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SUBJECTIVIST THEORY OF ETHICS 37!
bond are clearly different from his brains, and whose
brains are different from his blood. In primitive society
all men lead the same sort of life and the social structure
, is simple. In civilized societies one man lives in a hovel and
another in a mansion, while society is cut across by
infinitely diverse stratifications of class and creed and code.
As human existence becomes more complex, some degree
of co-operation is necessary in order that the needs of the
more complex beings whom the evolutionary process
throws up, may receive satisfaction. Co-operation relieves
human beings from the necessity of supplying for them-
selves their most elementary needs, and thus releases their
energies for the pursuit of fuller and more satisfying forms
ofexistence. In addition, then, to his native egoistic impulses
the individual gradually evolves another set of tendencies,
those, namely, which enable and prompt him to co-operate
with his fellows. These, no less than the egoistic impulses
required for survival, appear as the necessary products
of the development of the evolutionary process. Spencer
even goes so far as to suggest that an enlightened scientist
who was fully conversant with the nature of evolution from
the first, could have predicted their appearance in advance.
If man must become a co-operating social being, in
order that evolutionary development may continue beyond
the animal level, he must also become an altruistic one.
Society, to invoke again a simile of Schopenhauer's, is
like a collection of hedgehog's driven together for the
sake of warmth; hence the spikes of its members must
be felted, if the discomfort occasioned by their pressure
upon one another is not to become intolerable. Manners
and morals are like a covering of felt which is imposed
upon the spikes of primitive behaviour, and enable the
group to cohere without pain to its members.
Spencer adds that, although the development of social
sentiments and altruistic motives has the effect of screen-
ing
the individual from the unrestricted incidence of the
struggle for existence within the group, struggle, which is
the law of evolution, does not cease, but is transferred