176 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



method of moral progress. It is so certain and so 

 telling that all others may safely be neglected. 

 When Christianity was accepted by the Teutonic 

 barbarians it did not in the least pull them up to its 

 higher moral level. Slowly, in the course of some 

 thousand years or so, the incapable were weeded out 

 and the general level was raised. Those sinners wan- 

 dered in the wilderness for very nearly forty genera- 

 tions till the whole stock died out in detail. This is 

 a doctrine of the most unbounded materialism. It 

 regards man as fatally determined by his antecedents. 

 Free will is a dream, conversion or real repentance 

 an impossibility. Yes, and that is all implied in the 

 attempt to run natural selection right through to 

 make elimination the only method of moral progress. 

 At one point Mr. Sutherland seems inconsistent 

 with himself. In one passage he almost bursts the 

 shackles of naturalism. He speaks of imitation as a 

 cause of progress like Bagehot, or like Professor 

 Baldwin. But, so far as imitation acts, elimination 

 is unnecessary. If example can be copied, there is 

 a short cut to progress on the part of the inferior but 

 teachable multitude. In nature imitation plays a 

 very limited part. One species cannot borrow the 

 good habits of another. If it could, you would have 

 transformations ready made without the cumbrous 

 machinery of elimination. And if imitation does 

 work in human history, then, so far as it works, it 

 supersedes natural selection. 



We may make a separate heading for Mr. Suther- 

 land's conception of history in detail. The method 

 of elimination being always steadily and triumphantly 



