146 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



cally, the ideal presents itself are not distinct and rival 

 species, but elements in the final synthesis yearning 

 aspirations after it sketches, rough and rude at the 

 best, yet instinct with life, and all representing one 

 great pattern seen in the mount. Would an ideal kill 

 another ideal if it could ? I do not ask, would an 

 idealist kill an idealist ? That indeed is " another 

 story " ; but does the ideal itself aim at extermination 

 and destruction ? Mr. Alexander tells us that the 

 rivals often blend in a " compromise." Surely, once 

 again, the victory of truth is no compromise between 

 opposite extremes, but something higher than either, 

 in which all that is best in both the rivals lives on and 

 flourishes. And the tertium quid at least may be due 

 to a victory of truth. 



We conclude then that the application of Darwin- 

 ism to competing moral ideals breaks down all along 

 the line. For, first, what is described to us is not a 

 process of natural selection by means of a struggle 

 for existence ; and, secondly, so far as Mr. Alexander 

 does assimilate moral ideals to competing organisms, 

 he falsifies the facts. He has not really shown us an 

 extension of Darwinian struggle into a higher region, 

 but something radically different something de- 

 scribed by him more or less suggestively, but also 

 more or less inaccurately, in Darwinian language. 

 Progress by struggle this morality thrusting down 

 that morality and reigning in its stead is not exhib- 

 ited in the facts of history to any one who can look 

 ever so little below the surface. Moral progress is 

 much better described from Mr. Stephen's point of 

 view as one great orderly evolution of human thought 

 and life. Mr. Alexander sometimes uses similar Ian- 



