Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/470

452 unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct, and are to be conformed to, irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery."

If it is asked toward what general conclusions regarding the moral prospects of the race the Spencerian ethics may be said to point, the broadest answer will be found in the statement of the universal law, already frequently referred to—the law of equilibration. We bring with us into life instincts and impulses which we derive from our long line of animal and barbarous ancestry: our natures are very imperfectly adjusted to the demands of social life. But the influences of advancing civilization have throughout human evolution been gradually molding character into more and more complete harmony with the sum-total of the conditions under which we live. Hence we may anticipate a time, far distant though it must needs be, when the internal forces which we know as feelings will be in fairly perfect balance with the external forces which they encounter; when, in other words, the nature of man will have become fully adapted to the associated state. Mr. Spencer has, indeed, within recent years spoken less optimistically about this consummation than he did when, in Social Statics, he asserted the evanescence of evil. But he still looks forward to an "approximately complete adjustment" of constitution to conditions as the goal of moral evolution, toward which we are actually, if slowly, moving.

And now, even in so slight a sketch as this, we can not leave the synthetic system without broaching one last issue of the profoundest importance. What are the bearings of the Spencerian philosophy upon the ultimate questions of religion?

We have seen that on the very threshold of his undertaking Mr. Spencer cleared the way for constructive effort by defining philosophy as knowledge of the highest generality, and thus asserting its limitations within the sphere of the phenomenal. Ontological speculations are thus abandoned, and our concern is not with the absolute, the unconditioned, the infinite, but with the relative, the conditioned, the finite. We have seen, furthermore, that in the application of the universal laws of evolution to the various phenomena of the sciences we have to seek the final interpretation of even the highest manifestations of psychical life in terms of matter, motion, force. To what general conclusions do we thus seem to stand committed? Surely, it may be urged, there is but one inference possible. Our philosophy is a philosophy of materialism pure and simple.

Such an inference, however, though often loudly proclaimed by the ignorant and the perverse, is one that the careful student,