REVIEWS.
The Principles of Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. Vol. I. New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1892. – pp. 572.
This volume was briefly noticed in Review, No. 7, pp. 115-116. It is made up of the "Data of Ethics," and of two new Parts, viz., "The Inductions of Ethics" (pp. 305-474) and "The Ethics of Individual Life" (pp. 475-561), with ten pages of bibliographical references.
The new matter seems to me below the level of Mr. Spencer's other ethical writings. This is all the more disappointing as the volume on "Justice" (see Review, No. 1, pp. 79-88) gave no evidence of any abatement in the powers of the author, who has long suffered from serious illness. It is not improbable that the falling off which is observable in the present work is due partly to the nature of the subject, and partly to the method of treatment which the author adopts. Unfortunately, the calm air of scientific investigation is not infrequently disturbed by the eruption of prejudices against Christian bishops, emperors, and other potentates, whose offices are as objectionable to Mr. Spencer as their doings; but readers of the Synthetic Philosophy have grown accustomed to these catastrophic parentheses in the development of Mr. Spencer's arguments.
The most valuable feature in the new work is the conception, and the carrying out of the conception, of morality as relative to a life, on the one hand, of external enmity, and, on the other, of internal amity. Mr. Spencer long ago laid down the thesis (see "Data of Ethics," § 48) that from the sociological point of view "ethics becomes nothing else than a definite account of the forms of conduct that are fitted to the associated state." And with the elaboration of his theory it grows clearer that the sociological view of ethics is in Mr. Spencer's estimation the only fruitful one. He makes no use in later volumes of the physical view, the biological view, and the psychological view, each of which received, along with the sociological view, a chapter in the "Data of Ethics." It seems substantially correct to say that, in Mr. Spencer's present opinion, the science of ethics has simply to show that morality is the code of459
