Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. THE SPENCERIAN SOCIOLOGY. Mr. Spencer's social and political teachings are familiar enough in their main outlines to readers who otherwise know little or nothing of his works. The most popularly written and widely circulated of his books--the Education alone excepted--are those which deal directly with the problems arising from the relations of citizens to government and to one another. In the pages of Social Statics, the Introduction to the Study of Sociology, and The Man versus The State, these problems in their multifarious aspects are handled with rare force, clearness, and felicity of illustration; and though first principles are kept in view throughout, and are shown to constitute the firm foundation of every doctrine advanced--though in this way philosophic coherence and consistency are given to every chain of reasoning--the popular standpoint is that adopted; the arguments are directed rather to the general reader than to the special student. By the larger public, therefore, Mr. Spencer's individualistic theories are accepted or rejected without any thought of their relation to his philosophic system as a whole; how they fall into the body of his work, and what exact place they occupy there, are questions that seldom come up for consideration. This is the more natural because, even when we have grown tired, as Zschokke put it, of "living in the furnished lodgings of tradition," very few of us have thought out for ourselves a systematized theory of life. We have what we are pleased to call our ideas (usually more correctly to be described as our impressions) about most things; and the less we understand of a subject the stronger our assertions of opinion are likely to be. But these ideas rarely hang together among...