The Data of Ethics

by Herbert Spencer

§ 32. Thus far in treating of conduct from the biological point of view, we have considered its constituent actions under their physiological aspects only; leaving out of sight their psychological aspects. We have recognized the bodily changes and have ignored the accompanying mental changes. And at first sight it seems needful for us here to do this; since taking account of states of consciousness apparently implies an inclusion of the psychological view in the biological view.

This is not so however. As was pointed out in the Principles of Psychology, §§ 52, 53, we enter upon psychology proper only when we begin to treat of mental states and their relations considered as referring to external agents and their relations. While we concern ourselves exclusively with modes of mind as correlatives of nervous changes, we are treating of what was there distinguished as æstho-physiology. We pass to psychology only when we consider the correspondence between the connections among subjective states and the connections among objective actions. Here, then, without transgressing the limits of our immediate topic, we may deal with feelings and functions in their mutual dependencies.

We cannot omit doing this; because the psychical changes which accompany many of the physical changes in the organism are biological factors in two ways. Those feelings, classed as sensations, which, directly initiated in the bodily framework, go along with certain states of the vital organs and more conspicuously with certain states of the external organs, now serve mainly as guides to the performance of functions, but partly as stimuli, and now serve mainly as stimuli, but in a smaller degree as guides. Visual sensations which, as co-ordinated, enable us to direct our movements, also, if vivid, raise the rate of respiration; while sensations of cold and heat, greatly depressing or raising the vital actions, serve also for purposes of discrimination. So, too, the feelings classed as emotions, which are not localizable in the bodily framework, act in more general ways, alike as guides and stimuli—having influences over the performance of functions more potent even than have most sensations. Fear, at the same time that it urges flight and evolves the forces spent in it, also affects the heart and the alimentary canal; while joy, prompting persistence in the actions bringing it, simultaneously exalts the visceral processes.

Hence, in treating of conduct under its biological aspect, we are compelled to consider that interaction of feelings and functions which is essential to animal life in all its more developed forms.

§ 33. In the Principles of Psychology, § 124, it was shown that necessarily, throughout the animate world at large, "pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare;" since "it is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of Evolution, that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions." The argument was as follows:

If we substitute for the word Pleasure the equivalent phrase—a feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there, and if we substitute for the word Pain the equivalent phrase—a feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out; we see at once that if the states of consciousness which a creature endeavors to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and if the states of consciousness which it endeavors to expel are the correlatives of beneficial actions, it must quickly disappear through persistence in the injurious, and avoidance of the beneficial. In other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which, on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable and habitually avoided feelings went along with activities directly or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been, other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.

Fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in living things, even before consciousness arises; and after the rise of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than to become better established. At the very outset, life is maintained by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts which impede it; and whenever sentiency make its appearance as an accompaniment, its forms must be such that in the one case the produced feeling is of a kind that will be sought—pleasure, and in the other case is of a kind that will be shunned—pain. Observe the necessity of these relations as exhibited in the concrete.

A plant which envelops a buried bone with a plexus of rootlets, or a potato which directs its blanched shoots toward a grating through which light comes into the cellar, shows us that the changes which outer agents themselves set up in its tissues are changes which aid the utilization of these agents. If we ask what would happen if a plant's roots grew not toward the place where there was moisture, but away from it, or if its leaves, enabled by light to assimilate, nevertheless bent themselves toward the darkness, we see that death would result in the absence of the existing adjustments. This general relation is still better shown in an insectivorous plant, such as the Dionœa muscipula, which keeps its trap closed round animal matter, but not round other matter. Here it is manifest that the stimulus arising from the first part of the absorbed substance itself sets up those actions by which the mass of the substance is utilized for the plant's benefit.

When we pass from vegetal organisms to unconscious animal organisms, we see a like connection between proclivity and advantage. On observing how the tentacles of a polype attach themselves to, and begin to close round, a living creature, or some animal substance, while they are indifferent to the touch of other substance, we are similarly shown that diffusion of some of the nutritive juices into the tentacles, which is an incipient assimilation, causes the motions effecting prehension. And it is obvious that life would cease were these relations reversed.

Nor is it otherwise with this fundamental connection between contact with food and taking in of food, among conscious creatures, up to the very highest. Tasting a substance implies the passage of its molecules through the mucous membrane of the tongue and palate; and this absorption, when it occurs with a substance serving for food, is but a commencement of the absorption carried on throughout the alimentary canal. Moreover, the sensation accompanying this absorption, when it is of the kind produced by food, initiates at the place where it is strongest, in front of the pharynx, an automatic act of swallowing, in a manner rudely analogous to that in which the stimulus of absorption in a polype's tentacles initiates prehension.