Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/109

84 then it is hard indeed to see what the doctrine of evolution can do to help us to get it. Mr. Spencer seems to forget that a doctrine of Means is not a doctrine of Ends.

In sum then, either the fundamental moral distinctions are clear apart from the physical fact of evolution, or the physical fact cannot illustrate for us the distinctions that we do not previously know. If there is a real moral conflict between egoism and altruism, then this conflict must concern the aims of these two dispositions, not the accidental outcome that we reach, nor the more or less variable means that we employ in following the dispositions. And any effort to reconcile the two tendencies by showing that through evolution, or otherwise, it has become necessary for an altruistic aim to be reached by seemingly selfish means, or for a selfish purpose to be gained by seemingly altruistic devices, — any such effort has no significance for ethics. If the question were: “Shall we buy mutton or beef at the market to-day?” it would surely be a strange answer to the question, or “reconciliation” of the alternatives, if one replied, “But whichever you do you must go over the same road to get to the market.” How then are we helped by knowing that, in our society, altruism and egoism, these two so bitterly opposed moral aims, have very often to hide their conflicts under a use of very much the same outward show of social conformity.

There is indeed no doubt that all the knowledge we may get about the facts of evolution will help us to judge of the means by which we can realize the