Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/610

594 of emanation, the particular form, in working away from the original unity, is departing from perfection; whereas, according to the idea of evolution, the Good is the product or end, not the beginning of the process—it is ahead of the particular activity, not behind it. An evolutionary ethics, therefore, must be one according to which the Good is realized in the successive moments of a process which is to be described as the continuous tendency towards integration in differentiation.

The general standpoint from which Spencer's ethics will be criticised is, that wherever conscious struggles occur, wherever there is an alternation of tensions with solutions of tension, there is the field of moral judgment. The different impulses which are factors in the struggle constitute the content of the Good, and the resolution of these forces into a single purpose constitutes moral conduct or the Good. It is the essential postulate of an evolutionary ethics, that these impulses undergo change, that the content of the Good is a variable. The Good is never fixed, never absolved from contingencies; the morality of to-day is not the morality of to-morrow. The boy who wants to go fishing, and who still has some desire to go to school, finally makes a plan by which he may do both. The Good here is the final reconciliation or arrangement between all the factors which contributed to the conflict. In this particular situation, it would have been wrong merely to go to school, and wrong merely to go fishing. The Good is always in the nature of a mean or compromise; it is a solution of difficulty which embraces and represents all the factors in the struggle. In terms of control, the Good is the case where every impulse functions in the outcome—where action is controlled by the whole self. The decision or process of integration itself is the Good—there is no further principle of valuation to be applied to the process; this adjustment of impulses into a single plan or unit constitutes their valuation. The inclusiveness of this plan is the criterion of its rightness. That, therefore, which is good to-day will be bad to-morrow; for the arrangements, the plans, or the habits of to-day are inadequate to the needs of to-morrow. The repeated failures of habit and the constantly necessitated re-adjustments are the very nature of conscious and of moral life.