ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Herbert Spencer’s contributions to ethical science. The struggle of a new idea concerning the universe with the old ideas whose peaceful reign it disturbs, almost invariably passes through two stages—a stage of positive antagonism and a stage of high-handed conciliation. Properly to appreciate the place occupied by the work of Spencer in the general development of ethical thought, people must understand something of what had been done towards the establishment of a scientific basis of morality by writers who had preceded him in the field. This will bring out his relation to the doctrines of the so-called orthodox schools upon the one hand, and to the theories of earlier independent thinkers upon the other. An intrinsic difference in principle has long divided all ethical investigators, no matter what their minor points of agreement or disagreement may be, into two great hostile camps, usually known as the intuitive or intuitional, and the inductive or utilitarian.
