88 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
primarily, however, according to our author, on religion, which 
provides a super-rational sanction for the self-sacrificing conduct 
which is required of the great majority of people that their group 
may succeed, and especially that social progress may be furthered 
to theadvantage of future generations.! “The greatest good which 
the evolutionary forces, operating in society, are working out,” he 
says, “is the good of the social organism as a whole. The 
greatest number in this sense is comprised of the members of 
generations yet unborn or unthought of, to whose interests the 
existing individuals are absolutely indifferent.” ? This he terms 
the law of projected efficiency. 
This law of projected efficiency is the key to the understanding 
of Kidd’s social philosophy, so must be explained. He makes use 
of this law in the later chapters of Social Evolution, but it is 
developed at length in his Principles of Western Civilization. He 
claims biological support for it in Weismann’s essay on Duration 
of Life, but so far as I can discover there is not one word in the 
whole essay that, fairly interpreted, warrants the conclusion Mr. 
Kidd draws. All Professor Weismann claims is that duration of 
life in a given species is dependent on an internal principle deter- 
mined by utility to the species in its struggle for existence, — a 
theory which has received added confirmation in recent studies 
concerning Mendelian characters. Yet this theory of projected 
efficiency is enunciated by Kidd as if it were a demonstrated fact 
and we are told that “‘ Never before has a principle of such reach 
in the social sciences emerged into view.” In explanation of its 
workings, he says: — 
What we are now brought to see is that the overwhelming weight of 
numbers as of interests, in the evolutionary process, is never in the present. 
It is always in the future. . . . Weare, in other words, brought face to face 
with the fact that, in the scientific formula of the life of any existing type of 
social order destined to maintain its place in the future, the interests of these 
existing individuals, with which we have been so preoccupied, possess no 
meaning, except so far as they are included in, and are subordinate to, the 
interests of a developing system of social order, the overwhelming proportion 
of whose members are still in the future.’ 
1 Social Evolution, ch. IV. 2 Ibid., p. 312. 
3 Principles of Western Civilization, p. 4, cf. p. 65. 
