I wonder if participants in this discussion are aware that Hayek (a serious  
Mill scholar), got his phrase, 'spontaneous order', from a passage in one of  
Mill's three posthumous essays on religion, in which Mill writes -- rather  
disparagingly -- of 'the spontaneous order of Nature'?  
  
Mill  used the term to label what we might now call 'the balance of nature':  
the ecological (i.e. population-dynamic) general equilibrium of many   
coexisting species in defined space. He seemed to think that Man could improve on it; and
seemed also to think that we could improve on the 'spontaneous order' of human societies
that undoubtedly arise from the unintended consequences of
many private, self-regarding human acts. [But Mill may not have been right.   
Or he may simply have been biassed. See Linda Raeder's recent book (2002) on   
Mill's 'constructivism'.]  
  
Anthony Waterman