138 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART m 



our author with facts for manipulation ; it is allowed 

 to do nothing more. 



We cannot attempt to follow out Mr. Alexander's 

 interesting discussion in detail. We can only name 

 a few points which seem specially noteworthy, either 

 for their own sake, or in connection with the history 

 of the appeal to biology for human guidance. 



The subject is explicitly divided into two main 

 parts a statical and a dynamical ; moral order, and 

 moral progress ; in obvious dependence upon Comte. 

 One must be allowed to express a doubt whether 

 names and things exactly correspond to each other 

 here. As a point of detail, it is astonishing that 

 punishment should be discussed under moral progress. 

 If there is any obstinately statical element in the life 

 of society, surely it is penal law, which maintains 

 what has been reached, but is grimly indifferent to 

 further progress. When saints or martyrs challenge 

 a law that has been outgrown, or that is downright 

 bad, there may of course be progress through the 

 punishment they bear thanks to them, not to the 

 law. In itself the law does not even then make for 

 progress. Its preoccupation, then as always, is sta- 

 bility. And the ordinary victim of penal law is much 

 more likely to be affected by atavism than by " the 

 prophetic soul of the great world brooding on things 

 to come." What is he doing in this galley ? 



When one passes from details to principles, Mr. 

 Alexander's grouping of his materials looks more and 

 more disquieting. He is really not contrasting moral 

 order with moral progress ; he is giving us, first, an 

 analysis of morality in the abstract, apart from ques- 

 tions of progress, but secondly a theory of progress, 



