フェノロサとスペンサー

「世態開進論」(1880) の検討

抄録

Though Ernest Francisco Fenollosa is very famous as a scholar of Japanese traditional art, his activities as a professor of Tokyo University are not widely known. He came to Japan in 1878, and taught philosophy, politics and political economy at Tokyo University for eight years. Some of the content of his lectures can be known by the notes of his students, and also his speeches on religion and social evolution are remarkable as the materials of his thought during his early years in Japan. This article trys to examine his speech “Seitai Kaishinron” (Theory of Social Evolution) which was translated into Japanese in 1880.
This speech was based on Herbert Spencer's theory of social evolution. Fenollosa's analysis of the process of social evolution from primitive to civilized stages of society adapted Spencer's fundamental law of evolution; from the incoherent homogeneity to the coherent heterogeneity. He analysed the transition from primitive to centralized militant societies by the law of natural selection, and this speech reminds us of the theory of evolution which Spencer described in his “Principles of Sociology. ”Though Fenollosa limited the scope of this speech to the first stage of social evolution, namely a transition from the primitive to the militant type of societies, he looked forward to the next free democratic society based on individuality. Fenollosa should be estimated as one of the pioneers of Japanese social sciences.