346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



may regard absolute political ethics as an airy vision, he makes 

 bit by bit reference to it in everything he does. I simply differ 

 from him in contending for a consistent and avowed reference, 

 instead of an inconsistent and unacknowledged reference. 



Even without any such strain on the imagination as may be 

 required to conceive a community consisting entirely of honest 

 and honorable men even without asking whether there is not a 

 set of definite limits to individual actions which such men would 

 severally insist upon and respect even without asserting that 

 these limits must, in the nature of things, result when men have 

 severally to carry on their lives in proximity with one another, I 

 should have thought it sufficiently clear that our system of justice, 

 by interdicting murder, assault, theft, libel, etc., recognizes the 

 existence of such limits and the necessity for maintaining them ; 

 and I should have thought it manifest enough that there must 

 exist an elaborate system of limits or restraints on conduct, by 

 conformity to which citizens may co-operate without dissension. 

 Such a system, deduced as it may be from the primary conditions 

 to be fulfilled, is what I mean by absolute political ethics. The 

 complaint of Prof. Huxley that absolute political ethics does not 

 show us what to do in each concrete case seems to be much like 

 the complaint of a medical practitioner who should speak slight- 

 ingly of physiological generalizations because they did not tell 

 him the right dressing for a wound or how best to deal with vari- 

 cose veins. I can not here explain further, but any one who does 

 not understand me may find the matter discussed at length in 

 a chapter on " Absolute and Relative Ethics " contained in the 

 "Data of Ethics." 



It appears to me somewhat anomalous that Prof. Huxley, who 

 is not simply a biologist but is familiar with science at large, and 

 who must recognize the reign of law on every hand, should tacitly 

 assume that there exists one group of lawless phenomena social 

 phenomena. For if they are not lawless if there are any natural 

 laws traceable throughout them, then our aim should be to ascer- 

 tain these and conform to them, well knowing that non-conformity 

 will inevitably bring penalties. Not taking this view, however, 

 it would seem as though Prof. Huxley agrees with the mass of 

 " practical " politicians, who think that every legislative measure 

 is to be decided by estimation of probabilities unguided by a priori 

 conclusions. Well, had they habitually succeeded, one might not 

 wonder that they should habitually ridicule abstract principles ; 

 but the astounding accumulation of failures might have been ex- 

 pected to cause less confidence in empirical methods. Of the 

 18,110 public acts passed between 20 Henry III and the end of 

 1872, Mr. Janson, Vice-President of the Law Society, estimates 

 that four fifths have been wholly or partially repealed, and that 



