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is to say, a lion makes a successful adjustment of means to ends 
when he devours a lamb, and this involves an unsuccessful 
adjustment on the part of the unfortunate lamb. A similar 
combination of successful and unsuccessful adjustments is seen 
in a state of war between human beings; and the “struggle 
for existence” takes its highest form in such conflicts. But 
Mr. Spencer feels that a state of war cannot be regarded as 
the ultimate form of human society ; and, on the contrary, lie 
lays it down that an absolute standard of Ethics is unattainable 
except in perfectly peaceful associations. But how is this 
abandonment of the operative principle of evolution at its 
highest stage to be reconciled with the maintenance of the 
hypothesis ? It must be confessed that the transition is inge- 
niously made. “This imperfectly evolved conduct,” says Mr. 
Spencer (p. 18), “ introduces us by antithesis to conduct 
that is perfectly evolved. Contemplating these adjustments 
of acts to ends which miss completeness because they cannot 
be made by one creature without other creatures being pre- 
vented from making them, raises the thought of adjustments 
such that each creature may make them without preventing 
them from being made by other creatures.” As Professor 
Calderwood says, “ nothing can conceal, or even materially 
obscure, the vastness of the contrast involvi d ” in this transition. 
It is wholly inconsistent with the principle from which, as 
has been seen, Mr. Spencer starts, that Ethics “ has for its 
subject-matter that form which universal conduct assumes 
during the last stages of evolution” (p. 20). We are intro- 
duced to an entirely new form of conduct — a conduct in 
antithesis — that is to say, in opposition to the former ; and it 
would seem that such an alteration in the main principle of 
life would in great measure invalidate the attempt subse- 
quently made to explain human conduct by analogies drawn 
from the process of evolution in general. 
14. It must further be observed, that there is another 
enormous assumption involved in Mr. Spencer’s application of 
his principle to determine good and bad in human conduct. 
The principle is, that conduct is good or bad “according as its 
aggregate results, to ourselves or others, are pleasurable or 
painful.” Now, he refers once or twice, in the reasoning by 
which he reaches this conclusion, to the view of “the optimist,” 
who, “while saying that the pleasures predominate, urges that 
the paius borne here are to be compensated by pleasures 
received hereafter.” He cannot, of course, be ignorant that 
the total estimate of life formed by Christians is mainly deter- 
mined by reference to life hereafter; and it is obvious that if 
conduct is to be judged by its tendency to produce pleasure as 
