it has been so only because this proximate end was instrumental to the ultimate end."[1] According to a really evolutionary theory, the individual does not exist independently of society, and merely use society as a convenient shield; the individual is evolved in the associated state, the two are organically related. One does not originate the other; they arise together are analyzed out of a matrix as correlatives. Their ends ought to be identical and their functioning reciprocal or complementary.
In all the four views under which Spencer formulates his ethical doctrine, it is obvious that the end of moral action is for him a fixed end, the goal, a static goal. The Good is, thus, variously expressed as the equilibrium of forces, as the balance of functions, as habit completed or pleasure attained, and as society perfected. A consistently evolutionary theory would teach that there is no final goal or limit to evolution; that the crises in life will never all be settled, but that the very condition of conscious life and of moral action is the unfailing recurrence of critical moments and of unsettled problems. From the view of Spencer's ideal, evolution is merely incidental, an historical accident, which will not figure at all in the final outcome, the perfect state. To return to a sentence quoted above: "This final permanent code alone admits of being definitely formulated, and so constituting ethics as a science in contrast with empirical ethics." Instead, therefore, of having an evolutionary ethics, he would have no ethics at all until evolution were finished. The criticisms given above are all simply different ways of putting this same fact. They are intended to suggest that even Spencer might consistently have gone much further than he did in applying the concept of evolution as an explanatory principle in ethics.
Kate Gordon.
The University of Chicago.
- ↑ Ibid., ch. viii.
