1/8 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART m 



by common sense slips out when he speaks of 

 Howard the philanthropist 1 as moving his age. 

 Now, this is curious. Christianity had no chance 

 with the Teutonic peoples till natural selection killed 

 off the heathen and barbarous majority; John How- 

 ard, without waiting for natural selection to make 

 "Howards of us all," was able to "move the hearts" 

 of his fellow-countrymen. And yet Howard, with all 

 his qualities, was surely not comparable to the founder 

 of the Christian faith ? The one had his milieu ready 

 made; the other had to create his milieu; but was 

 His greatness not tolerant of that extra burden ? Or 

 put it at the lowest : if personal influence is capable 

 of doing anything, is there not a factor in moral 

 progress to be reckoned with, independently of natu- 

 ral selection ? 



On the whole, however, we might almost say that 

 Mr. Sutherland does not believe in any such thing as 

 history, or the throbbing and thrilling of the social 

 organism to one great life. In history the public 

 mind "moveth altogether if it move at all"; what- 

 ever lies below consciousness, there is a conscious 

 life, and the conscious service of common ideals. 

 But Mr. Sutherland will have it that nothing ever 

 happens, except the interminable weeding of the hu- 

 man garden. The bad die out ; the good have only 

 to stand still, and they, or their stock, will be carried 

 on by forces outside of them to a far distant triumph. 

 We are in no sense members one of another. We 

 are not so much men as things things exactly like 

 other things or exceptional only in this, that we can 

 find out in what direction we are tending, while we 

 1 i. p. 420, 



