128 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART HI 



moral progress ; in obvious dependence upon Comte. 

 One must be allowed to express a doubt whether 

 names and things exactly correspond to each other 

 here. As a point of detail, it is astonishing that 

 punishment should be discussed under moral progress. 

 If there is any obstinately statical element in the life 

 of society, surely it is penal law, which maintains 

 what has been reached, but is grimly indifferent to 

 further progress. When saints or martyrs challenge 

 a law that has been outgrown, or that is downright 

 bad, there may of course be progress through the 

 punishment they bear thanks to them, not to the law. 

 In itself the law does not even then make for progress. 

 Its preoccupation, then as always, is stability. And the 

 ordinary victim of penal law is much more likely to be 

 affected by atavism than by " the prophetic soul of the 

 great world brooding on things to come." What is he 

 doing in this galley ? 



When one passes from details to principles, Mr. 

 Alexander's grouping of his materials looks more and 

 more disquieting. He is really not contrasting moral 

 order with moral progress ; he is giving us, first, an 

 analysis of morality in the abstract, apart from ques- 

 tions of progress, but secondly a theory of progress, 

 or rather of change, which sets morality at defiance. 

 In the first half thanks to his appeal, however 

 strangely limited, to the moral consciousness he is on 

 moral ground ; the foundation is moral, whatever may 

 be the character of the superstructure. In the second 

 half he has moved off moral ground altogether. The 

 first is a theory of morality from the inside, if not 

 exactly from the heart of the 'subject; the second 

 is a theory of the changes in human opinion, a 

 view taken from the outside of the moral process, 



