sheer necessities of life will no longer occupy the central place, but in which devotion to occupations which are valuable per se will be far more general than now.
It is the duty of ethics to develop the content of the highest stages of social life. The method of ethics is essentially constructive: from the highest principles of evolutionary theory it constructs the idea of the perfect life as a harmony of concentration and differentiation, a complete determination. In the perfect organic type the development of the one suffers no limitation save the recognition of the corresponding right of the other to development, and the individual is not coerced to undertake occupations which offer no immediate satisfaction. Altruism on the contrary furnishes the individual opportunity to develop faculties and dispositions which would otherwise remain fallow. The contrast between altruism and egoism is thus reconciled. For the present we are still far removed from such an ideal state. For this we can only have a relative ethics, not an absolute system; but the absolute ethics can nevertheless be formulated and serve as a guide to relative ethics.
Spencer regards the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill as too empirical. The highest ethical ideas can be discovered only by the theory of evolution. But in his ethics as in his theory of knowledge, he still differs from his precursors only in the matter of having extended the horizon.
F. Positivism in Germany and Italy.
As we have already observed, positivism is by no means to be conceived merely as a movement which is opposed to romanticism. It is the result of well-defined intellectual motives which are peculiar to it alone. Within the positive school (in its broader sense) we have seen men like
