Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/160

 146 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

found in his work Justice, which constitutes Part IV of his Prin- ciples of Ethics?

As is well known, Mr. Spencer is a defender of the theory that the evolutionary process has been able, not only to develop the feeling of moral obligation, but to bring about its very crea- tion from materials which did not originally contain it even in germ. The illogicalness of such a position would seem sufficiently obvious, but is somewhat explained when we consider the essen- tial character which Mr. Spencer ascribes to the ethical idea :

Most people [he says] regard the subject of ethics as being conduct con- sidered as calling forth approbation or reprobation. But the piimary subject- matter of ethics is conduct considered objectively as producing good or bad results to self or others, or both. 3

Acting upon such a conception as this, it is, of course, com- paratively easy for him to treat human justice as but an out- growth from animal or sub-human conduct.

Within this lower world of life it is undoubtedly true that development has been an outcome of a competitive regime in which those less fit, as related to their environment, have been destroyed, and those more fit, in the same sense, have survived and been enabled to transmit their favorable characteristics to their offspring, and thus the gradual evolution of higher, more complex, and better integrated species rendered possible. It is also true that this weeding process has been the result of an order

1 In addition to the support claimed to be derived from the empiric facts of bio- logical evolution, Mr. Spencer, positivist though he be, relies also upon a bald doc- trine of abstract natural rights. In that chapter of \i\sjustice which is devoted to the establishment of the authority of the individualistic formula which he has obtained, he avowedly rests it upon an a priori ground, and calls to his support the dicta of such men as Blackstone and Mackintosh, wherein they have declared the supreme, invari- able, and all-controlling power of natural law. Spencer closes with the truly remark- able argument that " paying some respect to these dicta (to which I may add that of the German jurists with their Naturrechf) does not imply unreasoning credulity. We may reasonably suspect that, however much they may be in form open to criticism, they are true in essence." This is truly an argument remarkable, not only because of the method of demonstration involved, but because of the total misconception involved as to the connotation of the term Naturrecht in German jurisprudence. Mr. Spencer goes on, however, to assign a special and limited character to a priori beliefs in gen- eral, but in this we need not follow him, as we shall presently cover this point when we examine Mr. Spencer's system from a different standpoint.

3 Justice, p. 3.