Principles of western civilisation

392 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

tion into the more developed form it reached later in Herbert Spencer’s theories—it proceeded from the past experience either of the individual or of the race. Translated into the language of psychology, this conception of the empirical school of thought became in our time an assertion that all the faculties and intuitions of the human mind have arisen from the consolidated experience of antecedent individuals who have bequeathed their nervous organisations to the existing individuals.* Translated into a principle of ethics, it became an assertion that all ethical ideas represent simply the inherited experience of utilities.° Translated into the fundamental maxim of Marxian socialism, it became the assertion that all human institutions and beliefs are ultimately in the last analysis the outcome of economic conditions. *

The conclusion, in short, to which Kant advanced has been regarded by the adherents of the empirical school of thought as offering no solid ground for assent. For in the conception, for instance, which reaches its most developed phase in Herbert Spencer’s theories—that conception in which the clue to individual and social development alike is summed up in the relations of the ascendant present to the past—Kant’s conclusion necessarily presented itself as being without any correlative in the evolution of the individual

1 Cf. Principles of Biology, §§ 297-3143 Principles of Psychology, §§ 223273, and § 430.

2 Cf. Principles of Psychology, § 129 to end.

3 Cf. Principles of Ethics, S§ 24-62. The position with which the English school set out may be compared, in the first book of Locke’s Assay concerning the Human Understanding, with that reached by Mr. Spencer.

* Cf. Capital, by Karl Marx (trans. by Moon and Aveling), ch. i. sec 4, and ch, xxxii. ; also German Soctal Democracy, by Bertrand Russell, lecture i.

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