246 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



Not man the individual, but society as such is now 

 viewed as illustrating biological law. There are con- 

 ditions of vitality or of progress progress is a manifest 

 fact ; there are difficulties revealed by observation or 

 by consciousness ; and there are safeguards or remedies 

 discovered by analysis. This does not sound very like 

 Darwinism, still less like Weismannism, though it is 

 brought forward as based on the latter. The truth is, 

 the basis here is nothing ; " social organism " is only a 

 phrase ; the analysis here is everything. All depends 

 upon the truth or erroneousness, the worthlessness or 

 the value of Mr. Kidd's doctrines of religion and reason. 

 In dealing with these points, he must speak as a philo- 

 sopher. His biological knowledge does nothing here to 

 guard him against error. 



The doctrine of reason is similar to what we find in 

 Mr. A. J. Balfour's Foundations of Belief . Each writer, 

 in a footnote, 1 repudiates any higher or deeper doctrine 

 of reason than that which regards it as a calculating 

 machine or process of inference. This implies that 

 reason is passive in knowledge, and plays no part in 

 determining the motives of human conduct. The effect 

 of the latter belief, when held by intuitionalists, is that 

 they postulate a moral faculty of conscience alongside 

 of reason and independent of it. In Darwin the effect 

 is this, that moral motives are interpreted by the 

 animal impulses of gregarious creatures, impulses which 

 are held to be extended in range, but not altered in 

 quality, by the advent of reason. And in Drummond 

 the effect is that he looks for one set of impulses which 

 even in animals may be labelled good and right, in 



1 Social Evolution, p. 73, 2nd edition. Foundation of Belief, p. 

 195. 



