154 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



helplessness of babyhood ? The complexity of the pro- 

 cesses gone through by an adult brain in rational life. 

 Animals, even the highest of the lower animals, have 

 comparatively few lessons to learn. Their nervous 

 system is always repeating the same combinations. 

 These grow stable by habit, and the young creature is 

 early emancipated from the care of its parents. Not so 

 is it with mankind. Here the elaborate education of 

 the nervous system must be a slow process. During 

 its long course pity, tenderness, love tremble into 

 consciousness ; a mother is a mother indeed ; man is 

 growing human. 



Such in outline is the theory. What are we to say 

 of it? 



Does Drummond mean us -to understand, like Huxley 

 or like the Socialists, that struggle is purely bad in the 

 ethical region ? Verbally, he denies this. It is " struggle 

 for the life of others," not absence of struggle, which is 

 more and more to prevail till it dominates humanity. 

 Partly this struggle may be explained as carried on 

 against the forces of nature. Must it not also in part 

 be a struggle between group and group, home and 

 home ? The struggle will no doubt be carried on 

 according to the laws of the game, those laws which we 

 know as justice. It will be lighted up and made digni- 

 fied by sympathy, by love for those within the group, 

 by consideration even for rivals without. That is a very 

 worthy programme. But does it not involve dropping 

 the old hard false opposition between egoism and 

 altruism, and dropping the somewhat apocryphal bio- 

 logical deduction of these two opposite tendencies ? If 

 struggle is good, is there not an eternal use and fitness 

 in a limited amount of egoism ? Or rather must not 

 that which is called egoism, and marked under that 



