77o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



herbivores of humanity, or by destroying in any way I can other car- 

 nivores who happen to stand in my way ? If my acts are well ad- 

 justed to these ends, as Machiavelli says they are, why are they not 

 good ? The result will be that survival of the fittest which science 

 proclaims to be the decree of Nature. Is it not difficult to find an an- 

 swer which will not involve what Dr. Van Buren Denslow derides as 

 theistic altruism ? 



The motive power to which, at bottom, Mr. Spencer's ethic mainly 

 appeals in urging to moral effort or self-restraint, is the hope of a future 

 social state, which in his, as in other agnostic philosophies, fills the 

 void left by the discarded hope of a future life. Here, again, he is 

 confronted by the logical consequences of his mechanical necessity : 

 what must come will ; we need not make any effort or forego any 

 gratification to bring it about ; the " co-operation " which he speaks 

 of is needless, or, rather, illusory ; nor is it in our power to forestall 

 the process of evolution. Apart from this, however, the prospect of a 

 social goal indefinitely distant, and to be attained not by the individual 

 man, but by humanity, influences only highly educated imaginations 

 and refined natures, if it greatly influences even these. What does 

 Bill Sykes, what does a director of the Glasgow Bank, what does 

 William Tweed, what does Fiske, or St. Arnaud, or St. Arnaud's em- 

 ployer, care about the fortunes of humanity a million years after he 

 as an individual being has ceased to exist ? What impelling force, to 

 keep that side of the matter in view also, will such visions have with 

 the multitudes of common people, unread in the " Philosophic Posi- 

 tive," on whose conscientious performance of duty society depends, 

 and whose goodness is the salt of the earth ? The philosophers of the 

 ultra-evolutionary school put out of sight, in the scientific sweep of 

 their social theories, two commonplace facts individuality and death. 

 Death some of the philosophers of the last century thought might be 

 abolished : those of the present appear to think that, if we will all be 

 quiet and refrain from ill-omened words, it may be hushed up. They 

 constantly quote Spinoza's saying, that true wisdom concerns itself 

 not with death but with life. Spinoza had inherited the creed of re- 

 ligious secularism, which in his active intellect took the form of pan- 

 theism without, however, losing its essential character as a belief 

 generated at a stage before the wisdom or the folly, as the case may 

 be, which concerns itself with death and the life beyond death, had 

 come into the world. But does any one seriously believe that man 

 can now be put back into that infantine state in which he once passed 

 his days like the other animals, without spiritual aspiration, and, like 

 them, Jay down at last to sleep without hope or fear? What a clear- 

 ance of art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and history does a return 

 to contented and dreamless secularism imply ! Yet the other part of 

 the undertaking is even more arduous. That men should be made to 

 feel themselves members one of another, granting the theistic hypothe- 



