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shows that the survival of the individual is not explained by look- 
ing at the individual alone, but is in order that he may live for 
some larger issue. The organism is not only struggling with its 
own past, but being subordinated to the future, which it is 
anticipating and bringing into view. The interests of the in- 
dividual and of the present are always overlaid by the interests 
of the majority, which is always in the future. 
Having concluded the first section of his book, dealing with 
the past view of a self-centred State, Mr. Kidd, in his second 
section, shows how the principle has been born in the minds of 
men, whereby men have projected the controlling centre of life 
beyond the interests of the existing individual. He does not find 
it in religion, but in the influence of the non-utilitarian conception 
of what he calls Western Liberalism in English thought in the 
Seventeenth Century. The principles of the democracy which our 
civilization is destined to realise, are incompatible with the 
materialistic conception of history. In another section he shows 
the dawning and the purification of the sense of the eternal. He 
tries to show that there have been a body of men living in the 
world, obeying the ordinary laws necessary for the survival of the 
race, but keeping within their heart of hearts a sense of the 
eternal, and of those principles which will, one day, make all men 
one. We follow the development of the “vision of universal 
justice” that fitled the consciousness of the Jewish people, until it 
becomes greater than the race itself, till, at last, associated with 
an ideal of personal self-abnegation which has passed the bounds 
of the material, it goes forth to subdue the world in which the 
principle of the ascendency of the present had reached its 
culminating expression. How few students of history consider in 
this light the problem presented by the early Christian heresies ? 
Mr. Kidd sees in those heresies the tendency to make men live in 
the present, and thinks that that is the reason why persecution of 
them was so rife,—because they were attempts to close up that 
profound antithesis which the human mind would not allow to be 
closed. He shows that as a result of this new ideal came a new 
value to the individual life, each individual life being declared to 
have relation to the eternal. He traces a gradual growth since 
the time of Charlemagne of the principle that spiritual interests 
are more important than temporal, while he characterises the 
Reformation as an attempt to point out afresh men’s sense of the 
eternal, when the Papacy had gradually introduced something of 
the old military despotism of Rome, and was hindering the other 
ideal. After the Reformation, there arose a new sense of truth 
as the resultant of two opposing forces. 
Towards the end Mr. Kidd seeks to show us that we are in 
danger at the present moment of an Empire far more serious, far 
less grand and dignified than the Empire we have left behind. 
He shows that the principles which govern the distribution of 
a 
