of contact with nature and society, but sought heighten its sensibility, that it might become medium of pleasurable feeling. For the inspiz tion with which it may be pursued this ideal nowhere been more eloquently set forth than ⠀ the pages of Walter Pater, who styles himse "the new Cyrenaic."

"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, the end. A counted number of pulses only is given 1. us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we se in them all that is to be seen in them by the fines senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from poir: to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstacy, is success in life. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.""2

§ 122. In the course of modern philosophy the ethics of naturalism has undergone a transforma

22 Pater: The Renaissance, pp. 249–250.

ion and development that equip it much more formidably for its competition with rival theories. Development If the Cynic and Cyrenaic philosophies

of Utilitarian

ism.

Evolutionary
Conception

of Social

of life seem too egoistic and narrow in

outlook, this inadequacy has been largeRelations. ly overcome through the modern conception of the relation of the individual to society. Man is regarded as so dependent upon social relations that it is both natural and rational for him to govern his actions with a concern for the community. There was a time when this relation of dependence was viewed as external, a barter of goods between the individual and society, sanctioned by an implied contract. Thomas Hobbes, whose unblushing materialism and egoism stimulated by opposition the whole development of English ethics, conceived morality to consist in rules of action which condition the stability of the state, and so secure for the individual that peace

which self-interest teaches him is essential to his welfare.

"And therefore so long a man is in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, as private appetite is the measure of good and evil: and consequently all men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore also the ways or means of peace, which, as I have showed before, are 'justice,' 'gratitude,' modesty,'

'equity,' 'mercy,' and the rest of the laws of Nature, good; that is to say, 'moral virtues'; and their contra 'vices,' evil." 23

Jeremy Bentham, the apostle of utilitarianism the eighteenth century, defined political and socia sanctions through which the individual could pur chase security and good repute with action cond cive to the common welfare. But the nineteent century has understood the matter better-and the idea of an evolution under conditions that select and reject, is here again the illuminating thought No individual, evolutionary naturalism maintains, has survived the perils of life without possessing as an inalienable part of his nature, congenital like his egoism, certain impulses and instinctive desires in the interest of the community as a whole. The latest generation of a race whose perpetuation has been conditioned by a capacity to sustain social relations and make common cause against a more external environment, is moral, and does not adopt morality in the course of a calculating egoism. Conscience is the racial instinct of self-preservation uttering itself in the individual member, who draws his very life-blood from the greater organism. § 123. This latest word of naturalistic ethics has

23 Hobbes: Leviathan, Chap. XV.

ot won acceptance as the last word in ethics, and his in spite of its indubitable truth within its scope.

aturalistic thics not ystematic.

For the deeper ethical interest seeks not

so much to account for the moral nature as to construe and justify its promptings. The evolutionary theory reveals the genesis of conscience, and demonstrates its continuity with nature, but this falls as far short of realizing the purpose of ethical study as a history of the natural genesis of thought would fall short of logic. Indeed, naturalism shows here, as in the realm of epistemology, a persistent failure to appreciate the central problem. Its acceptance as a philosophy, we are again reminded, can be accounted for only on the score of its genuinely rudimentary character. As a rudimentary phase of thought it is both indispensable and inadequate. It is the philosophy of instinct, which should in normal development precede a philosophy of reason, in which it is eventually assimilated and supplemented.

§ 124. There is, finally, an inspiration for life which this philosophy of naturalism may conveyNaturalism as atheism, its detractors would call it, but

Antagonistic

to Religion.

none the less a faith and a spiritual ex

altation that spring from its summing up of truth.

It is well first to realize that which is dispirit in it, its failure to provide for the freedom, i mortality, and moral providence of the more sa guine faith.

"For what is man looked at from this point of vie Man, so far as natural science by itself is ab to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the univers the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His ve existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitor episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets Of the combination of causes which first converted dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. I is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant.

We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideles and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down inte the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labor, genius, devo