Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/611

No. 6.] Spencer is apparently in harmony with such a point of view in the chapter entitled "What Ideas and Sentiments are Ethical?" He says, in substance: "Human mind has no originally implanted conscience ... but ... the sentiments and ideas current in each society become adjusted to the kinds of activity predominating in it." A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge are applauded, and conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code in which harmonious coöperation prevails. If conditions stay constant long enough, men will develop the emotions and conscience appropriate to this code. "Clearly therefore, the conceptions of right, obligation, duty, and the sentiments associated with those conceptions, have a far wider range than the conduct ordinarily conceived as the subject-matter of moral science. In different places and under different circumstances, substantially the same ideas and feelings are joined with classes of actions of totally opposite kinds." In such a statement of the relativity of the Good, Spencer comes nearest to a really evolutionary explanation of moral life; but in the rest of his work he is not by any means consistent with the principle. There is, indeed, a systematic contradiction of it running through all his discussions. This may best be brought out by reviewing his distinction between 'absolute' and 'relative' ethics. Speaking of the absolutely right and the relatively right, Spencer says: "In multitudinous cases no right, properly so called, can be alleged, but only a least wrong." And again: "We have to recognize the further truth that in many cases where there is no absolutely right course, but only courses that are more or less wrong, it is not possible to say which is the least wrong." Absolute or 'real' ethics, he would hold, has to do only with completely evolved conduct. "Ethics has for its subject-matter the most highly-evolved conduct as displayed by the most highly-evolved being, man—is a specification of those traits which his conduct assumes on reaching its limit of evolution." "We must consider the ideal