back on the

subjective standard.

formal, and which is void of application to actual which falls conditions. We are thus obliged to fall back on a subjective criterion, and say that the abundant life which it is the end of conduct to promote is a man's strongest tendencies, or the greatest number of these. Natural good is determined by "preferring out of all the rudimentary possibilities existing in nature, the combination that harmonises the greatest number of the strongest tendencies."1 We set out, be it remembered, to obtain a characterisation of those acts to which the most persistent tendencies of human nature lead us; and the conclusion we have arrived at is, that they are the acts which harmonise the greatest number of the strongest tendencies. The objective standard is thus reduced to the subjective standard, which it was brought in to explain and support.

Strongest tendencies

the result of past activities,

Now these strongest tendencies, in the harmonious play of which natural good or perfection is said to consist, are themselves the result of the courses of conduct which have been most vigorous and successful in ancestral organisms, and they may therefore, perhaps, be taken as a survival and index of the antecedent state of human nature. So far as

the theory of evolution is able to reach any ideal for conduct, that ideal would seem to be simply the realisation-or, rather, continuation-of human nature as it has been and is, with this formal

1 Natural Law, p. 98.

modification, that, while the various impulses are, so far as possible, to have free play given them, they should be developed in a harmonious manner. It seems doubtful, however, how far this tendency towards harmony is properly suggested by, or consistent with, evolution, which has implied a ceaseless struggle of opposing forces. At any rate, evolution does not seem competent to give any sufficient principle of relative subordination between the various impulses, such as might add reality to the formal principle of harmony. But what it is essential to lay stress on here is, that the only ideal which empirical evolution tends to set up is conformity to human nature as it is, or to the tendencies in it which are strongest and most persistent.

We thus see that the attempt to explain on empirical grounds what is meant by positing 'life,' or 'increase and variety of life,' as the ideal or the standard for action, is practically reduced to making the most persistent impulses of human nature the guide of conduct. But these impulses, it has been shown, are only the survival or remnant of past stages in the course of development, not anticipations of future stages: so that evolution and thus is in this way incapable of providing an ideal of progress as the end for conduct, and the last word it seems able to give us as a guide for action is that we should tread in the places where the foot

give no ideal for progress.

prints of ancestral conduct have left the deepest impress. The ideal of such a system is summed up in a new Beatitude, "Blessed is he that continueth where he is." It is probably just because the empirical aspect of evolution seems so little able to yield an end for human conduct corresponding to the actual course of evolution-which has been progress-that the attempts made to develop a system of morals from the principle just reached are so unsatisfactory. It is true that systems have been worked out by moralists who have taken human nature as their standard, and that Trendelenburg, at any rate, expressly includes historical development in his conception of man. But both Trendelenburg and a moralist like Butler (who has as yet no conception of the gradual modifications of human character and tendencies produced by evolution) have a view of human nature essentially distinct from that which has been called the 'naturalistic' view.1 For both assume a definite rational organisation of impulses similar to that taught in Plato's analogy between the individual man and a political constitution, so that the whole nature, or human nature as

1 Cf. Trendelenburg, Naturrecht, p. 45: "Von der philosophischen Seite kann es kein anderes Princip der Ethik geben als das menschliche Wesen an sich, d. h., das menschliche Wesen in der Tiefe seiner Idee und im Reichthum seiner historischen Entwickelung. Beides gehört zusammen. Denn das nur Historische würde blind und das nur Ideale leer."

a whole, cannot be identified with the impulses which strength at any time makes most persistent, but depends upon the rational allotment of function and measure to each.

ends

In summing up the argument of the preceding Summary. chapters, it is necessary to refer again to the discussion carried on in chapter vii. on the relation between egoism and altruism as affected by the theory of evolution. This discussion was not in- Difficulty of reconciling serted in order to throw an additional obstacle in individual the way of obtaining an ethical standard from the and social empirical theory of evolution. It is an integral part of an attempt to estimate the ethical value of the evolution-theory. The theory of evolution certainly seems to go a long way towards establishing the unity of the individual with the race, and towards substituting an organic relation between them, in place of the almost contingent reciprocal relations spoken of in earlier empirical theories. But, when we come to enquire into the nature of this organic unity, attempting still to keep to the purely empirical point of view, we find that the old difficulties return, that it must be recognised that the connexion is empirically incomplete, and that it breaks down at the very places where a firm basis for the theory of morals is required. It was in this way that, quite apart from this opposition between the individual and the whole, the empirical char

U

Hedonistic

interpreta

ution not possible.

acter of the theory prevented our getting from it any clear and consistent notion of the ethical end to which it leads.

It appeared at first that the ethics of evolution, tion of evol. When interpreted empirically, might be easily reconciled with the older theory of hedonism, by identifying life with pleasure-holding that the highest or most evolved life is that which contains most pleasure, and that increase of pleasure may therefore be taken as the end of conduct. In this way the end of evolutionism would be reduced to the end of utilitarianism. Some utilitarians, on the other hand, sought to get rid of the difficulties of their calculus, by the assumption that the greatest pleasure would be found by following the direction of evolution. But, around both points of view, and the correspondence they assumed to exist between pleasure and evolution, special difficulties were seen to gather. Any hedonistic theory might be met by the assertion that life is essentially a painful experience, and pleasure unattainable; and, although the grounds on which this assertion was made seemed to be distinctly erroneous, and hedonism did not appear to be an impossible theory of conduct, yet a similar objection told with greater force against the combination of evolutionism and hedonism. For it holds the double position that the end is to promote life, and that life is to be promoted by adding to pleasure; or else, that the end is pleasure,