268 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD CHAP. 



is to break up the unity of sense, that unity may and 

 must be rebuilt in a higher fashion by the agencies of 

 morality and religion. So far we are willing to agree 

 with Mr. Kidd. Only we do not believe that the first 

 work of reason is its only work. We cannot admit that 

 morality and religion are divorced from reason. 



Still, if it be true, as wise men taught long before 

 Darwin or Adam Smith, that life is a battle if it be 

 true, as we have read in an old book, that the life of 

 a Christian man is a " fight of faith " then we may 

 well expect to find conflict and struggle appearing as 

 elements in the orderliness and beneficence of the social 

 organism. Not indeed such struggle as is found in 

 natural selection ; and very possibly not the " cut- 

 throat competition," as it is called, of unbridled 

 individualism, though in modern commerce we cut 

 prices, not throats, and nothing whatever is gained by 

 ignoring the advance which that fact implies. Not 

 every form of struggle, then, yet some form, and that a 

 keen one, is to be expected and desired. Morality still 

 leaves the individual personally responsible. He must 

 lead his own life, fight his own battle, gain his own prize. 

 And if, in the physical world, natural selection has 

 indeed been at work, if, so far as it has been at 

 work, its cruel or seeming cruel methods have secured 

 this notable result, a teeming population of healthy, 

 vigorous creatures, fit in every fibre, fit or fittest on all 

 the varied lines along which evolution has moved, at all 

 the varied points which evolution has reached, then 

 may it not be that social struggle, acting in union 

 doubtless with other forces, will give us an effective and 

 vigorous and truly happy human society ? A man, or a 

 school, or a world is the better of hard work. And the 

 world will be kept hard at work ; there is no throwing 



