ference intensely disagreeable, as an interference with his rights. The most fundamental moral right of a man is the right to do as he pleases, unrestricted by anything save the equal rights of others to the same freedom. If man were a perfectly moral being, he would voluntarily restrict himself to such limits. But a part of his inheritance from a primitive state, where egoistic self-assertion was necessary, is that tendency to disregard others' rights which constitutes an imperfection in his adjustment to present conditions; and so long as the existing maladjustment continues, there is need of an organ to bring about the mutual forbearance that society demands. This organ is found in what we call government. But here Spencer is able to get into connection with his formula, and lend to his natural individualistic bias the weight of a concordance with his philosophy. In two ways he justifies his individualism. First, and chiefly, according to the law of Evolution, functions become more and more specialized in definite organs. Now government is such a special organ. Its one distinct and fundamental work is to prevent mutual aggression. For that it is necessary; other social needs can be met by private initiative and association. By the general law of things, it ought to confine itself, therefore, to its special work. If it gets beyond these bounds, and tries to do the work for which there is other machinery, it will not only do this poorly, but it will lose so much energy for the proper performance of its own special task. There is another way in which the thing appeals to Spencer- a way which brings to light one of the presuppositions which, without his trying adequately to prove them, form the background of Spencer's whole system. This is the assumption that things work out in the evolving universe by purely natural laws, which it is quite impossible for man to interfere with or modify. Natural laws represent for Spencer not merely facts to be recognized, but to some extent, also, ideals that have a claim upon us. As one of his friends once said, "The laws of nature are to him what revealed religion is to us." To attempt to interfere with them is not only foolish and meddling, it is almost impious as well. By reason of this attitude, which, it may be noticed, is by no means a necessary consequence of evolution, he was led still further to discount the value of human efforts for remedying social conditions. Things will improve only when, in their own good time, the impersonal laws of nature work themselves out; our interference only helps to keep alive those who are socially unfit, and whose elimination in favor of a higher type is nature's method of advance. Evils can only rectify themselves by a selfadjusting process, which we cannot hasten, though apparently we may hinder it. In the Ethics, the idea of development is still further applied, this time to the facts of the moral experience. Here may be mentioned three points in particular: the use, once more, of the distinction between the individual and the race experience, to settle the quarrel over the so-called moral sense, or moral intuitions; the explanation of conscience, or the feeling of obligation, as taking its origin in social commands and restrictions; and the attempt to arbitrate between egoism and altruism, by making the moral life a composite of the two. A more general point is the application of evolution in the criticism of Utilitarianism. Spencer agreed with the Utilitarians that pleasure and avoidance of pain represent in a way the end of life. But he held Utilitarianism faulty for its inability to lay down any rules for the attainment of this end save those of pure empiricism-finding out by trial. To be a science, ethics must be able to deduce its results; and for this there is needed a more objective statement of the end than the mere feeling of pleasure. Spencer found this in the evolutionary conception of adjustment to environment. Such an adjustment involves natural laws, and by discovering such laws we can determine beforehand what course of conduct will secure happiness, since this is to be Since found only in a perfectly adjusted functioning. such a perfection of adjustment does not now exist, it follows that the principles of scientific ethics apply, strictly and without modification, not to our present conduct, but to a future society, where the process of evolution shall have reached an equilibrium. When such a state shall have been attained, all our troubles will be over, the idea of duty will disappear as no longer needed, and we shall all do the right by instinctive preference. In conclusion, we may turn back to a point to which reference already has been made. Our final estimate of Spencer's philosophy as a reasoned system must be considerably affected by the fact that its main outcome is an empirical generalization, which ignores most of the fundamental problems that a philosophy needs to consider. The recognition of development is compatible, that is, with a variety of opposing philosophies. Spencer has, it is true, an answer to give to these further problems, or to many of them. But his great deficiency lies in the fact that his answer, for the most part, is in the form of a merely temperamental attitude, implied or assumed as a background for his thinking, but seldom fairly brought to the light and scrutinized on its merits. This attitude is that to which the name of Naturalism has in recent times been given. Naturalism means that the natural laws of science are taken as the final word of explanation; that man, and human ideals, are to be regarded as nothing but products of nature, to be fully accounted for in terms which involve no more than can be detected in those prior processes of the developing world out of which they spring; that the complex, therefore, can always be reduced, without remainder, to the simple, the higher to the lower. This may all be true; but it needs at least a far more adequate proof than it ever occurred to Spencer to give. For him, it is almost wholly a matter of assumption; and the one point at which he does fairly face ultimate questions, is perhaps the weakest in his whole system. This is his Agnosticism. It is possible, so he thinks, to show that by the nature of our minds we are necessarily shut out from a knowledge of ultimate reality. We are as incompetent to think it as a deaf man to understand sounds. The proof of our incapacity is briefly this: that we can only think in terms of relating one thing to an. other, of comparison, whereas Absolute reality, by definition, is not relative, but absolute, and is in consequence beyond our grasp. On the other hand, it is implied in all our relative knowledge even, since there would be no sense in calling this relative, were there not something absolute to which it is contrasted. Although, then, we cannot think the Absolute, we have a sort of vague, indefinite meaning, which assures us that it really exists in some unknown form. That which comes closest to a description of this unknown reality, Spencer finds in the term Force. The Unknowable supplies what for Spencer is the only possible religion for the modern man of science. Historical religions are, of course, subject to a naturalistic explanation, and are discredited by their origin. But hidden in all positive religions, there is an irreducible minimum which science does not touch. This is the feeling of awe in the presence of the mysteries of the universe. If anything, science tends to emphasize the ultimate mystery of existence. A feeling of awe, then, in the face of the unknowable force from which all things spring, is the final form which religion is destined to take. Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism. Fiske, Darwinism and other Essays, Cosmic Philosophy. Watson, Outline of Philosophy. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel. Stephen, The English Utilitarians. Bowne, Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Collins, Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy. § 42. Conclusion Man's attempt progressively to come to a knowledge of the nature of the real world in which he finds himself, and of which he is a part, is at the same time a revelation of man to himself. It is the gradual freeing of himself from a power which is strange and foreign to him, through the recognition that his own life is bound up with this supposed external reality, and that only by accepting it, and putting himself in line with the forces that it represents, can he attain a freedom and self-realization that is substantial and real. This we have tried to show is the meaning of the history of philosophy. In so far as man is truly free, he knows the truth; and in so far as he has a real insight into truth, he is free. There is thus no contradiction between that practical philosophy which brings a man's life into harmony with itself, and the theoretical impulse, which is gratified by the widest possible knowledge; both have ultimately the same end in view. In closing, it may be well to point out, in a few words, some of the more general questions which our own time has received as a legacy from the past. And the central problem of all is still the problem which has come before us all along as the conflict between science and religion, mechanism and teleology, fact and ideal. How, in other words, are we to reconcile what we know of the laws of the outer world-laws of rigid mechanical necessity — with the needs of Spirit, the demand for freedom, the existence of ideals? That the laws of nature have a validity in their own realm, is the net result of the Age of Science — a result which it is now time to take as established and impregnable. But it is impossible, on the other hand, to adopt |