Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
articles within the means of those before unable to buy them, and so
increasing their comforts and improving their habits. At the same time
the practice of travelling is immensely extended. People who never
before dreamed of it, take trips to the sea; visit their distant
relations; make tours; and so we are benefited in body, feelings, and
ideas. The more prompt transmission of letters and of news produces
other marked changes--makes the pulse of the nation faster. Once more,
there arises a wide dissemination of cheap literature through railway
book-stalls, and of advertisements in railway carriages: both of them
aiding ulterior progress. And the countless changes here briefly
indicated are consequent on the invention of the locomotive engine. The
social organism has been rendered more heterogeneous in virtue of the
many new occupations introduced, and the many old ones further
specialized; prices of nearly all things in every place have been
altered; each trader has modified his way of doing business; and every
person has been affected in his actions, thoughts, emotions.
Illustrations to the same effect might be indefinitely accumulated, but
they are needless. The only further fact demanding notice, is, that we
here see still more clearly the truth before pointed out, that in
proportion as the area on which any force expends itself becomes
heterogeneous, the results are in a yet higher degree multiplied in
number and kind. While among the simple tribes to whom it was first
known, caoutchouc caused but few changes, among ourselves the changes
have been so many and varied that the history of them occupies a
volume.[5] Upon the small, homogeneous community inhabiting one of the
Hebrides, the electric telegraph would produce, were it used, scarcely
any results; but in England the results it produces are multitudinous.
The comparatively simple organization under which our ancestors lived
five centuries ago, could have undergone but few modifications from an
event like the recent one at Canton; but now, the legislative decision
respecting it sets up many hundreds of complex modifications, each of
which will be the parent of numerous future ones.
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