38 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



ends of every kind." l " Given its environment and its structure, 

 and there is, for each kind of creature a set of actions adapted to 

 their kinds, amounts, and combinations, to secure the highest 

 conservation its nature permits." 2 All conduct, that is, fits into 

 one scheme of things and only one line of action can be fitting 

 hence good. The total pressure of heredity, of material and social 

 environment tends to force a man into this line of conduct. The 

 normal man reacts approximately in the fitting way hence is good; 

 the abnormal man fails to react properly, that is, fittingly, hence 

 may be pronounced bad. 3 We have thus a doctrine of rela- 

 tivity similar to that of Comte with this difference: with the 

 latter ethics is relative until made absolute under the positive 

 regime while with the former there can be no absolute system 

 until the ideal state of social equilibrium is reached, a state 

 made up of ideal men each perfectly adapted to the whole. 4 



With Spencer, as we noted in our Introduction, adaptation is a 

 five-fold process: that of the individual to his material 6 and 

 social environment and that of the group to the well-beinp; of its 

 members, to its material environment 

 to its super-organic environment. 



Spencer's failure to emphasize active adaptation or "telesis " 

 was due to several causes: 



1 Data of Ethics, p. 37. 2 Ibid., p. 152. 



3 Cf. Mackintosh's interpretation of Spencer: "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," op. cit., p. 109. Cf . Social Statics, pp. 77 f. 



4 Data of Ethics, p. 83. 



6 In Spencer's Education published as early as 1860 we have his only important 

 contribution to the doctrine of active material adaptation (though the phrase is not 

 used), where, along with emphasis on the knowledge that insures health, stability of 

 the family, maintenance of wholesome social relations and the satisfaction of the 

 tastes and feelings, stress is placed on the knowledge that gives power over nature so 

 that with increased productivity will come the material essentials for " complete 

 living." Yet even in this treatise which has been one of the most potent factors in 

 the modern movement for an education which fits for success in life, the main 

 emphasis is on passive adaptation as shown in his discussion of " punishment," in 

 his insistence that education is to fit the child for the world as he finds it rather than 

 for an ideal social order, and in his repeated use of the dictum " follow nature " 

 without making clear that nature includes man and social groups with power to 

 react on it purposefully in the interest of the largest possible individual and social 

 life. 



