[148] Green, as is well known, allows that any formulation of the ideal self must be incomplete, but holds that it is not for this reason useless. But this is to assume that development in the ideal is never to be radically reconstructive, that the ideal is to expand and fill out along established and unchangeable lines of growth so that all increase shall be in the nature of accretion. The self as a system is fixed and all individual moral growth is in the nature of approximation to this absolute ideal. This would appear to be essentially identical in a logical sense with Mr. Spencer's hypothesis of social evolution as a process of gradual approach to a condition of perfect adaptation of society and the individual to each other in an environment to which society is perfectly adapted--a condition in which "perfectly evolved" individuals shall live in a state of blessedness in conformity to the requirements of "absolute ethics." For a criticism of this latter type of view see MR. TAYLOR'S above-mentioned work (chap. v, _passim_). [149] For GREEN'S cautious defense of conscientiousness as a moral attitude see the _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book IV, chap. i; and for a statement of the present point of view as bearing upon Green's difficulty, see DEWEY, _The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus_, p. 37 _ad fin._, and _Philosophical Review_, Vol. II, pp. 661, 662. [150] Along the line thus inadequately suggested might be found an answer to certain criticisms of the attempt to dispense with a metaphysical idea of the self. Such criticisms usually urge that without reference to a metaphysical ideal no meaning attaches to such conceptions as "adjustment," "expansion," "furtherance," and the like as predicated of the moral acts of an agent in their effect upon the "energetic" self. Anything that one may do, it is said, is expansive of the self, if it be something new, except as we judge it by a metaphysical ideal of a rightly expanded self. For an excellent statement of this general line of criticism see STRATTON, "A Psychological Test of Virtue," _International Journal of Ethics_, Vol. XI, p. 200.