Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903

An English philosopher and sociologist, the most widely read evolutionary thinker of the Victorian age. Trained as a railway engineer and self-taught, he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and spent nearly forty years applying the idea of evolution to biology, psychology, sociology and ethics in his System of Synthetic Philosophy.

1852
The Philosophy of Style

Spencer's attempt to find the single principle behind the rules of rhetoric, first published in the Westminster Review in 1852.

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