Always a very complex problem, the study of ethics, in Mr. Spencer's works, becomes in some respects still more complex from the necessity he is under of affiliating it in some way upon the cosmical process. Conceiving all knowledge to be capable of unification as a system of causation, so that when the relations of the original factors are understood, all histories are merely corollaries from these ultimate truths, Mr. Spencer feels bound, in the first place, to show that each particular science falls into its due place in the logical scheme. Consequently, one of the main ideas permeating the "Data of Ethics" is this view of ethics as interpretable only by an adequate knowledge of the cosmical process in which it forms a feature.
Indeed, the proposition is laid down at the outset that parts can only be properly understood through a knowledge of the wholes of which they form part.[2] Upon this Mr. Spencer reasons that since ethics deals with purposed conduct, that kind of conduct can only be understood through a scientific knowledge of conduct in general, which again forms part of the study of action in general, bringing us at once to the cosmical process upon the understanding of which, therefore, depends the understanding of our special subject.
This philosophic relation of Ethics to the cosmical process is referred to in the preface as being, in fact, the main object Mr. Spencer had in view in his elaborate series of volumes, and is more explicitly stated in Chapter IV. of the work under review, in which Mr. Spencer considering "The Ways of Judging Conduct," justifies the course he thus pursues. Here it is pointed out that in the systems of all preceding authors the idea of causation has been insufficiently recognised or has even been altogether ignored—an assertion which is thereupon justified by a review of the Theological, Political, Intuitional, and Utilitarian schools of moral philosophers. Mr. Spencer thereupon proceeds (¶ 22) "Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset, that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general defect—they neglect ultimate causal connexions. Of course, I do not mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but I mean that they recognise them only incidentally. They do not erect into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statements of them.
"Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently generalises these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage at which its empirical generalisations are included in a rational generalisation does it become developed science. Astronomy has already passed through its successive stages; first, collections of facts, then inductions from them, and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space. Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared, have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted that geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in the cooling and solidifying Earth, exposed to the Sun's heat and the action of the Moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and is still, exhibiting a like series of steps; the evolution of organic forms at large is being affiliated on physical actions in operation from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents, are coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed of matters that are affected by certain forces, and disengage other forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling ignored everything like cause, save in recognising those effects of habit which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs; but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes, the implication being that psychology becomes a science, as fast as these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate principles. Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by stray ideas about social organisation, scattered through the masses of worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognised by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalisations, are now beginning to assume the character of generalisations made coherent by derivation from causes lying in human nature placed under given conditions. Clearly then, ethics, which is a science dealing with the conduct of associated human beings, regarded under one of its aspects, has to undergo a like transformation, and, at present undeveloped, can be considered a developed science only when it has undergone this transformation.
"A preparation in the simpler sciences is pre-supposed. Ethics has a physical aspect, since it treats of human activities, which, in common with all expenditures of energy, conform to the law of the persistence of energy; moral principles must conform to physical necessities. It has a biological aspect, since it concerns certain effects, inner and outer, individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the highest type of animal. It has a psychological aspect, for its subject matter is an aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and guided by intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect, for these actions, some of them directly, and all of them indirectly, affect associated beings.
"What is the implication? Belonging under one aspect to each of these sciences—physical, biological, psychological, sociological—it can find its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths which are common to all of them. Already we have concluded in a general way that conduct at large, including the conduct Ethics deals with, is to be fully understood only as an aspect of evolving life; and now we are brought to this conclusion in a more special way.
"Here, then, we have to enter on the consideration of moral phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has wrought out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved—if the solar system as a whole, the earth as part of it, the life in general which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism—if the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest—if one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest creatures with which morality is concerned, also conform."[3]
In this passage Mr. Spencer propounds morality or ethics as a matter for scientific study, only to be understood or explained as part of general conduct when it is capable of explanation deductively from antecedent causes. The distinction recognised between conduct called moral and conduct regarded as immoral is only to be understood when, after a historical survey of human actions and of the actions of organisms in general, we not only perceive its immediately antecedent causes, but, going behind them, recognise the ultimate necessity of their occurrence in the very nature of the universe. This reveals the special features of Mr. Spencer's method in the treatment of his subject as distinguished from that followed by Mr. Leslie Stephen in his "Science of Ethics," a distinction which we may conveniently mark by terming them respectively the Philosophic and the Scientific methods. The former term we use in the sense assigned to it in the definition given by Mr. Spencer in "First Principles."[4]
A philosophy is complete when the mind has been able to form for itself such an appraisement of the relations and conditions of factors at a period sufficiently remote to ante-date any great amount of complexity as will enable us deductively to frame a history of developments which may correspond with the actual history of sequences in the concrete universe. If this appraisement of a remote cosmos characterised by comparative simplicity nevertheless admits the existence of many factors whose differences are not accounted for, philosophy is so far formally incomplete: but as the determination of these points lies beyond the powers of human reason, philosophy may justly be regarded as practically complete if it unifies from this point of view all the knowledge with which the human mind is conversant. If we are able to include all the sciences in one coherent whole nothing more can be expected of philosophy—beyond that lies the realm of speculation and the Unknowable.
The scope of the sciences is not so ambitious. Their aim is limited within a much narrower purview. They seek merely to ascertain the laws which subsume special classes of phenomena. They recognise causation and their inductions are valid to the extent of the classes of facts expressed in any particular law. But each science or class of facts is severally and separately worked upon even though the progress of study is ever disclosing the mutual dependence of the various sciences.