Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/612

596 man as existing in the ideal social state ... only when they co-exist, can there exist that ideal conduct which absolute ethics has to formulate, and which relative ethics has to take as the standard." Again: "This final permanent code alone admits of being definitely formulated, and so constituting ethics as a science in contrast with empirical ethics." Spencer seems virtually to give up his evolutionary principle, when he adopts phrases like 'the limit of evolution' and 'completely evolved conduct.' It is, indeed, a contradiction in terms to speak of evolution as stopping—as a static process. There is no final product of evolution nor is there any permanent set of habits which is the subject-matter of absolute ethics; for if we were able to imagine development as complete, we should see a life of perfected habits or pure reflexes—one to which ethical categories would not apply. Spencer is looking for the moral end in some one remote state, instead of seeing it in every stage of the evolutionary process, the earlier as well as the later. A man is not better than an animal simply by virtue of having a more highly evolved and complicated organism—that is a fact of descriptive science, not of ethics. His moral plane depends upon the adequacy of the conscious adjustment within his own environment. The content of the moral sphere, therefore, is not some one fixed form of social life; but it is constituted by the impulses which function in any conscious struggle whatsoever. This content is a thoroughly shifting one, so that what is a moral situation at one time may be indifferent or non-moral at another, no particular group of activities being identified as the subject-matter of ethics. Spencer's designation of the most highly evolved conduct of the most highly evolved men as the only subject of a 'real' ethics could not, therefore, be admitted; since there must be in the lives of savages, perhaps even of animals, points of effort and tension, psychic moments in the resolution of some crisis, which are just as truly problems of control and complete expression as are the activities of the most developed beings. One is included in a real science of ethics quite as properly as is the other.