View," treats consciousness as a relatively recent and very efficient means to the universal end of the maintenance and expansion of life. Consciousness is better, higher, worthier than the unconscious reflex, only because the adaptations which it mediates are more minute and flexible. An essentially similar position is held by Sir Leslie Stephen in his essay in criticism of Huxley's lecture. According to him, the essential part played by intelligence in the moral life is simply the recognition of the necessity of certain forms of coöperation which had existed prior to the supervention of intelligence.
It has been said that the chief enterprise of these writers was the statement and solution of the problems of ethics in terms derived from the theory of organic evolution. To themselves it would have seemed fairer to say that their design was simply to strip morality of its veil of peculiar mystery by bringing its phenomena into relation with the concrete facts of biology. In so far as they did this, no doubt they did well. In exhibiting the development of ethical norms in their constant relation to felt needs, they rendered a genuine service to moral philosophy. But here, again, they committed the dangerous error of conceiving the significance of morality as exhausted in its material conditions; they made ethiconomic[1] relations the sole content of ethics. In other words, they confused the external limits of morality with its inner content.
Certain characteristic features of the movement must be briefly noticed. In the first place, there was the alliance with hedonism. Of course, no logical ground existed for such a combination. It has been demonstrated again and again that the Darwinian theory will lie down peacefully with almost any variety of ethical faith. It was, rather, that the biological formulæ in terms of life, health, adaptation, struggle, and survival were too unmanageably general, too vague for practical application. A definite, specific import had to be fetched in from without, and pleasure being an important factor in biological economy, the pleasure theory lay close at hand for adoption.
- ↑ I use the word, after the analogy of Professor Baldwin's 'socionomic,' to denote the non-ethical conditions of ethical evolution.
