xx SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 279 



Bagehot's explanation is true (so far as it goes) that 

 reason was first emancipated among those races which 

 "happened" to have free political constitutions, and 

 acquired in politics the instinct of free inquiry. The 

 further question, what maintains progress ? or what 

 leads to new advance ? needs no discussion. We need 

 not, like Professor Kitchie, seek biological analogies, or 

 look to the mixture of races 1 as the cause of new 

 " varieties." Once the spring is opened up, it flows. 

 There is in intelligence, freely exercised and firmly 

 organised, a constant tendency towards improvement. 

 This is no metaphysical assumption like Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer's evolutionary doctrine ; it is plain fact that 

 where the reason of man is at work, a force has come into 

 operation which makes for progress by an internal law. 



Is that force absolutely sufficient ? Does it carry 

 with it all the allied forces of our nature so far as other 

 forces are distinguishable from it ? That is the doctrine 

 laid down by Mill, and more explicitly affirmed over 

 against the claims of morality by Buckle. 2 From 

 criminal statistics Buckle drew the extraordinarily 

 sweeping inference that goodness and sin were fixed 

 quantities, and that intelligence was the varying and 

 progressive factor in human nature. As well might he 

 have watched half-a-dozen waves break on the beach, 

 and then announced that the tide was neither ebbing 

 nor flowing. Moral progress, no doubt, is slow in 

 comparison with material progress ; but who will dare 

 to affirm that in a world of evolution goodness alone 

 fails to evolve ? 



1 Compare Bagehot as above ; also Dr. Tiele's Gifford Lectures. 



2 It must be remembered that Mill and Buckle were pre-Darwinian 

 writers or thinkers. They had no opportunity of asking themselves, 

 Does reason alter the working of evolution ? The working of evolution 

 was not among their data. 



