1894. PSEUDO-BIOLOGY. 453 



spirit. But Drummond rides a willing horse too hard. He tries 

 to make his phrase cover many things to wliich it is not appHc- 

 able. What does he mean by the " Struggle for the Life of 

 Others " ? On page 39 it appears to mean nothing more than 

 the struggle to produce, the tendency to grow fat and multiply. 

 But this is not an obvious meaning of the phrase. The fact is 

 that, in ascribing all animal acts to the two functions of nutrition 

 and reproduction, Drummond overlooks the inner impulse of life 

 that pervades all living beings, the joy of life, so wonderfully 

 described by Mr. Hudson in " The Naturalist in La Plata," the 

 Over-Soul as Emerson calls it, the excess of vitality that is the very 

 spur to sexual love and the essence of all reproduction. There is no 

 " Otherism " here ; it is the intensest of "Selfism." There is hardly 

 a passion in all animal life so purely selfish as this one, which 

 Drummond places at the base of the Struggle for the Life of Others. 

 Moreover, this Over-Soul it is that produces over-population, which 

 is the great goad of progress. But this is the very thing that makes 

 the Struggle for Life keen, and he is either very bold or very foolish 

 who would try to capture this for the side of Altruism. 



Surely the truth is, what we thought everyone recognised long 

 since, that the altruistic principle springs chiefly out of the gregarious 

 habit, which has not necessarily anything to do with reproduction. 

 Regarded in this light the Struggle for the Life of Others is merely 

 a development of the Struggle for Life itself. But here is the point 

 which so many of these pseudo-biologists seem to miss. The indi- 

 vidual is not the unit of evolution. The unit is the Species, and, as 

 Mr. Kidd has so \we\\ pointed out, the interests of the species are directly 

 opposed to the apparent and immediate interests of the individual. 

 In the lower animals, where reason does not come into play, there 

 is nothing to run counter to the forces that make for the progress of 

 the species, and these have produced the subservience of individuals 

 to the colony or tribe in those cases above referred to. Even in 

 the human species, we should in many cases be inclined to reverse 

 Drummond's idea (p. vii.) that Family life precedes the Tribe. 



It is when we turn to rational man, that we see difficulties in 

 the way of further altruistic developments. Man is an egoist as 

 well as a gregarious and political animal. He is an individualist by 

 reason, if not by nature. Mr. Kidd's point appears then to be this. 

 Religion is neither true nor false, natural nor supernatural, — merely 

 the apotheosis of the principle that governs the life of all herds, 

 families, tribes, nations, viz., self-sacrifice and the subordination of the 

 individual. The apotheosis of this altruistic principle gives it what 

 Mr. Kidd calls a " sanction," which, so far as the individual is 

 concerned, is "ultra-rational." The philosopher understands the 

 drift of altruism, he sees its origin and its necessity. Not so the 

 hungry man in the street or the forest. He needs something outside 

 to keep him in the path of allegiance to the race. This is religion, 



