First Principles
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~230,000 words · 1,071 passages
Cite this work
- APAHerbert Spencer. (n.d.). First Principles. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/herbert-spencer/first-principles
- MLAHerbert Spencer. "First Principles." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/herbert-spencer/first-principles.
- ChicagoHerbert Spencer. First Principles. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/herbert-spencer/first-principles.
What it is about
The volume that opens Spencer's system: first what science cannot know, then the single law he believed explained everything else.
Context and history
Published in 1862. The first part concedes to religion that there is an Unknowable and places it outside science; the second defines evolution as the passage from the homogeneous and indefinite to the heterogeneous and definite, and from there Spencer will apply the same formula to biology, psychology, sociology and ethics in the volumes that follow. That project of a single system for all the sciences is what posterity has not bought, and it is what makes him read today as a document.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
This volume is the first of a series described in a prospectus originally distributed in March, 1860. Of that prospectus, the annexed is a reprint. A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY. Mr. Herbert Spencer proposes to issue in periodical parts a connected series of works which he has for several years been preparing. Some conception of the general aim and scope of this series may be gathered from the following Programme. FIRST PRINCIPLES. PART I. THE UNKNOWABLE.—Carrying a step further the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel; pointing out the various directions in which Science leads to the same conclusions; and showing that in this united belief in an Absolute that transcends not only human knowledge but human conception, lies the only possible reconciliation of Science and Religion. PART II. LAWS OF THE KNOWABLE.—A statement of the ultimate principles discernible throughout all manifestations of the Absolute—those highest generalizations now being disclosed by Science which are severally true not of one class of phenomena but of _all_ classes of phenomena; and which are thus the keys to all classes of phenomena.[1] [_In logical order should here come the application of these First Principles to Inorganic Nature. But this great division it is proposed to pass over: partly because, even without it, the scheme is too extensive; and partly because the interpretation of Organic Nature after the proposed method, is of more immediate importance. The second work of the series will therefore be_—] THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY. PART I. THE DATA OF BIOLOGY.—Incl