Dear M^r Darwin

I cannot help sending you a word in reply about Herbert Spencer.¹ You say that if he has done nothing for science what a pity it is that such labour and such talents should have been thrown away. I have often thought about this & have long ago come to the conclusion that such is not the right view to take of Herbert Spencer’s work. His is not the rôle of the scientific discoverer however much he may think it to be so. But none the less does the world owe a large debt of gratitude to him. He has been a great scientific teacher—or I ought perhaps to say preacher. He was among the very earliest to accept the newly discovered ideas of Evolution as the formative process in Nature and his imaginative and suggestive mind felt at once how vast its importance was as the only admissible solution of the whole world-mystery.² And then—long before there could be any scientific knowledge of the modus operandi of the process in many of the departments of Nature with which he was dealing—he represented vividly and plausibly how this great principle might account for all that we see around us. The immediate result has been very great. In our fathers’ days the direct creative hypothesis was almost universally regarded as commanding à priori our belief. The supporters of all rival hypotheses had a heavy onus of proof to bear. Now, thinkers are half ashamed to hint that the principle of gradual and spontaneous growth is not all-sufficient. That this change of view has been so rapid is to a considerable extent—in England at least—due to Herbert Spencer’s writings. He has, as it were, abridged the intellectual childhood of our thinkers in this respect and helped them to step at once into the full realization of the potentialities of the new ideas.

His work has thus been educational rather than scientific. He belongs to the type of writers of which Robert Chambers the author of the Vestiges of Creation is a good example.³ They make the World rapidly appreciate the force of new ideas that would otherwise have only slowly made themselves felt. This is a great service rendered though the benefit conferred is not strictly scientific. It is in fact almost independent of the scientific value of the writings that produce it. I always say that those who read Spencer think Spencer. And yet scarcely any of them remember the definite results at which he arrives and still fewer (of the sounder thinkers) accept any considerable portion of them. The whole of these results may be wrong and yet the good he has done will remain. One never loses faith in the infinite potentialities of gradual growth after reading Herbert Spencer.

Such a work as this the true scientific discoverers always refuse to do. Indeed their mental habits unfit them for it. It requires a kind of intellectual laxity to enable a man thus to outrun our knowledge, and, confounding together proof and surmise, to interweave inextricably the known and the unknown in his theories. And I cannot in my own mind ascribe to Herbert Spencer any higher function than this. But of all such writers he seems to me to be the greatest for—living at the birth of the most important revolution in human thought that has ever taken place—he has shewn himself equal to the task of making the world of thinkers feel the fulness of the new teaching. But greater tho’ he be than his predecessors his fate will be the same. I doubt whether much that his books contain will ever be proved to be either right or wrong. Most of it will in the light of advancing knowledge be found to be so vague and unmeaning as to be cast aside. The real workers of the future may in their early days have caught inspiration from him but they will derive no light and no guidance. And by other ways and with other results than his, the intricate working of evolution will be followed out by men who are willing to seek scientific truth by patient labour and investigation as alone it can be found. And when they have thus laboured and achieved, Herbert Spencer will be generously remembered as he will deserve to be. When the day has broken his vague fore-shadowings will be pointed to as having been the harbingers of the coming dawn and there is no fear that the author of the most brilliant of the “Songs before Sunrise”⁴ will be forgotten. But he will be remembered as one of the prophets and not as one of the founders of the new era.

These remarks do not apply to his more purely physical writings such as First Principles.⁵ There the process is reversed. We have so far advanced into the day that we are beginning to see distinctly the outlines of the objects that surround us. He would tempt us back into the twilight that he may more freely descant on the possibilities of the vague forms that seem to people it. Such writings do not deserve even kindly treatment. They are worse than useless— they are actively pernicious

Once again I have troubled you with a long letter. It is a fault that shall not be repeated & I trust that in this case the common interest that we both of us feel in the matter may be taken as sufficient excuse.

I remain. | Yours very sincerely | J. Fletcher Moulton

C. Darwin Esq.