PARTIAL CONCILIATION OF THE NEW AND OLD ETHICS. 399 



other. But the real fact is, that this moral antinomy has 

 always existed ; the new moral philosophy has only 

 served to bring into clearer manifestation the contradic- 

 tions latent in the conditions of life, as well as other more 

 obvious ones. 



There always was and there always will be a collision 

 of interests amongst men, as well, indeed, as a certain 

 conflict in our own moral nature even when there is no 

 question of a collision with the interests of others. The 

 ideal and the real in morals can never be brought into 

 more than partial or momentary, not to full and final, 

 harmony. Their spheres can never be brought into 

 complete coincidence, not even should our species continue 

 to exist and to improve until the final day prophesied by 

 physical philosophers, when our old and worn-out earth 

 shall fall back upon the parent sun to recruit her ex- 

 hausted fires. There are, however, some hopeful consider- 

 ations. There is a tendency to greater harmony in the 

 conflicting conditions of life, and in the contrary moral 

 impulses within us. Although, as evolution teaches, the 

 most central fact of life should f orjbid the perfect and final 

 harmony between the interests of the individual atoms 

 composing the social aggregations, or between the various 

 united groups and interests as against each other, yet 

 is there the most undoubted tendency to a diminution of 

 mutual interference of real interests. This much, at least, 

 evolution and sociological science have shown us.* The 

 moral and industrial and social progress of society has 

 greatly consisted in the gradual creation or discovery of 

 common interests, common pleasures and sources of enjoy- 

 ment, and also, it must be particularly noted, in the 



evolution and the generalizations of the sciences, without regard to the 

 evolution of the science itself, through a series of thinkers from the days 

 of Aristotle. 



* See Spencer's Data of Ethics, ch. xii. 



