SCIENCE AND MORALITY. 773 



most important matter of all they have retrograded to this extent, 

 what becomes of the hope of civilization ? 



Yet Mr. Spencer himself sees the promised land of evolutionary 

 adjustment and felicity from a very advanced Pisgah. His man is a 

 man in a suburban villa with a good business in the city, who has only 

 to be content with a sufficient income, avoiding the moral gulf of over- 

 work, and that of " snatching a hasty sandwich," instead of taking a 

 regular luncheon every day. Alas ! to say nothing of the myriads 

 who in the past have lived and died in slavery and misery of all kinds, 

 how many centuries must elapse before the question between a hasty 

 sandwich and a regular luncheon becomes a practical one for any ap- 

 preciable portion of mankind ! To do too much office-work is bad for 

 health, and therefore, as Mr. Spencer most truly says, bad in every 

 way ; but how many are there who must either do too much work or 

 starve ! It is not healthful to be on the wintry Atlantic clinging to 

 the frozen shrouds, to pant all day beside the fiery furnace, to be delv- 

 ing in the dark mine, to be sitting as a cab-driver exposed to all weath- 

 ers, to be toiling as a farm-laborer with overtasked sinews from dawn 

 to dusk. Of the labor which is the lot of most men, and in which their 

 lives are almost entirely spent, very little is, like that of the artist, 

 relieved by any sense of enjoyment ; the bulk of it is drudgery and 

 nothing else. Schopenhauer exaggerates, of course. Were it not so, 

 the end, in spite of his super-subtile objection to the exertion of will in 

 self-destruction, would be universal suicide. There is happiness in 

 life ; above all, the happiness of affection, though it is in this that 

 we most keenly feel the sting of death. Yet if this life were all, and 

 if enjoyment were the object of being, it would be difficult to deny 

 that the pessimist had a formidable case, or that the world, on the 

 whole and for the majority of mankind, was a failure. It is, at least 

 it may be, otherwise if the theistic hypothesis is true, if the secret of 

 the universe is not mechanical but moral, if the paramount object is 

 the formation of character, and if the results of effort are to endure, in 

 any form whatever, beyond the physical catastrophe of the planet. 

 Trying to be good is within the power of a galley-slave ; and it is 

 conceivable that by being ever so little better than himself the most 

 abject of mankind may cast into the moral treasury a mite more precious 

 in the estimation of the Author of our moral being than the effortless 

 virtue of a born seraph. In touching upon such points we feel that 

 the criticism which repels a physical account of morality is not merely 

 destructive, but conserves something on which it is possible that a ra- 

 tional theology may hereafter be partly based. 



In short, while we find, as was said before, in the " Data of Eth- 

 ics " much that is acute, much that is eloquent, .much that is interest- 

 ing, we do not find in it a new basis of morality. We do not find a 

 practical answer to the question which was put at the beginning. We 

 do not find anything that, on the mass of mankind, is likely to act as 



