Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/231

 made perfectly definite, it would necessarily go a far way toward settling the social ethics, which is made up of individual interests, and has for its function the balancing of each against the rest. The first division of social ethics is Justice, which is the prime condition of cooperation. The final division is Beneficence, negative and positive, involving all those nice adjustments of egoism and altruism previously commented on.

While there are many questions of great interest propounded for debate in this highly original work, I must be content with adverting to what I gather to be the author's main position—the displacing of utilitarian calculation or empirical Hedonism by an ethics of evolution. Not that the acceptance of the evolution hypothesis is an essential preliminary; if it were so, a great many people would at once refuse a hearing to the whole speculation. The relationship of the physical and mental, taken as a matter of fact, is in reality the chief cornerstone of the whole erection.

Mr. Sidgwick, after stating the difficulties attending an empirical Hedonism, as a means of investigating right and wrong, examined the various alternative methods "of determining what conduct will be attended with the greatest excess of pleasure and pain, so as to dispense with the continual reference to empirical results, which it has been found so difficult to estimate with accuracy." In book ii., chapter vi., of his "Methods of Ethics," he took up Mr. Spencer's views as propounded in "Social Statics." To this chapter Mr. Spencer expressly replies in his "Criticisms and Explanations." The real reply, however, is the entire volume. We must peruse and assimilate the whole, before giving an opinion on the question as between evolution and empirical Hedonism. I had occasion to remark, in noticing Mr. Sidgwick's work ("Mind," vol. i., p. 185), that the Hedonic or utilitarian calculation admits of being helped out by a variety of devices such as to mitigate the apparent hopelessness of the problem. Every suggestion of this nature should be welcomed and made the most of. Now Mr. Spencer recasts the mode of propounding the problem, without altering its essential character as an inquiry into the best means of attaining happiness. But he does more than this. He provides certain new lights that were not possessed by the earliest theorists on the side of utility.

The comparison with empirical Hedonism is best taken in the personal ethics. It is admitted that a code of personal conduct can never be made entirely definite. "But ethical requirements may here be to such extent affiliated upon physical necessities as to give them a partially scientific authority. It is clear that between the expenditure of bodily substance in vital activities, and the taking in of materials from which this substance may be renewed, there is a direct relation. It is clear, too, that there is a direct relation between the wasting of