Page:Modern Rationalism (1897).djvu/155

Rh hedonists had ever been the altruistic element, which is necessary in every system that seeks to uphold the traditional ethical code. This difficulty has been entirely surmounted in the evolutionary theory as it is presented by Mr. Leslie Stephen, the eminent Rationalistic critic, or by Mr. Herbert Spencer, the great Synthetic philosopher. Charles Darwin and W. K. Clifford are also earlier eminent exponents of the evolutionary theory. The new theory finds the incentive to altruism and the origin of the altruistic feeling in the social nature of man. Man is not an independent unit, whose actions happen to conflict with the interests of other independent units; but he is part of an organic whole, and half the pleasure of life is derived from that social connection. His actions are, therefore, directly and functionally related to his fellow-men, and to the integrity, health, and preservation of the organism into which he is incorporated. Altruism thus turns out to be an enlightened self-interest. The unthinking egoism of an Aristippus, or the anti-social individualism of a modern Nietzsche, are equally injurious to the individual himself in the ultimate analysis. He suffers with the depression of the social organism as inevitably as do the members of a diseased body. Morality is therefore, as Mr. Stephen says, "the definition of some of the most important qualities of the social organism." The bridge from egoism to universalism has been safely constructed.

Mr. Stephen, in his "Science of Ethics," accepts happiness (in a broader sense) as the ultimate end of reasonable conduct, but he rejects the Benthamite method of ascertaining empirically the conduciveness of actions to this end. He finds a more scientific criterion in their conduciveness to the "efficiency," for the purpose of its preservation, of the social organism (or social tissue, as he prefers to call it). He differs from Mr. Spencer in his estimate of the future, holding that sociology, which Mr. Spencer thinks sufficiently advanced to predict an ideal society, is as yet "nothing more than a collection of unverified guesses and vague generalities disguised under a more or less pretentious apparatus of quasi-scientific terminology." He does not, therefore, accept (few writers do) Mr. Spencer's distinction of absolute and relative ethics.

A few evolutionary writers think happiness or pleasure a