That morality is but greater adjustment of acts to ends cannot be admitted. If, in ordinary speech, the word good refers to greatest adjustment to ends, whatever the ends may be, that is no proof that it must have the same significance in Ethics. A good shot may be a good one in that it hits the mark; but what if it kill a man? The acts of criminals may be as well adjusted to their ends and as easy to predict as those of a good man. Spencer's theory would lead, consistently carried out, to the principle that the means justify the end, an assertion that is even more dangerous than its opposite. The fact is, that in Ethics it is the nature of the end which is of importance. Spencer endeavors to show that only normal exercise of function is favorable to life, and so moral;--that excess and deprivation are both injurious. It is not true, however, that excess is always injurious; within certain bounds it is made up for by reserves in the animal organism. Or, if Spencer should answer to this objection, that his "normal" is not to be represented by a sharp line, difficult to keep to, but by a broad road within which excess is safe, such a representation would both burden his theory with two dividing-lines, and moreover would not save it. For he has not deemed it necessary to treat the concept "normal" to an exact definition, and we find him using it in his later deductions in an entirely new sense--not as equilibrium between capacity of function and its exercise, but in the ideal significance of a harmony between the claims of the individual on the one side, and those of the environment on the other. This normal is nowhere actually to be found and cannot, from the nature of things, be arrived at. By addition of this significance, the word normal becomes indefinite in meaning, and is used, now in one sense, now in the other. Normal exercise of function has, however, nothing to do with the claims of the environment, which generally demands, indeed, a deviation from the normal.