16 



and that notable and noble parts of it are chiefly intellectual 

 buttresses, thrown up to keep safe and intact the outworks of 

 the Moral Law. He has examined all the intellectual anti- 

 nomies, which Kant raised, but never solved, he has com- 

 bined them all in one conception, magnificent in its sweep, 

 startling in its originality the " Law of the Conditioned " 

 and any one who accepts that Law has provided for him a for- 

 tress of incalculable strength, within which the doctrines of 

 moral liberty and moral obligation may be defended against all 

 assailants. John Stuart Mill attacked that " Law of the Con- 

 ditioned " in what may honestly be described as a ferocious 

 style, for he saw how invincible it made the Theistic position ; 

 but his poor little sophisms are now treated with the contempt 

 they deserve. Mr. Spencer can be shown to have accepted as 

 valid the main arguments which lead up to the l ' Law of the 

 Conditioned," and it needs nothing more than a slight re- 

 setting of the Hamiltonian thesis in order to make it invin- 

 cible against all attacks. 



Kant and Hamilton are by this time almost proved to be of 

 the prophetic order of men, for what they asserted to be a 

 logical necessity has now actually come to pass. We just saw 

 that they declared moral Liberty and moral obligation to be 

 indissolubly united, and that the denial to man of Liberty 

 must lead to the denial to him of moral obligation. Mr. 

 Spencer's whole Philosophy is a startling commentary on this 

 thesis ; he denies Liberty to man, and there is in his system 

 no trace of moral obligation. He has lately proclaimed 

 that the (< sense of duty or moral obligation is transi- 

 tory/'* and that as civilisation progresses, man's nature 

 will become more perfectly co-ordinated, needing no moral 

 directions. No one who watches the currents of thought 

 in our day which deny to man Freedom of Will can 

 question that denial of moral obligation accompanies them 

 to no small extent. The advocates of Determinism and Auto- 

 matism can see instinctively that our moral instincts are op- 

 posed to them, and that if these instincts remain in full force 

 their theories cannot prevail ; as the doctrine of their school 

 sinks into Materialism, its antagonism to all moral principle, 

 all sense of right, all authority of conscience is at once more 

 constant and more vehement ; and in the lowest stages it 

 reaches a point where man is made to be only a helpless 

 mechanism, all future retribution is derided as an old world 

 dream, and the worst impulses of his sensual nature are un- 

 blushingly defended. Thus, surveying the matter along the 



* Spencer, Data of Ethics, p. 127. 



