I am far from saying that it tells us everything we might wish to know in regard to the springs of conduct, or the special sources of moral energy; but I contend that it tells us much that is of supreme importance, and that anything we may require to add to the statements it contains will not be found in conflict with the writer's main positions.
Mr. Spencer, it must be understood, undertakes to trace for us the evolution of morality as an objective process. Morality, like everything else, must have a history. What is that history? This is the question to which Mr. Spencer addresses himself. If we can trace the development of morality in the past, we shall be better able to understand its characteristics in the present, and its probable course in the future. Mr. Spencer says truly that morality is a certain aspect of conduct in general; it is, as he holds, developed conduct; and, in order that we may understand what conduct is, he asks us to examine it in its earliest manifestations, and to follow it through the ages, as it gains in definiteness, in complexity, in range, and in the importance of its reactions upon consciousness. This is a view, the legitimacy of which it seems impossible to dispute. When our attention is arrested by any structure in nature, we very properly ask: "How has it come to be what it is? Did it spring into existence at once, in the form under which we behold it now, or was it shaped by slow degrees? If the latter, what were the stages through which it successively passed?" Do not tell us that the same questions can not profitably be asked in regard to morality until the questions have been fairly put and answered according to the best obtainable knowledge.
The great objection hitherto made to the scientific study of history, or of any moral subject, has been that all calculations based upon general laws of growth or progress are liable at any moment to be thrown into confusion by the appearance upon the scene of forces or of influences of a wholly exceptional character. Thus the birth of some man of transcendent abilities may alter, it is said, the whole course of a nation's history. The answer to this objection is twofold: first, that the great man or hero is himself a product of antecedent conditions, and is born into a society more or less fitted to feel and submit to his influence; secondly, that the effects wrought by exceptional characters are but exceptional, and that the great stream of human development follows its course but little affected by accidents here or there. Mr. Spencer, therefore, and those who think with him, may, without in the least compromising their system, make large admissions as to the influence of certain special agencies. They do not necessarily blind themselves to the course of history in the ordinary sense of the word, because they make a special study of the development of conduct. The line of observation and argument pursued in the "Data of Ethics" is hopelessly antagonistic only to that form of supernaturalism which disbelieves totally in evolution, preferring to regard human history as
