496 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



which to compare them. He repeatedly and with almost passionate emphasis 

 affirms that our capacity for knowledge is limited: what matter, force, space, 

 and time really are we shall never know, for our mind cannot grasp them; 

 we can only investigate the phenomena that our personal experience of them 

 educes. But for that reason Spencer also gives religion the right to hold its 

 own views on this " unknowable." Religious problems, however, have little 

 interest for him. He is all the more occupied with social questions, and it 

 is in this sphere that his evolution theory finds its most curious expression. 

 His belief in the progress of humanity is boundless and he is prepared to 

 apply to it unreservedly Darwin's theory of natural selection — that is, as 

 he himself says, that the fittest shall survive. The freedom of the individual 

 he places above all else: "Every man is free to do that which he wills, pro- 

 vided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." The State is 

 a survival from the primitive conditions of earlier ages, and its interference 

 with the life of the individual is purely wrong and merely hinders the opera- 

 tion of free selection. All measures adopted by the Government are worse 

 than if they were carried out by individuals; public poor-relief is expensive 

 and badly administered compared with private charity; State schools are 

 always inferior to private schools; in a word, the State should gradually be 

 done away with, but for the present it is necessary to maintain a police 

 force to ensure domestic security, and a military force to protect the country 

 from invasion, though on no account should there be compulsory military 

 service. So much the higher, then, must be the claims laid on private mo- 

 rality, and, in fact, Spencer claims much from it. He holds, in conformity 

 with his belief in the heredity of acquired qualities, that the intellectual 

 capacity of the individual becomes the common property of the race; the 

 quality of the intellect corresponds to certain structural conditions in the 

 brain; if the former is perfected, then the latter develop, are inherited by 

 the descendants, and thus benefit humanity. The aim of morality is to create 

 as much happiness as possible; happiness, however, must not be sought in 

 material prosperity — the more so as the latter leads to dishonesty. To be 

 allowed to contribute, in however small a way, towards the advancement 

 of general evolution should be the highest happiness to which the individ- 

 ual can attain. Morality thus benefits the community more than the individ- 

 ual, according to Spencer, as indeed according to the positivism of the age 

 as a whole. Both his and his contemporaries' limitation in this sphere lay 

 in an insufficient sense of the purely personal; he had but little sympathy 

 for the individual's longing for personal release from his confined and trying 

 environment or from his inner qualms of conscience; he thought that one 

 and all should take things calmly in the hope for better times to come — 

 which, indeed, seemed a far more likely prospect for the people of those days 

 than for those of our own. 



