452 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



iinhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recog- 

 nized 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 equili- 

 bration. 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 de- 

 mands of social life. But the influences of advancing civilization 

 have throughout human evolution been gradually molding char- 

 acter 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 adjust- 

 ment " * of constitution to conditions as the goal of moral evolu- 

 tion, 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 pro- 

 foundest 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, further- 

 more, 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 philoso- 

 phy 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, 



* The Principles of Ethics, 244. 



