Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/614

598 external forces tending to overthrow it." Again: "The life called moral is the one in which the maintenance of the moving equilibrium reaches completeness or approaches most nearly completeness." The idea is here the settled rhythm, the undisturbed balance, the perfected equilibrium; but when this balance is finally reached, there is no longer any necessity for morality.

The Biological View. Conduct, in physiological language, is the harmonious fulfillment of all the functions of the organism. Spencer says, in effect, that the end is a "balance of function"— that it is the adjustment of internal to external relations—of organism to environment. Spencer's view seems to be that evolution explains only changes in internal relation, and that it is possible for the external relations to develop apart from the internal. He appears to maintain that the organism develops in response to an environment whose changes are more or less accidental and are initiated without reference to the organism. He speaks as if some day there would be a complete and permanant adjustment to environment, and as if man were nearer to that final goal than is the amœba. Such a view implies that the amœba has the greater vistas stretching before it, and that the environment relative to it is a thousand times more appalling and problematic than it is to the organism which has already made considerable progress. We may reasonably suppose that the vistas do not exist for the animal, and that man is in one sense no nearer any final goal than is the animal. To an animal lacking the senses of man, the universe as discriminated by man does not exist. No two human beings, even, have the same environment, nor does the same person move in the same environment as he passes from interest to interest. Environment is always correlative with organism, one is exactly as complex and involved as the other. The horizon of consciousness is never any wider, the environment never any more intricate, than the nearest problem to be solved or the next choice to be made. It is, in fact, within the activity or the problem of adjustment that the distinction of organism and environment must be made.