392 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



for a particular post may bear no personal ill-will to each other ; 

 they may not know each other personally, or they may even be 

 personally the most intimate of friends ; and yet, as far as the 

 competition is concerned, each one of them must have his own 

 interests, and these alone, in view. Only on this condition can 

 he hope to secure his object, which is to obtain the post in 

 question for himself. 



If we consider social evolution under its dynamic aspect, in 

 its historical sequence, we are equally unable to see the altruistic 

 tendencies of which Mr. Kidd speaks as the primary force which 

 has brought about the shiftings of the balance of power at the 

 expense of the wealthier classes. It would doubtless be agree- 

 able to see them thus operative ; but we have to deal in a positive 

 manner with facts. Nothing can persuade us that it was solely 

 sympathy for the people which led the nobles and higher clergy 

 to abandon their privileges on that historic night of August, 

 1791. Human nature is not a changing element ; and even as 

 we see it to-day, so it must have been four or five hundred years 

 ago. The nobility and the Church had nothing to gain and 

 everything to lose by the Revolution ; and where there is no 

 gain, but only positive loss, to be looked for, all the ethical maxims 

 in the world will scarcely avail to make even a siagle individual, 

 much less a great corporation, deUberately seek loss and prefer 

 it to gain. True, we must not be rmjust to individuals ; and 

 there have been, notably in the ranks of the Catholic Church, a 

 certain number of individuals who, Uke St. Francis of Assisi, have 

 been wholly actuated by altruistic sentiments, and have preferred 

 any degree of personal discomfort to enriching themselves at the 

 expense of others. Lives such as those of St. Francis of Assisi, of 

 St. Vincent de Paul, and others — lives shaped under the sole influ- 

 ence of Jesus Christ, whom they regarded as Master ; lives every 

 minute of which was filled with the great ideal of love and pity, 

 which was the ideal of Jesus Christ — such lives, we affirm, in 

 themselves constitute a proof of the extraordinary influence 



