Spencer's general position is very well illustrated in his definition of conduct, and his discussion of "Conduct in General." Conduct, he says, is "the adjustment of acts to ends."[1] According to this definition, the act is manipulated to suit some end which is apparently given or fixed. Nothing is said about the adjustment of ends to acts. Spencer's formulation reads as if he had in mind three things—the acts, the ends, and the adjustment between them—and as if the means and the end could exist before the adjustment were operative. Such an idea fails to recognize that the discrimination of means and end must be made within the function or the adjustment itself; this distinction of means and end does not exist apart from some problem of adjustment. There is no third factor or external power determining their relation, but they determine each other. Suppose a man to be building a sailing craft; he has, on the one hand, timber, canvas, and ropes, and, on the other, he has in mind a plan. His method, now, is not merely to work over the material, but to shape and alter the plan as well. The form of constitution must be suited to these particular resources quite as much as the material must be shaped to the final plan. We should say that there is mutual interaction of means and end, or, to be more exact, that the governing consideration is now the means and again the end. The formula "the adjustment of acts to ends" fails to do justice to the fact that ends are variable as well as means—that each influences the other and is immanent in the other. Assuming that impulses are the content of conduct, we may define conduct itself as the continually shifting disposition of this variable content.
In order to support in some detail the general criticism offered above, we may select a few points for discussion from the several aspects under which Spencer has formulated his theory of conduct.
The Physical View. From the physical viewpoint, evolution is defined as the maintenance of a "moving equilibrium." We have seen that maintaining life, expressed in physical terms, is "maintaining a balanced combination of internal actions in face of
- ↑ Principles, Pt. I, ch. 1, §2.
