Even before Darwin decisively severed it from theology, he engaged in encyclopedic extensions of the biological principle of continuity (imperceptible gradations in all living things) backward from organisms to nebula and forward to mind and human society.
Yet Spencer fell into fatal errors. In his evolutionary version of the Great Chain of Being, his method was only deductive, aiming at a priori (self-evident) truths. His test of truth, invariability of belief, led him to conflate perception and conception and argue that the negation of the perception of force was inconceivable. Desirous of demonstrating both universal evolution and philosophical realism, he reduced everything, even mind, to "the Persistence of Force" (or "the persistence of some Cause which transcends our knowledge"). Aiming to show that a world without a Supreme First Cause (God) still showed universal and inevitable laws, he deduced a utopia free from all uncertainty. Use inheritance would inevitably bring about the complete congruity of a priori knowledge and the laws of nature. Then all would be just as it must be: all laws of nature would be invariable beliefs, and all would be right with the world.
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