The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

In the late 19th century, Kantian idealism produced a backlash among those who wanted to restore philosophy to a more empirical foundation. One example was positivism, embodied by Auguste Comte, who posited three phases of learning: theology, which attributes phenomena to the divine; metaphysics, which refers to logical abstractions; and then positive science, which operates “by precise observation, hypothesis, and experiment […] its phenomena were explained through the regularities of natural cause and effect” (383).

Positivism found inspiration in the Industrial Revolution, which unleashed new scientific fields that promised nothing short of the transformation of nature and human life. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution then seemed to unlock the secrets of existence, introducing the concept of biology into philosophic discourse. Where Darwin was a scientist, Herbert Spencer would distill his ideas into a body of philosophic insights.

Born to an irreligious family, and fleeing his one brief encounter with formal education, Spencer had only minimal reading of philosophy, but proved an autodidact with a great deal of practical experience. He pursued the classification of data to the point of obsession, even as his writings abruptly shifted from one focus to another. His first brush with fame was a troubled one, as his attempt in First Principles to integrate science and religion placed it alongside Darwin’s Origin of the Species in the despised books of the day.