Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/168

 I 54 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

essence of justice, seems to me to be neither just nor unjust, neither right nor wrong, neither moral nor immoral. No doubt this process has made the later generations of animals stronger, more cunning, and better adapted to the environment than the earlier generations. And were we aiming at a similar improvement in the breed of man, we might perhaps not be able to do better than let the process of natural selection go on undisturbed. In that case we should have no charities for the poor, no hospitals for the sick, no protection for the weak and helpless. If the goal be the superiority of future genera- tions, let the least forward varieties be eliminated. But there is no reason or excuse for such consequences when it is recognized that the conception of human welfare as ethical end implies, first of all, the well-being of existing humanity, each member of which is to be treated as an end in himself, never as a mere means to other ends, and then, secondarily, the welfare of future humanity but only in so far as is compatible with the just claims of every living child of man. Mr. Spencer's moralization of natural selection is not demanded by an ethical system which places the supreme end in the welfare of the species, nor is it in itself inherently defensible. To the contention that the biological law "possesses the highest possible authority," because it records the process followed in the maintenance and evolution of life, it must be replied that even if this circumstance invested it with "authority" as it does not natural selection, when it reaches the plane of rational life, is sub- ordinated to the higher principle of human sympathy and sociality, which is the taproot alike of morality and of the organized community in which it is realized. Ethics, accordingly, carries us into a sphere not merely of living, but of living well in which the biological formula is without application. 1

In other words, with the advent of rational, self-conscious, moral man, the aims of life are so changed as to render inappropriate that process of development which is efficient in the lower animal world. With self-consciousness comes the appreciation on the part of the individual of the possibility of a personal perfection, the formation in idea of a happier and better life than a mere animal existence. Whether the formation of such an ideal be the result of a divine afflatus or the effect of race experience, its existence is undeniable.

In the light, then, of this new conception, the term "fit for survival" assumes a new significance. Fitness now means ethical fitness. As has been said by another of Mr. Spencer's critics, social progress thus becomes a progress "the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but

'Vol. I, No. I.