en 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.

It is because biological evolution is essentially an historical
doctrine that its votaries should not be too eager to apply it
directly to ethics. It has accomplished much if able to tell us how
things have happened in the past, without also dictating how they
ought to take place now. It is specially absurd to say that earlier
methods must govern later developments. That is what is done when we
are asked to take as our guide in voluntary choice a principle which
ignores volition. The whole progress from animal to man and from
savage to civilised man shows a gradual supersession of the principle
of natural selection by a principle of subjective selection which
steadily grows in purposiveness and in intelligence. To say that
intelligence should take nature as its guide is to ask civilised man
to put off both his civilisation and his manhood.

The course of evolution may describe the working of different
principles; but it cannot of itself supply a test of their value. How
then is such a test to be got? Can Metaphysics help us? I have pointed
out that the evolutionist ethics is relative--implying always a
relation between organism and envi