i;o COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



vives, there is no struggle. The better care paid to the 

 second child is not the cause why the first succumbs. 

 If the ill -cared -for child were the only child in the 

 world, it must still die of neglect. " Elimination " here 

 is not a case of selection after struggle ; it is nature's 

 own protest against vice and exuberant selfishness. 



But let us pursue the subject further. Does Mr. 

 Sutherland habitually place himself outside of morality, 

 and view it with scientific coolness, as one quality 

 tending towards success ? Or does he write from the 

 inside, with a glow of admiration for "the true, the 

 just " ? Very often he does the latter. It would be 

 altogether to misrepresent Mr. Sutherland if we did not 

 confess that he writes like a good man and a lover of 

 goodness. But in his final attitude he seeks to combine 

 both views. Goodness is authoritative for us ; we are 

 bound to be loyal to it ; we must speak and think and 

 feel as if goodness were something objective and absolute, 

 cosmical, divine ; and yet reason forces us to be agnostics. 

 Goodness is nothing but one of the conditions of race 

 efficiency and race survival. Beauty is nothing in 

 itself; and the sense of beauty is mere habituation to 

 environment, whether from inherited experience (La- 

 marck, Spencer, also Darwin) or from the slower but not 

 less sure (Darwinian) process of elimination. We must 

 steadily occupy a position on both sides of the hedge. 

 Mr. Sutherland is determined to warm his hands, as long 

 as he lives, at a painted fire. He knows it is painted ; 

 you shall not throw dust in his eyes ! He is determined 

 to keep on warming himself; how dare you forbid him ? 



We at least have no wish to do so. We would rather 

 hope that some day he may discover the glorious truth, 

 that what warms him is not paint, but God's own 

 sunshine. 



