Herbert Spencer
British philosopher who tried to discuss almost every topic in philosophy under the name of "synthetic philosophy", from the first principles of philosophy, to those of biology, psychology, sociology, and more. Although he earned a disreputation in this century because of his influence on Social Darwinism, his view contains some siginificant part.
Since he was not an academic philosopher, his arguments are often sloppy; however, his discussion of the conciliation of egoism and altruism in The Data of Ethics (1879) touches upon a very important problem, picked up again by sociobiology in this century. This at least shows that Spencer's philosophical sense was not as bad as many would suppose today (withot reading him); it may have been even better than T. H. Huxley's, although the latter certainly has a much higher reputation today.
See my Darwinism and Ethics (Japanese), sects. 6-7
