science. If these documents are truly lost, then it is certainly one of the greatest historical loses of modern American history. Conclusion Herbert Spencer’s ideas did not become powerful in America simply because they fit some amorphous “middle-class” ideal of society and justify the status quo. His ideas were accepted because they appealed to individual men and women who were traveling a similar intellectual track to his own. Unconfined, as he and his supporters saw it, by the discipline of a proper university education, Spencer was able to synthesize a cosmos-uniting philosophy that was as optimistic, progressive, unified, individualistic, humanistic, enlightened, and ethically- directed as the dissenting religious tradition in which he grew up in the early-nineteenth century English Midlands. His philosophy was appealing to other fellow travelers of the dissenting tradition precisely because it was a summary of all that they already knew, or at least hoped, to be true. He used the language of science, which was growing increasingly popular and powerful as orthodox systems of thought were found to be wanting among a community of non- conformists. In American the dissenting tradition of the Puritans, which shared a common root with the dissenters and non-conformists of England, emerged as , particularly Unitarianism in the nineteenth century. The Unitarian community of New England had connections, personal, religious, and intellectual, with the great centers of Anglophone thought on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the conversations of people who shared similar beliefs, similar ideas quickly spread. Just as Spencer’s prospectus passed from the author’s hand to Silsbee’s, from Silsbee’s to Johnson’s, and from Johnson’s to Youmans’s along a well-worn

191 path, so did Spencerian evolution find its way into the intellectual discourse of the Atlantic Anglophone world, and thence to the broader world. Of course Spencer’s ideas appealed to people in the middle class, but it was this web of personal relationships that brought his ideas to light. It was this web of personal relationships that brought Youmans from Manhattan into the broader Unitarian and reformist community with notable representatives in Brooklyn. It was this web that brought John White Chadwick first to Harvard and then to the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn where Samuel Longfellow had preached the sermon that had called Chadwick to the ministry. It was the web that would eventually bring a man named Lewis George Janes to the Second Unitarian Church. It was the web that he would extend further across the world, both the world of ideas and the geographic globe, and spread a Spencerian notion of progressive evolution, perfecting human ethics, and a derivative humanistic religion through the mechanism of the Brooklyn Ethical Association.

192 CHAPTER 5: THE BROOKLYN ETHICAL ASSOCIATION

Introduction During its lifetime, the Brooklyn Ethical Association and its members were broadly engaged in contemporary intellectual, political, and social debates. Its published volumes contain ninety-four lectures, and all but fifteen of the lectures in the second season include discussions of various lengths. The lectures touched on a broad range of topics that were being widely discussed at the time and included some of America’s most prominent spokespersons on those topics. The members also engaged in published debates in newspapers and magazines relating to Spencer and evolution. They played a key role in the Congress of Evolutionists at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Some of the members, too, were central figures in the late-nineteenth- century Free Religious Movement and in the introduction of Asian religions and philosophies to America. As a result, it is impossible in this short space to address the complete history of the Association’s published lectures, let alone all of the activities of its constituent members. An overview, however, of some of the leading figures, notable lectures and discussions from the three seasons between 1888 and 1891, and a brief history of the members’ participation in the “Outsider” controversy will serve to demonstrate their place at the center of the American Spencer debates. Such an overview will also do much to show how Spencer’s ideas were adapted to an American environment and how that environment was changing in the last decade or so of the century. The existence and success of the Brooklyn Ethical Association (BEA) resulted primarily from the efforts of two men, Lewis George Janes (1844-1901) and James Avery Skilton. Janes was the more important of the two and the trajectory of the group heavily depended upon his leadership. The written history of the organization, however, owes much more to Skilton, who was good enough to save his papers as the corresponding secretary of the group. Eventually, those papers were deposited in the archives of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, of which he was a graduate.

193 Lewis George Janes (1844-1901) Janes is an interesting character from an interesting time. He was a product of Providence radicalism in the years leading up to the American Civil War.1 He had a life-long interest in ethical matters.2 He does not appear to have acquired a formal college education, but he held an M. D., though from what institution is unclear.3 He was an entrepreneur who was the New York City partner to David P. Butler’s weight-lifting business.4 He became a member of John White Chadwick’s Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and soon took over the adult Sunday school class on ethics.5 He organized the class into the Brooklyn Ethical Association and presided as its

1. “From Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, of Providence, R. I.,” Lewis G. Janes. Philosopher, Patriot, Lover of Men (Boston: James H. West Company, 1902), 199-200. Anna Carpenter Garlin Spencer (1851-1931)--her husband, William H. Spencer, was not related to Herbert Spencer--was a prominent member of the Free Religious Association, the first ordained female minister in , and a well-known peace activist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She had grown up with Janes in Providence and wrote briefly about it in her letter to the memorial volume. Her husband was a Unitarian minister, who was also prominent in the Free Religious Association and the pacifist movement. 2. “From Prof. Charles E. Fay of Tufts College,” Lewis G. Janes, 155-159. Fay was Janes’s junior, but they were “seat-mates” in school in Providence. In his letter he writes: “While I cannot now definitely summon back the subjects of his school essays, I remember that they were usually of an ethical character.” (157). 3. The materials available in the Skilton Family Paper, John W. Chadwick’s sermons, and published articles regularly refer to Janes as having an M. D., but none specifies from where he took the degree. His grandson, Bradford Lyttle, with whom I corresponded by email, says that he does not know where his grandfather got his degree, either. It is possible that it was a product of his training with the Butler Health Lift, but that is purely speculative. 4. Jan Todd, “’Strength is Health”: George Barker Windship and the First American Weight Training Boom,” Iron Game History, 3:1 (September 1993), 9-10. 5. John W. Chadwick, Thinking Back: A Discourse. At the Conclusion of Twenty Years in Charge of the Second Unitarian Society, Brooklyn, N. Y. (New York: S. W. Green’s Son, 1884), 28.

194 president for eleven years.6 He attended the Parliament of Religions at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition in 1893 and “rendered valuable aid, especially in arranging the program” of the Congress of Evolutionists that followed.7 He became director of the Cambridge Conferences, director of the Greenacre Conference School of Comparative Religion in Eliot, Maine, and president of the Free Religious Association.8 He was an author, lecturer, instructor at academies in Brooklyn, and one of the leading advocates for the Evolution Philosophy in America. Like Youmans, he was a sort of freelance intellectual in the closing years of the nineteenth century.

6. Lewis G. Janes, “The Brooklyn Ethical Association,” The Popular Science Monthly, 42 (March 1893), 672. This was also reprinted as a short book: Lewis G. Janes, The Brooklyn Ethical Association: Its Objects, History and Membership (Brooklyn, n. p., 1893), 23pp. The title page states that it is reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, and the text is exactly the same except for a slight reorganization of the concluding paragraphs and a complete list of officers and members--complete with current addresses--as of the 1893-1894 season. For the convenience of the reader, I have chosen to make references to the text as it appears in The Popular Science Monthly because that journal, despite its relative rarity, is much more easily accessible than this short book. Incidentally, the final paragraph reads as follows: “That the Ethical Association has been able in a modest way to take up and carry on the work of popularizing evolution views so ably begun by the founder of The Popular Science Monthly is not the least among the sources of congratulation in the judgment of its members. To continue this work, and by means thereof to aid in the scientific solution of those vast and impending problems of our social and political life in the discussion of which, under the prevailing a priori and empirical methods, wisdom has often been obscured by a multitude of unscientific and conflicting counsels, is their continued ambition, and to this end they solicit the sympathy and co-operation of all consenting minds.” (p. 14) 7. B. F. Underwood to James A. Skilton, July 22, 1896, Skilton Family Papers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Archives and Special Collections, Troy, NY. 8. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Cambridge Conferences,” Lewis G. Janes, 43-55; Shehadi Abd-Allah Shehadi, “A Brief Account of the Greenacre Conference School of Comparative Religion,” Lewis G. Janes, 17-23; “From Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, Jamaica Plains, Mass., A Director of the Association,” Lewis G. Janes, 145-154.

195 Details of Janes’s early life are sketchy. He was born on February 19, 1844 to “anti- slavery pioneers” and “black Republican” parents in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents were Alphonso Richards Janes, “a highly respected merchant,” and Sophia Taft Janes.9 His parents were friends with the William Lloyd Garrisons and Anna Garlin’s family, all of whom were radical abolitionists. Anna Garlin, better known by her married name of Anna Garlin Spencer, recalled Janes and herself wearing “the bit of crape that testified to our horror and grief” upon John Brown’s execution.10 His ancestors included some of the leading names among the original colonists of New England: William Janes, Maj. John Mason, Gov. William Bradford, and Peregrine White. He went to school in Providence, but, according to his obituaries, before entering Brown in 1862 he came down with a severe, but unnamed illness, that kept him idle for four years.11 His idleness was not complete, however. He was an active member of the Union League. In April and May 1865, following Lincoln’s assassination, he organized a commemorative meeting held in Providence City Hall on June 1. He engaged William Lloyd Garrison as the keynote speaker and arranged his compensation.12 Some time in the post-war years, Janes became associated with David P. Butler, a leading entrepreneur in the budding health and exercise market. Butler followed in the wake of weight- lifting pioneer, George Barker Windship, who had begun to popularize strength training as the most effective route to greater health in the late 1850s. The method that Windship popularized was centered on an exercise called “the health lift,” which involved various apparatuses for lifting progressively heavier weights. Many people in the 1860s tried to get in on the new fad, but “Windship’s major rival in the field of heavy training was . . . Butler, who, unlike windship

9. John Haynes Holmes, “Lewis George Janes,” Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936, reproduced in Biography Resource Center (Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2003), document number: BT2310010426. 10. John White Chadwick, “Two Friends and Helpers,” excerpted in Lewis G. Janes, 99; “From Anna Garlin Spencer,” 200. 11. Chadwick, “Two Friends,” 100-101. 12. William L. Garrison, Jr. to Lewis G. Janes, May 5, 1865, Janes Mss., Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana; William Lloyd Garrison to Lewis G. Janes, January 23, 1866, Janes Mss.

196 [sic], had a true entrepreneurial bent.”13 Butler patented several different lifting machines of various complexities and costs, and established his first gymnasium in Boston in the years immediately following the Civil War. It is probable that Janes’s M.D.--Janes is consistently referred to as “Doctor” by his friends, acquaintances, and reviewers--is a result of his work with Butler before opening his own New York franchises. Janes was probably attracted to the health lift because of his infirmity. He trained with Butler in Boston, and with his partner, John W. Leavitt, he opened several gymnasiums in New York City beginning in 1868. Janes and Leavitt eventually ended their partnership. Janes was left operating four of the five Butler Health Lift facilities in the city. He maintained his main office in the Park Bank building and all four of his facilities were located along Broadway. 14 Early in 1871 he began looking for rooms in which to open a facility in Brooklyn, by which time he was living in that city.15 By May 6, 1871 he had opened his Brooklyn facility, which was being endorsed in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle by such men as , Wayland Hoyt, and David Moore, Jr.16 This business was Janes’s main means of support throughout his time in Brooklyn. When he eventually removed to Cambridge in 1896, he leased his facilities to a club headed by “Mr. Richardson.”17 Soon after opening his gymnasiums in New York, Janes married Gertrude Pool in Rockland, Massachusetts on June 2, 1869. They lived together in Brooklyn and raised a son until her death in 1875. Seven years later, on June 17, 1882, he married Helen Hall Rawson, who was an instructor at the Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn.18 Together they had two surviving

13. Todd, “’Strength is Health,’” 9. 14. Todd, “’Strength is Health,’” 10-11; 15. Classified Advertisement, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 10, 1871, 3. 16. “Card,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 6, 1871, 2. 17. Lewis G. Janes to Mr. C. R. Tyng, Sec’y Com. Of Taxes and Assessments, February 6, 1898; Lewis G. Janes to James A. Skilton, February 9, 1898, Skilton Family Papers, RPI. 18. “Former President of the Brooklyn Ethical Association Well Known Here,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 6, 1901, 18. There are a number of factual errors in this obituary, but this fact appears to have been accurate. For example, it credits Janes with inventing the Butler Health Lift.

197 daughters.19 One of whom later married Charles Lyttle, a Unitarian minister who headed the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn in the early twentieth century and wrote Freedom Moves West. It is not clear what first brought Janes to the Second Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, but his sympathies with the liberal Christianity of the Church were apparent by the time he established his franchise in New York. According to his friend, James H. West of Boston, Janes was an active participant in the Free Religious Association from its first annual meeting, which was held in Boston in May 1867--this was probably about the same time that he was working with David Butler.20 The Free Religious Association was started by liberal religionists, particularly liberal Unitarians including O. B. Frothingham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Francis E. Abbot, and supported by others like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, and Lucretia Mott.21 James West, himself, was an important member of the liberal Unitarian community. According to Charles Lyttle, historian of the Western Unitarian Conference, West’s publishing house was among the four most important liberal presses of the late nineteenth century.22 Janes’s association with both the Free Religious Association and James West demonstrate that by 1867 he was running with the same intellectual crowd as John W. Chadwick, so it is not surprising that he ended up in Chadwick’s church. The Brooklyn Ethical Association’s Early Years, 1881-1888 Some time in the 1870s, Janes took over as the teacher of the adult Sunday school class at the Second Unitarian Church.23 True to his emphasis on ethics, Chadwick had established the

19. Holmes, “Lewis George Janes.” 20. “From James H. West,” Lewis G. Janes, 174. 21. Sidney Warren, American Freethought, 1860-1914 (New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1966), 98-99. 22. Charles H. Lyttle, Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference, 1852-1952 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 192. The other three presses were the Colegrove Book Concern and C. H. Kerr Publishing Company, both of Chicago, and George E. Ellis of Boston. 23. The early dates relating to the formation of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, of which this is one, vary among the sources. According to Janes in, Lewis G. Janes, “The

198 adult Sunday school class as a forum for the discussion of ethical matters, and the latest ideas that influenced ethical concepts. Among these ideas was evolution, particularly of the Spencerian sort. Whether Janes knew of Spencer before joining Chadwick’s congregation is unclear, but he took up the subject with gusto, and by the time of his death he was a recognized leader among Spencer’s supporters in America. In the class, Janes had been “using as text-books such suggestive works as Spencer’s Data of Ethics, Mill on Liberty, Graham’s Creed of Science, Sidgwick’s History of Ethics, and others of a similar character.”24 It was from this seed that the Brooklyn Ethical Association grew beginning with the 1881-1882 season, when it “was temporarily in the charge of Franklin Hooper.”25 Professor Franklin W. Hooper (1851-1914). Hooper was born in of Puritan stock. He took his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1875. After completing Harvard’s master of arts program, he studied at both Middlebury College in Vermont and Antioch College in Ohio, both of which awarded him an LL.D. At the side of Louis Agassiz’s “grave the young man had vowed to carry on his work and found a great museum.”26 The museum he helped to found was the Brooklyn Museum, and he was the long-time director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. During his life he was also a member of the Brooklyn Board of Education, sat on the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Public Library, was chairman of the Board of Trustees of Antioch College, worked to establish the Agricultural College on Long Island, and worked to save the American Bison 27 He appears to have moved to Brooklyn in 1880, leaving his position as principle of Keene High School in New Hampshire to become the professor of biology at the

Brooklyn Ethical Association,” 672, as of 1881 he had been teaching the class for “several years.” 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. “A Fact A Day About Brooklyn,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 23, 1941, 12/5, clipping in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Morgue, Brooklyn Public Library. 27. Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, A Memorial Meeting in recognition of the services of the late Franklin W. Hooper, M.A., LL.D., 1851-1914. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sunday Afternoon, November First, Nineteen hundred and fourteen at four o’clock (Brooklyn, NY: The Institute, 1914).

199 Adelphi Academy. He must have begun attending the Chadwick’s church soon after he arrived in Brooklyn, for he took over teaching the adult Sunday school the following year. The earliest stages of the BEA’s organization took place between 1881 and 1885. During the 1881-1882 season--the “season” included the non-summer months generally running from September through May when most members of the church, including the minister, had not yet abandoned the city’s heat in favor of country homes and inns--the members of the Sunday school class formed “The Association for the Promotion of Moral and Spiritual Education,” which reflected the minister’s views and the Arminian tradition that had had a profound influence on the development of liberal Unitarianism in the preceding decades. They met on Sundays in the church and on Friday evenings at one or another member’s home. The focus of their discussions was ethics, and the subjects they used to investigate ethics included world religions, philosophy, history, literature, and science. During these years, Janes gave a number of public lectures on Christianity, which he later compiled into a book, Primitive Christianity.28 During these years, too, the members began to establish connections to foreign religious groups, particularly in India, which later led to visits and lectures by non-Christian religious figures.29 The association’s use of Spencer’s ideas is apparent from its first season when its members discussed Spencer’s The Study of Sociology. “The doctrine of evolution, which, indeed, had entered largely into the discussion of ethical topics in the previous studies of the Sunday- school class, thus inspired and directed the work of the association from its inception. [And gave] its members . . . a common pou sto, on which they could unite in fruitful study and discussion.”30 Robert C. Bannister asserts that: “The choice [of The Study of Sociology] itself-- since the work was more than a decade old--indicated how gradual was the dissemination of Spencer’s work.”31 Quite to the contrary, the very source on which Bannister relies--Janes’s article in The Popular Science Monthly, on which I, too, heavily rely--demonstrates that Spencer’s works were being used in the 1870s, and the history of the Second Unitarian Church

28. Janes, “BEA,” 673; Lewis G. Janes, A Study of Primitive Christianity (Boston: Index Association, 1886). 29. Janes, “BEA,” 673-674. 30. Ibid., 673. 31. Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 80.

200 of Brooklyn shows that Rev. Staples had begun to introduce Spencer’s ideas into his sermons in the early 1860s. A more plausible reason for the use of this text is its availability, affordability, and accessibility as Spencer’s only mature work on sociology intended for a broad popular audience.32 Hooper was elected to a two-year term as president, and Janes said that, “to him more than any other individual the organization and initiatory success of the association are due.” Z. Sidney Sampson (1842-1897) succeeded Hooper as president for a further two years, before Janes was elected to the post in 1885.33 Both Hooper and Sampson remained active members of the association through the 1890s. Both men gave lectures and participated in discussions, and Sampson even became president again upon Janes’s departure for Cambridge in 1896.34 Though Janes gave credit in his 1893 article to these two men for the founding of the association, in a sermon of 1884, Chadwick gave the credit to Janes.35 Beginning with the 1885-1886 season, Janes took over as president of the BEA and while continuing to follow the pattern of lectures

32. Even with this criticism, Bannister deserves credit for being the only well-known historian to give any substantial treatment to the Brooklyn Ethical Association in the twentieth century, albeit contained in only two and a half pages. The minor factual mistake he makes regarding the BEA seem to reveal a kind of mild ambivalence about the association as nothing more than a side-light in the evolution debates. Olive Hoogenboom, The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years: A History (Brooklyn: The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, 1987), also gives a very brief--about one page--history of the BEA, but it, too, has some minor factual errors and adds no new information to that provided by Janes’s 1893 article. Hoogenboom, however, does make use of church records, though she does not use The Popular Science Monthly or any of the BEA’s publications. 33. Janes, “Brooklyn Ethical Association,” 674-675. 34. Prof. James H. Hyslop, The Ethics of the Greek Philosophers Socrates, Plato, and . A Lecture Given before the Brooklyn Ethical Association, Season of 1896-1897 (New York: Charles M. Higgins, 1903), frontispiece. The frontispiece to the book is a Memorial to Z. Sidney Sampson. 35. John W. Chadwick, Thinking Back: A Discourse. At the Conclusion of Twenty Years in Charge of the Second Unitarian Society, Brooklyn, N. Y., (New York: S. W. Green’s Son, 1884), 28.

201 and discussion established in the preceding years, expanded its attendance and took it out into a community that would eventually stretch around the world. James Avery Skilton (1829-1904) 36 An important addition to the budding association was James Avery Skilton, who began attending the association’s sessions in the spring of 1888. His conversion to Spencerism demonstrated some of the philosophy’s breadth of appeal, since his journey to the BEA also differed from that of Janes, Chadwick, and others. He was older than they and came from a Methodist, rather than a Unitarian, background.37 Nevertheless, he embraced the organization’s

36. Much that I have gleaned of Skilton’s life before 1888 comes from documents in the Skilton Family Papers. Three documents, in particular, proved useful. Only one of them, however, actually has his name on it, and one does not have a title. However, the facts in all three correspond to one another and to a discussion he presented following Joseph Le Conte’s presentation on “The Race Problem in the South,” before the Brooklyn Ethical Association during the 1891-1892 season, Joseph Le Cont, “The Race Problem in the South,” Man and the State, Studies in Applied Sociology: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1892), 374-402 (Skilton’s discussion occupies pp. 383-402). The three documentary sources are: James A. Skilton to Theodore Roosevelt, President, October 14, 1902; unsigned letter to Hon. Elihu Root, February 4, 1903; and the Untitled and Unsigned Typescript in Folder 11--Brooklyn Ethical Association, Addresses and Essays, Author Unknown, which begins “Like every other member . . .”, 35 pp., Skilton Family Papers. There is a hand-written note on the letter to Root, presumably by an archivist, saying “sounds like James Avery Skilton.” I agree, and the facts related by the author of the letter match those in the signed letter to Roosevelt and the published discussion. The Untitled and Unsigned Typescript appears to have been an address delivered by Skilton to the Brooklyn Guild, which had its origins in the work of members of the Second Unitarian Church and the Brooklyn Ethical Association, in January 1891. Again in this case, the tone, use of language, and facts correspond with attributable documents. 37. From his own statements, it appears that Skilton joined the Methodist church in his early teens, see for example, James A. Skilton, “The Physical Basis of Ethics, Sociology, and Religion. Opening Discussion, by James A. Skilton. October 29, 1893,” Skilton Family Papers, 4.

202 activities and objectives. As corresponding secretary for the BEA from 1889 to 1894, an active lecturer and discussant through the 1890s, and a defender of the organization to his death, he played an important role in popularizing the organization. Aside from Janes, Skilton deserves more credit than anyone for the BEA’s success and for saving its history. Alone among the BEA’s officers, Skilton’s papers are available for public use. Skilton was the oldest of three sons born in Troy, New York to Avery Judd and Mary Augusta Candee Skilton.38 He studied at Troy Academy before entering the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in the same city, just across the upper Hudson River from Albany, New York. His father was a friend of Professor Amos Eaton, who taught botany at RPI. Eaton had been Asa Gray’s botany teacher years before, and it was after a lecture on Gray’s life and work that Skilton took the opportunity to give his own memories of the scientist. As a boy, James Skilton knew Eaton through his father’s contact with the professor and from when he “was made to fetch and carry in the work of the Troy Lyceum, and other scientific interests . . . [and] was a frequent messenger between them.”39 He graduated from RPI in 1845 and went on to

38. “Biographical and Historical Notes” in the Finding Aid for the Skilton Family Papers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY (http://www.lib.rpi.edu/Archives/access/inventories/manuscripts/MC22.pdf). 39. James A. Skilton, “Professor Amon Eaton,” Skilton Family Papers, 6. This particular passage was struck from the proof sheet and was not included in the published version of the essay included as Skilton’s discussion following: Mrs. Mary Treat, “Asa Gray: His Life and Work,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1893) (originally Boston: James H. West, Publisher, 1890), 356, Skilton says: “It was my privilege, before I was half through my teens, in an interval of rest from over- study, and between the preparatory school and the university, to earn the degree of Bachelor of Natural Science in the first institution established in the United States for the especial study of Botany and the other natural sciences.” This supports the notion that he graduated in 1845, when he would have been sixteen years old. The discussion published in the BEA’s volume matches a typescript proof sheet in the Skilton Family Papers.

203 study at Wesleyan University in Middletown, , before moving south in the 1850s. After the Civil War he received his LL.B. from the Albany Law School.40 Skilton’s father was a physician who spent much time caring for recent European immigrants. He attributed his early experiences in his father’s office and on house calls to poor people, including the deeply impressive image of “the furrows left in the back of a refugee Pole by the Russian knout” before he was five years old, to his lifelong interest in helping poor and oppressed people. For “nearly twenty years” after the memorable incident with the Pole, to 1851, he continued to provide services to such needy people. 41 He lived for “eight months or more” in England during his early twenties, in 1851 and 1852. He does not give details of why he was there, but the months in London and its environs made a strong impression on the young man. He toured the Crystal Palace at the World’s Fair often, which cannot help but make one wonder if he did not pass near Spencer on one of the many trips Spencer made as tour guide through the building. More impressive, still, for Skilton were his trips to the slums of East London and the farms nearby. The poverty he saw there and the politics with which he was surrounded, convinced him that similar dangers threatened America if urbanization was not properly mediated. The problem that he saw was one of

40. The history of his education is not perfectly clear, but this represents my best guess as to its course. The Finding Aid for the Skilton Family Papers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute say that he entered that school in 1845 and attended for only one year before “he went on to take over his father’s medical office and financial affairs, although he never was formally trained in medicine.” However, in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Proceedings of the Semi- Celebration of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y., Held June 14-18, 1874 (Troy: W. H. Young, 1875), on the Making of America website at the University of Michigan, 20, he is listed as a member of the class of 1845, which would seem to indicate that that was the year in which he graduated. Further, Lewis G. Janes, “The Brooklyn Ethical Association,” 677, states that Skilton was “a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N. Y., and the Wesleyan University of Middletown, Conn.” Janes does not mention Skilton’s legal training, and the Finding Aid at RPI states that James’s younger brother, Julius, attended Wesleyan University. 41. James A. Skilton (?), Untitled and Unsigned Typescript, 4.

204 individual human degradation caused by historical class structures.42 The solution to which he would eventually turn was that proposed by Spencer, both because it matched his own scientific bent of education and preference, but also because it attacked the system of privilege that he believed lay at the root of the English misery he saw. In December 1852, Skilton established a farm near Albany, Georgia, where he lived for about the next ten years.43 He started the farm with the support of white workers he brought down with him from New York. His northern workers did not fare well in the sultry weather of Georgia and the whole crew quickly succumbed to malaria, leaving Skilton to hire out slaves from neighboring plantations. Writing of the incident in 1892, he said that he was “forced to hire slaves to take their places or quit.” Looking back from that later date he treated it as an opportunity for sociological study. He also saw himself in a paternalistic role relative to his hired slaves, for he was “recognized by them as coming from the land of freedom, and had to an unusual degree their confidence and trust in general, and frequently as to the deeper experiences of their personal and family lives.” He claimed in later years that he never had “to sacrifice the broader Northern principles, properly so called, . . . certainly not [his] faith in freedom.” However, only with the new, enslaved, laborers was the plantation a success. Soon thereafter, Skilton became citizen of Georgia. 44 It was while living in Georgia that Skilton first became aware of Darwin and evolution. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Skilton “could only get access, in the South, through brief reviews, through the information contained in newspaper scraps, and--I may say-- through orthodox sermons and their struggles with the ‘monkey problem.’”45 Nevertheless, due to the skeptical frame of mind he claimed to have held since his work in botany in 1845, he immediately accepted Darwin’s notion of natural selection and the development of species. He also attributes his ready acceptance of Darwin to his earlier reading and discussion of Lamarck and the Vestiges of Creation.

42. Skilton, Untitled, 9-13. 43. Skilton, Untitled, 13; James A. Skilton, “Discussion,” in Le Conte, “The Race Problem in the South,” 383-384. 44. James A. Skilton, “Discussion,” in Le Conte, “The Race Problem in the South,” 383- 384. 45. Skilton, “Discussion” in Treat, “Asa Gray,” 359.

205 Skilton moved back north after he “saw the Rebellion develop around” him, and the southern states began seceding. In the summer of 1861, now in his early thirties, he did his “first sociological work in . . . fresh from a deep and long study of the South, and was anxious to begin then to prepare the way for the introduction of into the South after the war.”46 During the war years he worked to convince federal policy makers to protect the interests of Southern Unionists as a remedy for the problems sure to follow the Civil War.47 Following the war he was part of a short-lived and unsuccessful effort to establish the Republican Party in Georgia under Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction. Despite this failure, he stayed in the south to aid in the reconstruction. He soon saw trouble coming, though, and “carpet-bagged out of the South before the Negro regime began, impelled by unspeakable sorrow and disgust over the impending fiasco.”48 As he saw it, he “wisely gave up the job,” “because of the imminence of an unspeakable, tragical, and also farcical scheme of reconstruction that threatened the loss of most if not all that had been won on many bloody battlefields.”49 Skilton decided to leave because he believed that the reconstruction was not being done properly, that is, it was not being done in accordance with the sociological insights of Herbert Spencer.

46. James A. Skilton to Theodore Roosevelt, President, October 14, 1902, Skilton Family Papers, 4. 47. In a letter from James A. Skilton to Hon. Elihu Root, February 10, 1903, he says: “from 1861 to the summer of 1866 I gave myself not simply to the study of these subjects [the Negro problem in the South], but to efforts as well as to aspirations for the anticipation and prevention of the conditions we have seen and that you now seem to recognize and deplore,” 1; Skilton’s discussion in Le Conte, “The Race Problem in the South,” 395-397. 48. Skilton’ discussion in Le Conte, “The Race Problem in the South,” 399 fn. Of all the damnable charges that can be leveled as Spencer and his followers that of racism is the most valid. Not all of the BEA’s members were as strongly opposed to black rule, and xenophobic for that matter, as Skilton, but many were. Skilton, in turn was not nearly so racist as Le Conte proved himself to be in his lecture of the evening. I will take up the subject of racism in the BEA and Spencerian philosophy later in this chapter. 49. Skilton to Root, 2; Skilton to Roosevelt, 6. In both letters he speaks of “carpet- bagging out of the South.”

206 Skilton had first become acquainted with Spencer during the war, and, like many people describing their first encounter with the Englishman’s ideas, he was immediately taken by them. He had stumbled across one Spencer’s collected essays “in a bookstore in Albany in the Winter of 1862-1863, not long after Professor Youmans had brought about his introduction to America.” As he read, he “soon began to hear [his] mind saying: Here he is at last--the thinker, philosopher and leader for whom I have looked so long in vain!” He skimmed other of Spencer’s volumes on the table by which he was standing, read a copy of Spencer’s “Prospectus,” and saw a reference to his 1852 article in the Westminster Review on population. Skilton went immediately to the State Library and read the article. “From that day I have been an earnest Spencerian,” he said. 50 Following the war, Skilton studied law and moved to Brooklyn. After “carpet-bagging” out of the South, Skilton got his LL.B from Albany Law School and set up shop as a patent attorney in Brooklyn in 1867.51 About this time--as of September 28, 1871--he was living at 62 Heights, Brooklyn, and had his office at 25 Nassau St., New York. He was a tall, but slightly built forty-one year old man. At 6’-5/8” he weighed only 122 pounds and had a 28 ½ inch waist.52 Soon after settling down in Brooklyn, he began attending Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church, thereby making a transition from Methodism to Congregationalism. From 1867 to 1882, Skilton was “a teacher and member of the Board of Control of Plymouth Bethel Mission.”53 Although he remained an active member of the church, and despite Beecher’s own dedication to evolutionism, Skilton felt unappreciated and actively stymied by the church leaders, including Beecher and Lyman Abbott.54 Skilton took up progressive mission work in hopes of improving Northern society in much the same way he had hoped to improve Southern society after the war. He “engaged in that branch of work [despite] knowing that . . . it was radically faulty.” It was not until he discovered

50. Skilton, discussion in Treat, “Asa Gray,” 359. 51. “Biographical and Historical Notes,” Skilton Family Papers. 52. Skilton’s personal information is entered into the back pages of his personal copy of L. E. Waterman, A Manual for the Exercise known as the Butler Health Lift (New York: Lewis G. Janes & Co., 1871), Skilton Family Papers. This was the book that Janes distributed to his customers of the Butler Health Lift. 53. Skilton, Untitled and Unsigned, 16, 14. 54. Skilton, “The Physical Basis of Ethics,” Skilton Family Papers, 4-5.

207 the Brooklyn Ethical Association in 1888, however, that he believed such activities had a strong possibility of success. In his view, “the Brooklyn Ethical Association and its work . . . presents the only standing ground, the only basis, the only philosophy, the only theory, or set of theories, in and through which remedy and relief can be obtained” for the poor and disadvantaged.55 He was thus attracted to the organization by a shared belief in Spencer’s philosophy, and he became a leading proponent of Spencerism within and through the group. By the end of this his first season, he was the Association’s corresponding secretary. The Brooklyn Ethical Association, 1888-1889 Lewis Janes decided to do something special for the 1888-1889 season, the year following Skilton’s joining of the organization, and so began the most productive and important six years of the BEA’s history. Janes and the executive committee decided to make evolution, heretofore an important element in their discussions, the focus of the season’s lectures. As the preface to the BEA’s first published volume states: “Universal in its scope, penetrating every region of thought and life, it appeared to the managers of the Brooklyn Ethical Association Lectures that no work could be of more general and vital interest than that of popularizing correct views of the Evolution philosophy.”56 The timing was fortuitous for the idea of evolution was already widely discussed but not yet fully defined, so there was room for a group like theirs to develop the meaning and parameters of the term. By 1888, too, the BEA’s members had important personal relationships with people around the county, particularly within liberal Unitarian circles. By the end of the season, the Association would be known--not to say well and broadly known--around the world. It was a fruitful beginning. The season’s lectures offer an interesting and important insight into the way in which the members of the BEA used evolutionism and Spencer’s ideas, particularly the first twelve lectures. Those lectures may be conveniently divided into four categories: 1) biography; 2) inorganic evolution; 3) organic evolution; 4) super-organic evolution. The first two lectures were on the two most important modern evolutionary thinkers: Herbert Spencer and Charles Robert Darwin. The third and fourth lectures addressed inorganic evolution in “Solar and Planetary Evolution” and “Evolution of the Earth.” The third category of lectures covered organic

55. Skilton, Untitled and Unsigned, 14-16. 56. Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, Publisher, 1889), iv.

208 evolution, as seen by Spencer, which included “Evolution of Vegetal Life,” “Evolution of Animal Life,” “The Descent of Man,” and “Evolution of Mind.” Leading members of the BEA next covered super-organic evolution: “Evolution of Society,” by Skilton, “Evolution of Theology,” by Z. Sidney Sampson, and Janes’s essay on “Evolution of Morals.” Taken as a whole, this volume offers a particularly good insight into the state of the Spencer Debates at the end of the 1880s. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, “Herbert Spencer” (October 1888). The Brooklyn Daily Eagle announcement of the BEA’s first meeting of the season made clear the direction of the season’s lectures. It noted that the first lecture, to be delivered by “Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, acting president of the Nineteenth Century Club,” would be on Herbert Spencer.57 Thompson (1850-1897), was born and raised in Montpelier, Vermont, but like many other participants in the BEA’s lecture and discussion series, he had Boston roots. His great-grandfather had been killed at the battle of Lexington. His father, Daniel Pierce Thompson, was “well known as a lawyer, judge, editor, novelist and historian; his best known literary work being ‘The Green Mountain Boys.’” While attending Amherst College, from which he graduated with honors at the age of nineteen, “he served several terms as assistant Secretary of State, of Vermont.” After graduation he moved to New York City and studied law with his brother before becoming a classics instructor at Springfield, Massachusetts, High School and eventually publishing a textbook. After the 1871-1872 school year, Thompson returned to New York, completed his study of law, was admitted to the bar, and began to practice. By the time he gave his presentation before the BEA in October 1888, he was the partner of John A. Taylor, another member of Chadwick’s church and an officer of the BEA. Thompson, also, already had published numerous works on religion, ethics, and psychology in the Liberal Christian, Sentinel, Mind, and The Popular Science Monthly, as well as an 1884 book with Longmans, Green & Company of London, A System of Psychology, and an 1888 volume on the Religious Sentiments of Mind. He went on to write on Social Progress, “Philosophy of Fiction in Literature,” “Politics in Democracy,” and numerous other articles and lectures. Not surprisingly, too, throughout his life

57. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 13, 1888, 4. The language used in the numerous accounts of the BEA’s meetings in the Daily Eagle seem to show that the blurbs were being written by Janes, himself. The newspaper often included complete transcripts of the lectures and often of the discussions.

209 he was an active member of literary, social, political, and reform clubs in the city, including the Committee of One Hundred at the Columbian Celebration, New York Alumni Association of Amherst College, the Nineteenth Century Club, the Authors’ Club of New York, the Century Club, Manhattan Club, Reform Club, Bar Association, Lawyers’ Club, Sons of the Revolution, the Patria Club, and the New England Society. 58 Thompson’s work had garnered him recognition as an intellectual and he was allowed a limited membership in the Athenaeum in London, where he was an acquaintance of Spencer. Therefore, his presentation on Spencer before the BEA was based on an intimate knowledge of the philosopher’s works and a cordial social knowledge of the man. He spoke of Spencer as an intimate of Huxley and Tyndall, an avid player of billiards at the Athenaeum, well-mannered, “a keen critic,” “very combative,” “a ready conversationalist, very accurate and exact in his expressions . . . at home on all topics of current interest, as well as on those specially appertaining to his studies,” and a perceptive and insightful analyst of America.59 From the beginning of his lecture Thompson made clear his high esteem of Spencer, marking him as a greater thinker than Plato and Aristotle--though he thought most great minds of the nineteenth century were greater than these because of the generally higher nature of civilization and thought in modern society--and “the father of the modern philosophy of evolution.” He tipped his hat to the remarkable work of scientists like Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Wallace, but he placed Spencer above them all, for “profounder emotions are stirred when we contemplate Mr. Spencer and his work. We think no longer of the ingenious mechanisms and marvelous adaptations of nature . . . . Rather, it seems as if barriers were suddenly thrown down, and a vision opened of boundless knowledge and exhaustless being.”60 Thompson also distinguished between evolution and Darwinism by arguing that, despite their improper conflation in many people’s minds, Darwin’s work simply demonstrated evolution in biology and did not address the broader law of evolution.61

58. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Daniel Greenleaf Thompson. February 9, 1850. July 10, 1897 (New York: Eagle Press, 1898), 7-11. The copy of this rare book that I used is held at the New York Public Library. 59. Ibid., 7-12. 60. Ibid., 18. 61. Ibid., 12-13.

210 Thompson also spoke approvingly of Spencer spreading influence--mentioning George Kennan’s discovery of Spencer’s books, “somewhat mutilated, indeed, by the Russian censor,” in central Siberia--and his position regarding agnostic religion, evolutionary ethics, opposition to militarism and industrial combinations, and on government non-interference.62 He disagreed with Spencer only on points regarding education. For one, he thought Spencer would have been improved by a proper university education. He did not specify the improvements, but only said that “Spencer’s thoughts and writings seem . . . to show their main deficiency in precisely those things which a university training would have supplied.”63 Thompson also disagreed with Spencer’s opposition to public education. He agreed that education was essential to the development of individual freedom, but believed that some form of organized education was essential to the development of a more altruistic character. His opposition was oblique, however, and he criticized “those who hold these ideas,” rather than Spencer, himself. He vaguely tied education to security and security to the government’s proper role and concluded the point by saying: “For security’s sake, therefore, the State ought to have a care for education, and maintain a system of public instruction and discipline.”64 The discussion that followed, not surprisingly, further demonstrated the connection between the organization and Herbert Spencer, both intellectually and personally. Skilton broadly agreed with Thompson, differing with him only on the point of Spencer’s education. He argued that it was only because Spencer was unbound by “academical education” that he was able to make the leap from Social Statics, which was a product of the dominant intellectual environment, to the Synthetic Philosophy, which fully embodied the revolutionary notion of the progressive nature of institutions and thus the importance of relative ethics and morals.65 Chadwick merely clarified that Darwin had a prior claim to biological evolution, but agreed with the rest of Thompson’s lecture, particularly as it related to the essential religiousness of

62. Ibid., 6; The George Kennan to whom Thompson refers on this page is the father of the twentieth-century George Kennan known as the father of the United State’s policy of containment during the Cold War. 63. Ibid., 4. 64. Ibid., 15. 65. James A. Skilton’s discussion, in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 20-21.

211 Spencer’s “Unknowable.”66 Thomas Gardner, a member of the Association, too, agreed with the essential religiousness of Spencer’s philosophy, but he took issue with the notion that a laissez- faire system was the best one. In support of his point he quoted Edmund Burke: “Before I congratulate a people on having obtained their liberty which will allow then to do as they please, I think it would be well to wait and see what it will please them to do.”67 The responses indicated an important aspect of the Spencer debates both in terms of the BEA, specifically, and the United States generally; there were few absolute disciples of Spencer. Most of the people who claimed to follow or to have some affiliation with Spencer and his ideas adapted Spencer’s ideas to fit their own sets of beliefs. It was common for members of the BEA, particularly those who maintained a close relationship with one church or another, to emphasize explicitly religious aspects of his philosophy beyond what Spencer, himself, endorsed. Most of the members appeared to be reform minded and some eventually butted up against one stricture or another that Spencer placed on government intervention. The range of adaptations was broad, but for the most part they were not diametrically at odds with Spencer’s own opinion. In fact, Spencer agreed with some of the interpretations of his work presented by the BEA’s members. It was both a strength and a weakness of his system that it could be interpreted in a variety of ways. At that first meeting of the 1888-1889 season, Skilton also read a letter he had received from “the Master himself on the subject” regarding the BEA’s plan to treat evolution at its meetings.68 Spencer found the plan “gratifying . . . both on personal and on public grounds.” He then complimented the intention, effort, and organization of the lectures and hoped that they might be “circulated in a cheap printed form” to spread their impact.69 Even before the BEA began to publish its sessions, however, the program that Skilton had sent to Spencer had made its way into the hands of Spencer’s friends and coadjutors in England and Europe. In this case, the

66. Chadwick, in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 22. 67. Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France, quoted by Thomas Gardner, in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 22. 68. Skilton, in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 19. 69. Herbert Spencer to James A. Skilton, July 24, 1888, printed in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 19.

212 efforts of Americans in the name of the evolution philosophy traveled eastward over the same paths that had brought Spencer’s ideas to America decades before.70 Janes took Spencer’s advice in the letter and arranged with his friend, James H. West, to publish the lectures and discussions both serially and as a complete volume. West, under the name of either James H. West, Publisher, or The New Ideal Publishing Company71, published a biweekly paper called The Modern Science Essayist--also referred to in contemporary sources as Sociological Evolution and The Evolutionist--that contained one lecture and discussion per issue. As Janes noted in his introduction to the final lecture of the season, the various editions of this periodical made their way across the country largely through the network of Unitarian members of the Western Conference. The BEA’s work was noted in Unitarian journals like Unity, The Christian Register, and The Christian Union. The Association distributed over five hundred copies of the season’s program, sold over one thousand copies of the first six lectures of the season, and had subscriptions for 350 copies of the collected volume before it was published. Clearly these were tiny sums considering the size of the country, but it was indicative of a solid group of interested readers. 72 John W. Chadwick: “Charles Robert Darwin”.73 Chadwick delivered the second lecture of the season, in which he looked back at the life, achievements, and influence of the other great modern evolutionist, Charles Darwin. He portrayed Darwin as a good man, a great scientist, and Spencer’s coadjutor in the demonstration and propagation of the evolution doctrine. At the end of his presentation, Chadwick also considered how Darwin’s theories stood in relation to religious thought and found that both his own church and Darwin shared the pursuit of universal truth. Darwin, Chadwick argued, deserved credit for establishing “the doctrine of organic continuity upon irrefragable foundations.”74 The Origin of Species, which Chadwick called “the

70. Skilton, in Thompson, “Herbert Spencer,” 19-20. 71. West published a bi-monthly and later monthly magazine from January 1888 to December 1890 titled, The New Ideal. 72. Lewis G. Janes, “Address,” May 26, 1889, in Skilton Family Papers, 2-4. 73. John W. Chadwick, “Charles Robert Darwin,” in Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 23-51. 74. Ibid., 26.

213 most notable of nineteenth century books, an epoch-making book if ever there was one,” was merely the outline of his great life’s work, however.75 As Darwin filled out the various subsections of his argument in Origin in later works, he demonstrated both the strength of his argument and his dedication to the subject as he amassed an irrefutable body of evidence demonstrating his “most characteristic doctrine--the transmutation of species by means of natural selection and the preservation of the fittest.”76 Chadwick, however, was careful to keep Darwin’s epochal work in perspective as it related to the doctrine of evolution as a whole. He noted that “original and revolutionary as [Origin] was, it is possible to exaggerate its novelty. . . . For in 1859 this doctrine of the organic and genetic unity of plant and animal life upon the earth had already many powerful advocates. Goethe was one of them, Treviranus was another, Lamarck another, Erasmus Darwin another, our own Emerson another, the author of “The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” another, and Herbert Spencer another and the most notable of all.”77 In other words, Darwin’s contribution to evolution was not “the what of family relationships between all plants and all animals, past, present, and to be, but the how of this relationship” in the form of his theory of natural selection.78 In taking this position, Chadwick represented many of his contemporaries who saw evolution as much more than its biological manifestation through a process of variation, reproductive advantage, and slow divergence as a result of struggle for survival. Powerful as that theory of evolution was, it was but one aspect of the universal evolution outlined most powerfully by Spencer. In turning to a consideration of the relationship between religion and Darwin’s theory, Chadwick made clear how important it was to seat natural selection clearly in a broader theory of universal evolution. Coming out of Transcendentalism, as he did, Chadwick had already rejected supernaturalism and religious orthodoxy as viable tools for the discovery of universal and religious truth. The Arminian tradition, with which Unitarianism was shot through, biased his mind toward a progressively developing universe and a faith in a beneficent God of law and a unified natural and spiritual world. So, when Chadwick asked: “How does the thought of Darwin

75. Ibid., 31. 76. Ibid., 29. 77. Ibid., 32. 78. Ibid., 33.

214 stand related to our faith in human nature and in God?,” he was ready with his answers. First, if Darwin were right and evolution were true, then it is religious ideas that must be adjusted because any natural truth was by necessity a truth of God. Second, rather than demonstrating the “descent” of man, evolution surely showed man’s “ascent” from lower beasts into the social, religious, and ethical creature he had become. Third, evolution strongly suggested that human beings may look forward to a future of improvement at least as long as their improvement through ages past. Finally, evolution glorified God by showing Him to be far greater than any previous anthropomorphic formulation offered by orthodox religions.79 Chadwick’s reading of Darwin’s theory was colored by Spencer’s influence because Spencer’s works were far more explicit in their connection of physical to ethical evolution than were Darwin’s and more easily connected to religion, at least as Chadwick saw things.80 Lectures on inorganic evolution in the 1888-1889 season. Two authors, Garrett P. Serviss and Lewis G. Janes, presented lectures to the Brooklyn Ethical Association on the evolution of the universe and the earth, respectively. Both presentations accepted universal evolution, but they emphasized different aspects of it. Not surprisingly, Janes presented a much more optimistic version of inorganic development than Serviss. Serviss, in the discussion following his lecture, faced disagreement from another of the BEA’s leading members, Robert G. Eccles. The collateral readings for Serviss’s lecture began with Spencer’s First Principles and Illustrations of Universal Progress, which presented an interesting tension in the lecture. Serviss asserted, in accord with Spencer, that “everything of which we have any knowledge is the result of growth or progress, in one way or another, according to law . . .[, and] that no reasonable person who is acquainted with the facts, would pretend that the earth or the universe is any less

79. Ibid., 45-46. 80. As several scholars point out, Darwin did address the evolution of mind, society, and morals, but his works on the subjects were never so explicit or as extensive as Spencer’s. See Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Inc., 1980); and Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

215 the result of a regular process of development than a tree.”81 He also identified the “arch- mechanics” of universal development to be heat and gravitation, which “contended for mastery in the evolution of the earth.”82 The contest, as he saw it, however, made for a somewhat bleaker future for the universe. As gravity slowly forged the “fire-mist” into cosmic bodies, heat dissipated. Eventually, each cosmic body would cool and would become dark and lifeless. He suggested that the cycle might begin again with collisions between these dead bodies that would shatter them again into a fire-mist from which suns and planets would again form and on which life would again take hold. In First Principles, Spencer discussed the process of devolution that would follow the perfect differentiation and integration of matter, but it was not the focus of his remaining work. The downward part of the cycle did not sit well with many of his more devoted followers. Robert G. Eccles, one of the BEA’s most active participants in its heyday, took issue with this aspect of Serviss’s presentation. Eccles asserted that Serviss’s argument “seems to me to violate the basic laws believed in by modern evolutionists,” because Serviss’s theories assumed that energy in the form of heat would dissipate “till at last the whole universe ends as a dead, black, monster furnace-slag.”83 This conflict is telling because it centers on the second law of thermodynamics and the theory of . Where the first law of thermodynamics demonstrated the conservation of energy--a law on which Spencer’s entire system was founded--the second law proved that thermodynamic events were not reversible.84 This second law was not yet fully accepted outside of scientific circles, and even among scientists was still being debated. Even less well known

81. Garrett P. Serviss, “Solar and Planetary Evolution,” in Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 55. 82. Serviss, “Solar and Planetary Evolution,” 57. 83. Robert G. Eccles, in Serviss, “Solar and Planetary Evolution, 71-73. 84. Eccles, in a lecture a few weeks later, clearly demonstrates that Spencer’s followers saw the connection between his philosophy and what we now refer to as the first law of thermodynamics. “The advent of the doctrine of the Correlation and Conservation of Forces made it possible for Mr. Spencer to formulate the philosophy of Universal Evolution.” Robert G. Eccles, “Evolution of Mind,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 180.

216 was the theory of entropy, which held that due to the irreversible nature of thermodynamic events, some heat (i.e., energy) was radiating out into the universe in a form that was incompatible with further work and essentially lost. The combination of these two laws--the second law of thermodynamics and entropy--suggested that the universe was, indeed, moving toward such a “monster furnace-slag” described by Serviss. As the century came to a close, it was this rock of physics on which the ship of Spencerism floundered, far more than any obstacles thrown up by Darwinian evolution. Eccles, like many of his compatriots in the BEA and among Spencerians broadly, could not accept such a baneful vision of the future. For his part, Janes simply ignored any downward part of the cycle in his lecture on the “Evolution of the Earth.”85 Ignoring the bits of Serviss’s lecture to which Eccles objected, Janes began his own lecture by referring back to what he thought the prominent point of Serviss’s lecture of two weeks before: “We have seen how, from the primitive and almost homogenous fire-mist, the suns and planets have evolved, by a process of differentiation and integration, proceeding from the indefinite, incoherent, homogenous, toward the definite, coherent, heterogeneous condition illustrated by the present state of our solar system, thus fulfilling the fundamental law of evolution as laid down by Mr. Spencer.”86 In this vein he traced the geological record from the primeval surface of the earth to the rise of increasingly complex life forms. He said in conclusion that, “when we note all these processes of geological change . . . in landscape and in organic life, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the entire process of geological change has been one of evolution, obedient to the mandates of constant and invariable natural laws.”87 Janes, perhaps the most optimistic member of an optimistic group, did not recognize an ultimately dark and cold end of the evolutionary process. Like others who were part of the Arminian and Lockean traditions, progress was ever onward and upward, at least for those who obeyed the natural laws. Lectures on organic evolution in the 1888-1889 season. Although fissures in evolutionary thought that are now prominent appeared in the four lectures on organic evolution, the speakers and audiences appeared to be in agreement regarding its general tenets. The four

85. Lewis G. Janes, “Evolution of the Earth,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 77-107. 86. Ibid., 79. 87. Ibid., 103.

217 essays addressed some of the differences between Spencer and Darwin, Lamarckism and Darwinism, and societal conflict and cooperation. Potts’s lecture, “Evolution of Vegetal Life,” is notable for the way in which it related Darwinian and Spencerian evolution. Like most of his fellow members of the BEA, Potts gave Spencer credit for providing the sweeping generalizations of evolution, while allowing that, “the contribution of Darwin to this theory was the proposition of a condition, of an active agent, and of the method of its operation.”88 Potts followed Darwin’s argument regarding organic evolution very closely through the first part of his lecture. In the last quarter of it he made a transition, which was far from seamless, to a broader consideration of the implications of evolution, at which point his argument becomes much more Spencerian than Darwinian. Without making any specific connection between organic evolution and universal evolution, aside from saying that the best theory is “that theory which requires us to make the least upon the arbitrary and the cataclysmic,” he asserted that, “our life is becoming. . . . Speaking reverentially, as one must, it seems to me that the Universe with all that it contains is but the outward semblance of one life that is self-developing.”89 Human recognition of evolution is, itself, the product of evolution, and that recognition will allow human beings to act in accordance with the best dictates of a beneficent universal order. The way Potts related Darwinism and Spencerism was interesting because he did not provide a clear connection between the two, but rather demonstrated that his belief in evolution predated his investigation of Darwin and reflected the ideas coming out of the Arminian tradition that he shared with Spencer. In his lecture on “Evolution of Animal Life,” Raymond, too, distinguished between Darwinism and evolution. He began with “a prefatory explanation of the distinction between Evolution and Darwinism.” The former held “that in some way, by the combination of such interior and exterior forces, successive animal forms have been produced.” Darwinism, on the other hand was simply a proposed method, which may be rejected “as a complete or a half- complete statement of the mode” by which the forms arose. Raymond particularly condemns Darwin’s “ardent disciples,” who went well beyond their master in claiming that it was the sole cause of organic evolution, in favor of “Mr. Spencer, and many eminent naturalists (especially in

88. William Potts, “Evolution of Vegetal Life,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 128. 89. Ibid., 132-133.

218 America) [who] lay greater weight upon laws and processes” other than natural and sexual selection.90 Raymond’s lecture also touched upon the theological aspects of evolutionism, specifically as it related to the appearance of intent, or at least the influence of divine thought, in the products of evolution. Like Potts in the preceding lecture, Raymond argued that the weak point in Darwinism was the fact that the cause of variations was unknown. He, along with many others, believed that Lamarckian use inheritance was the most reasonable explanation. For this he was complimented during the discussion by Robert G. Eccles, who said that, “the evidence is multiplying that shows mind to be an active participant in the moulding process in the development of animal forms.”91 For Spencerians, mind played a crucial role in evolution that allowed them to assimilate a wide variety of deeply held beliefs. It allowed a place for reason in the understanding of creation. It allowed them to assimilate neo-Platonic notions of ideal forms, while allowing them to see the growing universe demanded by their Arminian heritage. Most importantly, it gave space for human reform by allowing individual initiative to play a role in universal evolution, particularly as related to the super-organic evolution of societies and individual ethics. The importance of mind to a Spencerian evolutionist was especially clear in Eccles lecture on “Evolution of Mind.” Following the fundamental tenet of Spencerian evolutionism, Eccles identified an essential cosmic unity, the One of philosophy, in which it was possible to distinguish lower and higher manifestation of the universal law of evolution. “The believer,” he said, “in special creations can hold to a belief in mind as separate from body, but the evolutionist must accept the doctrine of one persistent reality that subjectively is mind and objectively matter.”92 As such, the human mind was a product of evolution, though an as yet imperfect product that cannot discern absolute truth. This, of course, provided a convenient explanation for both the ability of reason to overcome the ignorance of religious orthodoxy, and an excuse for its inability to provide entirely consistent and accurate answers.

90. Rossiter W. Raymond, “Evolution of Animal Life,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 140-142. 91. Robert G. Eccles, in Raymond, “Evolution of Animal Life,” 155. 92. Eccles, “Evolution of Mind,” 181-182.

219 So important an element of evolutionism as mind could not easily be given up to those evolutionists who “look upon consciousness as an unnecessary accompaniment of automatons like men and animals.”93 Eccles directed this criticism toward Huxley, specifically, for his article, “Are Animals Automatons?,” in The Popular Science Monthly of October 1874, in which Huxley took an essentially materialist view of thought and mind.94 Strict materialism undermined the theological bearing, such as it was, of Spencer’s evolutionism as people like Eccles saw it. A materialistic interpretation, too, did not sit well with Eccles’s belief that intelligence ultimately led to the emotion of love and to the manifestation of altruism of an ever broadening scope. The final lecture of this category, Edward Drinker Cope’s “The Descent of Man,” contrasted with the other three, because Cope appeared much more like a so-called Social Darwinist than any of the other lecturers. He began by differentiating between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution, much as had other lecturers during the season, and like them he gave great

93. Ibid., 184. 94. T. H. Huxley, “Are Animals Automata?,” The Popular Science Monthly, 5 (October 1874), 724-734. Eccles’s main complaint appears to be the materialism inherent in Huxley’s position, because most of what the Englishman says squares neatly with both Spencer’s ideas and the way in which Eccles uses Spencer’s ideas. It should also be noted that Huxley nowhere in the article writes that mind is “an unnecessary accompaniment of automata.” In fact, he does not address the matter of the evolution of mind in any detail. What he does say is not uncomplimentary to evolution: “But I must say for myself--looking at the matter on the ground of analogy--taking into account that great doctrine of continuity which forbids one to suppose that any natural phenomenon can come into existence suddenly and without some precedent, gradual modification tending toward it--taking that great doctrine into account (and everything we know of science tends to confirm it), and taking into account on the other hand the incontrovertible fact that the lower animals which possess brains at all possess, at any rate, in rudiments a part of the brain, which we have every reason to believe is the organ of consciousness in ourselves, then it seems vastly more probable that the lower animals, although they may not possess that sort of consciousness which we have ourselves, yet have it in a form proportional to the comparative development of the organ of that consciousness, and foreshadow more or less dimly those feelings which we possess ourselves.

220 weight to the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the importance of mind. He also accepted the notion, largely Spencerian, that human ethics and a recognition of individual human rights was the great product of evolution. Unlike them, however, he emphasized the struggle for existence over natural self-stabilization in society and altruistic human cooperation.95 During the discussion that followed Cope’s lecture, Janes stepped in to argue the position normally taken by members of the BEA, and which was close to what Spencer had argued. Janes cited Spencer’s “Essays on the Law of Population,” as evidence that, contrary to what Cope argued, human society would be able to avoid a continuing struggle for existence because population was “self-correcting.” By that he meant that as society developed so did intelligence, and that intelligence would lead to lower birth rates for both physical and rational reasons-- physical because the energy used for thought deducted energy used for procreation. In that self- corrected world, each individual “will have an opportunity of developing every bodily and mental faculty without interfering with the of others.” It was a vision of a sort of Spencerian millennium that appears to have been shared by most active members of the BEA. The contrasting ideas of Janes and his co-conspirators and Cope reveal the complexity of evolutionism as it was being worked out in the late nineteenth century. It is often very difficult to distinguish clearly between Darwinists and Spencerians because different people adopted and adapted evolutionary ideas--ideas that quite often predated Darwin and Spencer or were developed by someone else--in very different ways. There are shadings of ideas, however, that make it possible to organize people into groups that they, themselves, would have recognized. (In the case of the BEA, of course, there is also a membership list that provides a legitimate way to identify at least one group.) Cope’s ideas differed from Janes’s in this shading. Both men accepted the same basic texts and the leading principles of evolution. They differed, however, on the end product of evolution, if one can speak of an end of evolution. Janes remained optimistic and bound to a faith in human progress and the promise of a better future. Cope, on the other hand, saw a somewhat bleaker future in which man’s ethics and material inventions would only postpone the ultimate over-population of the planet and a return to a brutish struggle for existence. If the second law of thermodynamics is the rock on which Spencerism foundered, this division between optimistic and pessimistic outlook was the gale driving the ship aground.

95. Edward D. Cope, “The Descent of Man,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 159-170.

221 Lectures on super-organic evolution in the 1888-1889 season. The lectures on the final division of universal evolution as defined by Spencer were delivered by leading members of the BEA: James A. Skilton, Z. Sidney Sampson, and Lewis G. Janes. Needless to say, there was broad agreement on both the general principles and specific manifestations of universal evolution between these three men. They agreed on the ubiquity of Spencer’s influence, the positive effect of evolutionism on human thought as it broke down old orthodoxies, the promise of a better future through the understanding of nature it provided, the mutual support between the evolution philosophy and the Bible as it was read by liberal Christians influenced by the Arminian tradition, the existence of an evolving social organism, and the centrality of ethics in human society and evolution. In all of these things they adhered closely to Spencer’s works. What is more interesting in their lectures are some of their specific points. Skilton touched on three notable subjects in his summary of the “Evolution of Society:” sexuality and reproduction, the social contract, and free will. He followed Spencer’s argument of the effects of population increase by connecting high rates of reproduction with lower intellectual and ethical development. “Nothing,” Skilton asserted, “could well be more selfish . . . than the original sexual impulse.” Since sex led to families, which created the altruism of parents toward children, which eventually led to altruism toward human beings broadly, however, the sexual impulse was ultimately progressive once put to heel by more evolved intelligence and morality. Were this as far as he went his point would not be all that interesting. He deduces, though, that people who suggested that humanity can be improved by “stock-farm principles” are misguided, because they consider only physical health and disregard the far more important component of the individuals’ character.96 This placed Skilton, and those with like beliefs, in an interesting position in the nascent arguments of the late nineteenth century. It was a position that may have believed some sort of human improvement might be gained through proper marriages, but ethics should be the measure of the people involved rather than simple physical attributes. Skilton’s position on the ideas of social contract and human free will were related. Unlike Spencer, he accepted the existence of a social contract at society’s base, but he saw it as the cause of society’s maladies and as doomed to fall in the evolutionary process. Skilton treated

96. James A. Skilton, “Evolution of Society,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 210-213.

222 contract society as an unstable developmental stage between early kingship and a future state based on mutual altruism and self-restraint. It was on these points, mutual altruism and self- restraint, that he based his belief in the limitation of human will. Like Spencer, he saw human beings constrained by both external and internal factors, with the later being the more powerful, important, and subject to evolutionary forces. Will, in terms of Spencerian evolution, was ultimately bound by feelings of sympathy and the moral sense, which imposed a penalty of mental anguish for acts that infringed on the equal freedom of others.97 As I noted in the discussion of Spencer’s philosophy in chapter two, this internal restraint on the will was essential to evolutionary ethics because it provided a scientific explanation for self-restraint and cast it as a natural necessity. The fact that it squared so neatly with Victorian mores and Christian values seemed merely to reinforce it as a universal truth. These seeming circles of logic may appear to be naïve and hopelessly unscientific, illogical, and obvious to modern readers, but they are central to an understanding of Spencerism positive reception. And to be fair, any past system of belief appears in much the same gloomy light once have shifted in society. Sampson, the once and future president of the BEA, followed Spencer’s works closely as he traced the “Evolution of Theology,” but the most intriguing part of his lecture was its later moments as he discussed the theology of the future toward which evolution was driving. After crediting Hebrews with infusing into monotheism “a profoundly religious and ethical significance, which gave to it its wonderful power of deeply and permanently moulding the future of religious speculation, and transforming previous ideas,” Sampson said that “with the arrival of true monotheism we reach the close of Objective Anthropomorphism” in religion. By “true monotheism,” of course, he meant Unitarianism. Continuing to see his denomination on the cutting of theological evolution, he proclaimed that the future of religion was through pantheism to “the Philosophy of the Absolute.” This progression had been marked, he said, by the steady recognition of “a fundamental Unity” of the universe that can be contained “not even [by] the terms Universal Mind, Soul, or Spirit. It insists that these phrases are but expansions of

97. Skilton, “Evolution of Society,” 214-217.

223 merely human ideas of personal mind, soul or spirit, and still, therefore, imply a limitation which does not allow a free development of a true doctrine of the Infinite.”98 Spencer had stopped short of speculating about the future direction of religion, but many, perhaps most, of the BEA’s members could not separate his ideas from their own Christian faith. To the extent that people like Sampson saw future religion as an uncompromising faith in the unity and beneficence of nature with a more or less purely ethical result, there does not appear to have been any conflict with Spencer’s own ideas. As with so many aspects of the BEA’s use of Spencer’s ideas, here again is an example of the organic relationship that at least sometimes existed between his ideas and those of his followers and fellow travelers. The evolution philosophy did not shatter old forms for these people, instead it was well fitted for the journey that they had already begun early in the century, and even three centuries before. Janes’s lecture on the “Evolution of Ethics” was a nice complement to Sampson’s, and it quickly picked up the thread of ethics left hanging by the Sampson. Early in the lecture, Janes asserted of the evolution philosophy and ethics that, “the new philosophy affirms that man’s primary obligation is to his fellow-man--that duty grows out of the necessities of social communion; that it is founded in the nature of things, instead of in the arbitrary will of an absent deity; that its penalties are not extrinsic but intrinsic--that they are registered immediately on the tablets of character, and their enforcement is dependent upon no speculative belief, whatever may be the theological implications involved in such beliefs.” Here, condensed into a single sentence, was the core principle of Spencerism as seen by most members of the BEA. Janes’s and the BEA’s emphasis on ethics was neither misplaced nor exaggerated. “The evolution philosophy affirms the supremacy of ethics, and makes moral science the culmination of its entire system of thought. ‘My ultimate purpose,’ says Mr. Spencer, in his preface to the Data of Ethics, ‘lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principle of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis.’” 99 An independent reading of Spencer’s works, too, confirms this assessment. Throughout the BEA’s lectures and the various writings and activities of the group’s members in the last decade of the century, Janes is especially

98. Z. Sidney Sampson, “Evolution of Theology,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 244-248. 99. Lewis G. Janes, “Evolution of Morals,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), 258-259.

224 notable for his close adherence to Spencer’s ideas. As such, he provides as good an example of an American Spencerian as one could be hoped for. As a representative Spencerian, it is noteworthy how Janes presented a similar bridge between liberalism and conservatism to that noted in Social Statics. Janes said in his lecture, “stability, order, law, evolutionary tendency--these are the essential elements in morality as in the differentiation and integration of nebulous matter.” Further, evolution induces a “change of conscious motive . . .[and] it also differentiates the sense of moral obligation from those peremptory selfish instincts in which it has its root, thus creating the imperative impulse of Duty.”100 This duty was based on “the individual’s inheritance of the moral experiences and tendencies of all past generations.” Conscience, however, was not “an infallible guide, in the unqualified sense assumed by the transcendental moralist,” so morality involved the use of intellect, particularly before the achievement of perfect morality and the perfect society.101 In this vein, Janes then argued that, “man’s first duty to society is to render himself an independent and self-supporting member thereof, and to qualify himself by the cultivation of his faculties for the intelligent and useful service of mankind. . . . all excesses are to be condemned and avoided-- including excesses of self-renunciation and in altruistic service. Care of the body, the preservation of physical health, thus becomes a moral obligation.”102 (This last comment should not be too surprising coming from the owner of several health clubs in the city.) Looking at Janes’s pronouncements as a whole, it would be hard to categorize him as anything other than a liberal, in my phrasing, an optimistic liberal. But Janes, like Spencer, insisted on the very same ideals underpinning society that Burke highlighted in his critique of the French Revolution. Unlike twentieth century ideological liberalism (e.g. , , and Libertarianism), this form of Spencerism did not offer panaceas or promises of immediate social reform, neither in laissez-faire economics nor anarchism. A deeply held conservatism made most of the members of the BEA alike reject Henry George’s single-tax, Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialism, and laissez-faire economics in the form of absolute free trade. They believed in Victorian self-restraint, Christian self-improvement, and honest business practices, all with an air of Revolutionary Republican Virtue. Just as this straddling of the growing divide

100. Ibid., 265-267. 101. Ibid., 269. 102. Ibid., 272.

225 between conservatism and liberalism left Spencerism to fall between political chairs, so it put the BEA’s members into an untenable political position as the century accelerated to its end. The 1889-1890 Season Where the proceeding season had traced out the grand contours of universal evolution in the inorganic, organic, and super-organic realms of the cosmos, the last season of the 1880s focused on evolution within society. The BEA thus aptly named the season’s theme Sociology. The sixteen lectures of the season included biographies of Asa Gray: and Edward Livingston Youmans, two general lectures on “The Scope and Principles of the Evolution Philosophy” and “The Relativity of Knowledge,” and eight lectures on various aspects of social evolution. The season closed with four lecture addressing “Evolution and Social Reform” in terms of “The Theological Method,” “The Socialistic Method,” “The Anarchistic Method,” and “The .” The lectures, which generally followed the lines of argument laid down the previous season, did not appear to stir much controversy at the meetings, with the exception of Hugh O. Pentecost’s lecture on anarchistic social reform. The discussions are not excerpted in the collected volume, however, and the reports in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle are very brief. At least as interesting as the season’s lectures, were the extracurricular activities of the BEA’s members. From late March through early May 1890, they led the defense of Spencer in a series of letters to the editor of in what may be called the Outsider controversy. At the business meeting of the Association in June of 1890, after the end of the formal lecture series, they hosted a discussion of “The Positive Side of Agnosticism,” which included contributions from local members, other American intellectuals, and from both Spencer and Huxley. The lectures, controversy, and discussion demonstrate the presence of the BEA and its members at the center of the Spencer debates and the evolution discussions of the late nineteenth century. They also further illuminate the various ways in which evolutionism, particularly Spencerian evolution, was being used by his self-proclaimed followers in the US. Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association in the 1889-1890 season The preface to the published lectures of the 1889-1890 season, like its predecessor, began by placing the season’s theme in the context of Spencer’s thought. “Sociology: a new word for a new generation: the name of a new science--the science of social evolution. To August Comte we owe the name, and some pregnant suggestions as to the character of the new science. To Herbert Spencer, more than to any other thinker, we owe the formulation of its laws, and the

226 collection and classification of the facts on which things are based.” As an inexact science, sociology does not offer dogma, a priesthood, or panaceas for social reform. Instead, it demonstrates “the natural trend of societary evolution, and . . . affords wise suggestions for our guidance in practical affairs.” The suggestions it made, according to the preface and most of the lecturers, were conservative in their operation while being liberal in their essence.103 In much the same manner as Spencer had reconciled liberal individualism with Burkean social conservatism, the members of the BEA in this course of lectures straddled the growing intellectual rift between post-Enlightenment utopian social schemes and traditional notions of propriety and social stability. They often came off sounding like the quintessential conservatives attacked by Hofstadter as Social Darwinists. As has been amply shown in this essay, of course, they were not Social Darwinists in any meaningful way. They did resist “panaceas” like Edward Bellamy’s “Nationalism, [Henry George’s] Single-Tax, Socialism, Anarchism, Free-Trade, Protection, Prohibition, and what-not,” because such “a priori schemes of the social reformer can never be made to exactly fit the actual conditions of any given society.” Instead, they insisted, like their predecessors in the Arminian tradition before them, social change had to be preceded by an improvement in the characters, ethics, and morals of the citizenry. The key was education and encouragement of altruistic behavior, “individual enlightenment and moral education,” rather than the overturning of established and functioning systems, no matter how reprehensible those systems may appear from the perspective of the ideal ethics and social forms promised by the evolution philosophy. Rejecting “violent and spasmodic change,” the evolution philosophy promoted “surely if slowly, the permanent welfare of societies and individuals.” 104 They, like Spencer, bridged the widening chasm with an optimistic liberalism that promised the steady and certain improvement of individuals and society, and the melioration of individual and social suffering. Also like Spencer, they looked to organized individual charities,

103. Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), v-vi. This was originally published by James H. West of Boston in 1890, but those editions are now extremely hard to find. The copy of the Arena edition that I used was a microfilm copy of the edition at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library of the Graduate Theological Union and microfilmed as part of the ATLA Monograph Preservation Program. Even that copy was rather poor in several places. 104. Sociology, vi.

227 to the proselytizing of individual moral improvement, and to constant self-improvement. Unlike Spencer, they saw some important roles for the government, beyond protecting property and enforcing contract. For example, they allowed for governmental actions to provide universal education and sanitation. They were active participants in education, charitable organizations like the Brooklyn Guild, and in the civil service reform movement in the last two decades of the century. Their ideas and positions, like their use of the ideas of Spencer and other scientists and social scientists demonstrated the immensely complex way in which Americans were integrating enlightenment ideas of individualism, reason, and universal progress with centuries-old familial, social, and legal traditions, all of which were in a state of flux in a nation changing under the pressure of economic expansion, foreign immigration, and internal urbanization. The season’s lecturers again included leading members of the BEA. Janes, Skilton, Chadwick, Thompson, and Chadwick each delivered a single lecture, and Eccles lectured twice. Two female members of the Association, Miss Caroline B. Le Row and Mrs. Mary Treat, spoke on “Education as a Factor in Civilization” and “Asa Gray: His Life and Work,” respectively. Other speakers included C. Stanlind Wake, Rev. John C. Kimball, Prof. George Gunton, William Potts, Hugh O. Pentecost, and Prof. John Fiske. Since it would be tedious to summarize and analyze each of their lectures, however, I will just briefly highlight a few of the more interesting and instructive ones. Lewis G. Janes, “The Scope and Principles of the Evolution Philosophy.” In his opening lecture of the 1889-1890 season, Janes hit on four important points: Alfred Russell Wallace’s recent attack on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the supposed materialism and agnosticism of the evolution philosophy, the tension between liberalism and conservatism, though he does not use these specific terms, and a refutation of William Graham Sumner’s assertion that the laws of evolution deny the natural existence of civil liberties. The first point demonstrated the tension within evolutionism in the late nineteenth century that Peter Bowler, in particular, has highlighted. Janes’s defense of Spencer against the charge of materialism was an ongoing theme in his broader defense of the English thinker, and one that appears to have met with Spencer’s kind approbation. This second point also proved to be the beginning of a discussion of Agnosticism, which led to a series of lectures and discussion in June of 1890 and an article in The Popular Science Monthly. The final two points helped to demonstrate one of the

228 central theses of my argument here, that Spencer and his fellows were trying to reconcile new ideas with old structures and sympathies. Wallace’s Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with some of its Applications had appeared earlier in 1889, and Janes took it up as the first topic in his lecture on “The Scope and Principles of the Evolution Philosophy.” In the book, Wallace was giving an early push in the movement that eventually created the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis. He went beyond Darwin, even, in denying the importance of sexual selection, which Darwin had highlighted in Descent of Man in 1872. Wallace was particularly pointed in his refutation of the inheritance of acquired characteristics on which Spencer’s philosophy was based and that Darwin had been showing greater willingness to accept in his later books.105 Janes admitted that Wallace’s supported his position “by logical argument from such a wealth of accumulated facts, that it will be extremely difficult for his opponents successfully to combat his views.” However, “his peculiar views on these topics will probably appear more or less reasonable to different persons according to their temperamental tendencies and educational biases.”106 While admitting the weight of Wallace’s argument, Janes’s biases were clearly opposed to those of the co-discoverer of natural selection. Janes’s recognition at all of Wallace’s contrary argument was indicative of both the range of evolution debate at the time and the way in which adherents to any given position viewed contrary arguments. For Spencerians like Janes, it would have been nearly impossible to accept Wallace’s conclusions because they fundamentally undermined the entire structure of the evolution philosophy. Without the possibility of inheriting the improved character of one’s parents, who themselves had struggled to improve themselves through their use of reason, adherence to natural laws, and sharpening of the moral sense, the

105. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), identifies the steps by which the idea we now know as Darwinism evolved between the late nineteenth and middle of the twentieth century. Bowler effectively argues that Wallace’s assertion that natural selection was the most important element of biological evolution and that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was unsupported by science was an important early step in that process. 106. Lewis G. Janes, “The Scope and Principles of the Evolution Philosophy,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 5.

229 millennium promised by Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy could not reasonably be expected to dawn. It would cast human society into chaos without a beneficent guiding hand. Given their background, Janes and Spencer not only refused to believe in Wallace’s vision, they were incapable of believing in it. Their minds were set in a belief in an orderly, progressive, law- bound, predictable, and beneficent universal order. A shift from that liberal tradition to the one embodied by Literary Naturalism and Pragmatism would have been far more shattering than the transformation from supernaturalism through Transcendentalism to naturalism described by Chadwick. It was a reticence and deep intellectual conservatism--a very different type of conservatism from the political conservatism of Burke that I have addressed heretofore--that goes far toward explaining not only the evolution debates of the nineteenth century, but the continued presence, today, of ideas similar to those held by the members of the BEA. The state of mind revealed by Janes, too, does much to shed light on the mental state of people on the edge of the twentieth century. Such a worldview as Janes’s and Spencer’s was simply unprepared to deal with the dramatic changes taking place in the world around them. Unable to change their views so fundamentally as would have been necessary to melt into the new paradigm, people like Janes and Spencer continued to interpret the changing times through the lens of their optimistic liberalism. Only, instead of seeing their beliefs belied, they saw a world of individuals acting contrary to the dictates of natural law of evolution (i.e., the divine plan), and thus ensuring their own downfall. It was this paradigm that gave to the latter writings of Spencerian evolutionist an often jeremiad quality. After discussing Wallace’s recent work, Janes turned to the evolution philosophy called “Cosmic Philosophy” by John Fiske and “Synthetic Philosophy” by Herbert Spencer. The remainder of Janes’s argument reflected the tension between the direction of non-Spencerian evolutionary science and philosophy and the attempt by Janes to maintain a seamless integration of Spencerian philosophy, Christian worldview, and democratic political ideology in an optimistic liberal framework. Janes argued that Spencer’s definition of the Unknowable had been misunderstood by many contemporaries who believed that it led to nihilistic agnosticism and materialism. In this, he was, in part, answering a criticism leveled by Chadwick in the previous

230 season.107 More than this, however, Janes was defending the BEA and Spencerism against a fairly widespread assumption regarding the Synthetic Philosophy. He attempted to give agnosticism a positive meaning by reiterating Spencer’s argument that the “First Cause” and essential unity could not be comprehended in relation to anything, but could only be apprehended by minds that perceived the physical manifestations of that cause and unity. (Janes did not use Plato as an example, but Plato’s analogy of the cave is parallel to what Spencer argued according to Janes.108) That was not to say, either, that all truth was embodied in the material universe, but merely that because all true knowledge is knowledge of material relations, the material universe in its forms and laws of motion should be the focus of science. Such a

107. In “Evolution as Related to Religious Thought,” Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: James H. West, 1889), Chadwick had taken Spencer to task for his use of the Unknowable and had said that, “in so far as the Evolution of Spencer and Haeckel has been convicted of mechanism, it has been, I am persuaded, convicted of a fault.” (329) Janes, in his discussion, disagreed with Chadwick and suggested that there was nothing incompatible between Spencer’s Unknowable and either a religious or an organic view of the universe. Based on Chadwick’s later writings, it appears that Janes eventually convinced him of this. 108. Certainly, Janes did not suggest, like Plato, that there were Forms or that by a process of dialectic human being could know true forms. In a sense the two, Spencerism Unknown and Plato’s Forms, differed in their projection. Plato suggested that the perceived world is but the two-dimensional shadow of real things and that by dialectical reasoning a person could come to know the Forms in something like their three dimensions. Spencer’s Unknown could be apprehended though the physical universe which was forever becoming. Rather than static forms reflected in creation, creation was an ever-becoming reality that became more solid and identifiable as the process of evolution continued. Plato’s reality was back-lighted and cast shadows. Spencer’s reality was nascent and organic, and it grew through a process of organization and differentiation. For a concise and effective treatment of the Platonic tradition as related to thought among the Puritans’ descendants see: Daniel Walker Howe, “The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England,” in Conrad Edick Wright (ed.), American Unitarianism, 1805-1865 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989), 87-119.

231 study did not preclude the contemplation of things beyond the material world, but showed them to be ever tentative and uncertain. On politics, Janes’s lecture presented the ideas that appeared in the preface of the collected volume, and further demonstrated the way in which he and his cohort reconciled liberalism and conservatism. Regarding the evolution philosophy, he said: “It will inculcate justice in place of charity. Instead of accepting poverty, ignorance and wretchedness as ordained of God,--as conditions of life to be accepted with resignation and mitigation in some small degree by alms,--it will endeavor as far as it may be to abolish these conditions, by rendering the poor self-helpful by educating the ignorant, and by removing the cause of disease and vice, thus laying the foundations of a nobler individual manhood, which is the only sure basis for a regenerate society.” This reconciliation of conservatism and liberalism was further illuminated by his statement, the very essence of Burkean conservatism, that “evolution would build on the existing good, rather than seek to lay an entirely new foundation.” 109 All ideas for social reform are welcome, he said, but they must all be tested against the laws of evolution. However, “evolutionists do not claim that society should take no forward step, or that man should simply imitate or repeat the past.”110 This position, of course, begged the question: What, precisely, is to be done? Their response, based on their writings over the years, seemed to be: I will know it when I see it. It is not hard to understand why this position was frustrating for pragmatic politicians and activists who did not share Janes’s faith in an inevitably progressive and beneficent natural order. The contrasting views of Sumner and Janes regarding civil liberties are an example of the differences between evolutionists of different stripes. Sumner published an article on civil liberties in the July 1889 edition of The Popular Science Monthly. In it he took issue with both the notion that civil rights were the product of evolution and that evolution provided any positive guide to human social development. Sumner did not deny the importance and beneficial qualities of civil liberty, but he argued that it was an “a priori dogma . . . among the most favored nations” that had spread throughout the nineteenth century. 111 This assertion that civil liberties were

109. Janes, “Scope of the Evolution Philosophy,” 18-19. 110. Ibid., 23-24. 111. William Graham Sumner, “What is Civil Liberty?,” The Popular Science Monthly, 35 (July 1889), 295.

232 simply imposed by those who took the idea in hand was anathema to the position staked out by Janes and other Spencerians. Sumner’s ideas regarding society did not simply contrast with Janes’s, they conflicted in much the same way as had Wallace’s ideas regarding biology. If true, Sumner’s argument would undermine the entire plan--or lack thereof--for social improvement put forward by the BEA’s members. It is worth noting, too, that Sumner’s ideas stand in stark contrast to Spencer’s, which Janes aptly portrayed, because it is further evidence of the mistake made by Hofstadter in connecting Sumner and Spencer too closely. Prof. John Fiske, “Edward Livingston Youmans: The Man and His Work.” Fiske’s lecture before the BEA is not remarkable, today, for its content but for what it demonstrated about the Spencerian community in America. The text of Fiske’s lecture, as it turned out, was a sketch of the biography he would publish four years later. His presence, along with Eliza and Kitty Youmans, however, reinforced the fact that the Spencerian community in America was a community of individuals who shared personal as well as intellectual affiliations. Fiske had first run across Spencer’s writings as a student at Harvard in 1860. “On my first visit to Massachusetts,” he wrote in his biography of Youmans, “in May, 1860, I fell upon a copy of . . . [the] prospectus of Spencer’s Series, in the Old Corner Bookstore, in Boston, and read it with exulting delight, for clearly there was to be such an organization of scientific doctrine as the world was waiting for.”112 He talked Spencer with his friends at Harvard in the early 1860s at the same time that Chadwick was being exposed to the English philosopher as a student at the Divinity School there. Spencer’s writings inspired his own work, and in 1863 Fiske published an article on the “Evolution of Language” in the North American Review. In November 1863, as Youmans was making his rounds in New England drumming up support for Spencer, he met Fiske in his college dorm room and struck up a life-long friendship. The meeting also inspired Fiske to write to Spencer, and thus begin his own friendship with the Englishman.113 Upon his death in 1887, Youmans requested in his will that Fiske write his biography and directed that his papers be given to his siblings, Eliza and William, who would make them available to Fiske. Fiske was in the early stages of writing the biography when he gave his presentation to the BEA on March 23, 1890.

112. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People. A Sketch of His Life (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1894), 167. 113. Ibid., 164.

233 Fiske’s lecture was the fourth one he had given that day, and he might not have made the engagement at all had Eliza Youmans not sent “a handsome carriage with a pair of lively well- groomed steeds to my door” at 63 Irving Place in New York City. He rushed across the still-new Brooklyn Bridge, and arrived at “a very large church which was simply packed.” The podium had been prepared with a large portrait of Youmans, and the audience included the late editor’s sister Eliza and wife Kitty. The lecture went well, and he was heartily complimented by Chadwick for his works on the “Destiny of Man” and the “Idea of God,” which Chadwick declared, “had more concentrated wisdom in them than any other man had uttered in this country.”114 Chadwick also added that he knew Youmans as a free-trader through their mutual friend, and Chadwick’s parishioner, Richard H. Manning, at whose house Youmans had first seen Spencer’s prospectus.115 Hugh O. Pentecost, “Evolution and Social Reform III. The Anarchistic Method.” The last four lectures of the season, beginning at the meeting following Fiske’s lecture, considered the question of evolution and social reform in terms of religious, socialistic, anarchistic, and scientific methods.116 Chadwick’s lecture on “The Religious Method” presented the familiar argument that old religions had impeded social progress, but that the newer liberal religions offered hope because they took evolution and the science of society into account.117 William Potts made no effort to defend the socialistic method in his lecture, but rather used his time to demonstrate that socialism, like all other panaceas was doomed to failure. He called out for special attack the recently published Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy,

114. John Fiske to Abby Fiske, March 23, 1890, in Ethel F. Fisk, The Letters of John Fiske (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 573-574. 115. John W. Chadwick’s discussion, in John Fiske, “Edward Livingston Youmans: The Man and His Work,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 389. Incidentally, only this lecture and the one on Asa Gray include excerpts of the discussion for the 1889-1890 season. 116. The four lectures appeared before the biographies of Gray and Youmans in the published volumes but, in fact, were delivered after them. 117. John W. Chadwick, “Evolution and Social Reform I. The Religious Method,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 255-274.

234 which he connected to other failed utopian schemes like those of “Brook Farm and the Fourierite Phalansteries, to the Socialist State of Lassalle, , and the International.”118 Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, who presented the scientific method, reiterated the position made over and over again by the BEA’s members that social reform had to follow the direction of evolution, be patient in its bearing, and seek always to perfect the individual.119 Pentecost’s lecture, then, was the only dissenting voice among the final four lectures. At a time when anarchists were better known for wielding knives, shooting pistols, and throwing bombs than for thinking and philosophizing, Pentecost tried to redefine the term in a much more genteel manner that is somewhat like our current idea of libertarianism. He said: Anarchists believe there should be no government: by which they mean no government by physical force; no government to prevent persons from thinking, saying or doing what they should be free to think, say or do; no government for the encouragement of those who invade what should be the rights of others, with the protection of such invaders; no government to authorize a few to monopolize what should be opportunities for all; no government to compel persons to do what they should be free to refuse to do, what it is not necessary for the good of all that they should do; no government in favor of one class as against another class; no government to enrich the idle by impoverishing the industrious. They believe that there should be no government that interferes with wholesome individual liberty and wealth-producing exertion.120 He even suggested that “rent-takers,” “interest takers,” and “profit-takers” were “social parasites,” though he admitted that some such activity was inevitable, if limited in scope. It is

118. William Potts, “Evolution and Social Reform II. The Socialistic Method,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 275-300, 279. 119. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, “Evolution and Social Reform IV. The Scientific Method,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 319-336. 120. Hugh O. Pentecost, “Evolution and Social Reform III. The Anarchistic Method,” Sociology: Popular Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893), 303.

235 this socialistic, or at least anti-capitalistic, coloring that distinguishes Pentecost’s position from modern libertarianism.121 (It appears that when people at the BEA spoke disparagingly of laissez faire, it was this sort of anarchism that they had in mind.) Pentecost, like his audience, however, counted on the good behavior of citizens to maintain social stability and functioning in the absence of such government control. The difference was that Pentecost thought that such a social form was ripe for his own time. Though Pentecost’s position appears to be similar to that of Spencer--his suggested reading list was even headed by Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, Social Statics, and “The Man versus the State”--the members of the BEA took strong exception to his position. “John A. Taylor . . . tried to say a good word for the landlord and the money lender, but was only just beginning to warm up when his ten minutes ended.” Several other members, too, took issue with his position.122 This appears often to be a point of confusion in regard to Spencer’s ideas and those of his followers and fellows. Though the ultimate direction of evolution pointed to the sort of utopian anarchistic state envisioned by Pentecost, Spencerians generally did not anticipate the millennial dawn in the very near future. How could it be near at hand when it depended upon the perfection of individual character through the slow process of self-perfection and inheritance of parental character, which was so clearly lacking in many citizens? Spencerians did themselves no favors by being unclear and unspecific about their hypothesized time-frames, but the reactions of the Association’s members demonstrated that they suspected the millennium still to be well off in the future, however much they might hope for its arrival. The Outsider Controversy, March 23 to May 4, 1890. On the same day that Fiske presented his lecture to the BEA, the New York Times published a letter to the editor from “Outsider,” who questioned the validity and standing of Spencer’s philosophy.123 The Times

121. Ibid., 308. 122. “Anarchism Without Physical Force. Hugh O. Pentecost Preaches It to the Ethical Association,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 12, 1890, 1. 123. In my research I found no clue as to the identity of “Outsider.” Over tasty Belgian ales in Monk’s Café, in Philadelphia, however, I was given light. According to Donald Bellomy, the leading biographer of William Graham Sumner, author of “’Social Darwinism’: Revisited,” and a damned fine drinking companion and conversationalist, “Outsider” is none other than Charles Saunders Peirce. Bellomy found references to the controversy in his own researches

236 editors appeared happily to have seized the opportunity to encourage a controversy that might boost readership while illuminating an important body of contemporary thought. The column on page four announcing Outsider’s challenge was titled, “Herbert Spencer Attacked,” and began, “Is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer permanent or perishable? Has he constructed a working theory of the universe or only a patchwork of speculation, unsound in its parts and unstable as a whole?” The editors noted that, Outsider was “himself eminent for his attainments in science and might speak with some authority upon the questions he raises.” “For our part,” they continued, “we should like to see ‘Outsider’s’ position thoroughly discussed, to see the pretensions of the synthetic philosophy examined by friend and foe, and to find out which way opinion about Spencer is drifting among the high priests and the laity of scientific and theological thought.” 124 Over the succeeding five Sundays, they would get their answer, and it showed that as of mid- 1890, Spencer was still generally held in high regard. The opponents of Spencerism in the controversy, however, were presenting the very criticisms that would eventually prove fatal to his philosophy. Outsider leveled his challenge by writing, “Herbert Spencer’s philosophy has been before the public now for some thirty years; it seems time that some one should tell the truth about it, and inform the public what value has been accorded to it by men competent to judge it.” Outsider questioned Spencer’s methods of reasoning in the sciences, his suggestion that truth may be deduced from “mere opinion,” the logical construction of his system, the validity of the Unknowable as a foundation for either science or religion, and he suggested that Spencer “is one of those who build Babel systems to scale the heights of knowledge.” He further asked for

regarding Sumner, and I have no reason to doubt their accuracy. As such, it makes the discussions in the Times important, indeed, because they clearly portray the state of the Spencer debates as they stood in 1890. If Bellomy if further correct in his guess that KAPPA, who appears later in this section, is Fiske, then the tête-à-tête on the editorial page of the Sunday paper is all the more interesting. In neither instance can I claim any inkling of the identities of these two participants prior to that discussion in Philadelphia, and all credit for it must go to Bellomy. In fact, I am very much looking forward to his treatment of the letters in his own works. 124. “Herbert Spencer Attacked,” New York Times, March 23, 1890, 4.

237 evidence that Spencer’s theory had successfully predicted scientific discoveries, since “the recognizable touch-stone of a is successful prediction.”125 On the following Sunday, the Times editors announced that Outsider’s letter “has caused an extraordinary awakening among the students of Evolution and cognate theories as set forth by Mr. Spencer’s works.”126 A total of twenty letters appeared in the paper’s pages. Outsider contributed three, including his opening challenge, a mid-point defense and clarification, and a final letter thanking the editors for their indulgence and those who had participated in the discussion. Other contributors who openly signed their names included Lewis Janes, William Youmans, a handful of local professors, and a couple others. About half of the contributions came from people who signed with initials or, in the one case, with the pseudonym, KAPPA. Of the responses twelve were positive, two negative, one somewhere between ambivalent and supportive of Spencer, one attacking KAPPA, and one from a crank. Spencer’s strongest support came from KAPPA, Youmans, Janes, H. J. Messenger, Jr. of , Edgar R. Dawson of Baltimore, R. G. E. (almost certainly Robert G. Eccles), and W. H. B. (probably William H. Boughton). Spencer’s defenders included some of his strongest supporters at the time. Youmans, of course, was the brother of Edward Youmans, who had continued to defend and promote Spencer in the pages of The Popular Science Monthly, though with less verve than his older sibling. Janes, Messenger, Eccles, and Boughton were all members of the BEA. These writers differed in their responses to Outsider and reflected the rather wide range of ways in which Americans adapted Spencer’s ideas. Among the contributions, those from KAPPA, Janes, and Youmans are the most coherent, consistent, and polite. “KAPPA” defended Spencer as a scientist and the Synthetic Philosophy as a theory. He predicated his argument with the assertion “that there are two kinds of scientists--the specialist, and the generalizer, or philosopher,” and that as a philosopher, Spencer had created “a

125. “Outsider,” “Herbert Spencer’s Philosophy. Is It Unscientific and Unsound? Its Pretensions Attacked and a Demonstration Called For,” New York Times, March 23, 1890, 4. 126. “Spencer Ably Defended. The Philosopher’s Friends Accept ‘Outsider’s’ Challenge. The Synthetic Philosophy a Sound and Workable System--What Herbert Spencer Does, and What He Does Not, Claim to Be--the Knowable and the Unknowable,” New York Times, March 30, 1890, 13.

238 generalized theory of the universe, built up on recognized facts in each branch of human knowledge and deductions from those facts.” He had to explain what Spencer meant by the Unknowable and to defend the philosopher’s ideas regarding science and religion. KAPPA said, “the long-standing dispute of the ages between science and religion has not been a dispute as to the ‘nature of things in themselves,’ but rather a dispute as to whether certain special phenomena were the result of direct supernatural causes, or natural antecedents.” He argued that Spencer had set to rest any question regarding the nature of knowledge by resolving “the long-standing dispute between Kant and Locke and their respective followers, as to the nature of knowledge, whether partly intuitive or wholly derived from experience . . . by the conception of the inherited effects of the experience of ancestors, producing a body of organized experience in the individual, which Kant mistook for intuitive knowledge.” KAPPA then challenged Outsider to present “a more accurate conception of evolution than that of Mr. Spencer.”127 Kappa’s response revealed several of the intellectual trends discussed thus far as common to the optimistic liberal tradition and the assumptions on which they were based. Science, according to KAPPA, was the pursuit of truth through the physical world in the broadest sense, so it included generalizations based on the facts produced by each scientific discipline. This definition of science drifted somewhere between classical philosophical traditions, like those of the ancient Greeks and the medieval theologians, and modern experimental science; it still held universal truth to be the ultimate and achievable goal of science. Kappa’s definition of the conflict between science and religion fit in this same middle ground between old and new ways of thinking, because it rejected the existence of ideal types and the notion of supernatural intervention in favor of a law-bound and predictable universe still imbued with an essential order and goodness. Finally, his belief that knowledge was a product of race and individual experiences, as discussed in chapter four, was necessary for the progressive evolution of ethics, which lay at the very heart of the Spencerian philosophy. Janes’s letter appeared on the penultimate Sunday of the controversy and stood with KAPPA’s as the strongest and best defenses of Spencerism. He began: “It is the misfortune of the critics of the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer that, almost without exception, they

127. KAPPA, “Flaws in ‘Outsider’s’ Reasoning. His Attention Called to the Fixed Line Between the Knowable and the Unknowable--Experience and ‘Intuition,’” New York Times, March 30, 1890, 13.

239 demonstrate to careful students of that philosophy the superficial character of their acquaintance with its principles. . . . it is of little wonder that the ordinary mind, even of the cultivated and studious man, is unable to grasp the wonderful synthesis of materials which the great philosopher has wrought into a harmonious and perfect system of thought.” As a result, Janes continued, Outsider had not rightly judged “their unity, sufficiency, and logical validity as parts of a consistent system.”128 As was the case in KAPPA’s letter, Janes assumed the relationship between truth and universal law and order. Outsider and Janes viewed things from different sides of the growing divide within liberalism. Outsider stood on the pragmatic side, and Janes stood on the optimistic side. Outsider could not believe in a comprehensive system that purported to bind all thought and material reality under a single universal law that was built more upon speculation and, as it seemed, wishful thinking than upon hard facts of observation and experimentation. Janes, on the other hand, could not accept a world without meaning, progress, and beneficent order. What separated the two men was not Spencer or their views regarding him or his philosophy. They were separated by traditions within liberalism that had coexisted since the earliest days of the Enlightenment--perhaps even stretching back to archetypal human conceptions of the world--and had only begun to separate as liberalism ascended over conservatism in the nineteenth century. On four points, in particular, Janes offered to help clarify things for Outsider: 1) Spencer’s method of reasoning as related to comparing and contrasting opinions, 2) on the supposedly mechanical nature of Spencerian evolution, 3) on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and 4) Spencer’s successful predictions. On the first point, Janes defended Spencer by pointing out that, “if we carefully examine the first four sections of ‘First Principles’ we shall see that Mr. Spencer makes no claim that the methods therein laid down amounts to a demonstration of absolute certainty. He merely affirms that the comparison of various beliefs . . . will enable one to arrive at a probable hypothesis.” So far as the explanation went, it did not conflict with the first steps in scientific investigation. However, and I think this is what Outsider was getting at, it could easily become nothing more than a method that justified a priori assumptions, which was precisely what Spencer did in much of his Synthetic Philosophy. For

128. Lewis G. Janes, “The Grandeur of Spencer’s System. Not Mechanical but Vital--A Great Prediction Verified--Spencer’s Own View of the Limits and Results of His Work,” New York Times, April 27, 1890, 13.

240 Janes, on the other hand, this method fit comfortably with the idea of progressive universal development, the intimate and necessary connection between the human mind and nature as a result of evolution, and a kind of transcendental perception of truth. On the third point, Janes simply denied that people like Wiesmann and Wallace were right to reject the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In support of his fourth point regarding Spencer’s scientific predictions, Janes cited only Spencer’s use of the nebular hypothesis, “at a time when this hypothesis had fallen into disrepute,” which, all things considered, was not a very strong argument. The second point regarding Spencer’s supposed materialism, however, was the most important, because it was closest to Janes’s heart. He denied that Spencer’s conception of evolution was purely mechanical, as Outsider had suggested, which Janes took to mean purely materialistic. Instead, “what Mr. Spencer has really done . . . is to unite vital and mechanical principles in a deeper synthesis which includes and harmonizes both.” In this Janes was defining the term mechanical, as had R. G. E. the week before, as “‘merely the equivalence of law and order’ as opposed to chance, , and miracle.” Janes seemed to believe that Outsider was an orthodox religionist, and so he cast his argument in religious terms. Janes recognized that the existence of mechanical relations--that is to say, “definite and ascertainable relations . . . with predictable results in actions”--might imply the “negation of intelligence and vitality” in the universe to an untrained mind. “To the scientific mind, on the contrary, they imply the highest intelligence and the manifestation of growth force under the most perfect possible conditions.”129 Janes appeared to have misunderstood Outsider’s argument. Outsider’s complaint was that Spencer’s philosophy did not leave room for chance and evolution in the neo-Darwinian and pragmatic sense. Indeed, in his second letter, Outsider said “that my dissatisfaction with Spencer is not that he is an evolutionist, but that he is not evolutionist enough. He subordinates life to force.”130 Janes was doing battle with orthodox Christianity. Outsider was engaged with the mechanical science of the early modern period. In many ways, they were speaking different languages, and neither perfectly understood his opponent. The contrast is telling because Outsider’s voice was the voice of modernity and the rising strain of Pragmatic liberalism. Janes

129. Ibid. 130. “Outsider,” “‘Outsider’ Wants More Light. He cometh After His Critics and Searcheth Them--Spencer’s Standing in Science--His Theory of Evolution--‘Outsider’ is an Inquirer, Not an Assailant,” New York Times, April 13, 1890, 13.

241 spoke for the optimistic liberal tradition and its affiliated Arminian Christianity. To a modern reader, Outsider’s arguments were the stronger ones, but to their contemporaries, Janes’s position continued to hold the field, as was evident in Youmans’s letter. William J. Youmans supported Spencer, but he was not the avid disciple his older brother had been, and under his editorship after Edward’s death, The Popular Science Monthly made space for Pragmatists like Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and neo-Darwinists like Weismann and Wallace. Youmans confined his rather lengthy letter to answering the first question posed by Outsider in his initial letter to the Times: In what regard are Spencer’s ideas held by specialists in the various scientific disciplines? “It is amusing,” wrote Youmans, “to see the self-confidence with which ‘Outsider’ asks ‘whether the pretensions of Mr. Spencer are acknowledged to be well founded,’ the tacit assumption being that they are not so acknowledged.” Youmans then presented a list of noted scientists and thinkers and their praises of Spencer including: G. H. Lewes, Prof. St. George Mivart, Prof. David Masson, Dr. James McCosh, John Stuart Mill, Prof. Stanley Jevons of Owens College, Carveth Read, Dr. Hirst of the Mathematical Society of London, Mr. Proctor, M. Fave--a French astronomer, Prof. Ray Lankester, Dr. Joseph Hooker, Prof. Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin, Dr. Hughlings Jackson, Pitfield Mitchell, Dr. Campbell, Dr. W. J. Collins, Dr. J. D. Morell, M. Ribot, Prof. John Tyndall, , Leslie Stephen, Mr. E. B. Taylor, and “Draper, Bryant, Evarts, Beecher, Chapin, Ripley, and five heads of colleges and universities” who agreed “that the carrying out of this undertaking [the Principles of Sociology] ‘will constitute an epoch in the science of .’” Youmans then pointed out that Spencer’s books had been translated into Russian, Italian, German, and French, despite the fact that such philosophical works could never have broad popular appeal. Finally, Youmans noted, Spencer did not have numerous titles and honors because he habitually refused to accept them. Among his honors, some accepted but most refused, were a fellowship in the Royal Society, memberships in the Royal Academy of Rome, the Royal Academy of Turin, the Royal Society of Naples, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy, and the degree of Doctor from the University of Bologna. Youmans concluded: Being in possession of the particulars called for, to withhold them would be apparently to admit the truth of “Outsider’s insinuations. As the facts are diametrically opposed to what he tacitly affirms, it has appeared imperative, in

242 justice to Mr. Spencer and to prevent the diffusion of wholly erroneous beliefs, to set the facts forth. “Outsider” said he would like to be told what the facts are, and now he has been told. Whether he “likes” the information may reasonably be doubted. His obvious purpose was to discredit Mr. Spencer’s teachings and to shame his American friends. Unhappily for him he has succeeded in doing the reverse.131 For the time being, at least, it appeared that Spencer’s rank among scientists and philosophers was still sound. The following week, Outsider thanked “Dr. Youmans for having demonstrated, as he clearly has, the profound respect in which Mr. Herbert Spencer is held by men of science the world over . . . This, without of course sufficing to put his philosophy beyond doubt, does satisfactorily answer the question to which I gave special prominence.”132 Looking back at the events of that spring, Skilton claimed victory for the BEA in its defense of Spencer when they “silenced the attack of his enemies by those articles in the Times.”133 Certainly, members of the BEA represented a strong portion of Spencer’s defenders in the ensuing exchange, and Spencer evidently thought well of the defense they mounted. On May 12, 1890, Spencer wrote a letter to Janes that shows that he was well aware of the BEA, was keeping up with their activities, and, particularly in the case of Janes, that they were accurately representing his views in their activities and pronouncements. The letter expressed Spencer’s satisfaction “with the outcome of the controversy in the New York Times.” More than this, however, Spencer conceded to Janes that, “your statement of the case is, I think, quite as satisfactory as limited space could make possible. In the paragraph numbered 2, more especially, you have stated quite clearly the Agnostic view as distinguished from the materialistic view and truly insisted upon the fact that a spiritualistic interpretation might just as reasonably be given to the symbols in which we interpret phenomena as a materialistic one.”134 The letter revealed an

131. W. J. Youmans, “Mr. Spencer’s Rank as a Philosopher. A Formidable Array of Evidence in His Support--Metaphysicians, Biologists, Mathematicians, Physicians, and Learned Societies in Many Lands Pay Him Honor,” New York Times, April 27, 1890, 13. 132. “Outsider,” “‘Outsider’s’ Thanks,” New York Times, May 4, 1890, 4. 133. James A. Skilton, “The Physical Basis of Ethics, Sociology and Religion. Opening Discussion by James A. Skilton, October 28, 1893,” 2, Skilton Family Papers. 134. Herbert Spencer to Lewis G. Janes, May 12, 1890, Janes Mss., Lilly Library.

243 important correspondence between Spencer’s and Janes’s thoughts on science and religion, which went beyond a simple master-disciple relationship. Both men identified science the same way and did not understand the fundamentally different way in which Outsider saw it. They also shared a similar view of religion, which Spencer called agnostic, which was the product of the continued liberalization of the Arminian tradition in the nineteenth century. By the end of the 1889-1890 season, then, the BEA was clearly in the middle of the Spencer debates in America. They had taken up the mantle of Spencerism in their lectures and in the broader intellectual community. They were corresponding with Spencer, himself, and other members of the trans-Atlantic intellectual community. They connected that intellectual community through their position in Brooklyn society and the Unitarian community to a broadly popular audience through their lectures and publications. In this position, they were playing an important role in the diffusion and definition of Spencerism in America. The 1890-1891 Season Having in the two previous seasons addressed the broad scope of evolution and its application in the field of sociology, the members of the BEA turned to the influence of evolution on the fields of science, philosophy, and art. There were seven lectures on science, including a biography of by Professor Edward D. Cope, which bears the greatest relevance to my work here. The five lectures on art, touching on architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and art broadly conceived, are interesting but beyond the scope of this work. Of far greater relevance are two of the five lectures discussing the place of evolution in philosophy given by BEA corresponding members, Benjamin F. Underwood and John Fiske. Janes’s contribution to the season does not directly address Spencer or his philosophy, but it is as concise a rendering of the optimistic liberal tradition’s use of Spencerian evolution as one could hope to find. The lectures present little that had not been seen in the previous seasons, but they reinforced the BEA’s position regarding the direction, mechanism, and lessons of evolution, the place of Spencer as a thinker, and the fact that Spencer was not a materialist. It was also in the midst of this season that the Brooklyn Ethical Association formally incorporated itself as a “benevolent, charitable, scientific and missionary” society.135

135. The Brooklyn Ethical Association, Certificate of Incorporation, February 5, 1891, Skilton Family Papers.

244 Edward D. Cope, “Alfred Russel Wallace, L.L.D.” Cope’s lecture is notable for the way in which he defined the evolution debates. Cope began with a brief professional biography of Wallace, then briefly turned to Wallace’s quirks as a devoted spiritualist and a borderline Swedenborgian before criticizing his position on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Cope identified Wallace as a “Neodarwinian” because he went beyond Darwin in his belief that natural selection was the sole process by which evolution in the organic world occurred. Cope then tied the Neodarwinians to “Postdarwinians” like Weismann, to whose works he gave only brief and uncomplimentary mention. Opposed to them and on the right side of science stood the Neolamarckians like himself and Spencer. He argued that both the Neodarwinians and the Postdarwinians were in error because they could offer no mechanism by which the variations on which natural selection acted came about. He also noted that both groups, keeping his focus primarily on Wallace and the Neodarwinians, were forced in one way or another to resort to some influence of the environment on the creation of variations--in the case of Wallace, he hinted that the inconsistency may have been part and parcel of Wallace’s faith in spiritism. The inability of the Neodarwinians and Postdarwinians to explain the cause of variation left them open to attacks like those of Cope.136 Cope concluded his essay with a table comparing the doctrines of the Neolamarckians and the Neodarwinians that is as concise and accurate today as it was in 1891.137 For the members of the BEA it appeared to present the Neolamarckian side as the stronger. Equally strong is the impression it makes on modern post-Darwinian-synthesis readers that the Neodarwinians were the ones on the right track. Benjamin F. Underwood, “Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy.” Underwood, a leading Spencerian of the Midwest, provided a concise and lucid summary of Spencer’s synthetic philosophy. He placed it in relation to the philosophies of Locke and Kant. He began by noting that, “the movement imparted to philosophy by the application of the ‘Newtonian method’ to

136. Histories of evolutionism since the nineteenth century, too, recognize this weakness, and much of their narrative is devoted to explaining the process by which science discovered the cause of variations in genes and then the actual process of mutation in DNA. 137. Edward D. Cope, “Alfred Russel Wallace, L.L.D.,” Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1891), 1-20.

245 philosophical problems gave rise to that form of sensationalism which originated with Locke and culminated with Hume. . . . Before this movement was started philosophical tenets were principally deduced from ‘innate ideas.’”138 In reaction to Hume’s suggestions, “Kant’s life-long and most earnest endeavor was to extricate philosophy from these God and soul eliminating implications of sensorial experientialism,” which he accomplished though transcendental idealism.139 Kant accomplished this by suggesting that human beings were born with a priori “forms of thought” that conditioned the way in which they perceived the universe through their senses. According to Underwood, “it remained for Herbert Spencer to apply the principle of evolution to mind and to show that Kant’s ‘forms of thought,’ although a priori in the individual, are experiential in the race--in other words, were acquired in the evolutionary process.”140 Underwood did not connect Spencer’s reconciliation of Lockean and Kantian philosophy to the wide acceptance of Spencer’s ideas in America and the world. It seems likely, however, that the reconciliation was part of the philosophy’s appeal in two ways. First, it offered its adherents in the BEA a way to reconcile their own views on experience and their inheritance from Transcendentalism. Having rejected an interventionist God and old-fashioned divine revelation, they could not accept either Kant’s intellectual forms or Emerson’s romantic notion of the transparent and all-seeing soul. Likewise, their deep faith in a beneficent order, omnipresent God, and progressive universe would not allow them to accept the directionless and soulless universe suggested by a belief that knowledge was nothing more than the random accumulation of sensory input by disconnected individual human beings. Second, it was further evidence that Spencer’s philosophy was not simply a restatement of the materialism of a Deistic universe. Instead of a watchmaker and a watch, evolution showed that the world was a growing and progressing thing in which human free will and reason had a natural place and in which they played an essential role in the perfection of human individuals and society. John Fiske, “The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Scope and Principles.” Fiske’s talk on the doctrine of evolution gave evolutionism credit for changing the way the people looked at history

138. Benjamin F. Underwood, “Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy,” Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1891), 85. 139. Ibid., 88. 140. Ibid., 91.

246 and argued that a close study of evolution made clear the presence and power of God in the world. Science, which was particularly influenced by the evolutionary synthesis, gave people a framework in which to study history that helped them avoid the mistake of treating history as “an indiscriminate catalogue in which important and trivial events are jumbled together in utter obliviousness of any such thing as historical perspective.” It helped to y avoid looking at history “from a statical point of view, or as if a picture of the world were a series of detached pictures of things at rest.”141 Fiske’s best known book was The Cosmic Philosophy, which was devoted to showing the religious implications of Spencer’s evolutionism. He closed his lecture before the BEA by summarizing the argument he made there. Fiske, in much the same way that Janes and Spencer had done in the Outsider controversy, equated materialism to atheism. Fiske said that, “to a materialist the ultimate power is mechanical force, and psychical life is nothing but the temporary and local result of fleeting collocations of material elements in the shape of nervous systems.” According to Fiske, however, this was a misinterpretation of the correlation and conservation of forces, which properly understood related only to activities in the nerves not to thought, itself. Psychical, as opposed to nervous, activities were conditioned by the development of mind and intellect as a result of evolution. Spencer and his fellows did not accept that mind was simply the product of physical forces, but that it was a higher product of universal evolution in itself. This separated Spencerian evolution from materialism and made space for God in the world and an afterlife for the soul.142 As Fiske put it at the end of his lecture:

141. John Fiske, “The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Scope and Principles,” Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1891), 435-436. Fiske called on historians to study the history of all humanity, particularly the process of human progress, rather than the deeds of just political and military leaders. History in recent decades has clearly been influenced by work in Sociology and Anthropology. Since both of those fields, especially in their formative years, were influenced by evolutionism generally and Spencerism specifically, I believe that a study of the relationship between Spencerism, evolutionism, and the course of our study of history would make for an interesting study. 142. Evidence that Janes, too, separated mind and thought from the strictly physical functioning of the brain may be found in a letter from William James responding to questions

247 The doctrine of evolution . . . brings before us with vividness the conception of an ever-present-God--not as an absentee God who once manufactured a cosmic machine capable of running itself except for a little jog or poke here and there in the shape of a special providence. The doctrine of evolution destroys the conception of the world as a machine. It makes God our constant refuge and support, and Nature his true revelation; and when all its religious implications shall have been set forth, it will be seen to be the most potent ally that Christianity has ever had in elevating mankind.143 As in the Outsider controversy, it was clear that Spencerians like Fiske and Janes had a definite notion of who their opponents were and what materialism was. They equated it with atheism and with the deistic mechanical theories of the early eighteenth century; ideas they rejected even as they incorporated more of them they would admit--it was with this aspect of Spencerian thought that Outsider had taken particular issue when he suggested that Spencer and his fellows were “not evolutionist enough.” Lewis G. Janes, “Life as a Fine Art.” Late in the season, on May 24, 1891, Janes delivered a lecture to the BEA that neatly summarized the view of life in relation to evolution shared by his fellow Spencerians in the BEA, and one may suspect, of the class of optimistic liberals broadly. It certainly echoed much that Spencer had written both in the Synthetic Philosophy and in his earlier works. It also clearly bound together Spencerian ethics and evolution and Emersonian Transcendentalism. In fact, the suggested readings included Spencer’s Education, Data of Ethics and Justice (two early installments of the Principles of Ethics that Spencer had published in the 1870s from fear that he might not live to finish these most important sections of the Synthetic Philosophy), and Emerson’s Nature and Essays. Janes opened his lecture by stating that, “the object of life is life itself--fullness of life, the free, temperate, and harmonious exercise of every natural faculty in the service of the Good,

posed by Janes, whose letter I do not have. James said that “Empirically everything points to brain activities being conditions of our thoughts. . . . Everything points to some sort of Idealism. But the question of unmortality doesn’t seem to me soluble either by science or philosophy, it is a teleological hope, which if the world have a teleological constitution, may have prophetic value.” William James to Lewis G. Janes, February 15, 1891, Janes Mss., Lilly Library. 143. Fiske, “The Doctrine of Evolution,” 460.

248 the True, and the Beautiful.” In line with his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and reflecting the Arminian emphasis on the perfection of human character and thus human society, “this rule, made universal should be the ideal end toward which all human activities are directed--the criterion of choice in our vocations, the mentor of our bodily appetites, the educator of conscience, the final test of the morality of actions.” The change must begin with the individual because, “what the world is for us depends upon what we are ourselves. Life is never stale, flat, and unprofitable, save as it reflects the dullness of our own torpor and our neglected opportunities.” Further: “Life is, indeed, for each individual largely what he chooses to make of it. Granting the limitations of environment, of inheritance, of finite imperfection, it is within the power of each of us to find in these very limitations the spur to noble endeavor, the promise of progressive attainment, the hope for that which at the instant is far beyond the reach of our finite powers. . . . We should always remember, with Mr. Spencer, that ‘that which the best human nature is capable of is within the reach of human nature at large.’”144 There, in his opening statements, Janes showed his Victorian conception of the good life, his faith in the ability of humanity to transcend mundane life through self-improvement, and the connection between individual morality and human ethics found in Spencer’s philosophy. Janes identified three major stages in the progressive development of the human regard of life: “the empirical, the scientific or legal, and the artistic or philosophical.”145 These stages paralleled the stages of human evolution presented by Spencer, but also generally held to be true even before Spencer’s time when the still dominated proto-anthropological thought. The characteristics of human beings at each of these stages also reflected the deep- seeded racism that Anglo-Americans inherited from their pre-nineteenth-century ancestors and refashioned into the evolutionary racism of the late nineteenth century. It is important to note, however, that in its evolutionary form, this age-old racism was not static and evolutionists of the Spencerian stripe held out hope that racial inheritance was only a temporary disability that could and must be overcome in time.

144. Lewis G. Janes, “Life as a Fine Art,” Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1891), 407-408. 145. Ibid., 408.

249 The empirical stage was that of “primitive man, using the term inclusively, as a descriptive of a degree of culture rather than of an era of time . . . [for] primitive man is naturally imitative, lacking in originality and individuality of character, impersonal, empirical.” Primitive man did not think much of the future, but lived an immediate life of survival hemmed in on all sides by his lack of intelligence and corresponding lack of imagination and understanding. His view of life, according to Janes, was “piecemeal. His sense of causal correlation of events was undeveloped by experience. He had little comprehension of the relations between phenomena, and no conception of an underlying or indwelling unity.” As a result, “his morals, like his conduct in general, were based upon the egoistic data of a narrow personal experience or the dictates of arbitrary mandates.”146 It is easy to see how an evolutionist and a Victorian like Janes would see this argument as an effective tool for pushing his contemporaries to behave better. Surely no one, particularly no white, middle-class American, would want to be equated with a “primitive man” because he or she acted selfishly and failed to comprehend the essential cosmic unity. Shame, of course, worked hand in hand with education and the good example of more ethically advanced citizens, in the eyes of Spencerian evolutionists and Arminians, to encourage people behave more sociably and to improve their moral and ethical characters. The second stage, “the scientific or legal,” was marked by greater intelligence, a recognition of universal order, and the apprehension of “the reality of the one permanent Being which is the nexus of all fleeting and transient phenomena, and whose constant methods of operation, symbolized in the steadily moving order of these phenomena.” (That is, the apprehension of true monotheism.) These things gave the man of this middle stage “an intenser outlook toward the future. New hopes, new desires, awakened within his mind.” Awe and reverence replaced fear of the natural world. More than this, in the scientific and legal stage, man gained “a profounder insight into those uniformities of conduct which were revealed to his clearer vision in the commanding features of the Moral Law.” The intellectual and moral advances of this stage promised a brighter future for all humanity. In the new conception of the universality and imperative nature of law developed in the second stage lay the germs of a deepening sense of moral obligation and, consequently, of an advancing and triumphant civilization. In this and in the allied conception of an indwelling and all-comprehensive unity of force and being lay the possibilities of a new theology--spiritual,

146. Ibid., 408-409.

250 universal, monotheistic--that must of necessity become a solvent of national antipathies and a beneficent impulse toward the solidarity and brotherhood of the race.147 With these intellectual and moral tools in hand, man could then move to the final stage. The final stage, however, could only be reached if the dangers inherent in the second stage could be overcome. The dangers that Janes identified were clearly those he saw in his contemporaries, both secular and religious. Looking back, we can see them as an admonishment of those who did not share Janes’s optimistic faith and as a reflection of Janes’s own negative view of Pragmatism and Literary Naturalism. Implied in the new thought are certain dangers and limitations as well as inspirations. It is evident that it might become the sources of an intellectual bondage scarcely less oppressive than that of the ignorant of superstition which it had measurably superseded. Man might easily picture himself in the grasp of inexorable and unmoral forces. Law might, to his spiritual nature, become a weary burden rather than an uplifting helper. His conception of the one Absolute Being would naturally retain a strong residuum of the primitive anthropomorphism, and his God would come to be regarded as the stern lawgiver, the arbitrary and unyielding autocrat of the universe. . . . In philosophy a harsh realism might easily degenerate into a crude materialism, as empty of inspiration toward ideal excellence in character and achievement as it is full of the delusions of intellectual conceit. Under the unopposed and uncounteracted sway of such an intellectual impulse, life would become an habitual round of commonplaces. . . . Human nature, held in the grasp of inexorable law, would lose its feeling of dignity and true responsibility. . . . In the effort to escape from this bondage of legalism, old superstitions would be revived, and sweep like baleful epidemics through communities. Aspiring soul would eagerly clutch at any wild expedient which seemed to promise an escape from the bondage of legalism and fatalism to the freedom of the spirit.148 Writing as I am in the midst of another Great Awakening and in a society with ever more new- age religions and revivals of ancient religious forms, it is hard not to find Janes’s jeremiad eerily

147. Ibid., 409-410. 148. Ibid., 410-411.

251 prescient. He had grown up in the years immediately following the rush of utopian movements, many of them of a religious character, in the first half of the nineteenth century, so he was looking backward as well as forward as he spoke these words. The final stage of regard for life avoided the dangers mentioned above by providing the “two things [that] are absolutely essential . . . to the human mind as normally constituted . . . : a substratum of reality, a pou sto, a fulcrum for the leverage of the intellectual and moral as well as of the physical activities of man; and an ideal outlook, a belief in an infinite opportunity for improvement, which would become an incentive to hope, conquest, faith in the essential beneficence of life.” The “art-impulse,” which was to mark the final stage, “while appropriating all that is helpful and beneficent in science and in the conception of the universality of law, emancipates this conception from its fettering limitations and restores the soul to freedom.” Using the lessons of Spencer, Janes asserted that the art-impulse, “is that perfected form or mode of mental activity which arises from an approximately complete psychical adaptation to the conditions of the environment--social, intellectual, and physical--out of which it has been evolved; which no longer conscious of meeting resistance in its efforts at intellectual apprehension, acts, as it were, spontaneously, and conceives of its own activities under the form of freedom; which appears, therefore, to the conscious individual as a self-creative impulse, not as the mechanically constrained resultant of external determinative forces.”149 In other words, as a result of ethical evolution, individual human beings would naturally work to improve themselves in accordance with existing conditions and natural laws and would believe that their actions were the result of their own free will. To a cynic, this may appear to be nothing more than hopeful self-delusion. To the mind of a Spencerian, however, it was the natural and proper outcome of ethical evolution. Therefore, it was, to use Janes’s words, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It would be hard to find a clearer example of the nature and integration of the optimistic liberal tradition, modern Arminianism, and Spencerian evolutionism than is presented in “Life as a Fine Art.” Conclusion The BEA remained an active organization for the next four years or so. They produced three more published volumes, acted as Spencer’s American agents in controversies of the early 1890s, and played a major role in the Congress of Evolutionists in Chicago at the World’s Fair in

149. Ibid., 412.

252 1893. They became known around the world through their publications, even to the point that they were complimented on their work by . Janes became a lecturer at academies in Brooklyn, director of the summer conferences at Greenacre, and eventually the head of the Cambridge Conferences. Early in the twentieth century, leading members of the Association continued to speak in its name in defense of Spencer and evolutionism even after the BEA had ceased to be an ongoing concern. All that later work, though, adds little to our understanding of how the members adapted Spencerian ethics that was not presented more clearly in the first three seasons. And despite the fact that the history of those years presents a fascinating window into their views on and role in politics, , and social reform, it is beyond the scope of this work and must wait for my next endeavor.

253 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION

On the grand scale, this essay has asserted that over the course of the nineteenth century a fundamental fissure in the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition between optimistic and pragmatic trends widened as liberalism ascended over conservative political, religious, and social norms. This essay has sought to return Spencer and Spencerians to their place on the optimistic side of the dividing liberal tradition and to demonstrate the essential importance of ethics to Spencer’s philosophy. It has shown that Spencer and his American followers shared a common radical intellectual tradition coming out of the late eighteenth century. It has suggested that they also shared an Arminian Christian background that emphasized individual ethical development and a belief in an orderly, progressive, and beneficent universe bound by the natural laws of an equally beneficent deity. On a much smaller scale, the essay has identified and begun to present a history of the Brooklyn Ethical Association. The lives of the BEA’s members and the Association’s activities demonstrate each of the larger arguments being developed throughout the essay. Leading members of the BEA explicitly discussed evolution, ethics, science, and religion in their first three published seasons. Beyond those seasons, their lecturers diversified to include many non- members among whom were national and international political, economic, and religious leaders. The lectures, too, diversified to include a wider range of political, religious, and scientific topics. The arguments and demonstrations of this work beg far more questions than they answer, but the research on which it is based provides a solid foundation for several studies that will help to answer some of those questions. The American Spencer debates, which was to be the original subject of this dissertation, still needs to be done, but that is an enormous undertaking that will take more than this single scholar’s lifetime. Several subject studies derived from the foundations laid in this essay will help to advance that larger study, though. The most obvious subject that needs further development is the complete history of the Brooklyn Ethical Association because the research is already largely completed. The documents in the Skilton Family Papers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute cover the years 1889 to 1893 pretty thoroughly, and have some good material for later years, particularly biographical material for Janes. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, too, has much useful information that I have not needed for this essay. The Brooklyn Historical Society and the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn have relevant materials, but they were not open to researchers when I was in New York. Many members of the Association, too, were authors, lecturers, and political leaders who left numerous published works and some archival materials behind. Most of these materials are now pretty rare, but they are concentrated in and around New York City, so they might be gathered in a single trip to the city. A biography Lewis George Janes, the central figure in the BEA, will give insight into a number of late nineteenth intellectual, political, religious, and social movements related to the optimistic liberal tradition. Research into his life will also produce material useful to a history of the BEA. Janes was a latter-day president of the Free Religious Association, the director of the Cambridge Conferences, and a director of the Monslavat School of Comparative Religion during summers at Greenacre in Eliot, Maine. Janes’s family still has at least some of his papers and potentially a great many of them, including a diary from his final months when he finally met Herbert Spencer. If his descendants are interested in having his biography written, I would like very much to do it. John White Chadwick, also deserves further consideration because of his role in the liberalization of Unitarianism in the second half of the nineteenth century. I have not been able to find his personal papers, but he left behind hundreds of sermons, over one thousand book reviews, and dozens of articles in several Unitarian periodicals. It may not be possible to produce a biography to surpass that done by Cameron, which was based on published sources, but there is much more to be done with his views on God, religion, science, ethics, and evolution that will illuminate the history of American Unitarianism, the Arminian tradition in America, and the course of the Spencer debates. His published sermons are held at Andover-Harvard Theological Library, where most of the periodicals to which he contributed are also available. I presented a developmental essay on this topic at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, where it met with a generally positive response and sufficient interest to encourage me to develop it further. The most important single periodical in the Spencer debates was The Popular Science Monthly. It gave Spencer a friendly forum, but its pages offered far more than Spencerism. The monthly journal offered a popular discussion of all aspects of science from all the leading writers of science. It was a forum for discussions of politics and reform, and occasionally even for religion. To date there has been only one monograph written on the magazine, a dissertation that

255 only scratches the surface of the subject. Such a project, like a complete study of the Spencer debates, would be onerous in its scale and breadth, but it would be a critical addition to the intellectual history of science and of the nineteenth century. The volumes of The Popular Science Monthly are still available, but unfortunately the editorial papers appear to be lost, so its history will be restricted to its published materials, to letters and memoirs held in the collections of its contributors, and to materials in other published sources. The editorial papers of this journal remain my personal holy grail, and I will continue to look for them even if I have to tear down drywall in the abandoned homes of the Youmans family from the past century. The Youmans family played a central role in the national Spencer debates and the history of science through their work in The Popular Science Monthly and for the Appletons Publishing Company. A single comprehensive treatment of their lives and contributions would be interesting and useful. Unfortunately, the only surviving letters relating to their lives appear to be those saved in the collections of their correspondents, and those are limited. They did publish many articles, and dozens of letters are reproduced in John Fiske’s biography of Edward L. Youmans. From these it might be possible to produce at least an article-length treatment of them. Each step of this process will do more than detail the American Spencer debates. Each will also further illuminate the course of Liberalism in America and the West, particularly the place of the optimistic liberal tradition before it submerged beneath Pragmatic liberalism in the early twentieth century. The next phase of the investigation, after all the projects outlined above are completed, can pursue the course of optimistic liberalism in the twentieth century. This phase should offer a better and more textured understanding of the political, economic, religious, and social thought of the United States, the West, and the world as it has be influenced by Western thought in the twentieth century.

256 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Collections: Appleton-Century Manuscripts. Lilly Library. Indiana University--Bloomington.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Morgue. Brooklyn Public Library, New York.

Janes Manuscripts. Lilly Library. Indiana University--Bloomington.

Skilton Family Papers. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Archives and Special Collections, Troy, New York.

Unitarian Universalist Association Inactive Ministerial File. Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Cambridge.

Newspapers: Brooklyn Daily Eagle

New York Times

Published Primary and Secondary Sources: Ahlstrom, Sydney E. and Jonathan S. Carey, eds. An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Ames, Charles Gordon. “Tribute to John White Chadwick.” Unity 50, no. 1 (March 2, 1905): 15.

Baker, William. “Herbert Spencer and ‘Evolution’--A Further Note.” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 3 (July-September 1977): 476.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Christopher Ryan Versen was born at Fort Riley, Kansas in 1968 and lived in Frankfurt, Germany and Columbus, Mississippi before his father took a position on the Social Work faculty at James Madison University and moved the family to Harrisonburg, in 1977. Chris graduated from JMU in 1990 with a BS in Political Science and History. After a few months in the Philippines and a few years in Richmond, Virginia, he returned to JMU in 1995 to work on a master’s degree in history. He again left JMU in 1997 with an MA in European Intellectual History and, more importantly, a betrothed--Susan Anne Van Duyn--for Tallahassee, Florida. He and Susan were married in 1998 and their son Alexander was born in 2003. Chris completed his Ph.D. in American Intellectual History at Florida State University in 2006.

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