SPENCER'S PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY.*

ONE can scarcely think without wonder of the work on which Mr.. Herbert Spencer is now engaged, and which he has partly per- formed in the volume before us. He has undertaken to account,. on the principle of evolution, for all the vast variety of pheno- mena which human societies in the course of their long history have exhibited—for all the religions, laws, and social forms of all the world, and for a great deal besides ; not merely to put those. phenomena before us, but to exhibit them in their proper order, and show how each in turn has originated that which follows it. This must have been a stupendous task, even if a multitude of workers had so far prepared the way, that there was needed only a master-mind to co-ordinate the knowledge accumulated through their labours. But the science which treats of the growth of societies and the growth of institutions is in its infancy, and haz as yet succeeded in attracting very few trained and competent. thinkers such as are engaged in developing the other sciences. Take religion, or property, or the family, and it will be seen, as regards the early history of each, that so much had been left obscure or altogether unexamined, so little settled beyond con- troversy, that Mr. Spencer could scarcely anywhere march with assured step in the track of his predecessors, and that their labours were therefore not very helpful for Ids purpose. In this volume, rts Principros of BociolOPY. By Herbert Spencer. Vol. L Second Edition. London: Williams and 1,Torgato.

in which he deals with the earlier and obscurer parts of human history, he has, in fact, had to do nearly everything for himself, for he rarely adopts in full a view from any preceding writer ; and, nevertheless, he has propounded in it a pretty complete theory of the movement of mankind as regards religion and the family, from the rudest beginnings to what may be considered essentially modern types. The more we wonder at finding so much attempted, the more curious must we be to see how far the attempt has been successful.

In dealing with a work of such wide scope as Mr. Spencer's, it is impossible to notice everything, and we therefore pass by the preliminary chapters, in which he endeavours to conjecture what external circumstances—of climate, soil, vegetation, &c.—would most favour the progress of early men. These, indeed, can be nothing more than matter of curious speculation, and in such speculations—as many examples show—the degree of error is likely to be proportional to the ingenuity or power of fancy which a writer has at his command. We pass over, too, without much regret, the chapters in which Mr. Spencer inquires what was probably the physical, emotional, and intellectual condition of primitive men ; nor can we dwell, though much tempted to do so, on the succeeding chapters, which treat of primitive ideas as to sleep and dreams, death and resurrection, supernatural agents and their relations to men, and many cognate matters. It must suffice to say that Mr. Spencer's views about these matters—though independently developed—are very like 11.1r. Tylor's, which have been for some years before the world. We go on to Mr. Spencer's evolution of systems of religion, to which, indeed, we shall have to confine our notice, Arrived at that, one's first feeling must be surprise at having got to it so soon.

For before you can have religions, you u must have the societies by which the religions were believed in and practised, with whose growth they grew up, whose circumstances must somehow— possibly in ways not easily understood—have determined their form and character. The evolution of society should, therefore, have preceded the evolution of religion, or at least, the two should have proceeded pan i pass.u. This does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Spencer. He" evolves" the religions of the world as if religion had no relation whatever. to fact or social structure. The same mistake had been made by others before him, and it is a natural mistake for those to make who have had no occasion to think of the matter; but we do not expect a writer like Mr. Spencer, engaged in pointing out the connections of all social phenomena, to fall into so serious a fault of method. How serious it is, in what confusions it was likely to involve the writer, and what perplexities it prepared for the reader, appears the instant we think of the phrase which Mr. Spencer has used to denote his religious theory. Of what may pass for ancestor- worship, there have been two kinds,—a tribal worship of reputed ancestors, and a sort of family worship of known ancestors. The tribal worship of reputed ancestors, of gods regarded as having been the ancestors, first parents or makers, of the tribes who worshipped them—including, as it does, animal-worship, and much of what is called nature-worship—has undoubtedly been a very wide-spread thing; and to known ancestors of the family, or rather to its dead within certain limits, observances have been paid among various historical peoples. As to the tribal religion,

the question arises, was it, in its origin, a worship of ancestors at all ? Ae to the family worship, the question arises, how far is it

to be considered a religion ? The latter is best known to us in connection with rather advanced religions systems and complex AOCial systems, and it still lasts among the Chinese, although their religious systems have almost entirely lost hold of that people ; but it has occurred also alongside of primitive forms of worship, like the totem-worship of Egypt and Peru. Taking Egypt, then,

where observances were paid to known mummy ancestors, and where there was also a elan, and to some extent, a national, worship of animal-gods, such questions as the arise,—In what social conditions—in what form of the family—did the mummy-cult, whatever it may have been, originate ? In what social state could the tribal worship have originated ? Which is likely to have been the older? and what, if any, relation had the one to the other ? Without a theory as to the growth of society, one is working in the dark in attempting to answer such questions, and to leave them altogether unconsidered is to admit chances of perplexity and error which, in the interest of both writer and reader, ought to be carefully shut out. The religious facts, moreover, supply a means of testing the social theory, and may either lend powerful corroboration to it, or raise a strong probability that it is wrong. No thought of the growth of tribes, however, or of the history of the family, or of the influence of systems of kinship, as affect- ing religious development, has been taken by Mr. Spencer. Let us see how he gets on, workingn his own way.

Although he applies the • term "ancestor-worship" to that

s which he holds to be at the root of alt religions, Mr. Spencer' view really is that every divinity has had a human original, and that religious worship has sprung out of the rites paid to the dead. On this view he undertakes to explain animal-worship, plant-worship, and all the varieties of nature-worship. With his conception of "ancestor," enlarged so as to include every dead man who has been worshipped, even when he has been of a different race from the people who have worshipped him, of course, the anthropomorphic gods give him no trouble. Of animal. worship, he offers three distinct explanations, but he believes that for the most part it had its origin in the misinterpretation of nicknames. Before proper names came Into use, he says, men addressed each other by nicknames, taken in each ease from some personal peculiarity ; thus a brave man might be called a lion, a cunning man a fox, an industrious man (if there was such a person in, primitive times) a beaver. Time descendants of a person having such an animal nickname, "lacking knowledge and with rude language," believed that they were really descended from the animal which furnished the nickname ; and upon this naturally followed, first, a special regard for the animal, and a belief that the animal had a special regard for them, and then a religious veneration of the animal. But there might be a tradition that - the ancestor was both a man and an animal, or various facts sug- gested by Mr. Spencer might, in course of time, produce the be- lief that he had been so. Thereupon would naturally follow the worship of gods who were half-brutes, half-men, such as abounded among the Chaldeans and other Eastern peoples, Two varieties of worship thus disposed of, we go on to plant-worship, of which also Mr. Spencer offers three distinct explanations. The first is that the toxic effects of certain plants or their fermented juices were supposed to be caused by spirits and demons, and when they were agreeable, by beneficent spirits, and that these spirits were some- times identified with human originals, and gradually developed into divinities. The second is that people who had emerged from a district characterised by a particular tree or plant, unawares changed the legend that they were come from such a district, into a legend that they were descended from the tree or plant which characterised it. Thirdly, as in the case of animal- worship, the trick of naming persons after trees or plants led to a belief in the descendants of persons so named that they were descended from the tree or plant. Of nature-worship—the worship of the heavenly bodies, mountains, rivers, 80.—Mr. Spencer has offered only two explanations, "Partly by confounding the parentage of the race," he says, " with a conspicuous object,. marking the natal region of the race, partly by literal interpreta- tion of names given in eulogy, there have been produced beliefs in descent from mountains, from the sea, from the dawn, from animals which have become constellations, and from persons once on earth, who now appear as moon and sun." It is due to Mr. Spencer that the explanations just mentioned

should be soberly examined, but little attention would be given to an unknown author who put forward three distinct hypotheses as to the origin of a phenomenon so mysterious, and so mysteriously wide-spread as animal worship. Of such a

writer it would be said off-hand that he had been making mere guesses, and did not know the meaning of the word hypothesis: As for Mr. Spencer,

lie has given us three " origins " of animal- worship, because he thought he needed throe. One was capable of explaining a few of the facts, but not the rest ; the second, a few more ; while the third, that which we have mentioned, will, he thinks, account for the greater number of them. Each of the causes assigned is represented as acting independently of the others, and yet yielding its quota of the same mysterious result. It is to be noted that he has also offered a plurality of of plant-worship and of the origin of naturea-worship.origin

for his " nickname " hypothesis.

To begin, if a man has a nickname, he must have comrades who. have given it to him. And they, by hypothesis, will have nick- names also. Before there can be nicknames, then, there must be society ; men must already be included in tribes. And finding- men in tribes, each matt with a nickname, how, out of such tribes, are we to get tribes each having its special tribal nickname ? Did every man with a nickname become the progenitor of a tribe ? And if only some did so, how did they come to do it, and what became of their comrades, who also had nicknames ? Here Mr. Spencer plainly needed a theory of the growth of tribes, but no thought of this has interrupted his exposition. Making the best of his exposition as it is, and granting to him that nicknames could commonly be so grossly misinterpreted as he has supposed possible, what seems to follow is, not that there should have been recognised in every tribe a single animal ancestor worshipped as a god, but that in every tribe there should be many people who bad the notion that they were descended from some animal or other. But what is to be accounted for are tribes each with a single animal ancestor. That, however, a system of naming which was in daily use should have been mis- interpreted, and so generally misinterpreted as Mr. Spencer supposes, will to most people—and it is a mere question of probability—appear to be anything but probable. Already, then, we almost seem forced to the conclusion that the nickname theory cannot be accepted. When we inquire into the systems of kinship with which animal-worship has been associated, it appears beyond all doubt that it cannot. Nearly all the tribes now existing which practise animal worship—and the number of them is very great—count kinship through women only, so that a son is no relative of his father, belongs to his mother's tribe, not to his father's, and takes the totem—tribal name, and tribal worship—of his mother, not that of his father. If in such tribes men do not give their names to their children now, and are no relatives of their children, is it likely that the men, their predecessors, among whom, in a time long gone by, and in a social condition necessarily far ruder, animal-worship became established, had children who were their acknowledged relatives, and to whom they could transmit their names? There can be but one answer to this question, and that is destructive of Mr. Spencer's theory. Father- hood, still unrecognised at law among the animal-worshipping tribes, may even have been unrecognised in fact at the time when the animal-cult was developed. The contemporary animal- worshippers furnish us with another fact, which by itself would be almost conclusive against Mr. Spencer. Though every man has a name by which his fellows speak of him—a name taken from the "medicine," which is a sort of patron-saint, usually an animal or plant,—so little are personal names even now regarded among them, that at death the personal name is ignored, and it is the totem or tribal mark alone that is put upon the grave. What likelihood is there that, in the dim past, personal names were more regarded by their primitive predecessors ?

The misinterpretation of birth-names is one of Mr. Spencer's explanations of plant-worship, and the literal interpretation of names derived from heavenly bodies and other natural phenomena —names given to men either at birth or in eulogy—is what sup- plies him with his explanation of the greater part of nature- worship. Nearly all that has been said of the nickname origin of animal-worship applies to the birth-name origin of plant- worship and much of it—quite enough to discredit an hypo- thesis—to the literal interpretation origin of nature-worship. In regard to the latter, it is quite plain that Mr. Spencer has had to strain his invention to the utmost. And here is a kind of difficulty in which he often finds himself. To account for the extensive worship there has been of natural phenomena on his ancestor theory, he has to make out that a practice of naming people after natural phenomena has been common. He does not do this, as it seems to us, very successfully. Assuming that he has done it, however, he has laid himself open to the observation that the more this system of naming was used, the less likely was it to be misunderstood in the way his theory requires. But enough of this. What has been said seems sufficient to show that Mr. Spencer's explanations, so far as they involve nicknaming and naming—and as regards the primitive religions, they almost entirely depend upon these cannot possibly be accepted. It is scarcely worth while to consider any of his minor ex- planations—whether, for example, the toxic influence derivable from a plant has in many cases led men to reverence it as a god and father, or whether mountain-worship could arise from a people confounding the traditional source of the race with the tradi- tional parentage of the race. It may be said, however, in passing, that to point out the circumstances which fixed the choice of a particular tribe on a particular plant—if it could be done—would be a very small matter in accounting for plant-worship. Mr. Spencer derives the belief in idols—the belief that a god could be enshrined in an idol—from ideas connected with the worship of mummy ancestors, and of the images of ancestors. It should follow that the first idols were in the human form. But what of the brazen serpents, winged bulls, and sphinxes of Eastern worship ? Mr. Spencer has laid down that there seems to have been a movement in religion from animal gods to the compound gods, and from these to anthropomorphic gods. Sphinxes and animal idol, then, may have been anterior to anthropomorphic Idols. We should be sorry to make any affirmation on a matter of such difficulty, but it lay in Mr. Spencer's way, at any rate, to consider this. Here it may be pointed out that, while making great use of the ancestor-worship of Egypt in laying the basis for his theory that gods have everywhere been human spirits deified, Mr. Spencer does not indicate—he mentions the fact, however, elsewhere—that the gods of Egypt were animal gods, to whose worship the mummy-cult, whatever it may have been, was sub- ordinate ; and of course he does not make any inquiry whether the tribal or the family worship was the older.

In Mr. Spencer's theory of the evolution of Society, had we been able to consider it, we should, we fear, have found much to disagree with ; and in truth, we have, on the whole, been driven to the conclusion that the task Mr. Spencer undertook is one to which, in the present state of knowledge, the highest genius, impressed with the best scientific training, must certainly have proved unequal. Some questions which he considered,—e.g., the origin of animal-worship or the origin of exogamy, may be al- together insoluble. At any rate, though evolution may ultimately • give an account of such questions, it by no means follows that the most ingenious of believers in evolution can, when he pleases, and whatever the state of knowledge, set forth what the pro- cess of evolution has been. It scarcely need be said of any work of Mr. Spencer that it contains much that is novel and in- genious; and of this one it may at least be safely said that it must powerfully stimulate the discussion of a set of problems which have hitherto not received from the better class of minds the attention to which they seem entitled.