It seems evident, therefore, that to take adaptation to environment, or self-preservation as interpreted by adaptation, as the end of conduct, is to adopt an end which cannot be shown to be desirable on the ground of yielding a maximum of happiness or pleasure. And it is almost with a feeling of relief that one finds Mr Spencer's confidence in the tendency of evolution so far shaken as to admit of his saying that "however near to completeness the adaptation of human nature to the conditions of existence at large, physical and social, may become, it can never reach completeness."[219] "Adaptation to environment" must, at any rate, be kept quite distinct from any theory of ethics which takes pleasure as the end of life; and it cannot consistently determine any result as of ethical value on account of its pleasurable consequences. The goal it sets before us, and in which human progress ends, is conformity with an external order. The modification of these external conditions by human effort is to be justified ethically by the opportunity it gives for bringing about a fuller agreement between the individual or race and its environment. The result is a stationary state of human conduct, corresponding with, or a part of, that general "equilibration" to which, according to Mr Spencer, all evolution tends. But this theory, which places the goal of conduct in what seems to be the actual tendency of evolution, gains no real support from this apparent harmony of ethics with general philosophy. It may be granted that the evidence of physical laws goes to show that the evolution of the solar, or even stellar, system is towards a condition in which the "moving equilibrium" will at last pass into a form in which there is no further sensible motion, and the concentration of matter is complete. But to infer from this that the theory which places the end of conduct in a similar equilibrium shows the harmony of morality with the tendency of existence in general, would really involve a confusion of the two different meanings of "end." The end or termination of all things may be equilibrium, motionlessness, or dissolution, but this is no reason why the end or aim of conduct should be a similar equilibrium.