[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, p, 417.]

The second remark which has to be made on this final point is, that neither on the method of system and self-assertion nor on the method of expansion and self-sacrifice has the author given or suggested any criterion for the distinction of good and evil.  He has cast his net so wide as to include all conduct within it without discrimination of moral worth.  His own result is that “the good is, as such, transcended and submerged."[1] But this result loses all significance if it is the case, as our enquiry seems to prove, that the good as such has never been reached at all, nor any tenable suggestion offered for distinguishing it from evil.

[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, p. 419.]

This is the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought.  This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science.  A comparison of the purposes and results of the two schools may be instructive.

Mr Herbert Spencer has told us that since the time of his first essay, “written as far back as 1842,” his “ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large a scientific basis....  Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularisation of morals is becoming imperative.  Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it....  Those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, and that it must be filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief."[1] But more than fifty years after the publication of this first essay, as, with the completion of the ‘Principles of Ethics,’ his whole system of philosophy lay unrolled before him, he made the significant and pathetic confession that “the doctrine of evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped....  Right regulation of the actions of so complex a being as man, living under conditions so complex as those presented by a society, evidently forms a subject-matter unlikely to admit of definite conclusions throughout its entire range."[2] And the lack of confidence which the author himself felt in these parts, there is good reason to extend to the whole structure of evolutionary ethics.

[Footnote 1:  Preface to Data of Ethics, 1879.]

[Footnote 2:  Preface to Principles of Ethics, vol. ii., 1893.]