CHAP, vin EVOLUTION IN SPENCER 73 



doctrine when he writes as follows : " The application 

 of evolution to morals may mean only the employment 

 of biological ideas ; or it may mean that morals must be 

 treated as one part of a comprehensive view of the 

 universe, in which a steady development may be ob- 

 served from the lowest to the highest phenomena, and 

 a development, it may be added, ivhich follows the law 

 of the survival of the fittest." * The use of biological 

 ideas we have seen in Comte, though doubtless only in 

 one of many possible applications. We shall not find 

 much more in Mr. Leslie Stephen's Ethics, though he 

 has of course, in the background, a belief in evolution 

 on the grand scale, as a cosmic philosophy. Spencer 

 works out such a philosophy, and we see in it a con- 

 siderable amount of pressure directed upon ethics from 

 other parts of the fabric of knowledge. But in Spencer 

 there is no attempt to take the law of the survival of 

 the fittest out of its biological limits, and to give it 

 a cosmic significance. So far as he traces an influence 

 from one cosmic system upon another which has ad- 

 vanced any distance along the evolutionary path, he 

 regards such influence as purely mischievous. It makes 

 for dissolution, but not for evolution. Perhaps even 

 Mr. Alexander did not seriously mean to include the 

 physical "universe" in his Darwinian scheme. Com- 

 peting organisms we know ; are competing universes 

 anything better than a delirious dream? Organisms 

 die out, not because they are too ill -balanced for the 

 tasks of life, but because they are, on the whole, in their 

 own environment, inferior to other organisms, and there- 

 fore succumb in the competition. We must go back to 

 very early " pioneers of evolution " to Democritus or 

 Empedocles if we are to find survival of the fittest 



1 Moral Order and Progress, p. 14. 



