eristics which were suitable for the conditions of
his earlier predatory life. He needed one moral constitution for his
primitive state, he needs quite another for his present state. The
resultant is a process of adaptation which has been going on for a long
time, and will go on for a long time to come.

Civilisation represents the adaptations which have already been
accomplished. Progress means the successive steps of the process. That
by this process man will eventually become suited to his mode of life,
Spencer has no doubts. All excess and deficiency of suitable faculties
must disappear; in other words, all imperfection. "The ultimate
development of the ideal man is logically certain--as certain as any
conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that
all men will die." Here is the theory of perfectibility asserted, on new
grounds, with a confidence not less assured than that of Condorcet or
Godwin.

Progress then is not an accident, but a necessity. Civilisation is a
part of nature, being a development of man's latent capabilities under
the action of favourable circumstances which were certain at some time
or other to occur. Here Spencer's argument assumes a final cause. The
ultimate purpose of creation, he asserts, is to produce the greatest
amount of happiness, and to fulfil this aim it is necessary that each
member of the race should possess faculties enabling him to experience
the highest enjoyment of life, yet in such a way as not to diminish the
power of others to receive like satisfaction. Beings thus constituted
cannot multiply in a world tenanted by inferior creatures; these,
therefore, must be dispossessed to make room; and to dispossess them
aboriginal man must have an inferior constitution to begin with; he
must be predatory, he must have the desire to kill. In general, given
an unsubdued earth, and the human being "appointed" to overspread and
occupy it, then, the laws of life being what they are, no other series
of changes than that which has actually occurred could have occurred.

The argument might be put in a form free from the assumption of a final
cause, and without introducing the conception of a divine Providence
which in this work Spencer adopted, though in his later philosophy it
was superseded by the conception of the Unknowable existing behind all
phenomena. But the ROLE of the Divine ruler is simply to set in motion
immutable forces to realise his design. "In the m