1 66 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



animals, have comparatively few lessons to learn. 

 Their nervous system is always repeating the same 

 combinations. These grow stable by habit, and the 

 young creature is early emancipated from the care of 

 its parents. Not so is it with mankind. Here the 

 elaborate education of the nervous system must be a 

 slow process. During its long course pity, tender- 

 ness, love tremble into consciousness ; a mother is a 

 mother indeed ; man is growing human. 



Such an outline is the theory. What are we to say 

 of it ? 



Does Drummond mean us to understand, like Hux- 

 ley or like the Socialists, that struggle is purely bad 

 in the ethical region ? Verbally, he denies this. It 

 is "struggle for the life of others," not absence of 

 struggle, which is more and more to prevail till it 

 dominates humanity. Partly this struggle may be 

 explained as carried on against the forces of nature. 

 Must it not also in part be a struggle between group 

 and group, home and home ? The struggle will no 

 doubt be carried on according to the laws of the 

 game, those laws which we know as justice. It will 

 be lighted up and made dignified by sympathy, by 

 love for those within the group, by consideration 

 even for rivals without. That is a very worthy pro- 

 gramme. But does it not involve dropping the old 

 hard false opposition between egoism and altruism, 

 and dropping the somewhat apocryphal biological 

 deduction of these two opposite tendencies ? If 

 struggle is good, is there not an eternal use and fit- 

 ness in a limited amount of egoism ? Or rather must 

 not that which is called egoism, and marked under 

 that name with obloquy, enter, however transformed, 



