166 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



this, that we can find out in what direction we are 

 tending, while we are utterly incapable of modifying 

 that direction or of altering the pace. 



Along with Mr. Sutherland's doctrine of history we 

 may take his doctrine of reason, which resembles the 

 other doctrine closely. There is no such thing as 

 reason. Applying natural selection to every process, 

 from the life of the amoeba to that of the saint, Mr. 

 Sutherland scarcely has room for reason in his system. 

 And therefore he shows us nature selecting the fittest 

 emotions in the form of so many physiological processes 

 consciousness being a mere blind alley ; it came 

 no one can say how or why; it leads nowhere. The 

 appropriate emotions are organic to our race, in total 

 independence of the accident of reason or consciousness. 

 They might last if it lapsed ; they are untouched and 

 unaffected by it. It is a practical nullity, and ought 

 not to have troubled our theories by existing at all. 1 



Passing on to morals, we meet with the great surprise 

 of the book. By " moral instinct " Mr. Sutherland means 

 sympathy. There is, he says, no instinct which tells us 

 what is right and what is wrong ; moral opinion could 

 not vary as it does if instinct were controlling it. There 

 is, however, a sympathetic instinct the creation of 

 natural selection. And that instinct tells us one of the 

 conditions of right conduct ; another of the conditions, 



1 Mr. Sutherland ascribes emotions to a bodily source, and remarks 

 that Professor William James has reached similar views. One observes, 

 however, that Professor Lloyd Morgan speaks of the " almost paradoxical 

 emphasis of Mr. James's views," and of " making them somewhat less 

 repugnant to common sense" by confining them to the first rise of 

 emotion, in contrast to subsequent emotions qualified by " association." 

 Habit and Instinct, p. 190. Dr. S. H. Mellone (Studies in Philosophical 

 Criticism and Construction, p. 249) states that Professor Dewey has main- 

 tained the paradox with more determination than Professor James. 



