FIRST PRINCIPLES (1880) - Herbert Spencer

Hardover book.
Gilded decorations and reliefs on covers and spine.
Exterior condition: fair / good. Interior condition: pristine / unused / uncut pages.
Philosophy book.
FIRST PRINCIPLES
A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
[FOURTH EDITION]
Author: HERBERT SPENCER
Publisher: WILLIAMS & NORGATE
Publication Place: LONDON
Publication Year: 1880
Pages: xx + 586 + 16
Dimensions: 22,5 X 15,5
CONTENTS:
PART I.—THE UNKNOWABLE.
I. RELIGION AND SCIENCE
II. ULTIMATE RELIGIOUS IDEAS
III. ULTIMATE SCIENTIFIC IDEAS
IV.—THE RELATIVITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE
V. THE RECONCILIATION 
PART II.—THE KNOWABLE.
I. —PHILOSOPHY DEFINED 
II.—THE DATA OF PHILOSOPHY 
III. —SPACE, TIME, MATTER, MOTION, AND FORCE . 
IV. THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF MATTER 
V. THE CONTINUITY OF MOTION
VI. THE PERSISTENCE OF FORCE 
VII. THE PERSISTENCE OF RELATIONS AMONG FORCES. 
VIII. THE TRANSFORMATION AND EQUIVALENCE OF FORCES 
IX. THE DIRECTION OF MOTION 
X. THE RHYTHM OF MOTION 
XI.-—RECAPITULATION, CRITICISM, AND RECOMMENCEMENT
XII.-—EVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION
XIII--SIMPLE AND COMPOUND EVOLUTION
XIV--THE LAW OF EVOLUTION
XV—THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONTINUED
XVI--THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONTINUED
XVII--THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONCLUDED
XVIII—THE INTERPRETATION OF EVOLUTION
XIX—THE INSTABILITY OF THE HOMOGENEOUS
XX--THE MULTIPLICATION OF EFFECTS
XXI--SEGREGATION
XXII--EQUILIBRATION
XXIII--DISSOLUTION
XXIV--SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
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Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
While most philosophers fail to achieve much of a following outside the academy of their professional peers, by the 1870s and 1880s Spencer had achieved an unparalleled popularity, as the sheer volume of his sales indicate. He was perhaps the only philosopher in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own lifetime. In the United States, where pirated editions were still commonplace, his authorised publisher, Appleton, sold 368,755 copies between 1860 and 1903. This figure did not differ much from his sales in his native Britain, and once editions in the rest of the world are added in the figure of a million copies seems like a conservative estimate. As William James remarked, Spencer "enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally." The aspect of his thought that emphasised individual self-improvement found a ready audience in the skilled working class.
Spencer's influence among leaders of thought was also immense, though it was most often expressed in terms of their reaction to, and repudiation of, his ideas. As his American follower John Fiske observed, Spencer's ideas were to be found "running like the weft through all the warp" of Victorian thought. Such varied thinkers as Henry Sidgwick, T.H. Green, G.E. Moore, William James, Henri Bergson, and Émile Durkheim defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a very large extent an extended debate with Spencer, from whose sociology, many commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively.
In post-1863-Uprising Poland, many of Spencer's ideas became integral to the dominant fin-de-siècle ideology, "Polish Positivism". The leading Polish writer of the period, Bolesław Prus, hailed Spencer as "the Aristotle of the nineteenth century" and adopted Spencer's metaphor of society-as-organism, giving it a striking poetic presentation in his 1884 micro-story, "Mold of the Earth", and highlighting the concept in the introduction to his most universal novel, Pharaoh (1895).
The early 20th century was hostile to Spencer. Soon after his death, his philosophical reputation went into a sharp decline. Half a century after his death, his work was dismissed as a "parody of philosophy", and the historian Richard Hofstadter called him "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic." Nonetheless, Spencer's thought had penetrated so deeply into the Victorian age that his influence did not disappear entirely.
In recent years, much more positive estimates have appeared, as well as a still highly negative estimate.