as to conditions it may be, but immutable and inevitable to the end.' (Pp. 191-2.)

This is a dreary prospect indeed! If this is all that we are to get by belief in Weissmann's germ-cells, by the innate power of directing developement, we feel no temptation to accept it for its consequences independent of its evidence. The temptation under which Mr. Kidd adopts it, is clear enough. It lends itself to his dominant idea.

Natural selection, or rather that only active half of it which consists in the idea of natural rejection, is still the fetish with which he works. Under Darwin's conception nature could work its saving havoc only on weak individuals, leaving the stronger to live and propagate. But under Weissmann's system he sees the opportunity for contending that this sole plan of working by havoc and continual destruction can be attributed to nature, as against all individual organisms, whether for the present strong or weak, if they stand in the way, in the least degree, of the new creatures which are to come. The strain and the stress of ceaseless and ruthless rivalry and competition is kept up as the only method in which progress can possibly be effected, and all individual lives are as nothing compared with the interests of living creatures which are yet unborn. Nature cares nothing for the individual. She cares only for species and races. Her eyes are ever fixed upon the future, and fixed with the stern resolve so to constitute the world, and so to shape the disposition of all creatures in it towards each other, that it shall be one constant scene of labour and of death and of extermination. All creatures shall be made the instruments of killing off each other, so that room shall be made for an endless procession of new forms, which in their turn again shall repeat the same process. This is the one predominant conception of Mr. Kidd's book, so far at least as the method of creation is concerned; and it is repeated over and over again as representing the one allpowerful and all-sufficient agency employed in the direction and government of the world.

The next step, and one of the first, is to assert that man has never been, is not now, and never will be any exception to this ruthless law, either as regards his individual or his social developement. Mr. Kidd is undoubtedly right when he points out that man, so far at least as his physical frame is concerned, is simply one of the other animals, and is subject to the same general conditions. He is equally right when he points out that this fact must be taken into

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account in all reasoning on the laws governing the developement of human society, as well as in speculating on the origin of his body. Whether the law which passes under the name of natural selection is one of those depends much on the sense in which that elastic formula is understood. But nothing can be more emphatic than Mr. Kidd's declaration, that it is so in the narrowest and most rigid sense. 'Like 'all that have come before him, he is engaged in a fierce ' and endless struggle for the means of existence; and he now takes part in this struggle not only against his fel'lows but in company with them, as against other social 'groups. Again he says: We find man in everyday life continually subject to laws and conditions which have 'been imposed upon him in common with all the rest of 'creation.'† There is nothing whatever new in this doctrine, except, perhaps, in the extreme and unqualified terms in which it is expressed. It is the foundation of the whole Darwinian philosophy and of Mr. Herbert Spencer's elaborate exposition of its results. But the remarkable feature about Mr. Kidd's book is, that wherever this doctrine tends to restrain or limit at all his own special argument and conclusions, he turns round on Mr. Herbert Spencer and blames him for not seeing immense distinctions. He 'has never realised,' says our author, the nature of the 'essential difference which distinguishes human evolution 'from all other evolution whatsoever.' And here we come on one of the novelties of Mr. Kidd's philosophy. The one great distinction between man and the lower animals is, of course, the gift of reason. The lower animals all do reasonable things in their own individual interests-in the interests of their species. But they do them, as we believe, in virtue of implanted instincts, without the exercise of any conscious reasoning process, and it is very remarkable that many of the acts which involve the most wonderful and far-reaching foresight in the lower animals are the acts of creatures comparatively low in the scale of life-that is to say, the creatures in which it is most impossible to conceive that they can be dictated by anything in themselves which can be called reason. The reasonableness or purposefulness which is conspicuous in those acts must reside somewhere else than in them, and must be the result of implanted and innate instincts delegated to them for the purposes which are actually attained. But it is the strange doctrine of Mr. ‡ P. 293.

* P. 18.

† P. 33.

Kidd that although the rational faculties are as much instinctive in man as lower faculties in the lower animals, so far as the impulse to use them is concerned, the reason of man is not only no guide whatever for him in promoting the interests of his species and of his race, but is an actual hindrance to him in so doing, and is indeed the one great enemy which he has to deal with in the higher developement of his individual life, and of his species, and of his social condition. Nothing can be more emphatic, violent, and extreme than the terms in which Mr. Kidd expresses this novel doctrine. He does not tell us, in the well-known language of Christian philosophy, that something must have happened which makes all human instincts liable to gross perversions and corruption. What he does tell us, over and over again, is that reason in itself leads in utterly wrong directions, and not only in wrong directions, but in directions specially suicidal and destructive as regards all interests but those of the moment and of the individual man. Man is thus represented as a creature lower than any of the lower animals, and lower, not by virtue of any loss of status, or of any corruption of original gifts, but lower because of the inherent viciousness of that very gift which we are accustomed to consider as one of the highest he possesses. Nothing can be more extreme than the language in which Mr. Kidd lays down this doctrine. He begins gently enough by affirming merely, as Archbishop Whately affirmed long before him, that, left to him'self, this high-born creature, whose progress we seem to take for granted, has not the slightest innate tendency to make any onward progress whatever.' This is a proposition the truth and even the meaning of which entirely depends on the reservation which may be intended in the words 'left to himself.' The question may well arise in our minds whether we are quite sure that man, as a race, is ever left to himself' in the sense of any absolute and complete separation from some other Spirit greater than his own. But passing over this question for the moment, it is to be observed that, under whatever reservations, this affirmation of Whately does not satisfy Mr. Kidd. He lays it down absolutely that the teaching of reason to the in'dividual must always be that the present time and his own interests therein are all important to him.' Then follows this tremendous dictum:- The central fact,' he says, 'with which we are confronted in our progressive societies is, therefore, that the interests of the social organism, and

*

those of the individuals comprising it at any time, are 'actually antagonistic-they can never be reconciled, they are essentially and inherently irreconcileable.' This is an accusation against the constitution of the world and of human nature which is pessimist indeed. It represents man as wholly destitute, so far as his reasonable nature is concerned, of those social instincts which are universal among the beasts, and which in some of the lower animals attain to a very high level indeed in the constitution and government of great social communities. It would make man an absolute and solitary exception to an otherwise universal law of organic life. If this far-reaching dogma had been expressed in any one sentence alone, however distinct its terms, we might suppose it to be the result of some incidental line of thought rashly followed up to unpremeditated conclusions. This is a common danger, and an abundant source of fallacies in all the deeper questions of speculative thought. But we cannot thus excuse or explain Mr. Kidd's sweeping assertions of the rebellion and revolt of human reason against the whole constitution of nature as known to it. His book aims at being a constructive theory of social evolution, and this doctrine of the absolute alienation of the reasoning faculties of man from any sympathy with, or even understanding of, some of nature's most certain and operative laws, is a fundamental part of the structure which he erects. It lies at the root of his whole scheme of explanation. The innate and ingrained antagonism between the reason of man, as represented in every individual mind, and the true interests of society is enforced with emphasis and reiteration throughout his pages.

Fortunately there is one feature in this doctrine which reveals its fallacy. Human society is, he says, essentially an organism. This, of course, is no theory, but an obvious fact. Mr. Kidd dwells upon it, and evidently wonders how its consequences have not been seen. But its consequences have been seen much better by others than by him. For one of the most necessary of these consequences is fatal to his conception of the part played by the individual man towards Nature, and of the counterpart played by Nature against him. The essential characteristic of all organisms is that they are built up by the harmonious growth of co-operative parts. Every part is necessary to the whole. There can be no antagonism between them-least of all such an antagonism that their interests are essentially irreconcileable.' That the

* P. 87.

organism, as a whole, should be ever jealously watching its own individual parts with the one great object of continually killing them off in the interests of its future self-that all the individual parts, in the exercise of one of their highest functions, should be possessed with a corresponding spirit of opposition and enmity against the whole-all this is an imagination so grotesque that the deliberate entertainment of it as an essential element in a constructive theory does seem to be almost incredible. Yet nothing can be more distinct or emphatic than Mr. Kidd's repeated declarations to this effect. The individual reason he represents as a power which is blindly selfish, regarding nothing but the individual's momentary interests and impulses, which are all, in themselves, purely reasonable. Reason,' he says, 'has in an 'examination of this kind nothing to do with any existence but the present; what it insists it is our duty to make the most 'of.'* Here, be it observed, the word 'duty' comes in, as it were, by a slip of the pen, with this result: that the human reason does include, and does deal with, the idea of obligation, but directs it into channels which intensify its own. selfish and destructive tendencies as regards the interests of the organism as a whole. If this be true, then the whole moral, as well as the whole purely intellectual nature of the individual man, is indeed so constituted as to be the one great enemy of human society, of which all the parts are at deadly enmity with the interests of the whole.

It is really almost needless to bring to the test of experience and experiment such a grotesque result of following into the region of obvious absurdity certain abstract conceptions which depend largely on mere verbal ambiguities. It may, however, be well to notice one, at least, of the few examples which Mr. Kidd gives us of the natural laws which he says are essentially irrational. It is an example which it is almost as difficult to conceive any writer allowing himself to present, as it is difficult to conceive his giving his assent to the abstract doctrine which he thinks it illustrates.

'It is evident that any organisation of society with a system of rewards according to natural ability can have no ultimate sanction in reason for all the individuals. For as the teaching of reason undoubtedly is that we are all the creatures of inheritance and environment, and that none of us is responsible for his abilities or for the want of them, so in reason all should share alike. Their welfare in the present existence is just as important to the ungifted as to the

* P. 67.