Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/615

LEID DBS MEXSCHEXGESCHLECHTS. 603 meiit of practical philosophy. Mr. Spencer's Data of Etltics may not unfitly be called an epoch-making book, for never before was the Theory of Conduct so clearly conceived in its relation to the positive sciences, or so completely taken out of the hands of the abstract psychologist and metaphysician. The author of the book before us acknowledges his obligations to Mr. Spencer in no faint terms, and Dr. Schneider's " social- psychological investigation " may be regarded as a revision and amplification of the Data of Ethic-s. Ethics, according to the author, is rooted hi Biology understanding by Biology the doc- trine of the conservation and evolution of life. Man must from first to last be conceived as higher animal : not only is this true physically but also psychically, for his supreme efforts are motived by impulses identical with those which induce the mani- festations of vital activity on the lower plane of the brutes. The scholar and the artist, absorbed in their very special pin-suits, are apt to enlarge on intellectual and aesthetic ends as the proper determinators of conduct, but the scholar and the artist are ex- ceptional human beings ; while it may be shown that they too practically confess that the struggle for subsistence, the contract- ing of family ties, and the rearing of children are the main business of life. Shortly then, human duty, as animal instinct, is summed up in self-preservation and perpetuation of the species. This is the objective aspect of organic existence, the subjective concomitants being the feelings of Pleasure and Pain. Here our author finds his point of contact with Mr. Spencer, whose doctrine, that pleasures are the correlatives of actions favourable and pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, forms the a posteriori first principle on which his own, as the Spencerian, Ethics is based. Dr. Schneider signalises, however, two errors in Mr. Spencer's statement of this axiom. The English thinker is said to have overlooked the most important element in the Kelativity of Pleasures and Pains, viz., that we only attain to a consciousness of pleasurable feelings so far as a successive furtherance, a change for the better, or a simultaneous difference in our favour, occurs or is perceived, and the contrary in the case of pain " that therefore pleasure only attains to consciousness through the want of it, and through suffering, and the latter only attains to consciousness through the want of it and through pleasure ". Closely connected with this is another error, viz., the regarding pain (or suffering) as injurious under all circumstances, and conversely pleasure or satisfaction as in all cases useful, with the inevitable consequence that slight passing pains are under- estimated. The effect of these two considerations is to limit Mr. Spencer's principle and, one might add, to moderate his some- what extravagant optimism. The first chapter is entitled " Pleasure and Pain (Freud und J ) as expression of furthered and impaired vital processes".