246 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



Man is beginning to learn slowly, very slowly, that 

 he is part of a universal brotherhood. 1 From the thral- 

 dom of class influence man is merging. Old institutions 

 must fall, and the religion of the future must be 

 humanitarian, that is to say, that religion which 

 suppresses human misery, and tends to produce human 

 happiness. Commercial progress is cementing nations 

 together in the arts of peace, and this must of necessity 

 continue. The next war (if such a war take place) 



the lower branches of his subject has carried us up to human 

 society and there left us without a guide. It is true that at an 

 earlier stage he has been warned off the ground at the other side and 

 treated with bitterness and intolerance. But there is no reason why 

 the remembrance of such treatment should cause him still to so far 

 forget himself and his duty to science, that we should find him in a 

 state of mind capable of speaking of any class of social phenomena 

 as grotesque fungoid growths. In the meantime, each of the depart- 

 ments of knowledge which has dealt with man in society has regarded 

 him almost exclusively from its own standpoint. To the politician 

 he has been the mere opportunist ; to the historian he has been the 

 unit which is the sport of blind forces apparently subject to no law ; 

 to the exponent of religion he has been the creature of another 

 world ; to the political economist he has been little more than the 

 covetous machine. The time has come, it would appear, for a 

 better understanding and for a more radical method ; for the social 

 sciences to strengthen themselves by sending their roots deep 

 into the soil underneath from which they spring; and for the 

 biologist to advance over the frontier and carry the methods of his 

 science boldly into human society where he has but to deal with the 

 phenomena of life where he encounters life at last under its highest 

 and most complex aspect." (" Social Evolution," Benjamin Kidd, 

 1895, p. 29.) 



1 " The better a man understands the true connection of his soul 

 with the souls of his fellow-beings, and the better he comprehends 

 his right relation to the great whole of all-existence, the more will 

 he conform to what he calls the laws of sociology and the moral rules 

 of conduct. And the more he conforms to these conditions, the fitter 

 he will be to survive in the struggle for existence." (" Fundamental 

 Problems," Dr. Paul Cams, 1889, p. 207.) 



