Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/389

Rh must be assured first of all things. Everything, therefore, that is important for the most prolonged existence of the greatest number is also important for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The utilitarian will utilize all that the evolutionist can tell him—and one thing more.

The evolutionist will tell him that there is a correlation, on one side, between disagreeable and destructive, and on the other side between pleasurable and advantageous action; that the "useful," in the sense of the pleasurable, nearly agrees with the useful in the sense of the life-maintaining; and that there is a close connection between health and happiness and between disease and unhappiness. While this correlation is far from being perfect, it is, nevertheless, true that a more certain road to happiness lies through maintaining or improving the health than through a direct striving after a maximum of pleasure. The same rule prevails in society. The sound health of society must be the practical end through reaching which alone the real prosperity of society can be attained.

The truth that health is a fundamental condition of happiness has, indeed, not been unknown to any ethicist; that pattern of ancient cheerfulness, the philosopher Epicurus, is an emphatic reminder of this fact. And that the care of one's own health is enjoined also through regard for others, and that the so-called duties toward one's self are really duties toward others, and for that reason only duties, is likewise a doctrine that did not have first to be learned from Darwin and Spencer. But we have to thank Spencer for having adduced, in his exposition of the facts of transmission, so potent evidence of this truth, that no such dictum upon it as Schopenhauer has uttered will ever again be possible. While, however, he has performed the service of defining the physical conditions of happiness with greater emphasis than any of his predecessors, it does not follow that the utilitarian method founded by Bentham will have to be given up. Evolutionist writers have reminded us that too little attention has been paid to health in discipline and in public instruction. This is too true, but it is not in consequence of the application of utilitarian but of non-utilitarian precepts. And if it has been declared to be one of the results of the doctrine of a correlation between species-maintaining and pleasure-bringing action that family happiness is the highest human happiness, that is only a confirmation of a view expressed long ago by utilitarian ethicists, as appeared most plainly a hundred years ago (1785) in Paley's "Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy."

If, however, by the phrase, "health of society," something else is understood than a society consisting of healthy individuals, then the word "health" is only a metaphor, and one the sense of which is not clear; and to put this metaphor in the place of the principle of the happiness of the whole can not be regarded as an improvement. If Bentham should return now, he would have to censure the evolutionist