conditions, these being maintained meanwhile by a “pro-altruistic” sentiment, into which dread of retaliation, of social reprobation, of legal punishment, and of divine vengeance enter as component parts.  The idea of justice emerges gradually from the sentiment of justice:  it has two elements, one brute or positive, with inequality as its ideal, one human or negative, the ideal of which is equality.  In early times the former of these was unduly appreciated, as in later times the latter, the true conception includes both, the idea of equality being applied to the limits and the idea of inequality to the benefits of action.  Thus the formula of justice becomes:  “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man “—­a law which finds its authority in the facts, that it is an a priori dictum of “consciousness after it has been subject to the discipline of prolonged social life,” and that it is also deducible from the conditions of the maintenance of life at large and of social life.  From this law follow various particular corollaries or rights, all of which coincide with ordinary ethical concepts and have legal enactments corresponding to them.  Political rights so-called do not exist; government is simply a system of appliances for the maintenance of private rights.  Both the nature of the state and its constitution are variable:  the militant type requires centralization and a coercive constitution; the industrial type implies a wider distribution of political power, but requires a representation of interests rather than a representation of individuals.  Government develops as a result of war, and its function of protection against internal aggression arises by differentiation from its primary function of external defense.  These two, then, constitute the essential duties of the state; when war ceases the first falls away, and its sole function becomes the maintenance of the conditions under which each individual may “gain the fullest life compatible with the fullest life of fellow-citizens.”  All beyond this, all interference with this life of the individual, whether by way of assistance, restraint, or education, proves in the end both unjust and impolitic.  The remaining parts of the Ethics will treat of Negative and Positive Beneficence.

If J.S.  Mill and Spencer (the latter of whom, moreover, had announced evolution as a world-law before the appearance of Darwin), move in a direction akin to positivism, the same is true, further, of G.H.  Lewes (1817-78; History of Philosophy, 5th ed., 1880; Problems of Life and Mind, 1874 seq).