ABSTRACT

The most important British disciples were Webb, the novelist and popularizer of science Grant Allen, and a group of disaffected secularists, who took up Spencer's religion of the Unknowable. These disciples celebrated Spencer as one of the great minds of the nineteenth century and they disseminated his ideas to the British public. Many of them were determined to correct misunderstandings of Spencer's thought and to delineate the magnificence of his achievements. Since Victorians often conflated Darwin and Spencer's evolutionary theories, they argued for his unique contributions to the edifice of modern science. Webb repudiated the overly rationalistic religion of science, based on Spencer's Unknowable, and in her move to socialism had cast off his notion of social organism as unscientific and capitalistic. The agnostic secularists, who were part of a radical tradition with roots in eighteenth-century deism, were attracted to what Spencer shared with the pre-Darwinian worldview in which Nature was a scene of benevolent design.