Data Of Ethics

by Herbert Spencer

Overview

'Spencer regarded the Principles of Ethics - of which The Data of Ethics and Justice constitutes parts one and four respectively - as the culmination and crowning achievement of the System of Synthetic Philosophy, to which the other volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology had been mere preliminaries' - Michael Taylor, from the Introduction. In Justice Spencer revisits the Law of Equal Freedom which first appeared in Social Statics and forms the keystone of social morality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781855067486
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/15/1999
Series:	Works by and about Herbert Spencer Series
Edition description:	FAC
Pages:	612
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.31(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER VII. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW. § 40. The last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their relations to conduct, recognized only their physiological aspects : their psychological aspects were passed over. In this chapter, conversely, we are not concerned with the constitutional connexions between feelings, as incentives or deterrents, and physical benefits to be gained or mischiefs to be avoided; nor with the reactive effects of feelings on the state of the organism, as fitting or unfitting it for future action. Here we have to consider represented pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, as constituting deliberate motives—as forming factors in the conscious adjustments of acts to ends. § 41. The rudimentary psychical act, not yet differentiated from a physical act, implies an excitation and a motion. In a creature of low type the touch of food excites prehension. In a somewhat higher creature the odour from nutritive matter sets up motion of the body towards the matter. And where rudimentary vision exists, sudden obscuration of light, implying the passage of something large, causes convulsive muscular movements which mostly carry the body away from the source of danger. In each of these cases we may distinguish four factors. There is (a), that property of the external object which primarily affects the organism—the taste, smell, or opacity; and, connected with such property, there is in the external object that character (b), which renders seizure of it, or escape from it, beneficial. Within the organism there is (c), the impression or sensation which the property (a), produces, serving as stimulus ; and there is, connected with it,the motor change (d), by which seizure or escape is effected. Now Psychology ia chiefly concerned with the connexion ...