Herbert Spencer was regarded by the Victorians as the foremost philosopher of the age, the prophet of evolution at a time when the idea had gripped the popular imagination. His ambition was to construct a Synthetic Philosophy which unified all knowledge by demonstrating evolution to be at work throughout the universe from the nebulae to human society. In so doing he made important contributions to biology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and his writ ran from the intellectual elite - Darwin called him our great philosopher - through the professional classes to the working men whom...

Herbert Spencer (1820 1903), Victorian philosopher, biologist, sociologist and political theorist, one of the founders of Social Darwinism and author of the phrase 'survival of the fittest', was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902, losing out to Theodor Mommsen. Spencer left his post at The Economist in 1857 to focus on writing his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy, a work that offers an ethics-based guide to human conduct to replace that provided by conventional religious belief. Published in 1879, this volume seeks to demonstrate that social evolution tends towards...