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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
a measure of altruism. Higher and higher differentiation of social' ' 
structure and function involves corresponding subjective adaptation ; 
as the economic duties of an individual develop in complexity and 
remoteness to the immediate result, so must their subjective aspect 
on pain of failure deepen and widen ; and thus the material evolu- 
tion demands a moral evolution running parallel to it. That the 
material evolution has for the time outrun the moral adaptation is, 
in fact, from the present point of view, the essential explanation of 
much existing economic anarchy. 
As the society reaches completer polymorphism, altruism in- 
creases ; progress towards the physical and biological ideal of pro- 
ductive synergy involves parallel progress to an ideal of sympathy 
or maximum altruism. This does not, however, at once extend to- 
different societies ; between these competition and antipathy may 
exist to any extent; hut as antagonism becomes subordinated to 
community of interests, here also antipathy becomes replaced by 
sympathy. 
The concomitant parallel progress of reproductive action — incident 
upon the origin of the family and the progressive integration of 
families into higher and higher aggregates — is too familiar to need 
recapitulation here. It is evident that even on the most sternly 
biological grounds, so far from a scientific basis for economic deduc- 
tion being furnished by “ the iron law of competition,” the highest 
generalisation of the phenomena (from which deduction, if anywhere- 
is alone permissible) is the accurate converse of this — the golden 
rule of sympathy and synergy. And it is a remarkable result that, 
without introducing into the argument any so-called moral or senti- 
mental considerations, hut arguing soberly from the two fundamental! 
functions and wants of living beings — from nutrition and reproduc-- 
tion alone — the noblest ideals of politics and morals arise before us. 
Appendix to Chapter HI. — Practical Psychological Economics. 
§ 42. Can our psychological conceptions of (1) pleasure and pain;. 
(2) value, (3) of wants and desires, furnish a basis of economic 
action? Actions may be classified as they produce pleasure or 
pain, or as they tend to satisfy our desires ; hut such an attempt, 
|iowever reasonable in constructing a theory of personal action. 
