Social Evolution 335 



Reformation, the growth of Islamism, and the like. 

 Mr. Kidd is quite right in insisting upon the im- 

 portance of the part played by religious beliefs, but 

 he has fallen into a vast error if he fails to under- 

 stand that the great majority of the historical and 

 sociological writers have given proper weight to 

 this importance. 



Mr. Kidd's greatest failing is his tendency to use 

 words in false senses. He uses "reason" in the false 

 sense "selfish." He then, in a spirit of mental tau- 

 tology, assumes that reason must be necessarily 

 purely selfish and brutal. He assumes that the man 

 who risks his life to save a friend, the woman who 

 watches over a sick child, and the soldier who dies 

 at his post, are unreasonable, and that the more their 

 reason is developed the less likely they will be to 

 act in these ways. The mere statement of the asser- 

 tion in such a form is sufficient to show its nonsense 

 to any one who will take the pains to think whether 

 the people who ordinarily perform such feats of 

 self-sacrifice and self-denial are people of brutish 

 minds or of fair intelligence. 



If none of the ethical qualities are developed at 

 the same time with a man's reason, then he may 

 become a peculiarly noxious kind of wild beast ; but 

 this is not in the least a necessity of the develop- 

 ment of his reason. It would be just as wise to say 

 that it was a necessity of the development of his bod- 

 ily strength. Undoubtedly the man with reason 

 who is selfish and unscrupulous will, because of his 

 added power, behave even worse than the man with- 



