[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Green, ‘Prolegomena to Ethics,’ p. 7:  “A philosopher who would reconstruct our ethical systems in conformity with the doctrines of evolution and descent, if he would be consistent, must deal less scrupulously with them than perhaps any one has yet been found to do.  If he has the courage of his principles, having reduced the speculative part of them to a natural science, he must abolish the practical or preceptive part altogether.”]

That, so far as I can see, is the tendency of a good deal of quite recent writing from the point of view of the evolution school:  in the face of controversy and in the face of difficulties to give up the attempt which they started on so confidently thirty years ago,—­the attempt to show that evolution affords a means of deciding between right and wrong and of establishing an ideal for human conduct.  Failing in this attempt, they seem to turn round and say that ethics should content itself with describing facts instead of laying down a law or setting up an ideal.

Now, whatever truth there may be in the assertion of the difficulty of determining an ideal for conduct, there is one thing certain:  that whether or not the ideal can be philosophically or scientifically defined and established, some ideal is always being set up.  Human action implies choice, implies the selection of one course rather than another; and the course that is chosen is always chosen for some reason, because it seems better than the course which is passed by.  Choice always follows some kind of principle.  We may use different principles at different times, we may use badly established principles, we may use uncriticised principles, but principles we do use, and we cannot act voluntarily without using them, even when we are not definitely conscious of them.

It is not possible, therefore, to entertain the suggestion that these principles should be excluded from ethics.  Ethics must consider them, even if it should fail in reaching a correct account of them.  We are bound to ask, for instance, what principles can decide between those divergent tendencies brought to light by natural selection, between the conditions of success for the group and the conditions of success for the individual?  The conflict between individual development and group development is continually pressing to the front The individual cannot reach a high stage of development except in and through a highly developed society.  But the efficiency which a highly developed society requires of its members is not the same as individual development; it more commonly implies a specialisation which tends to warp or cramp individual capacity.  This is a long familiar opposition.  And the theory of evolution can do nothing to reconcile it All it can say is that in certain cases natural selection points one way, and that in certain cases it points the other way.  If ethical significance be claimed for it, it must be said that natural selection is divided against itself, and that it is without any principle for reconciling its own divergences.