Book: First Principles

Overview
Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862) lays the groundwork for his System of Synthetic Philosophy by proposing the most general truths that underpin all sciences. It is divided into two complementary parts: the limits of knowledge, which circumscribe what can be known, and a unifying law of evolution, which characterizes the order of phenomena in nature and society. Spencer seeks a single conceptual framework broad enough to include physics, biology, psychology, and sociology, while neutralizing the conflict he saw between religion and science.

The Unknowable
Spencer contends that ultimate reality, the Absolute or the ultimate cause of phenomena, is beyond human cognition. All knowledge is relative: we apprehend not things-in-themselves but relations among appearances. This limitation, he argues, is established by both philosophy and science; every attempt to think the infinite or absolute ends in contradiction. Religion, too, implicitly acknowledges an inscrutable power. By recognizing a region of the unknowable, philosophy can set bounds within which positive investigation proceeds without metaphysical pretensions, and religion is preserved from dogmatic claims about the ultimate nature of things.

The Knowable and the Persistence of Force
Within the sphere of the knowable, Spencer identifies axiomatic truths that guide scientific synthesis. Chief among them is the persistence of force: the assertion that the total amount of force remains constant, a philosophical generalization consonant with conservation principles in physics. Corollaries include the indestructibility of matter and the continuity and transformation of forces. Because cognition deals in relations among changes, not their absolute substance, these regulative truths serve as the most general premises from which to interpret the world.

The Law of Evolution
Spencer defines evolution as the passage from relatively uniform, indefinite, incoherent states to relatively diverse, definite, coherent states, with increasing differentiation joined to integration. This process is driven by the redistribution of matter and motion under persistent forces. As structures differentiate, movements are progressively localized and organized; as organization advances, systems tend toward equilibration. The reverse process, dissolution, occurs when equilibrium is disturbed and integration fails, returning systems toward relative homogeneity. Evolution and dissolution are, for Spencer, complementary modalities of the same universal dynamics.

Space, Time, Matter, and Motion
He treats space, time, matter, and motion as the most general forms of appearance given in experience. Their ultimate natures are unknowable, yet their relations are knowable and law-governed. The sciences refine these relational descriptions, and philosophy’s task is to collate their widest inductions without overstepping into assertions about absolute substances. This stance links metaphysical restraint to empirical breadth.

Religion and Science
By segregating the unknowable from the knowable, Spencer proposes a reconciliation: science confines itself to phenomena and their laws, while religion directs sentiment toward the inscrutable source of those phenomena. Dogmatic creeds are philosophically untenable, but reverence for the mystery underlying existence is, he argues, both rationally mandated and morally valuable. The supposed antagonism between faith and inquiry dissolves when each observes its proper bounds.

Method and Scope
Spencer calls his approach synthetic because it unifies the widest scientific generalizations into a coherent system, employing induction from observed laws and deduction from the most general principles. He insists that philosophy should not add new facts, but organize the established results of the special sciences into a consistent architecture governed by the law of evolution.

Significance
First Principles provided Victorian thinkers with an ambitious, naturalistic cosmology that extended the idea of evolution beyond biology to the physical universe, mind, and society. Its agnostic epistemology, conservation-based metaphysics, and expansive evolutionary schema shaped debates about progress, order, and the limits of knowledge for decades.