Carlyle first uses it in his essay Goethe to translate the master's original German Umgebung and to signify not merely surroundings or context (as it had been commonly used before) but rather the vital, ongoing influence of those surroundings upon a person or thing.1 As Ralph Jessop argues, this coinage arises from the “counter-Enlightenment” stance Carlyle took against the forces of mechanization and mechanical thinking: environment is an attempt to convey something of the holistic, “dialogical and open-textured” set of influences—physical, social, intellectual, spiritual—at work upon someone.2 We can thus see in it the stirrings of an interdependent, “green” sensibility, though always filtered through Carlyle's peculiar metaphysical division of “substance” from “semblance” and his quasi-reactionary politics. ...the word ‘environment’ does metaphysical work.” The natural world and human civilization may both be considered “environments,” but in Spencer's system the latter is at a further stage of evolutionary “complexity,” and thus it functions as a stimulus to even more profound kinds of intellectual, moral, and social growth.6 And civilization, as Raymond Williams has shown, had not yet been relativized by the widespread adoption of its plural form: for Spencer, it means Western civilization.7 Thus, such developmentalist arguments reflect the way the concept “environment” was inflected by assumptions of racial and cultural superiority; indeed, as George Stocking notes, to be an “environmentalist” in Victorian anthropological circles was to believe in the profound shaping power of external forces upon human characteristics and capacities and, more often than not, to uphold the ascendancy of European culture on such grounds.8 Moreover, the complete continuity of nature and civilization also makes Spencer—at least in his early writings—famously wary of any “artificial” human intervention in economic and social processes.