ecclesiastical lamentations over our policy. The disentangling of ethics from theology and the treatment of it as an independent science were demanded as a logical requirement of our educational system, for morals must be taught in public schools, while religion is left to the special agencies of spiritual instruction. And, if the country has thus decreed the divorce, why mourn over a book which merely conforms to it, and which furnishes the best defense of the national wisdom in making the divorce?
But the characterization of Spencer's work as dreary and the suggestion about "the setting of a great hope" are untruthful, and are probably morbid subjective illusions of the writer. The "Data of Ethics," so far from being a dreary book in its spirit and tone, is, on the contrary, a book more buoyant with hope and more full of rational encouragement than any former philosophical treatise upon morals ever written. It connects the moral duty and improvement of man with pleasure and happiness more closely and profoundly than any other ethical system hitherto promulgated. It arrays the grand results of modern science against a spurious metaphysics to stem the black tide of advancing pessimism; and it appeals to the unfolding of the universe as giving trust of something brighter and better for man—yet to be realized this side of his chances of perdition. Other reviewers of "The Data of Ethics" have not failed to recognize and to declare this quality of the book.
A writer in the "Home Journal" of November 16th closes an interesting account of Spencer's work as follows: "To whatever criticism the system of ethics which is thus logically developed from the law of evolution may be subjected on the part of the opponents of the evolution theory, yet this at least is evident—that as an instrument for the acceleration of the progress of society toward the beautiful ideal which it sketches out, as a stimulus to individual exertion in furtherance of this high aim, the new system is immeasurably superior to all antecedent theories of life. While other systems have encouraged the hope, none have supplied the data of a rational faith in the ultimate realization of a lofty morality among the masses of mankind. Nay, the prevalent codes which claim for themselves a supernatural origin make it their duty to proclaim the native impotency of man, and place the realization of their ideal quite beyond this 'vale of tears.'
"Believe in the perfectibility of men, believe that society in the very conditions of its existence is impregnated with the potency that insures this perfectibility, and a great step is made toward the end desired. Faith in this preëstablished destiny—the faith that the laws of the universe are working in and through and side by side with the aspirations and endeavors of individual men, can not fail but impart a new impulse to these aspirations and a new vigor to these endeavors."
Equally to the point are the words of a critic in "The Nonconformist" of November 5th—a journal which is the leading organ of English orthodox Dissenters. After an excellent analysis of the work, the writer remarks: "The value of the discussion in this volume is the glimpses it affords into the future which its author anticipates. No loftier view, we venture to think, was ever entertained. Whatever may be the opinions we hold respecting the origin of our ideas of right and wrong, and of the sanctions by which they are enforced, we can not refrain from admiring the optimism of Mr. Herbert Spencer. It is as pure and sublime as that of the most spiritual seers of the past, and it involves as radical a change in human nature as that demanded by the New Testament. It is, in his own words, 'a rationalized version of its ethical principles.' He feels, as we feel in reading
