Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/42

30 to Spencer, for the former—although of course he would have needs met by private beneficence.

Less directly and unambiguously Nietzsche had made use of Darwinism as one of the many motives in his challenging of all existing standards. His fundamental demand for an overturning and revaluation of all values rests indeed on the sociological distinction between morals of masters and morals of slaves, but his thoughts of the Will to Power and the Superman seem to get definition and imagery, at least in part, from the cosmic process.

There is no doubt that 'evolution' has found wide acceptance as a source for moral standards, and further that the particular reading of evolution which finds in it the precept of ruthless self-assertion as the method of progress is by many considered the only correct interpretation. Criticism of both these positions has been a prominent feature of ethical discussion. Sidgwick's doctrine of the uniqueness of the ethical valuation was developed by Moore. If 'good' means just 'good' and nothing else, then we cannot substitute survival value for moral value. Moral valuation will sit in judgment upon the cosmos; it will not abdicate its own standards, Idealists have insisted upon the significance of the self as a factor not found in nature aside from man, though there has been little disposition to adopt Green's theory of the reproduction of an eternal consciousness. But the most brilliant attack upon the ethics of naturalism was that by Huxley in his Romanes Lecture, who pointed out in striking epigrams the difference between a cosmic process which seems to reck little of any values and an ethical process controlled by ends set up by man.

As one reviews the discussion he is likely to reflect that as usual each side has a half truth. Moral standards are not identical with survival values,

"'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die." None the less a standard that called for universal suicide would be paradoxical. To abolish all life would be to abolish all valuation and all values. Even the advocates of war as a nurse of the virtues do not claim that it should be carried to the stage