38 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
ends of every kind.” 1 ““ Givenits environment and its structure, 
and there is, for each kind of creature a set of actions adapted to 
their kinds, amounts, and combinations, to secure the highest 
conservation its nature permits.” All conduct, that is, fits into 
one scheme of things and only one line of action can be fitting 
hence good. The total pressure of heredity, of material and social 
environment tends to force a man into this line of conduct. The 
normal man reacts approximately in the fitting way hence is good; 
the abnormal man fails to react properly, that is, fittingly, hence 
may be pronounced bad. We have thus a doctrine of rela- 
tivity similar to that of Comte with this difference: with the 
latter ethics is relative until made absolute under the positive 
régime while with the former there can be no absolute system 
until the ideal state of social equilibrium is reached, — a state 
made up of ideal men each perfectly adapted to the whole.‘ 
With Spencer, as we noted in our introduction, adaptation is a 
five-fold process: that of the individual to his material® and 
social environment and that of the group to the well-being of its 
members, to its material environment and to other societies, i. e., 
to its super-organic environment. 
Spencer’s failure to emphasize active adaptation or “telesis’”’ 
was due to several causes: — 
1 Data of Ethics, p. 37. 2 Tbid., p. 152. 
3 Cf. Mackintosh’s interpretation of Spencer: ‘The morally good society is the 
typically human society; the morally good individual, so far as he is good, is 
qualified for membership in that society,” of. cit., p. 109. Cf. Social Statics, pp. 77 £. 
4 Data of Ethics, p. 83. 
* In Spencer’s Education published as early as 1860 we have his only important 
contribution to the doctrine of active material adaptation (though the phrase is not 
used), where, along with emphasis on the knowledge that insures health, stability of 
the family, maintenance of wholesome social relations and the satisfaction of the 
tastes and feelings, stress is placed on the knowledge that gives power over nature so 
that with increased productivity will come the material essentials for “ complete 
living.” Yet even in this treatise which has been one of the most potent factors in 
the modern movement for an education which fits for success in life, the main 
emphasis is on passive adaptation as shown in his discussion of “ punishment,” in 
his insistence that education is to fit the child for the world as he finds it rather than 
for an ideal social order, and in his repeated use of the dictum “ follow nature ” 
without making clear that nature includes man and social groups with power to 
react on it purposefully in the interest of the largest possible individual and social 
life. 
