Excerpt from The Ethical Aspects of Evolution Regarded as the Parallel Growth of Opposite Tendencies
The purpose of the following essay is twofold; in the first place, to enforce the view that the process of evolution, whether it be forward and in the direction of further development, or backward and degenerative, has never exhibited the isolated advance or decay of any single principle in the pairs of opposites, such as good and evil, pain and pleasure, ignorance and knowledge, and many others, which enter into the total complex of human nature; but that, on the contrary, when any one of the partners in any such a pair has either grown or decreased, the other partner too has shared the growth or decrease to an approximately equal extent. The other half of our purpose has been to trace the connexion of this principle with ethics, or the systematic representation of our judgements on human conduct.
No long account of the circumstances in which this essay was produced is called for. The idea of evolution as the equal and parallel progression of opposites was suggested to me, while I was still an undergraduate, by the simultaneous study of Herbert Spencer and Schopenhauer. My mind was already prepared for its reception by the lesson taught by Tocqueville, that in the republican institutions of America, when compared with the institutions of the old world, special advantages were nearly counterbalanced by special drawbacks. At first my generalization only took in the contrasted pair of pleasure and pain; very soon it was extended to good and evil; and finally it came to embrace adaptation and misadaptation generally, or, in other words, the whole of the phenomena of life when regarded under the aspect of evolution. At this point it was my lot to enter a service whose absorbing duties left neither the leisure nor the appetite for abstract speculation, and the theory was not carried further. But it was far from being lost sight of.
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