758 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in his own veins, goes calmly to the hospital to die. On the other 

 hand, a man, between whom and a great fortune there stands a single 

 life, takes that life in such a way as to escape suspicion, gets possession 

 of the fortune, and, instead of a life of drudgery to which he would 

 otherwise have been doomed, passes his days in the healthy develop- 

 ment of all his faculties, in the enjoyment of every pleasure, intel- 

 lectual and social, as well as physical, amid the troops of friends and 

 grateful dependents with which his hospitality and munificence sur- 

 round him, and, after an existence prolonged by comfort, ease, and 

 immunity from care, dies universally honored and lamented. Why is 

 the first man happy, and the second miserable ? Theism, on his own 

 hypothesis, has an answer ready. What is the answer of agnostic 

 science ? We must prefix an epithet, because without it a distinction 

 drawn between science and theism begs the question. A rational 

 theist maintains that theism is science. 



We are likely to find the answer, if anywhere, in the " Data of 

 Ethics," by Mr. Herbert Spencer a book belonging to a series which 

 has earned for its author, from Darwin himself, the title of " our great 

 philosopher " ; and which every one, whether he accepts its general 

 conclusions or not, will allow to exhibit powers of acute criticism, and 

 to be written in a most lucid and attractive style.' 



Mr. Spencer commences, as might have been expected, not with 

 humanity, but with the mollusks, and treats men simply as the last (he 

 says the highest, but we have a caveat to enter against that phrase) of 

 the evolutionary series. His tests of right and wrong in the actions of 

 the most evolved of animals, as in the case of the least evolved, are 

 pleasure and pain pleasure denoting that the action is favorable, pain 

 that it is unfavorable, to the vitality of the organism. His " supreme 

 end" is "increased duration," together, if we understand his phrase- 

 ology rightly, with increased intensity, " of life." An authoritative 

 conscience, duty, virtue, obligation, principle, and rectitude of motive, 

 no more enter into his definitions, or form parts of his system, than 

 does the religious sanction. Of that which constitutes moral beauty, 

 he has no word. Actions of a kind purely pleasant are absolutely 

 right. The highest instance of right conduct is a mother suckling her 

 child, because " there is at once to the mother gratification, and to the 

 child satisfaction of appetite, a satisfaction which accompanies further- 

 ance of life, growth, and increasing enjoyment." That the action is a 

 mere performance of a function of nature, involving the exertion of no 

 high quality, does not lower its place in the scale. Conduct, even the 

 noblest and most heroic, which has any concomitant of pain or any 

 painful consequence, is, to that extent, wrong, and the highest claim 

 to be made for such conduct is that it is the least wrong which under 

 the conditions is possible. We need not shrink from the hypothesis, 

 or even commit ourselves to the rejection of it. Possibly the conclu- 

 sion ultimately reached may be that man is nothing but the highest 



