ii8 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



Before history, he tells us, there was a prehistoric 

 age, before morals, a non-moral age. If man was 

 created, he must have had everything to learn. If man 

 was evolved from purely animal forms this Bagehot 

 seems to regard as probable, but as non-essential to his 

 argument there must have been an interregnum 

 between the time when instinct guided action and the 

 time when reason became effective. Instinct on the 

 whole secures safety, but reason weakens instinct, and 

 custom, which is the equivalent of instinct at a higher 

 grade, which is the earliest and most important safe- 

 guard of rational beings, must have been very slowly 

 and very gradually formulated. Primitive savages 

 were like modern savages in almost all their defects ; 

 they were ignorant, capricious, passionate ; but their 

 minds cannot have been " tattooed over with customs " 

 like the minds of their remote posterity, the savages of 

 to-day. While civilised man is social, primitive man, 

 according to Bagehot, was a being no longer guided by 

 animal instinct, but imperfectly human, and very hard 

 to break to the sway of society. Most men were wild ; 

 many races were purely wild ; and the vital problem 

 during the emergence of society was to secure the forma- 

 tion of " a cake of custom " which might keep savage 

 nature in check. Good custom or bad might serve ; 

 the quality of the custom was a secondary though 

 doubtless very important point; its existence was the 

 main thing. " Any sort of government was better than 

 none at all." But in this, as in so many matters, the 

 first step was much the hardest. Once he had laid aside 

 his primitive rudeness, the imitativeness of man made 

 everything easy. Imitation continued old customs, 

 imitation diffused attractive novelties. It was thus 

 both a conservative and a progressive force, but it was 



