In a rough way it may be said that Spencer, in restricting himself to demonstrating so much of evolution as could be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, left open too much opportunity for the German conception that evolution stops at the point where those terms stop; and it can be said, with equally rough justice, that the philosopher who, up to this time, has traced the law farthest beyond that point, was Fiske. * * * * * Spencer said in a letter to Fiske, February 2, 1870 (_Life_, I, 368. The italics are apparently the biographer's. We condense a little.): "The deanthropomorphization of men's conceptions has never occupied any conspicuous or distinctive place in my own mind--_they have been all along quite secondary to the grand doctrine of Evolution from a physical point of view_. As I originally conceived it, 'First Principles' was what now forms its second part. I subsequently saw the need for Part I (The Unknowable) _simply for the purpose of guarding myself against the charges of atheism and materialism_. I consider it ['The Synthetic Philosophy'] as essentially a Cosmogony that admits of being worked out in physical terms, without necessarily entering upon any metaphysical questions, and without committing myself to any particular form of philosophy commonly so called. My _sole original purpose_ was the interpretation of all concrete phenomena in terms of Matter and Motion, and I regard all other purposes as incidental and secondary." Spencer would not go out of reach of experiment--at least collateral experiment, but Fiske went into intuition freely. Spencer avoided the labyrinth altogether, Fiske went into it boldly, but always kept within reach of the clue of experience. But those who do not already know the contrary, should not infer from this that Spencer ignored the field of Ethics. Quite the reverse: he made probably the most important scientific contributions to that field yet made, in tracing the evolution of the conduct of sentient beings from its first manifestations in reflex action, in the avoidance of danger, and the procuring of food, through the seeking of mates, the care of offspring, the forming of groups, up to the highest development of personal and social relations and the moralities therein involved. But for one person who has read Spencer's _Ethics_, a hundred, probably a thousand, have read his work in the unmoral fields, and tens of thousands have their ideas of Evolution restricted to the fields explored by Darwin and Hæckel, and in those fields it is the brute and the Prussian that survive. But civilization grows in other fields.