mercial life, much less in the selfish designs of the trading class to increase its wares at the expense of other sections of society. Whether right or wrong, whether for good or for evil, it took its origin from profound philosophical conceptions; the belief in nature as a mighty force, and in reason as having only to coöperate with nature, instead of thwarting it with its own petty, voluntary devices, in order to usher in the era of unhindered progress. Spencer's insistent and persistent opposition to the extension of the sphere of governmental action beyond that of police duty, preventing the encroachment of one individual upon another, goes back to this same sublime faith in nature. The goal of evolution of Spencer's ethics, the perfect individual adapted to the perfect state of society, is but the enlarged projection of the ideal of a fraternal society, which made its way into the Social Statics from the same creed of revolutionary liberalism. His "Absolute Ethics," deductively derived from a first law of life, has in its origin nothing to do with science, but everything to do with the reason and nature of the Enlightenment. It has, of course, been often enough pointed out that the main features of Spencer's later ethics were already well along before he came to that conception of evolution upon which his sociology and ethics are professedly based. This point has, however, generally been employed as a mode of casting suspicion upon the content of his moral system, suggesting that after all it has no very intimate connection with the theory of evolution as such. But I am not aware that attention has been called to this converse fact of greater moment: that Spencer's entire evolutionary conception and scheme is but the projection upon the cosmic screen of the spectrum of the buoyant a priori ideals of the later eighteenth century liberalism.
Certain essays, now mostly reprinted in three volumes, entitled Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative, put before our eyes the links of the transformation, the instruments of the projection. We may refer particularly to the essays on "Progress: Its law and Cause," "Transcendental Physiology" (both dated 1857); "The Genesis ofScience" (1854), and "The Nebular Hypothesis" (1858), together with "The Social Organism" (1860). What we find exposed in these essays is the increasingly definite and solid
