—_—s ee 
23 
There are the two salient points—Augustus, summing up the 
tendencies of the Roman Empire ; and Dante, summing up, if not 
the tendencies, the best expression of the tendencies of 
Christendom. The problem is, how to relate those two salient 
peaks in the vast amount of human endeavour and achievement, 
so as to show that there is a connection which will indicate the 
principles which are working out in life. And the present book 
does suggest an explanation how the world came to take into its 
heart the principles represented in Dante, which make him and 
his writings the exponent of the Life of Christendom. 
Coming then to the third line of thought he had laid down 
for himself, Mr. Asher turned to Mr. Kidd’s book itself, illustrat- 
ing what he had to say with a number of quotations. Mr. Kidd, 
in his chapter on ‘‘ The close of an Era,” shows that at the time 
at which he writes, there is a conception of a State which he feels 
belongs to a previous stage of existence, and must be lost in the 
newer conception which he offers to us towards the close of his 
book. All previous systems of social civilization have been con- 
sidered as revolving round this principle—the interests of certain 
existing individuals, whom we call Society. But the point of view 
has been altered by a revolution without any parallel in the history 
of thought. It is not the interests of these existing individuals 
with which all our present systems of thought and science concern 
themselves, but the life and the interests of the future, which 
await the meaning of the evolutionary processes in history. In 
the scientific formula of the life of any existing type of social 
order, the interests of these existing individuals possess no mean- 
ing, except so far as they are included in, and subordinate to, the 
interests of a developing system of social order, the overwhelming 
proportion of whose members are still in the future. This makes 
us look at all the processes of our civilization entirely in a new 
light. Our relation to that which we can possess for ourselves 
and hold against the world, is opposed to the principle of sacrific- 
ing ourselves to something else which we shall never possess. We 
are interested in our possessions ; we sacrifice to a larger life ; and 
all the way through the book we find this antithesis. It is fair to 
say that the State exists at present for the protection of property. 
Mr. Kidd goes on to say that this conception of the State is due 
to the teaching of the Manchester School. Theirs are the prin- 
ciples which correspond with the era of the ascendancy of the 
present in the economic activities of the world. But another 
influence is at work in the world, which enables men to live for 
that which they will never enjoy, to live for a larger life which 
shall never be theirs, and it is in the bringing together of these 
two factors that Mr. Kidd’s book deserves to be most closely 
examined. 
In Chapter II. we are shown that the theory of Natural 
Selection is not sufficient to account for the forms of life. He 
