NATURE 



i8i 



THURSDAY, MAY 9, 1918. 



SOCIAL HEREDITY. 



The Science of Power. By Benjamin Kidd. 

 Pp. 306. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 

 1918.) Price 6s. net. 



THIS posthumous book is a vigorous, some- 

 times impassioned, statement of convictions, 

 rather than a reasoned argument. In fact, the 

 author did not believe much in reason ; he did not 

 find that it , led to a knowledge of Truth. 

 The general thesis is that we are at the 

 beginning of a world-revolution ; we have 

 reached the limit of a disastrous pagan retro- 

 gression ; Western knowledge has proved a 

 cultural failure ; we have to begin afresh. This 

 time our ideal must be social integration, not 

 individual efficiency as fighting animals ; the inte- 

 grating principle must be found, not in reason, but 

 in collective emotion — "the emotion of the ideal " ; 

 we must cease concentrating attention on our " in- 

 born heredity"; we must realise the limitless 

 importance of "social heredity"; we must turn 

 from man to woman as the psychic centre of 

 power in the new social integration ; we must 

 seek first, not the kingdom of man, but. the king- 

 dom of heaven. There is good counsel here, wc 

 think ; but the book offends even the sympathetic 

 reader by its extremism. 



Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in this sequel to his famous 

 *' Social Evolution," endeavoured to formulate 

 human history, and this is a laudable scientific 

 ambition. The difficulty, at this level of com- 

 plexity, is to find verifiable formulae and to avoid 

 a false simplicity. There is some point in calling 

 "the male of Western civilisation" the supreme 

 fighting animal, but it is far from being an 

 adequate scientific description. There is some 

 warrant for saying that money-makers and mili- 

 tarists alike found in a vulgarised version of Dar- 

 winism (the crudity of which was left by the author 

 Unexposed) a theoretical justification of their aims 

 and methods, but that Darwinism has had the 

 blighting and retrograde influence for which Mr. 

 Kidd reproached it seems very problematical. 



There is a modicum of sense in the summary, 

 more than once quoted in the book, which 

 Bagehot gave of Darwinism, beginning : " If A 

 was able to kill B before B killed A, then A sur- 

 vived " ; but, on the whole, Bagehot's summary 

 Was a caricature of Darwin's Darwinism. Again, 

 the impression conveyed by Mr. Kidd's book is 

 that Darwin thought only of the efficiency of the 

 struggling individual organism ; in point of fact, 

 Darwin laid emphasis on the importance of en- 

 deavours to secure the welfare of offspring and 

 on the survival value of social instincts. It is, as 

 the book insists, a materialism to force bio- 

 logical formula? on human society, but we are 

 not told that the fallacy of this materialism has 

 been repeatedly exposed by sociologists of emin- 

 ence, such as Tarde. 



NO. 2532, VOL. 1 01] 



"The Science of Power" abounds in fallacious 

 alternatives. There is really no antithesis between 

 what Galton called "natural inheritance" (the 

 author's "inborn heredity," not a felicitous phrase) 

 and the extra-organismal social heritage (the 

 author's "collective heredity" or "social here- 

 dity "). Both are big facts. We have not to 

 choose between attaching importance to hereditary 

 "nature" and attaching importance to the influ- 

 ence of "nurture" in the widest sense. The book 

 says that an interruption of the social heritage 

 would leave man without a trace of its age-long 

 operation, but this ignores the fact that there has 

 been all through a selection of the types relatively 

 more susceptible to the integrative influence of the 

 external registration. The social heritage, cumu- 

 latively enriched, operates as an evolving sieve, 

 and thus indirectly, yet permanently, affects the 

 racial type. We have not to choose between 

 reason and emotion; we wish more of both. 

 Choose, we are told, between individual self- 

 expression and socialised self-subordination. 

 Choose, we are told, between the psychic 

 and spiritual forces that make for social 

 integration and the biological factors that make 

 for healthy men and women. But we decline to 

 choose between complementary ideals. Eutopias 

 are biological as well as psychological, personal 

 as well as social, and if they aje not regional too, 

 they are apt to be Utopian. 



The fact is that the lamented author was ever, 

 in his zeal, prone to draw his bow too tightly. 

 Thus, on the strength of his exceedingly interest- 

 ing experiments with young hares brought up 

 along with rabbits, young wood-pigeons fed along 

 with hawks, and so on, he maintained the relative 

 unimportance of inborn racial characters and an 

 astounding doctrine of equality. 



By force of constitution, function, and tradition, 

 it has come about that woman thinks more of the 

 race and more of the future than man does ; she 

 has long-range emotions and a far horizon, man 

 has short-range emotions and a pre-occupation with 

 the immediate ; woman is permanently endowed 

 with a capacity for self-sacrifice and renunciation 

 which is foreign to the Western male ; in fact, 

 "the mind of woman has in reality already out- 

 stripped the mind of the male of the race by an 

 entire era of evolution." 



We find these "hard sayings." We cannot 

 believe that all the good qualities of women are 

 sex-linked, continued only in the daughters of the 

 house. Much more probable is the view that 

 the fundamentals of a fine character are heritable, 

 to either sex or from either sex, like a sound 

 physical constitution or beautiful features, yet 

 find different expression according as they develop 

 in man or woman. The Germans and Japanese 

 have shown how great changes in a people may 

 come about in less than half a century. Mr. 

 Kidd's counsel is that "the emotion of the ideal " 

 — which is to society like blood to the body — 

 should be "imposed" persistently and systematic- 

 ally on children by wise women. This will bring 

 about a new social, integration, a new order of 



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