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Synthetic philosophy

The basis for Spencer's appeal to many of his generation was that he appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science. Spencer's philosophical system seemed to demonstrate that it is possible to believe in the ultimate perfection of humanity on the basis of advanced scientific conceptions such as the first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution.

In essence, Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and positivism. On the one hand, he had imbibed something of eighteenth-century deism from his father and other members of the Derby Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe 's immensely popular The Constitution of Man (1828). This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural laws are thus the statutes of a well-governed universe that have been decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness. Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless held fast to this conception at an almost subconscious level. At the same time, however, he owed far more than he would ever acknowledge to positivism, in particular in its conception of a philosophical system as the unification of the various branches of scientific knowledge. He also followed positivism in his insistence that it is only possible to have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it is idle to speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality. The tension between positivism and his residual deism ran through the entire System of Synthetic Philosophy.

Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.' Like Comte, he was committed to the universality of natural law, the idea that the laws of nature apply without exception, to the organic realm as much as to the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as to the rest of creation. The first objective of Synthetic Philosophy was thus to demonstrate that there are no exceptions to being able to discover scientific explanations, in the form of natural laws, of all the phenomena of the universe. Spencer's volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines. Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it is possible to discover 'laws' of morality that have the status of laws of nature while still having normative content, a conception which can be traced to George Combe's Constitution of Man.

The second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these same laws lead inexorably to progress. In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of the scientific method, Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. In this respect, he followed the model laid down by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Chambers' book was, in reality, a programme for the unification of science which aimed to show that Laplace 's nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system and Lamarck's theory of species transformation are both instances of 'one magnificent generalisation of progressive development' (Lewes' phrase). Chambers was associated with Chapman's salon and his work served as the unacknowledged template for the Synthetic Philosophy.