principal issues that were involved, partly because the issues were not always clearly formulated by the disputants themselves. But, as we look over the history of the movement, we find that, consciously or unconsciously, one question above all others has been all the while at stake : Do the general conceptions of organic evolution, especially those of the Darwinian theory, provide adequate terms for the statement and solution of the problems of ethics? For such, briefly stated, was the enterprise in which these men, with many others, were engaged. It is true that they recognized the importance of various phases of social evolution. Spencer's interest in sociology dated from the earliest years of his philosophical life; and Stephen's Science of Ethics is preeminently a theory of society. But the individualism of the former made society for him, in the last resort, a mere aggregate of biological units, while the latter never freed himself from the leading-strings of biological analogy in his treatment of the social organism. The consequence was that their treatment of ethical problems, though often suggestive, is very much after the fashion of those old English grammars, in which the idioms of our language were disposed of after the analogy of Latin syntax. The data of the social and biological sciences have, to be sure, many points of resemblance, as have also the constructions of the English and Latin tongues; but the treatment of the former in terms of the latter was bound to be vacuously general, where true, and decidedly false or inconsistent, where it descended to particulars.
This defect of general method shows itself particularly in a certain fallacious mode of reasoning, which may be said to be characteristic of the entire movement. This fallacy consisted in regarding as the sole significance of a later developed function its supplementation of previously existing functions. It is considered only as a more efficient means of realizing ends which had formerly been less perfectly attained, never as a source of radically new ends. This is notoriously the case with the theories of the relation of consciousness or intelligence to conduct. It will be remembered that Herbert Spencer, in his chapters on "The Evolution of Conduct" and "The Psychological
