158 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



said regarding anthropology. In history Mr. Suther- 

 land does not profess to be an original scholar, but he 

 quotes to good purpose, and generalises strikingly. Yet 

 why does a student of Robertson Smith express himself 

 as if he had never heard of Old Testament criticism ? 

 Why should he speak as if the character or conduct of 

 King Solomon threw any possible light upon the Book 

 of Proverbs ? No doubt the Old Testament references 

 are of trifling amount ; but when an author is de- 

 pendent (necessarily) on a great amount of borrowed 

 material, one cannot but judge of his quotations from 

 regions beyond one's knowledge by what one sees of his 

 procedure in regions where one is able, so far, to control 

 his method and test his judgment. In philosophy, 

 finally, Mr. Sutherland is well read, but is hardly 

 master of his materials. A writer who supposes that 

 Kant's " moral law " meant the statute law or criminal 

 code, puts himself out of court. And, for our part, we 

 must dissent in the gravest possible way from his 

 philosophical principles. 



Mr. Sutherland is chiefly interesting to us from the 

 unflinching way in which he carries out the appeal to 

 natural selection, or, as he very tellingly words it, to the 

 working of " elimination," l in one region after another. 

 He conducts a valuable experiment in seeking to use 

 this one conception as a key to all the mysteries of 

 progress. Mr. Sutherland modestly tells us that he has 

 done little more than expand Darwin's chapter in the 

 Descent of Man. Yet Darwin was concerned with 

 morals only in an incidental fashion. Morality furnished 

 a possible objection to the opinion that man is descended 



1 Yet it is questionable whether Mr. Sutherland's elimination is the 

 same process throughout as Darwin's, i.e. whether his natural selection 

 in morals, etc., is true natural selection. 



