mere accompaniment of the "preservation" of society which is the end of moral action. Mr. Spencer, in his "Data of Ethics," dissents from them, and thinks that conduct tending to the preservation of life is only good on the express assumption that life is attended with a "surplus of agreeable feelings." Ethics, he thinks, is not primarily concerned with the actual condition of human beings, but with an ideal society in which normal conduct will produce "pleasure unalloyed by pain anywhere." In such a society, which Mr. Spencer feels justified in predicting, moral conduct will be spontaneous. Absolute ethics is thus concerned with this ideal state, and deduces from necessary principles what conditions must be detrimental and what conditions must be beneficial in an ideal society. Relative ethics is a provisionary science, determining how far these absolute rules are applicable to the actual condition of humanity. In any case, the empirical reasoning of the earlier Utilitarians, and the attempt to adjust the balance of pleasure and pain, have given place to a more scientific treatment. Moral rules are deduced from sociological laws. As Mr. Stephen says: "A full perception of the truth that society is not a mere aggregate, but an organic growth . . . supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern speculation." The conceptions of modern biology are also utilized, especially by Herbert Spencer. Thus the difficulty of the early appearance of the moral sense in the child (a point which is much exaggerated) is met by the doctrine of transmission of parental characteristics by heredity. The long experience of the race has roughly determined which courses of action are prejudicial, and thus formed an empirical decalogue. These results are permanently registered on the nervous system, and transmitted with it in reproduction.
The older intuitive school of ethics, the school of Butler, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, etc., which opposed the empirical school in the last century, has few followers in the modern controversy. Dr. J. Martineau is its most eminent representative. With it may be associated the Hamiltonians and the Catholic writers. Its decay is largely due to the introduction into England of the German systems, which have been generally adopted by the opponents of empiricism. Kant, as we saw previously, arrived at the conclusion that
