How tortured are Spencer’s disquisitions on absolute and relative ethics! For the natural, ethical point of view absolute ethics consists in this: that a man experiences directly in himself an absolute ethical “must.” Because absolute ethics thinks of devotion without limits and would lead straight to a self-sacrifice which would in some way or other suspend life and activity, it has to come to an understanding with reality and decide what measure of self-sacrifice is to be made, and how far that minimum of compromise can be allowed which is necessary to ensure a continuation of life and activity. In this origin out of absolute ethics of applied, relative ethics the scientific, biological point of view cannot acquiesce. Spencer transforms the conception of absolute ethics and turns it into [pg 158] the conduct of the perfect man in the perfect society. We have no need, he says, to picture to ourselves the ideal man except “as he would exist in ideal social surroundings.” “According to the evolution hypothesis the two mutually condition each other, and only where both are to be found, is such ideal action also possible.” The ethic which thereby comes into consideration is produced, therefore, from outside. It is determined by the relation in which society and the individual stand to one another in their mutual state of imperfection. Into the place of the living conception of absolute ethic there steps a fiction. It is only relative standards, subject to the changes produced by time and relations with others, that the ethic of sociological utilitarianism provides for men. That means that it can only feebly rouse his will to the ethical. It even reduces him to a state of confusion because it takes from him the elementary conviction that he has to exert himself without regard to what the given relations are in a state of perfection, and must contend with circumstances from an inward compulsion, even without the certainty of any result at all. Spencer is more biologist than moralist. Ethics are to him merely the setting in which the principle of utility comes to us after it has been worked up in the brain-cells together with the experiences it has produced, and after it has been passed on by heredity. Thus he gives up all the inward forces by which ethics live. The urge to attain to a perfecting of the personality which has to be reached through ethics and the longing for a spiritual bliss which is to be experienced within them, are deprived of their office.