LITERARY NOTICES. 



847 



the interplay between intelligence and 

 conscience was made very clear ; plainly 

 did it appear that without knowledge, 

 aud much knowledge, without a judg- 

 ment trained to nice discrimination, the 

 desire to do right and justice in these 

 days of complex social life must be 

 vain. In this department summaries of 

 experience in reform were added by 

 men who have devoted their lives to 

 seeing the Indian righted, the wretched 

 in cities relieved, the prisoner born to 

 new hope and purpose. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



Justice : Being Part IV of the Principles of 

 Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. New 

 York : D. Appleton & Co. 1891. Pp. 291. 



The appearance of a new volume of the 

 Synthetic Philosophy after a long enforced 

 interval of rest on the part of its author is 

 an event which merits the hearty congrat- 

 ulation, not only of the avowed disciples 

 of Mr. Spencer in America a goodly and 

 growing number of our most intelligent 

 thinkers but also of all friends of scien- 

 tific and liberal thought. 



It is now twelve years since the publica- 

 tion of the Data of Ethics. As was then an- 

 nounced, this volume was issued in advance 

 of the regular order of publication, under the 

 pressure of premonitions of failing health. 

 Similar considerations have impelled Mr. 

 Spencer to leave unfinished the concluding 

 sections of The Principles of Sociology and 

 intervening parts of The Principles of Mo- 

 rality, in order to apply himself to the ex- 

 position of the law of Justice, which we have 

 his explicit warrant for regarding as the con- 

 summate fruit of his patient study and dis- 

 criminating thought. The noble volumes 

 which have preceded it are all subsidiary 

 to the practical application of the principles 

 of Justice to the pressing problems of our 

 societary life. 



Viewed from the standpoint of the phil- 

 osophical evolutionist, nothing surely could 

 be more timely than the appearance of this 

 work. The past decade has been an era of 

 crude and rash speculation upon social and 

 political problems. In America, no less than 

 in England, we have need to listen to the voice 



of one who looks neither to th^ inventions 

 of a closet-philosophy nor to the chance- 

 suggestions of the political empiricist, but 

 to the eternal laws of Nature for wise coun- 

 sel and enlightenment upon these vast is- 

 sues. We have recently listened to enthu- 

 siasts who expect to abolish poverty and 

 reform society by the simple panacea of the 

 single tax ; we have seen a political party 

 spring into an ephemeral existence based 

 upon the success of a visionary novel the 

 effort of a professional story-writer to im- 

 agine a society constructed on principles as 

 foreign as possible to those illustrated in 

 the existing social order. Another political 

 organization promises to abolish crime and 

 regenerate human nature by the simple ex- 

 pedient of prohibiting the manufacture and 

 sale of alcoholic drinks ; and anarchistic agi- 

 tators would abolish the evils of society by 

 the short and easy method of abolishing so- 

 ciety itself. It is refreshing to turn from 

 this array of absurdly inadequate panaceas 

 to the wise and conservative counsels of Mr. 

 Spencer, whose more than seventy years, 

 with whatsoever burdens of physical in- 

 firmity they may have afflicted him, have 

 detracted nothing from his logical acumen, 

 his clarity of thought, or lucidity of diction. 

 The first six chapters of the present vol- 

 ume were published in The Nineteenth 

 Century and The Popular Science Monthly 

 in the spring of last year, and their tenor 

 will readily be recalled by the readers of 

 these periodicals. Defining the highest con- 

 duct as " that which conduces to the greatest 

 length, breadth, and completeness of life," 

 Mr. Spencer shows that we must seek for 

 the germs of morality in the animal world. 

 He goes further, and shows that human 

 morality is based upon laws which are as 

 universal as life itself, and are active and 

 potent in the development of all living things. 

 The reference to these underlying biological 

 principles runs all through the present vol- 

 ume, and differentiates the treatment of its 

 topics from that of his earlier work, Social 

 Statics, which aimed to cover much of the 

 same ground. Social Statics, however, was 

 not the product of Mr. Spencer's mature 

 thought. He has long been conscious of 

 its imperfections. In the successive vol- 

 umes of his Synthetic Philosophy he has 

 substituted an exclusively natural or evolu- 



