88 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



primarily, however, according to our author, on religion, which 

 provides a super-rational sanction for the self-sacrificing conduct 

 which is required of the great majority of people that their group 

 may succeed, and especially that social progress may be furthered 

 to the advantage of future generations. l ' ' The greatest good which 

 the evolutionary forces, operating in society, are working out," he 

 says, " is the good of the social organism as a whole. The 

 greatest number in this sense is comprised of the members of 

 generations yet unborn or unthought of, to whose interests the 

 existing individuals are absolutely indifferent." 2 This he terms 

 the law of projected efficiency. 



This law of projected efficiency is the key to the understanding 

 of Kidd's social philosophy, so must be explained. He makes use 

 of this law in the later chapters of Social Evolution, but it is 

 developed at length in his Principles of Western Civilization. He 

 claims biological support for it in Weismann's essay on Duration 

 of Life, but so far as I can discover there is not one word in the 

 whole essay that, fairly interpreted, warrants the conclusion Mr. 

 Kidd draws. All Professor Weismann claims is that duration of 

 life in a given species is dependent on an internal principle deter- 

 mined by utility to the species in its struggle for existence, a 

 theory which has received added confirmation in recent studies 

 concerning Mendelian characters. Yet this theory of projected 

 efficiency is enunciated by Kidd as if it were a demonstrated fact 

 and we are told that " Never before has a principle of such reach 

 in the social sciences emerged into view." In explanation of its 

 workings, he says: 



What we are now brought to see is that the overwhelming weight of 

 numbers as of interests, in the evolutionary process, is never in the present. 

 It is always in the future. . . . We are, in other words, brought face to face 

 with the fact that, in the scientific formula of the life of any existing type of 

 social order destined to maintain its place in the future, the interests of these 

 existing individuals, with which we have been so preoccupied, possess no 

 meaning, except so far as they are included in, and are subordinate to, the 

 interests of a developing system of social order, the overwhelming proportion 

 of whose members are still in the future. 3 



1 Social Evolution, ch. IV. 2 Ibid., p. 312. 



3 Principles of Western Civilization, p. 4, cf. p. 65. 



