Herbert Spencer
Pre-reading
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was “an enthusiastic exponent of evolution” and even “wrote about evolution before Darwin did”. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in Englishspeaking academia. Spencer was “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”, but his influence declined sharply after 1900.
Spencer is best known for the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
The following essay is an excerpt from Spencer’s longer essay “On the Genesis of Science”.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What are the similarities and differences between scientific knowledge and ordinary knowledge according to Spencer?
2.What is the relationship that exists between scientific knowledge and ordinary knowledge?
3.Are there cases where science disproves our common knowledge? What are they?
4.What are the characteristics of scientific knowledge?
5.What do the words “certainty” and “completeness” mean in Paragraph 7?
6.How does scientific knowledge develop in stages?
7.What is the difference between inductive and deductive science? Can you give some examples?
8.How would you describe the general tone of this passage?
9.What is the general logic behind the organization of ideas in this passage? Work out an idea flow chart to illustrate the chain of thoughts in this passage.
[1] There has ever prevailed among men a vague notion that scientific knowledge differs in nature from ordinary knowledge. By the Greeks, with whom Mathematics—literally things learnt — was alone considered as knowledge proper1, the distinction must have been strongly felt; and it has ever since maintained itself in the general mind. Though, considering the contrast between the achievements of science and those of daily unmethodical thinking, it is not surprising that such a distinction has been assumed; yet it needs but to rise a little above the common point of view, to see that no such distinction can really exist: or that at best, it is but a superficial distinction. The same faculties are employed in both cases; and in both cases their mode of operation is fundamentally the same.