222 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ethics. On the other hand, the central idea with Spencer 

 as with Comte and the utilitarians before him, was the 

 welfare of human society, its progress towards a greater 

 common good or general happiness and the obligations 

 which this end imposed upon individual members ; though 

 Spencer also insisted on the rights of the individual, 

 which with him remained prior to the society of which 

 it is the unit. If with the latter school the dominant 

 thought was the end to be attained which the study of 

 nature and history alike helps us to define, the great 

 event which casts its shadow before; with the former 

 it was the perfect personality of the Divine Spirit which 

 stood at the beginning ; it was the sustaining ground of 

 everything, the principle which was realising itself by an 

 endless process in the gradual development of finite 

 human minds towards fuller consciousness and more 

 perfect personality. The idealists were, at the same 

 time, too much interested and impressed by the social 

 and political reforms which had emanated from the 

 utilitarian school to confine themselves as much to 

 individual ethics as had been the case with many of the 

 leading German thinkers ; this circumstance may explain 

 why they were specially attracted by Hegel, whose 

 ethics, though not embracing sociology, moved more in 

 the region of objective morality (culture, society, and the 

 State), and why the writings of Lotze, in which this 

 interest never made itself prominently felt, did not fully 

 satisfy the speculative need of his English readers. 

 These might perhaps have found what they looked for 

 in the writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher, had it not 



