THE ERRORS OF MR. KIDD 23 



another moment he says that this surprisingly patient Book i 

 majority could have easily "suspended these condi- 

 tions " at any period of its history, and only failed 

 to do so because religion prompted it to forbear. 

 How a contradiction of this kind could have found 

 its way into the reasoning of a really painstaking 

 thinker, and been actually allowed to form the back- 

 bone of it, may at first sight seem inexplicable ; but 

 it is simply a typical result of the practice we are 

 now considering that practice, common to all our 

 modern sociologists, of grouping the men they deal 

 with into the largest aggregate possible, and treating 

 mixed classes of men as one single class "man." 



It is easy to see precisely how Mr. Kidd's mind 

 has worked. In the first part of his argument he 

 divides progressive communities into two sections, 

 which he calls respectively "the power - holding 

 classes" or the "successful" and the "excluded 

 classes" or the " unsuccessful" '; and he declares 

 that the latter would naturally desire to suspend 

 the conditions of progress, whilst the former would 

 naturally desire, and are also able to maintain them. 

 But when he pushes his argument farther, and 

 advances to the proposition that if reason had been 

 " mans" sole guide, the conditions of progress would 

 have been suspended over and over again, he is 

 enabled to take this extraordinary step only because 

 his thought and his terminology undergo an un- 

 conscious metamorphosis. He forgets his original 

 analysis altogether. He merges the two classes, so 

 sharply contrasted by him, into one. He argues and 



