128 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



of a " cake of custom " which might keep savage 

 nature in check. Good custom or bad might serve ; 

 the quality of the custom was a secondary though 

 doubtless very important point ; its existence was the 

 main thing. "Any sort of government was better 

 than npne at all." But in this, as in so many matters, 

 the first step was much the hardest. Once he had 

 laid aside his primitive rudeness, the imitativeness of 

 man made everything easy. Imitation continued old 

 customs, imitation diffused attractive novelties. It was 

 thus both a conservative and a progressive force, but 

 it was oftenest at work in the service of inherited 

 usage. Here then were the factors of social order 

 custom and imitation. Once the race became politi- 

 cal it developed an overwhelming power of conserva- 

 tism. Custom had made men what they were ; they 

 dimly felt this and worshipped every custom with 

 equal enthusiasm, the worst no less than the best. 

 But indeed isolation was useful in early days. 

 Jealousy of novel or foreign ways was a wise pas- 

 sion while the social type was too weak to bear 

 contact with other types. 



In the way of comment or criticism one need only 

 here remark that almost everything in this eulogy of 

 custom turns upon Bagehot's theory of the unsocial 

 wildness of the first men, or, as he tends to translate 

 that conception, on the theory that, when man was 

 evolved, instinct went off duty before reason and 

 custom came on duty. Probably that proposition is 

 disputable. And the whole attempt to affirm how 

 reason must have proceeded in entering a world 

 that knew it not is perhaps an attempt to tran- 

 scend the limits of possible knowledge, more 



