CHAP, x " SCIENCE OF ETHICS " 101 



evolution. Morality is vindicated when we see that all 

 nature, or all animated nature, toils upwards, and that 

 our goal, if not as individuals, yet as a race, is moral 

 goodness. The morally good society is the typically 

 human society ; the morally good individual, so far as 

 he is good, is qualified for membership in that society. 

 Here, however, a difficulty arises. Mr. Stephen renews 

 his warning against a doctrine of absolute or ideal ethics. 

 The type is a real type in the actual present, a type 

 constantly modifying itself as the environment alters or 

 as the conditions of struggle change. Yet on the whole 

 the broad outlines of the type are fixed ; the cardinal 

 virtues are recognised on all hands, very nearly as they 

 have been blocked out by Mr. Stephen ; and we may 

 say in general terms that morality represents the human 

 ideal the demand addressed by the race to every in- 

 dividual. Here as elsewhere, Professor Alexander 

 gives us a more extreme position on the lines of Mr. 

 Stephen's tentative suggestions. 



It is necessary to emphasise one other feature in Mr. 

 Stephen's evolutionary view of ethics. He insists that, 

 in such a society as that of mankind, the organic whole 

 may change while the individual organisms are un- 

 changed. In a somewhat obscure passage he contrasts 

 this most complex case, exemplified in human society, 

 with simpler cases, in which the individual organism 

 and the social organism are modified simultaneously. 

 One cannot help thinking that the whole distinction is a 

 piece of very doubtful philosophy. What Mr. Stephen 

 wishes to bring out by it is the fact that the social 

 organism exerts its influences by the spiritual forces of 

 thought and language, apart from any necessary 

 reference to physiological change. So completely is Mr. 

 Stephen indifferent to the moral applications of Mr. 



