This 3-volume book features a comprehensive collection of most significant scientific, political and speculative essays by Herbert Spencer. The first volume is made up of essays in which the idea of evolution, general or special is dominant. In the second volume essays dealing with philosophical questions, with abstract and concrete science, and with aesthetics, are brought together; but though all of them are tacitly evolutionary, their evolutionism is an incidental rather than a necessary trait. The ethical, political, and social essays composing the third volume, though mostly written from the evolution point of view, have for their more immediate purposes the enunciation of doctrines which are directly practical in their bearings.
Volume 1:
The Development Hypothesis
Progress: Its Law and Cause
Transcendental Physiology
The Nebular Hypothesis
Illogical Geology
Bain on the Emotions and the Will
The Social Organism
The Origin of Animal Worship
Morals and Moral Sentiments
The Comparative Psychology of Man
Mr. Martineau on Evolution
The Factors of Organic Evolution
Volume 2:
The Genesis of Science
The Classification of the Sciences
Reasons for Dissenting From the Philosophy of M. Comte
On Laws in General, and the Order of Their Discovery
The Valuation of Evidence
What is Electricity?
Mill versus Hamilton – The Test of Truth
Replies to Criticisms
Prof. Green’s Explanations
The Philosophy of Style
Use and Beauty
The Sources of Architectural Types
Gracefulness
Personal Beauty
The Origin and Function of Music
The Physiology of Laughter
Volume 3:
Manners and Fashion
Railway Morals and Railway Policy
The Morals of Trade
Prison-ethics
The Ethics of Kant
Absolute Political Ethics
Over-legislation
Representative Government – What is It Good for?
State-tamperings With Money and Banks
Parliamentary Reform: the Dangers and the Safeguards
‘The Collective Wisdom’
Political Fetichism
Specialized Administration
From Freedom to Bondage
The Americans
Circa l’autore
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his theory of social Darwinism whereby superior physical force shapes history. Spencer is best known as the originator of the expression ‘survival of the fittest’, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864). The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism. 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. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology.
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