344 Habit and Instinct. 



men, stronger in brain power than our men." Mr. Kidd 

 himself writes as follows * : " Not only is it probable that 

 the average intellectual development of the races which 

 are winning in the struggle for existence to-day is below 

 that of some of the peoples which have long ago dis- 

 appeared from the rivalry of life, but there seems every 

 reason to suppose that the average intellectual develop- 

 ment of successive generations amongst ourselves does 

 not show any tendency to rise above that of the genera- 

 tions immediately preceding them." And he quotes with 

 evident approval this passage from an article of Mr. 

 Bellamy's f: "All that man produces to-day more than 

 did his cave-dwelling ancestors, he produces by virtue of 

 the accumulated achievements, inventions, and improve- 

 ments of the intervening generations, together with the 

 social and industrial machinery which is their legacy." 

 Mr. Kidd's conclusion is that social evolution is not 

 primarily intellectual. But surely the main inference 

 to be drawn from all this, supposing it to be true, is, 

 not that social evolution is not primarily intellectual, 

 but rather that intellectual evolution, whether of primary 

 or secondary value, is no longer by increment of human 

 faculty, but by summation and storage in the environ- 

 ment it creates. 



So far as intellectual evolution is concerned, Mr. Kidd's 

 contention is that natural selection affects it, if at all, 

 only in a secondary and subsidiary way. In this we 

 may agree with him. But no further. For he con- 

 tends that natural selection does affect man as a moral 

 agent. " Natural selection seems," he says,| " to be 



" " Social Evolution," p. 255. 



t Contemporary Eecietv, January, 1890. Quoted in " Social Evolution," 

 p. 267. 



X " Social Evolution," p. 280. 



