New York Daily Tribune, Preface.

“It deserves very high praise for the ability, clearness, and force with which it is written, and which entitle it to the character, now so rare, of a really substantial book.”

“A remarkable work…Mr. Spencer exhibits, and exhibits with remarkable force and clearness, many social equalizations of a just and right species which remain yet to be effected”

“An inquiry conducted throughout with clearnes, good temper, and streit logic…We shall be mistaken if this book do not assist in organizing that huge mass of thought which, for want of a ore specific name, is now called Liberal Opinion.”

“It is the most eloquent, the most interesting, the most clearly expressed and logically-reasoned work, with views the most original, that has appeared in the science of social polity. Proceeding synthetically from very simple postulates, to which the most cautious reader cannot refuse his assent, the author deduces from them, in a most stictly logical process of reasoning, conclusions the most startling and unexpected.”

“The author of the present work is no ordinary thinker, and no ordinary writer; and he gives us, in language that sparkles with beauties, and in reasoning at once novel and elaborate, precise and logical, a very comprehensive and complete exposition of the rights of men in society… The book is calculated to give an impulse to thought, and to interest the public mind in subjects of the very highest importance, and the most abstract nature. It is distinguished by good feeling and close reasoning, and will mark an epoch in the literature of scientific morality.”

“We remember no work on ethics since that of Spinoza to be compared with it in the simplicity of its premisses, and the plogical rigour with which a complete system of scientific ehics is evolved from them. This is high praise; but we give it deliberately… A work at once so scientific in spirit and method, and so popular in execution, we shall look in vain for through libraries of political philosophy.”

“The careful reading we have given it has both afforded an intense pleasure, and rendered it a duty to express, with unusual emphasis, our opinion of its great ability and excellence. Mr. Spencer manifests no ordinary combination of power and culture. He has written a truly philophic work—logical almost to perfection; and although it never loses the strictly scientific character which the practised thinker demans, it is varied with luminous illustrations and appeals to general sympathies, by which it gains interest and force for the popular mind.”

“This is a the production of an acute and independent thinker.”

“We commend ‘Social Statics’ to be notice of our enterprising publishers. The book has only to be known to command a ready sale among all clases.”

Being somewhat at variance with precedent, the tone and mode of treatment occasionally adopted in the following pages will, perhaps, provoke criticism. Whether, in thus innovating upon established usage, the writer has acted judiciously or otherwise, the event must determine. He has not, however, transgressed without adequate motive; having done so under the belief that, as it is the purpose of a book to influence conduct, the best way of writing a book must be the way best fitted to effect this purpose.

Should exception be taken to the manifestations of feeling now and then met with, as out of place in a treatise having so scientific a title; it is replied that, in their present phase of progress, men are but little swayed by purely intellectual considerations—that to be operative, these must be enforced by direct or implied appeals to the sentiments—and that, provided such appeals are not in place of, but merely supplementary to, the deductions of logic, no well-grounded objection can be made to them. The reader will find that the several conclusions submitted to him are primarily based on entirely impersonal reasoning, by which alone they may be judged; and if, for the sake of commending these conclusions to the Edition: current; Page: [vi] many, the sympathies have been indirectly addressed, the general argument cannot have been thereby weakened, if it has not been strengthened.

Possibly the relaxations of style in some cases used, will be censured, as beneath the gravity of the subject. In defence of them it may be urged, that the measured movement which custom prescribes for philosophical works, is productive of a monotony extremely repulsive to the generality of readers. That no counterbalancing advantages are obtained, the writer does not assert. But, for his own part, he has preferred to sacrifice somewhat of conventional dignity, in the hope of rendering his theme interesting to a larger number.