Spencer Museum of Art

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
English philosopher

Together with Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, Spencer was responsible for the acceptance of the theory of evolution, and he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" later attributed to Darwin. He projected a vast work, Synthetic Philosophy, which would apply the principle of evolutionary progress to all branches of knowledge; the numerous volumes published between 1855 and 1893 covered such subjects as biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics. He is credited with the establishment of sociology as a discipline in the U.S.

From The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia © 1994