98 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART n 



giving distils down into a single old phrase, laissez 

 faire. Of course so acute and systematic a thinker 

 betrays the same bias in his ethical writings as in his 

 sociology. He is a thorough individualist in his 

 emphasis upon justice, with its indefinite appendixes 

 in favour of negative and positive beneficence. Both 

 as moralist and as sociologist, Spencer is full of the 

 thought of individual rights : in curious contrast with 

 previous utilitarian writers, and in curious sympathy 

 with intuitionalism. This doctrine of rights consti- 

 tutes, in fact, one of the most genuine and most 

 important among the vanishing traces of intuitional- 

 ism in Spencer's thinking. Still it seems fair to say 

 that when he handles ethics technically this doctrine 

 of rights is overruled and held in check by a doctrine 

 of maximum pleasure. The Utopian state is not 

 praised on account of its freedom, so much as on 

 account of its balance and harmony. All this is 

 altered when we pass to the technically sociological 

 discussion. Here freedom is the good ; not harmony 

 or co-operation per se, but that harmony or co-opera- 

 tion which results from freedom in contrast with that 

 which results from compulsion. This (sociological) 

 doctrine is supported by an appeal to history. The 

 cosmic philosophy is silent here, except in so far as it 

 hints that the voluntary co-operation of industrialism, 

 being later in origin than militarism, is presumably 

 higher more truly evolved more complex. There 

 is hardly any trace of hedonism in the argument. If 

 the appeal to history ran into the form, " Freedom 

 has worked better ; " " Freedom has increased aver- 

 age happiness ; " that would, of course, be sound 

 hedonistic doctrine. But Spencer, like Comte, has 



