76 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART n 



has upon me, a separate individual, with my own de- 

 sires, ay, and my own rights ? But his reply is 

 ready. The tribal or national conscience is within 

 you ; it is a part of you from your birth ; sinning 

 against it you sin against what is best in yourself. 

 Morally, however, Spencer gives this no great range, 

 and his colleague or disciple, Mr. Leslie Stephen, 

 writes a treatise on ethics without once mention- 

 ing it. Spencer is little inclined to admit true moral 

 axioms ; he is resolved to keep the door open for 

 a phenomenalist doctrine of " causal connexions " in 

 conduct, if not exactly for hedonistic sophistications. 

 It is elsewhere that he has frankly confessed the exist- 

 ence of axioms, mathematical or " transcendental." He 

 has got his explanation of these, if he is allowed the 

 appeal to use -inheritance ; but if not ! Spencer is 

 fighting for his hearth and home, and for all that he 

 counts most sacred, when he girds himself to refute 

 Weismannism off the face of the earth. Apart from 

 use-inheritance, indeed, one does not see how the 

 evolution of mind is ever to be made decently in- 

 telligible, unless because "intelligence" was in the 

 beginning a " casual variation " of small amount and 

 the stupider specimens died out, etc., etc. ! That 

 explanation will never fail those whom it can satisfy. 



Except on this point of use-inheritance, Spencer is 

 hardly to be regarded as Darwinian in his thinking. 

 Natural selection has hardly influenced his statement. I 

 do not mean that he refuses help from the doctrine, when 

 he finds help offered incidentally, in the biological or his- 

 torical region. He is too good a tactician to do that. 

 But Professor D. G. Ritchie seems quite unwarranted in 

 explaining Spencer's laissez faire individualism by his 

 bigoted attachment to the doctrine of natural selection 



