KIDD ON "SOCIAL EVOLUTION." 41 



the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the former are 

 rendered subordinate to the latter in the general interests of the 

 evolution which the race is undergoing." Whatever is true in 

 this definition is expressed in simpler and stronger phraseology 

 by Dr. Maudsley. Whatever meaning there is in the word " ultra- 

 rational" is better expressed, it seems to us, in Dr. Maudsley 's 

 declaration that " it (religion) appeals to and is the outcome of 

 the heart, not the understanding, and so goes down into lower 

 depths than the fathom line of the understanding can sound"; 

 while, as regards the furnishing of a sanction for actions per- 

 formed in the interests of society, the language of Maudsley, who 

 says that religion rests on "the deep foundation of sacrifice of 

 self, devotion to the kind, the heroism of duty," surely covers the 

 whole ground. On the next page to that in which these expres- 

 sions occur we find the following : " Any one who looks forward 

 with a light heart to the overthrow of Christianity might do well 

 to consider what can ever adequately replace it merely as a social 

 and humanizing force." We turn another page and read : " In 

 him (the founder of Christianity) was the birth of the greatest 

 social force that has ever arisen to modify human evolution " ; 

 and the paragraph ends with the declaration that if humanity is 

 to progress, " it will, as heretofore, draw from a source within 

 itself, deeper than knowledge, the inspiration to direct and urge 

 it on the path of its destiny." 



Now, we venture to say that Mr. Kidd has nowhere in his book 

 put the case for the social utility of religion more strongly than 

 it has been put in these passages and many others which we 

 might quote from one of the most advanced of modern scientific 

 thinkers. But Dr. Maudsley, as we have already hinted, does 

 not, in what he says on this subject, take up any very peculiar 

 position. Mr. Spencer fully recognizes religion as an indispensa- 

 ble source of moral control in early stages of society, and as one 

 that can ill be discarded even in our own day. He believes that 

 it will be progressively purified of all doctrines that are not es- 

 sential to it, and that it will abide as an ineradicable conscious- 

 ness of a power behind phenomena, in and by which all things 

 exist. Schopenhauer declared that the metaphysical impulse of 

 the human race, that by which it seeks to formulate those trans- 

 cendent truths that are of the substance of religious belief, is no 

 less fundamental in human nature than the scientific impulse; 

 and the later Schopenhauerians, like Prof. Paul Deussen, whose 

 excellent little book on Metaphysics has lately been given to the 

 world in an English dress, use language which might be supposed 

 to have been specially intended to forestall what Mr. Kidd evi- 

 dently regards as his most striking and original utterances. Take 

 the following passages, for example, from Prof. Deussen: "For 



