CHAPTER III.

REST.

§ 205. Though the ethically-enjoined limitations of life-sustaining activities, specified towards the close of the last chapter, apparently implies that rest is ethically enjoined, and in a large measure does so, yet this corollary must be definitely stated and enlarged on for several reasons.

CHAPTER IV.

NUTRITION.

§ 210. Except perhaps in agreeing that gluttony is to be reprobated and that the gourmet, as well as the gourmand, is a man to be regarded with scant respect, most people will think it is absurd to imply, as the above title does, that ethics has anything to say about the taking of food.

CHAPTER V.

STIMULATION.

§ 214. To write sundry chapters on the ethics of individual life and to say nothing about the taking of stimulants, is out of the question.

CHAPTER VI.

CULTURE.

§ 219. Taken in its widest sense, culture means preparation for complete living. It includes, in the first place, all such discipline and all such knowledge as are needful for, or conducive to, efficient self-sustentation and sustentation of family. And it includes, in the second place, all such development of the faculties at large, as fits them for utilizing those various sources of pleasure which Nature and Humanity supply to responsive minds.

CHAPTER VII.

AMUSEMENTS.

§ 225. I have closed the last chapter with a division, the subject matter of which links it on to the subject matter of this chapter. We pass insensibly from the activities and passivities implied by æsthetic culture, to sundry of those which come under the head of relaxations and amusements. These we have now to consider from the ethical point of view.

CHAPTER VIII.

MARRIAGE.

§ 229. Up to the present point there has been maintained, if not absolutely yet with tolerable clearness, the division between the ethics of individual life and the ethics of social life; but we come, in this chapter and the chapter which follows it, to a part of ethics which is in a sense intermediate. For in the relations of marriage and parenthood, others are concerned, not contingently and indirectly, but in ways that are necessary and direct.

CHAPTER IX.

PARENTHOOD.

§ 235. The subject-matter of this chapter is of course only in part separable from the subject-matter of the last chapter. But though in discussing the Ethics of Marriage, as primarily concerning the relations of parents to each other, it has been needful to take account of the relations of parents to offspring, it has seemed best to reserve the full consideration of these last relations for a distinct chapter.

CHAPTER X.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS.

§ 241. The title of this division—“The Ethics of Individual Life”—has excited a publicly-expressed curiosity respecting the possible nature of its contents. Nothing beyond prudential admonitions could, it was thought, be meant; and there was evident surprise that ethical sanction should be claimed for these.

To find the authority for any statement in the text, the reader is to proceed as follows:—Observing the number of the section in which the statement occurs, he will first look out, in the following pages, the corresponding number, which is printed in conspicuous type.

THE PRINCIPLES

OF

ETHICS.

BY

HERBERT SPENCER.

VOL II.

NEW YORK:

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 1896.