Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/516

 502 B. R. MARETT : ' typical '. Pure type like pure norm is identical with pure form. In Biology, however, it is customary to use ' typical ' as equivalent to ' racial ' or something of the sort, that is, to use it to express the progressively selected character trans- mitted by inheritance in a real kind or species and regarded by science as the determinate ' biological end ' of the mem- bers of that species. So too then in evolutionary Ethics ' normal ' is constantly employed to signify ' selectively adapted,' though by a dangerous transference of thought the attribute of normality is too often attached to the pas- sive instead of to the active condition, to the amorphous physical environment instead of to the morphological self- determining agency. Mr. Spencer, for instance, is especially given in Ethics and Biology alike to this fallacious mode of representing the adequacy of the typical organism to its surroundings as rather the result of a happy accident of circumstance than the achievement of the living thing coming into fuller being according to its own intrinsic law of development. Now in a strictly biological connexion, perhaps, it may accord best with the working hypotheses of the particular science involved to exclude all idea of any ' unconscious metaphysic ' immanent in subanimate nature. In human Ethics, on the other hand, where teleological adaptation is an empirical fact that cannot possibly be ignored, thus to divorce normal action from norm-seeking action is bad science and bad philosophy to boot. Hence a ' normal ' Self may, I think, by right of the natural associa- tions of the word be taken to stand for a moral Self that in comparison with other, competing, that is, actually possible, forms of moral selfhood is self-adapted, self-harmonised, both in regard to outer circumstances and to inward diversities of content ; that contains, in short, the mixture of relatively adjusted characters which the good man as good and as mortal man displays in contrast to all other mixtures not so good. And this question of nomenclature settled, let us proceed from words to facts so as to define the general nature of this happy mixture as best we may in the light of com- parative ethical science. If I rightly understand Clifford's all too brief essay ' On the Scientific Basis of Morals,' the Tribal Self is sharply opposed by him to the Individual Self with the object of pro- viding the ethical inquirer with his fundamental working distinction. This distinction is based on an alleged fun- damental difference of origin. Now such insistence on Origins is the typical peculiarity of the Evolutionary Method as such ; nor do I wish to quarrel with it. On the contrary