CHAP, xix HYPER-DARWINISM IN SOCIOLOGY 261 



" You will retrograde, 1 and therefore your posterity 

 will soon be extinguished." Suppose the socialist to 

 reply, " What on earth do I care about posterity ? I 

 mean to have an easy time of it myself ! " Then cer- 

 tainly your remonstrance has missed fire. 



Another consequence of some importance for socio- 

 logical science attaches to this second great loan of 

 Mr. Kidd's from Weismann. The old Comtist and 

 post-Comtist division into statics and dynamics con- 

 ditions of order 2 and conditions of progress falls 

 to the ground. Mr. Kidd discusses the " conditions 

 of progress," and these only. The formula seems 

 to be, " Take care of progress and stability will take 

 care of itself ; " a formula which follows directly 

 from Weismann's dilemma advance or downright 

 retrogression and yet once more so startling a 

 position that once more it seems Mr. Kidd ought 

 to have been arrested, as by a large type note of 

 interrogation or by a danger signal, and ought to 

 have inquired whether something had not been 

 ignored when biology was transferred wholesale to 



1 There are two points here : (i) you will retrograde, because 

 natural selection will cease ; (2) natural selection will extinguish you, 

 because you have retrograded. The second will only hold true if social- 

 ism and stationariness are partial. Like the eight hours' movement, or 

 like bimetallism, socialism (etc.) must seek to come in by international 

 arrangement if it is not to be speedily swamped by competition from 

 hardier races, within which natural selection is still going on. But, if 

 it were an international possibility, the whole world might jog quietly 

 down hill (see p. 315). That is the theory. Facts do not seem as 

 yet fully to bear it out. France is still a great power, though perhaps 

 in a perilous way (Feb. 1899). And at least France is being swamped 

 by the more prolific races. 



2 Comte's Statics, however, as he states them, are rather abstract con- 

 ditions of social well-being than conditions of social order. 



