On Mr. Spencer's Data of EthicsGuthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Philosophy
On Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics
Guthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Ethics, Evolutionary; Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. Data of ethics
It is difficult to imagine under a system of evolution, even if an
universal subjective factor be admitted, the operation of a teleological
activity as ordinarily understood. Nevertheless, we find a teleological
faculty evolved in man. And even if we accept Mr. Matthew Arnold's
description, the question arises, Has the eternal power a conscious
intention of making towards righteousness from the first or from any
time? Or is it implicit in the original relations of the subjective to
the chemical and physical that it makes through Biology towards
righteousness--is righteousness merely another expression for a
completed biological law involved in the original relations of atoms
with an omnipresent subjective and relative factor?
And again, what, scientifically viewed, is our personal relation to
that inscrutable power which makes for righteousness? Here comes in the
ethical problem as affected by the religious, and both as affected by
our views of evolution. Professor Fiske says of the propositions
recognised by all religions "that men ought to do certain things and
ought to refrain from doing certain other things; and that the reason
why some things are wrong to do and other things are right to do, is in
some mysterious but very real way connected with the existence and
nature of this divine Power."
The fact that personal responsibility to the inscrutable Power belongs
to the essence of all religions is one thing, and the establishment of
it as a scientific truth is another. The fact of its existence and of
its universality is a presumption in its favour, but is not more than a
presumption. What has science to say to it? With this point Professor
Fiske next deals. He says that science, after all its searchings, finds,
in its ultimate enquiries, not only inexplicable laws whose effects it
can calculate though the laws themselves remain unexplained, but also
long processes which are not explicable by the known laws, and which
will probably remain for ever inexplicable. If he does not say so in
those words, we presume that must be what he means: for if he only means
that all cosmical histories are explicable by known laws, these laws
being themselves inexplicable, the inscrutable or Divine Power is only
antecedent to cosmical histories, and is not present in them, nor does
it affect the future. Nevertheless, what Professor Fiske has to say of
the results of scientific enquiry does not amount to much. "The doctrine
of evolution asserts, as the widest and deepest truth which the study of
nature can disclose to us, that there exists a power to which no limit
in time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenomena of the
universe, whether they be what we call material or what we call
spiritual phenomena, are manifestations of this infinite and eternal
Power."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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