The Ideal State 221 



mankind as to secure permanence in our Western 

 civilisation. Without doubt, therefore, we can accept 

 as a scientific aphorism founded upon observed pheno- 

 mena that the process at work in society is evolving 

 religious character as a first product. The latter part 

 may be accepted, but with a certain amount of modi- 

 fication. We have already come to the conclusion that 

 the further evolution of the human intellect is not to be 

 expected, and that the only evolutionary process 

 possible to humanity at this stage is a spiritual one. 

 But with an improved condition socially we are cer- 

 tainly entitled to hope that for every man there will be 

 greater leisure in which to develop his intellectual facul- 

 ties to the highest degree possible for him. Each man 

 will be so affected by the higher ethical plane to which he 

 has attained, that he will feel it to be his duty, not only 

 in his own interest, but in that of his fellow-men, to 

 do his fair share in the particular sphere of action 

 allotted to him and for which he is best fitted, and to 

 devote his leisure to the attainment of the best possible 

 intellectual and physical standard, so that he may keep 

 thoroughly efficient, and thus resist those degenerative 

 tendencies with which we are threatened if we do not live 

 our lives under the dominating law of the struggle for 

 existence. Mr. Kidd is quite entitled to urge that I 

 have only proved his point, and I am quite willing on 

 condition that he agrees as to the process by which the 

 ethical affects the intellectual development. The 

 general intellectual standard would undoubtedly im- 

 prove, but this is quite a different thing from the state- 

 ment that the intellect is capable of greater evolution 

 than has been evidenced in the time of the great Greek 

 civilisation — of iEschylus, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, 

 or of the Elizabethan period, when the master mind 

 not only of his age, but of all time — the immortal 

 Shakespeare, of whom his rival, Ben Jonson, testified : 



