250 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



rewards and punishments. These are represented as 

 supernatural motives for doing good. They are not, 

 however, extra-rational ; they make it worth one's while 

 to be moral. Righteousness is strictly a rational and 

 self-interested policy, if this be the truth. This is not 

 therefore Mr. Kidd's meaning; and the doctrine in 

 itself is unsatisfactory. Selfishness produced to infinity 

 remains selfishness still ; it does not turn into righteous- 

 ness or unselfishness. Other worldliness is only a more 

 morbid growth from the same root as worldliness. If it 

 is moral if it is one's duty to preach the doctrine of 

 future judgment, that is only because selfish fears and 

 selfish hopes, once awakened, may be transformed, with- 

 out a visible break, into something nobler than them- 

 selves. They are moral protoplasm (in the true and 

 Aristotelian sense). They are the germ, though only 

 the germ, of goodness. 



When once, however, we have shut out this 

 interpretation of Mr. Kidd's doctrine of religion, it is 

 very hard indeed to say what the doctrine means. 

 Religion works powerfully, but irrationally ; that is all 

 we are told. It sounds as if religion were a sort of 

 white magic or hypnotic influence. It sounds like a 

 revival of opinions held by wise men under the Roman 

 Empire, according to Gibbon, when all religions " were 

 considered by the people as equally true, by the 

 philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as 

 equally useful" Religion serves the public weal ; 

 religion augments altruism ; the Christian religion in 

 particular attains its ends by a sweeping dogma of 

 human equality. But how Christianity or any other 

 religion captures the wills of human beings, of that we 

 have no explanation. And when we find that Mr. 

 Kidd, in view of the scramble for Africa, and of the 



