78 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART u 



power from which all things have proceeded master 

 of the whole situation. 



When we ask whether there is any close connection 

 between Spencer's philosophy and the doctrine of 

 struggle for existence, we feel at once that Darwinism 

 is almost impossible as a cosmic philosophy. Pro- 

 fessor Alexander seems, indeed, to contemplate giving 

 a position of universal importance to the Darwinian 

 doctrine when he writes as follows : " The application 

 of evolution to morals may mean only the employ- 

 ment of biological ideas ; or it may mean that morals 

 must be treated as one part of a comprehensive view 

 of the universe, in which a steady development may 

 be observed from the lowest to the highest phenom- 

 ena, and a development, it may be added, which 

 follows the law of the survival of the fittest'' 1 The 

 use of biological ideas we have seen in Comte, though 

 doubtless only in one of many possible applications. 

 We shall not find much more in Mr. Leslie Stephen's 

 Ethics, though he has of course, in the background, 

 a belief in evolution on the grand scale, as a cosmic 

 philosophy. Spencer works out such a philosophy, 

 and we see in it a considerable amount of pressure 

 directed upon ethics from other parts of the fabric of 

 knowledge. But in Spencer there is no attempt to 

 take the law of the survival of the fittest out of its 

 biological limits, and to give it a cosmic significance* 

 So far as he traces an influence from one cosmic 

 system upon another which has advanced any dis- 

 tance along the evolutionary path, he regards such 

 influence as purely mischievous. It makes for dis- 

 solution, but not for evolution. Perhaps even Mr. 



1 Moral Order and Progress, p. 14. 



