Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/27

11 remove from the intentions of these men themselves. We have only to recall how civilizations, separated in earlier times by national exclusiveness, have been fruitfully united by vast conquests, such as those of Alexander, Caesar, the German emperors, and even Napoleon. Though many a battle-field has been sown with the bodies of men, fighting under heroes who were the dupes of the Unconscious, only a mind incapable of a truly historical survey would despise these events, since from such battle-fields have sprouted rich and beneficent harvests. The Unconscious attains to other ends by way of peace also, etc."

And, once more, Mr. Spencer writes, "The ultimate man is one in whom the adaptation to the social state has gone so far as to produce a correspondence between all the promptings of his nature and all the requirements of his life, as carried on in society. If so, it is a necessary implication that there exists an ideal code of conduct, formulating the behavior of the completely adapted man to the completely evolved society. Such a code is that here called absolute ethics," as distinguished from relative ethics, the only ethics which applies to "the acts of men during the transition which has been, is still, and long will be in progress."

We may notice, in passing, von Hartmann's fine phrase 'dupe of the Unconscious,' descriptive of the hero or genius, and also the sturdy courage of Spencer, who bids us plod on through this benighted age, even if most of heaven's candles are out. The happy mortal, whom he calls 'the ultimate man,' is still a long way in the future, invisible even to the trained eye of a philosophic Lynceus. It must be left to the reader to consider the import of the fact that these views have sprung up independently and almost simultaneously in England, Germany, and Russia; and it must also be left to him to discover the extent to which the theory that all mankind is being conveyed along by an unknown power, implies even in the minds of its framers the subsidence