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 PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHY
 
 ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
 PSEU DO- PHILOSOPHY 
 
 AT 
 
 THE END OF THE NINETEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 HUGH MORTIMER CECIL , 
 
 I. 
 AN IRRATIONALIST TRIO 
 
 KIDD DRUMMOND BALFOUR 
 
 LONDON 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED 
 
 16 JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C. 
 
 1897
 
 TO THE 
 
 MEMORY OF CHARLES DARWIN.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE old conflict between religion and science has 
 persisted down to our own time, but under a somewhat 
 altered aspect. Neither then nor now have the com- 
 batants met on terms near enough equality to make 
 the contest altogether a fair one. In the past, the 
 Church, if not strong in brain, was at least powerful 
 in arm ; and if it could not convince the heretic it could 
 at all events silence him. Then religion fought down- 
 wards upon science from the higher ground of the hill- 
 side. In our own day, thanks to the principle of 
 compensation in the universe, the positions of the com- 
 batants have been reversed ; and I am free to admit 
 that the advantage of science is now as unfair as was 
 the advantage of theology in the past. It is all the 
 more unfair in that it is an advantage that science is 
 hardly likely ever to lose again or theology ever likely 
 again to win. There is bound to be an end, some time 
 or other, to the dominion of brute force ; and even the 
 charming paradox of this brute force being exercised 
 by a religion of love by the religion of love, perhaps I 
 ought to say cannot hope to be permanently success- 
 ful in retaining the world for the inquisitor and the 
 hangman. These things have had their day, and are 
 never likely to return. But the advantage of science
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 is an intellectual one ; and in the long run, if barbarism 
 and the grace of God do not overtake a nation, that 
 course will be adopted, both in matters of opinion and 
 in matters of practical life, that is most consonant with 
 reason. Hence in a society in which the lower and 
 more animal forms of strife are sinking gradually into 
 more and more discredit, the victory tends to rest with 
 the party of superior logic. And herein, I say, science 
 has an unfair advantage over theology. For theology 
 can apparently never hope to find herself again in the 
 position of fighting from the top of the hill ; so long as 
 men are rational, and so long as bishops confine their 
 energies to garden parties and do not go forth with the 
 men of war, so long will theology have to keep at the 
 disheartening task of attacking a fortress that is quite 
 impregnable. Hence a candid friend is prompted to 
 ask the attacking party why the vain assault should 
 still be kept up. The men in the citadel are in a posi- 
 tion to dictate their own terms ; and these terms are 
 nothing more than the modest request that the theolo- 
 gians will be but rational in fact as well as in appearance. 
 Evidently, however, this is too much to ask ; and the 
 theological party would rather make itself ridiculous in 
 the eyes of the civilised world by its attacks on science, 
 than take the best that science has to give it, and be 
 grateful. If it will not be content to do this, then 
 theology should leave the hill of reason in possession 
 of the enemy, and settle down comfortably and bovinely 
 on the fat plains of sentiment below. Here is pasture 
 enough and to spare for them ; and the brains that are
 
 Preface. ix 
 
 unfit for the conclusions of Darwin and Spencer may 
 feed on the religious novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
 the geology of Sir J. W. Dawson, the apologetics of 
 Mr. Gladstone, and the biographies of Jesus that are 
 said to be in preparation by Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Ian 
 Maclaren, and Mr. Crockett, three gentlemen whose 
 capacity for sentimental fiction is the best guarantee 
 of their fitness for such a task. Yet I fear that this 
 cordial and disinterested recommendation to sanity of 
 conduct will not be accepted by the party of theology. 
 They will continue to attempt to fight Science with her 
 own weapons, and they will continue to fail disastrously. 
 The object of the present volume is to show how 
 three of the modern champions of theology have 
 fared in their attempts to capture the scientific fortress 
 by the use of pseudo-scientific methods. 
 
 H. M. C. 
 
 January, 1897.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Object of the present volume The significance of such works as Mr. Kidd's Social 
 Evolution, Mr. Drummond's Ascent of Man, and Mr. Balfour's Foundations 
 of Belief Necessity for combating their errors Nothing essentially new 
 in these three works Change of front of the theological party The three 
 modern irrationalists merely repeat, in another form, some of the oldest 
 theological arguments Religious apologetics almost inevitably driven into 
 irrationalism Mr. Kidd's thesis an old one Illustrations from Ambrose, 
 Savonarola, Pascal, Kant, Kaftan, Newman, and Luther. . Page i 
 
 MR. KIDD'S SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Light thrown on Mr. Kidd's mind by his unconscious betrayals Most of 
 his fallacies of a purely verbal kind His sense of his own importance and 
 originality The argument of the first portion of his book Science and 
 religion Importance of religion in the social evolution The conditions of 
 human progress Selection and rejection No diminution of the rivalry of 
 life in civilised societies Man's reason antagonistic to the conditions of 
 progress Man's reason, as inimical to progress, held in by irrational religion 
 Religion secures the maintenance of the conditions of progress Religion 
 provides a super-rational sanction for socially-preservative action in the in- 
 dividualThe character of a civilisation depends upon the ethical system on 
 which it is founded. ........ Page 15 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Mr. Kidd's intellectual type defined by his juvenile blunders " Aggressive 
 unbelief" Mr. Kidd and Mr. Bradlaugh Mr. Kidd's own book ag- 
 gressive in the most pronounced degree His misconception of the historical 
 relations of science and religion Scepticism as " significant " a phenomenon 
 as religious belief His error in supposing religious beliefs to be independent 
 of reason Man "in conflict with his own reason' 1 Ideas and feelings 
 Comte and Spencer Mr. Kidd's psychological ignorance His errors of 
 phrasing and of psychology. - ...... Page 30 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Progress as the result of over-population Mr. Kidd's argument as to the 
 desirability of progress merely a circulus in probando " Progress " cannot 
 philosophically be defined as equivalent to "improvement" Organism 
 and environment Mr. Kidd's self-contradictions and inconsistencies. 
 
 Page 39 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 " No rational sanction for the conditions of progress " Man's individual 
 interests subordinated by evolution to the social interests of the race Mr. 
 Kidd's teleology His error in conceiving natural selection as a "force" 
 antagonistic to man His self-contradiction Reason not a " force " an- 
 tagonistic to natural selection, but merely one of the forces with which
 
 xii Contents. 
 
 natural selection has to do Mr. Kidd's misconception of evolution The 
 individual and the social organism His own book a demonstration of the 
 fatuity of his arguments. ....... Page 44 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Religion as the irrational force which maintains progress Man's " profound 
 social instinct" Absurdity of Mr. Kidd's thesis More self-contradictions 
 His errors of the most primitive kind Examination of his thesis as to 
 the "ultra-rational sanctions" of religion His verbal confusions His 
 own book once more a refutation of the principles he is enforcing His 
 spurious philosophising His confusion of " supernatural " and " ultra- 
 rational " "Heart" and "head" Mr. Kidd's real ignorance of the psy- 
 chology of belief His want of training in psychology and ethics. Page 52 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Mr. Kidd's philosophy of history Difference between Pagan and Christian 
 society The social virtue of Christianity Mr. Kidd's admonishment of all 
 previous historians The " great problem of every progressive society " 
 Christianity makes for the equality of man, thus tending to bring all into the 
 struggle for life on more equal terms It is thus of the highest importance 
 to the cause of progress, which demands strenuous competition, selection 
 and rejection Greek morality egotistical Evolution not an intellectual 
 movement The high altruistic ideal of Christianity It tends to break 
 down caste and slavery Our civilisation exists on an irrational basis Mr. 
 Kidd's historical and psychological ignorance His misplaced regard for 
 Mr. Froude, Mr. Lecky, and Mr. Mahaffy The real facts as to Pagan 
 humanitarianism Mr. Lecky's opinion of early Christian morals His 
 self-contradictions The real character of the Gospel Jesus His intolerance 
 Christianity and slavery Paine and the deists of the eighteenth century 
 Mr. Kidd's vulgar errors on the subject of Pagan altruism Mr. J. A. 
 Farrer's comparison of Christianity and Paganism Mr. A. W. Benn on 
 Stoicism and the idea of humanity The innate equality of men not a 
 Christian but a Pagan doctrine Futility of Mr. Kidd's philosophy of history 
 "Destinies" and "forces" His notion of the continuity of history 
 His self-contradictions His philosophy of history a mere burlesque His 
 treatment of ethical developments More absurdities He has no concep- 
 tion of the real causes of moral changes Almost stumbles upon the truth 
 by accident. .......... Page 64 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Mr. Kidd on modern socialism The real significance of the movement The 
 real impelling force is the development of the altruistic feelings This leads 
 to the admittance of the lower classes to the struggle for life on more equal 
 terms with the higher classes Mr. Kidd's confusion of mind as to selection 
 and progress Religion must be relied on to keep up the struggle for life in 
 all its old intensity Confusion as to the effect of reasoning upon mankind 
 Superfluity of his own book His formulas pseudo-scientific and mean- 
 ingless Page 82 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 "Human Evolution not Primarily Intellectual" Social development and 
 ethical codes Religion and the intellect No such continuous increase 
 as we are wont to imagine in the mental development of races Mr. Gallon 
 on the intellectual power of the ancient Greeks The real importance of 
 intellect as a factor in social evolution Mr. Kidd fighting his own shadow 
 Secondary and primary use of intellect Religion as the prime factor in 
 progress Religious character of the Teutonic peoples The French mind 
 irreligious Mr. Kidd's explanation of race differences affords an illustra- 
 tion of his sociological ignorance France and the limiting of the popula- 
 tion Mr. Kidd's own thesis self- subversive Reason and the individual 
 Mr. Kidd's pseudo-scientific jargon. ..... Page 88
 
 Contents. xiii 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Mr. Kidd on history and universal law " The forces at work in the evolution 
 of society " Evolution only concerned with the interests of the social 
 organism as a whole More confusion on Mr. Kidd's part The Reformation 
 Latin Christianity Evolution of the Anglo-Saxon peoples Absurdity 
 of speaking of our civilisation as "based upon Christianity" Negro 
 slavery among the " altruistic " Anglo-Saxons Mr. Kidd's forecast of the 
 future of civilisation An unreliable guide The reception of his book by 
 the uncritical press His " reply " to his critics The gross paralogism of 
 his book Mr. J. M. Robertson's summary of it Mr. Kidd incapable of 
 answering even the charges of historical ignorance that were brought against 
 him Ten years spent in reading for Social Evolution Ten weeks' reading 
 actually embodied in it Mr. Kidd's thesis an old one His mental defects 
 and his lack of adequate training Social Evolution the most ignorant book 
 of modern times. ......... Page 94 
 
 MR. DRUMMOND'S ASCENT OF MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Theological quality of Mr. Drummond's fallacies Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World Mr. Drummond as the educator of the human race Object of 
 The Ascent of Man Necessity for a re-examination of the Darwinian theory 
 Typical examples of Mr. Drummond's habit of thought and expression 
 Theological tactics in relation to the evolutionary theory Teleological 
 biology " The God of evolution ". Page 103 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Mr. Drummond's conception of the standpoint from which evolution should be 
 viewed The beginning must be interpreted from the end The evolution 
 of man the culminating point Mr. Drummond's absurd .analogies Error 
 of reading a purpose into evolution The "struggle for life" and the 
 " struggle for the life of others " Nutrition and reproduction Mr. Drum- 
 mond's confusion of the physiological and the ethical Egoism and altruism 
 The old theistic problem of evil Huxley on Evolution and Ethics His 
 fallacies Mr. Drummond on evolution as the work of love " Why was 
 this method chosen ? " The moral purpose of evolution Theism old and 
 new Browning's optimism Romanes Professor Knight Professor Cal- 
 derwood The old t-heistic dilemma Nummary of Mr. Drummond's short- 
 comings up to this point His thesis of the importance of altruism not new 
 Mr. Drummond's criticism of Mr. Kidd Spencer and Huxley on altruism 
 as a factor in the struggle for existence The "struggle for the life of others " 
 simply a phase of the struggle for life Page 108 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Mr. Drummond on the struggle for life The problem of evil made by the theist 
 Nature and the unevolved savage Mr. Drummond's confusion of mind 
 Evolution "an instrument of perfection " The significance of weapons 
 in early evolution " Implements of self-preservation " The ethical aspect 
 of the struggle for life Suspending judgment upon the moral meaning of 
 evolution Mr. Drummond as the Lady Plyant of biology Mistake of 
 looking upon the struggle for life as altogether painful Theistic ethics 
 Omnipotence and the question of evil Lying for the glory of God " The 
 object of the survival of the fittest is to produce fitness " Confusion of Mr. 
 Drummond's theology. ........ Page 130
 
 xiv Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The struggle for the life of others Mistaken notions of all previous scientists 
 Evolution taken as a whole is a " love-story " Altruism and evolution 
 Physiological origins of egoism and altruism Sacrifice in lower nature 
 Confusion of physiological and ethical terms The ethical significance of 
 sex Teleological biology Illustrations from Weismann Fallacy of credit- 
 ing Nature with " intentions " The evolution of a mother and the evolu- 
 tion of a father " The one motive of organic nature was to make mothers " 
 The creation of fathers Sympathy as a factor in evolution Monogamy 
 and natural selection . Page 146 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Stigmaria and sigillaria " Did mind, morals, men, evolve out of matter ? " 
 A tree does not grow out of its roots The secret of evolution lies with the 
 environment Environment the supreme factor Mr. Drummond's self-con- 
 tradictions and confusion Evolutionists have always recognised the factor 
 of environment The cosmos as "environment" Organism and environ- 
 ment purely relative terms Mr. Drummond's confusion as to the meaning 
 of environment The " environment of the social tree " Mr. Drummond 
 nearing the rocks of folly The physical world in reality a spiritual world 
 " Evolution demands a creative hand " God accountable for the whole of 
 nature Love the final result of evolution Christianity at one with evolu- 
 tion The real character of the Gospel Jesus Mr. Drummond's book as 
 a whole. .... ...... Page 160 
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Difference between Mr. Balfour and the two other irrationalists Mr. Balfour 
 as organism and environment His mind and his surroundings The 
 Foundations of Belief based on the Defence of Philosophic Doubt Mr. 
 Balfour appealing to the " general reader " Critical and uncritical recep- 
 tions of the book Comparison of Mr. Balfour's essay on " The Religion of 
 Humanity "and" A Fragment on Progress " " The Religion of Humanity " 
 Positivism emotionally inadequate, tending to despair The "conse- 
 quences " of belief Positivism ends " in a chilling scepticism concerning 
 the final worth of human effort " " A Fragment on Progress " No logical 
 ground for the belief in a general progress of the race Despair the note 
 of Mr. Balfour's paper Comparison of the two essays. . Page 179 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Naturalism The "consequences" of naturalism Naturalism and aesthetics 
 Mr. Balfour arguing his opponents' case for them Naturalistic and intu- 
 itional theories of aesthetic Mr. Balfour's tearful rhetoric The upshot of 
 his argument Naturalism and ethics Incongruity of ethical ideals and the 
 account given by naturalism of their origin Determinism leads to moral 
 impoverishment Dishonesty of Mr. Balfour's method Example from the 
 theory of heredity Mr. Balfour's "pairs of contrasted propositions" 
 More rhetoric. Page 191 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Examination of the philosophic basis of naturalism Reasons for postponing 
 this examination until now Mr. Balfour's metaphysical arguments and the 
 plain man Difficulties in the way of a purely empirical theory of things 
 Science and the theory of science Mr. Balfour merely attacking the 
 latter, not the former The primary and secondary qualities of matter
 
 Contents. xv 
 
 Amateur scepticism Accommodating character of Mr. Balfour's scepticism 
 Mr. Pearson on criticism Irrelevance of Mr. Balfour's attack Mr. Benn 
 on the Greek sceptics The regularity and irregularity of nature The 
 principle of causation Naturalism forcing itself into the retinue of 
 science Mr. Balfour's self-contradictions. .... Page 202 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Philosophy and Rationalism Consistency not to be purchased at famine prices 
 Natural and revealed religion Reason and natural religion " Some 
 Causes of Belief" Reason and authority Fate of a society that should 
 try to base its beliefs and actions wholly upon reason Sophistry of the 
 argument Mr. Balfour on morals and authority Mr. Balfour's warning 
 superfluous on his own showing Weakness of Mr. Balfour's argument in 
 favour of authority His own oscillation between authority and reason. 
 
 Page 212 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Mr. Balfour's " suggestions towards a provisional philosophy " Preparing the 
 ground for inconsistency Different classes of belief No distinction to 
 be made where no relevant distinction can be discovered Protest against 
 the assumption that scientific beliefs stand upon a more solid platform 
 than any others Mr. Balfour's object in all this The obvious criticism 
 upon it Mr. Balfour's anticipation of this criticism His uncandid air of 
 assumed candour The " inevitableness " of certain scientific beliefs 
 These compared with the fundamental proposition of theology Reasons 
 for the universal belief in a material world Universality and inevitableness 
 no test of truth ' ' Faith or assurance in excess of, or at least independent 
 of, reason " Inevitable beliefs and the " state of nature " Sophistry of the 
 argument "Higher" and "lower" feelings Psychological distinction 
 between the belief in a real world and the belief in God Dishonesty of 
 Mr. Balfour's dialectic Mr. Balfour, Mr. Spencer and Spinoza Warding 
 off criticism His object " not to discredit reason " Authority and reason 
 once more The cause of Mr. Balfour's new-found zeal for reason Utilises 
 reason as an argument for theism " Needs " and their " satisfactions " 
 Professor Seth on Mr. Balfour A rational world and a rational Creator 
 Similarity of Mr. Balfour's argument to that of Kant The argument " from 
 the mere fact that we know " The illegitimate use of the word "needs" 
 The logical defects of transcendentalism Impossibility of " accounting for 
 knowledge " except in terms of knowledge The " mere fact that we know " 
 does not help the argument for theism Kant upon knowledge Weak- 
 ness of his position and of Mr. Balfour's Fallacy of the argument about 
 " higher " and " lower " qualities. Page 224 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Universality and inevitableness of beliefs Sense-perceptions denied to be "the 
 most worthy " Action and reaction between beliefs and the formulas which 
 express them Difference between scientific and theological beliefs in this 
 respect Examples : in science the theory of heat ; in theology the doctrine 
 of the atonement Mr, Balfour's "non-rational" beliefs in reality sub- 
 consciously rational Beliefs and hypotheses The "consolation" of theo- 
 logical beliefs Relations between language and belief, and between belief and 
 authority The feminine quality of Mr. Balfour's mind Some psychological 
 criticisms of him Beliefs do not exactly correspond to reality Futility of 
 using this fact as an argument for religion The real ground for the 
 rationalist's refusal to believe religious dogmas The " needs of mankind " 
 once more Rationalism also " meets the needs of mankind" Mr. Balfour's 
 use of reason when it suits his purpose The theistic reliance upon senti- 
 ment Page 246
 
 xvi Contents, 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Mr. Balfour as negative and positive thinker His failure as a constructionist 
 Mind and the naturalistic account of the origin of mind Must presuppose 
 the world to be " the work of a rational Being " Fallacy of this argument 
 Meaning of right and wrong "Atoms" and truth and error The 
 entanglement of Mr. Balfour's argument The consequences of his positing 
 a supreme reason Failure of the attempt to reconcile religion and science 
 The real conflict of religion not with naturalism but with science itself 
 Mr. Balfour as the defender of the faith Evasion of the problem of evil 
 Miracles Psychological climates The naturalist unfit to weigh the historic 
 evidence for miracles The " preferential exercise of divine power " 
 Argument in a circle. . Page 257 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The question of inspiration Reason and natural religion Natural religion 
 and " traditional religion " Mr. Balfour's argument in a tangle The 
 inspiration of sacred books Mr. Balfour's difficulties Inspiration as a 
 whole " Divine co-operation " Mr. Balfour's final effort Theism versus 
 naturalism Christianity versus theism The incarnation Belief in " mys- 
 teries " Mr. Balfour's argument might be used in behalf of any religion 
 Reason and the incarnation The historical criticism of the Bible Mr. 
 Balfour's misrepresentations "The ethical import of Christianity" 
 Ethical "needs" once more Is Mr. Balfour a Christian ? Failure of his 
 attack upon naturalism Rationalism and morals The naturalist as a 
 moral parasite Mr. Kidd's remarks Our ethical code not the product of 
 Christianity Social ethics as cause and effect of social changes Mr. 
 Spencer and Mr. Balfour Christian and rationalistic ethics in theory and 
 practice Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bradlaugh Page 270 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Object of the final chapter The reviewers of The Foundations of Belief Mr. 
 Spencer's criticism Futility of the argument from needs to their satisfac- 
 tion The anthropocentric view of the universe Mr. Balfour's scepticism- 
 Fallacy of his theistic position Reason and authority The authority of 
 religion decreasing, and that of science increasing Mr. Spencer's own 
 agnosticism The spearing of an effigy Examination of Mr. Balfour's criti- 
 cism Mr. Balfour merely dealing in pseud-ideas Historical development 
 of the God-idea Mr. Huxley's criticism Ancient Rome and modern Europe 
 Science and religion Naturalism and Demomism The germs of modern 
 agnosticism in Hamilton and Mansel Agnosticism and atheism Mr. 
 Balfour's definition of naturalism at once too wide and too narrow Mr. 
 Pearson's criticism Christianity and statesmanship Ambiguity of most of 
 Mr. Balfour's terms His confusion of naturalism, science and rationalism 
 Mr. Balfour's superficial acquaintance with science The materialism of 
 Moleschott and Biichner The certitudes of religion and the certitudes of 
 science Science conceptual Things-in-themselves Mr. Balfour's criti- 
 cism of science beside the mark The law of causation conceptual 
 Authority and reason A redttctio ad absiirdum The Liberal press and 
 The Foundations of Belief Mr. Vamadeo Shastri's criticism Christianity 
 and Brahmanism Mn Shastri's delicate soul Superiority of Brahmanism 
 to Christianity Mr. Shastri on Mr. Balfour's "needs" "Needs" and 
 psychological climates One absurd religionist against another Reaction 
 in religion, in politics and in social life Reason the final arbiter Dangers 
 of modern irrationalism P a g e 283
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE primary object of this volume is the refutation of the 
 fallacies and errors contained in three books Kidd's Social 
 Evolution, Drummond's Ascent of Man, and Balfour's Founda- 
 tions of Belief- which at the time of their publication caused a 
 literary sensation in England and the United States without 
 stirring the scientific world. The ephemeral nature of these 
 productions is so self-evident that most persons of culture and 
 intelligence will assert that similar works do not call for a 
 volume especially devoted to their errors, and that in a few 
 short years they will die a natural death and go the way of all 
 fallacy and deception. I am far from disagreeing with this 
 criticism ; on the contrary, no one could be more convinced 
 that the vogue of these books, great as it was at first, is des- 
 tined to grow smaller and smaller, until the particular form 
 of pseudo-philosophy which they represent has passed into 
 deserved oblivion. The path of literature is indeed mal- 
 odorous with the dead bodies of their predecessors. Never- 
 theless, I am probably not alone in the belief that, transparent 
 as are most of the fallacies of these books, it is not altogether 
 superfluous to devote a volume to the consideration of them. 
 They, and the applause which they drew forth, represent a 
 feature of human evolution that is as interesting as it is sig- 
 nificant. The justification of the present volume will be
 
 2 Pseiido-Philosophy. 
 
 tolerably plain to any one who runs his eye over the past 
 history of the conflict between religion and science, and views 
 these modern products of irrationalisrn in the light of that 
 history. He will then perceive that the problem presented by 
 the appearance and the success of such books as these is of far 
 greater importance than would appear upon the first glance 
 is, indeed, far too important to rationalism for the books to be 
 dismissed in contemptuous silence. The books themselves 
 especially those of Mr. Drummond and Mr. Kidd are perhaps 
 the mere phenomena of a moment, and may hardly be worth 
 detailed criticism ; but the state of the intellectual world in 
 which such works can command an enormous sale and receive 
 almost unstinted commendation from many of the literary 
 reviews, is undoubtedly a serious matter for rationalists. It 
 serves to enforce the lesson, if any enforcement of it were 
 needed, that the conflict between science and religion, between 
 rationalism and irrationalism, is by no means a thing of the 
 past ; that it is as important now as ever it was, and that 
 while the combatants and the weapons and the modes of war- 
 fare have changed, the conflict is as bitter, and must be as 
 bitter, in the present as in the past. There can be no truce 
 between the rationalist and the irrationalist ; and if in these 
 happier days the religious obscurantist has lost most of his 
 power to inflict physical disabilities upon his opponent, none 
 the less is it incumbent upon lovers of truth to take up arms 
 against the hereditary foes of reason. I forbear to urge in 
 defence of this volume the obvious argument that it is to the 
 interest of all who value social freedom to withstand these 
 modern forms of unreason, because of the immemorial associa- 
 tion of religious obscurantism and political reaction. I would 
 rather take the higher ground of arguing that intellectual error, 
 or what we conceive to be error, should be opposed for the 
 mere truth's sake, for the mere dignity and decency of human 
 nature ; that the spectacle of three such men as Mr. Balfour,
 
 Introduction. 3 
 
 Mr. Kidd and Mr. Drummond playing fast and loose with 
 reason in the cause of religious irrationalism is one that no 
 thinking man can regard without a feeling of shame for the 
 race ; and that whatever may be our duty in respect to error as 
 a whole, there can be no question that it is our duty to oppose 
 to the uttermost these deliberate attempts to weaken the 
 authority of reason in the lives and thoughts of men. Among 
 the readers of any book on a controversial subject there are 
 always some who, unconvinced one way or the other, are 
 candid enough to hold their judgment in suspense upon the 
 matters in dispute ; and it is to these readers, to those who 
 stand upon the border-line between religion and rationalism, 
 that the appeal of such a book as the present must be made. 
 If after reading it they are disappointed with its reasoning 
 and fall back into the rank of the religious, be it so ; they will 
 at least have discovered their philosophy by the exercise of 
 their own reason : while if any can be persuaded that the 
 pseudo-philosophy of the modern apologist is just so much 
 elaborate fallacy, rationalism will be to that extent the gainer. 
 It is evident at the outset, to any one who reflects for a 
 moment, that there is nothing essentially new in the books of 
 our three irrationalist writers. To discredit reason, to show 
 that it is incompetent to direct the whole of our intellectual 
 life, to place the " spiritual " above the " natural," to prove the 
 importance of religious beliefs to the individual and to society, 
 t'o justify the ways of God to man, to rebut the rationalist 
 attack upon the benevolence of the Deity who permits so 
 much evil in the world these have been the objects of theo- 
 logians from time immemorial ; and there is nothing whatever 
 new in the works of their modern successors, except that the 
 defence has been altered to suit the changed method of attack. 
 After fighting with dogged persistence for centuries, the up- 
 holders of religion have had to surrender position after posi- 
 tion to the enemy ; they have been proved wrong on point
 
 4 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 after point of history and of ethics ; their sacred books have 
 been riddled by hostile criticism, and their practical no less 
 than their intellectual authority has almost departed from 
 them. In our own day there has been added to the previous 
 weapons of the sceptic the powerful weapon of the evolutionary 
 theory, and the tactics of the religious hierarchy in face of this 
 new attack have been consistent with all its previous modes of 
 warfare. The theologians began with the most strenuous 
 opposition to the evolutionary theory ; they opposed to it the 
 grotesque authority of their own sacred books ; they indulged, 
 like Bishop Wilberforce, in pointless impertinences towards 
 better and wiser men than themselves; they declared the 
 theory to be irreligious in itself and fatal in its consequences 
 to morals. And how stands the matter now? The theory of 
 evolution having conquered the intelligence of the whole of the 
 civilised world, even theologians have no longer the hardihood 
 to deny its truth ; and the old weapon of persecution no longer 
 lying ready to their hand, they have adopted the new method 
 of stealing their opponents' thunder. We are now informed, 
 in all gravity, that so far from Darwinism and the Bible being 
 antagonistic, they are really one in principle ; that so far from 
 evolution being an irreligious invention, it has really been 
 " God's method in creation " ; and the old farce of what Mill 
 called "suborning evidence in favour of a First Cause" has 
 gone on apace. 
 
 Glancing cursorily at the three books, it will, as I have 
 said, readily be seen that there is nothing essentially new in the 
 matter of them ; that they are, in fact, merely an adaptation of 
 the old arguments, already discredited in other departments, 
 to meet the altered attack of rationalism. When Mr. Kidd 
 argues that reason is an anti-social force, and that an irrational 
 element religion has been the prime factor in progress, we 
 are but listening to the primitive emotionalism of earlier 
 apologetics talking the cant of modern pseudo-science. When
 
 Introduction. 5 
 
 Mr. Balfour argues that there is no rational basis for the 
 system he calls naturalism, and that not reason but authority 
 is the main arbiter of our beliefs, and when we find him turn- 
 ing this exceedingly naive thesis to the uses of religion, and 
 arguing from it that it all proves, in some mysterious way, 
 that we ought to believe that nineteen hundred years ago a 
 Jewish virgin gave birth to a child, we recognise that we are 
 simply face to face once more with the same emotionalism 
 masquerading in the garments of modern philosophy and 
 psychology. And when Mr. Drummond, in that dreadful 
 manner of his, that seems to be a curate's imitation of a 
 bishop delivering a pastoral charge, regales us with his really 
 humorous reading of evolution, when he informs us that God 
 is Love, that the suffering attendant upon natural selection is 
 not to be urged against the moral character of the Deity, 
 although he has chosen to work out his scheme of evolution 
 by this means ; when we find evolution and natural selection 
 being turned, after the manner of Browning, to the account of 
 religious optimism, and the death of the unfit being " justified " 
 by the survival of the fit, we see at once the affinity of these 
 arguments with those of all the theologians of the past, who 
 have tried to deal with the problem of evil, and who have 
 argued either (i) that pain was necessary in order to work out 
 a larger balance of pleasure, o^ (2) that if we had eyes to 
 view the whole past, present and future of things, we should 
 see that, as Fope put it, " all discord " is " harmony not under- 
 stood," and "all partial evil, universal good". To state the 
 case briefly, Mr. Drummond's book is just a variation upon 
 the old theological theme that God is Lovt, while the works 
 of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Kidd are variations upon the equally 
 old theine that the emotions are nobler than the intellect, the 
 "heart" more excellent than the " head ". 
 
 There are, in fact, but three main lines on which the 
 defenc? of religion against rationalism can run. The religionist
 
 6 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 must either show that rationalism is wrong in theory, that the 
 acceptance of it involves serious consequences to the morals and 
 the well-being of the community, or that rationalistic methods 
 may be valid within a certain circle but invalid outside it, 
 invalid, that is, in the domain of theology. As to the first, 
 theologians have suffered so many reverses that they now 
 hesitate to meet science face to face as an avowed enemy ; as 
 to the second, that argument, such as it is, will be considered 
 in the course of the present volume ; while as to the third, one 
 has only to glance at the ..theological literature of the past to 
 see how incapable the modern apologists are of improving on 
 their predecessors. Ever since dogma was worsted in the 
 conflict with reason, it has claimed to emanate from a faculty 
 that should take precedence of reason. The argument has 
 been that the truth of certain religious dogmas, or of religion 
 as a whole, is certified by a faculty other than reason, which 
 reason is incompetent to criticise ; while all the time that the 
 jurisdiction of reason is being denied explicitly, it is being 
 implicitly admitted ; for the very object of the argument has 
 been to induce conviction by means of reason. This is the 
 fundamental fallacy of Mr. Kidd's book ; and nothing could 
 better illustrate that gentleman's incompetence than the fact 
 of his having studied his subject for ten years, as he tells us, 
 without discovering that his main thesis was almost as old as 
 religious apologetics themselves. All he has done is to re- 
 clothe the .argument in the tattered garments of second-hand 
 biology and perverted history. And as the demonstration of 
 the antiquity of the thesis goes far to discredit Mr. Kidd 
 a priori, it will be well to indicate briefly some of the main 
 uses to which it has already been applied. 
 
 One is not surprised to come across it so early as Ambrose, 
 whose Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populuni 
 is the dictum of a stupid theologian who, had he lived 
 
 J DC Fide, i., 5, sec. 42.
 
 Introduction. 7 
 
 in these days, would probably have written a book like Social 
 Evolution. All through the ages, indeed, and in theologians 
 of all denominations, while faith has been held to be the pass- 
 port to salvation, and while faith has been looked upon as a 
 gift of God, theologians have been foolish enough to argue 
 with heretics whose heresy, in the very terms of the case, must 
 have been due to the deliberate withholding by God of the 
 gift of faith. The process has been one of giving to reason 
 with the one hand and taking away with the other. Reason 
 has to be adjudged competent to make an objection against 
 religion, but incompetent to understand the answer. Thus 
 Savonarola, after arguing that theology is the true and only 
 science, because while " all the others treat of special things 
 under special aspects, theology alone treats of all under a 
 single and universal aspect," lays it down that "for this the 
 light of nature is not sufficient, the light of heaven being 
 required". His real originality, says Villari, "consisted in 
 recognising the weight of reason, experience, and conscience, 
 in both scientific and practical questions, but without separating 
 science from the religion in which he believed, and without 
 admitting as many then admitted that man might hold one 
 faith in philosophy, and another in religion". Savonarola, 
 however, merely escaped this latter absurdity by falling into 
 another. If the Christian finds that science negatives a dogma 
 of his creed, he must either (i) give up the dogma, or (2) 
 believe, if he can, in it and in the scientific doctrine that con- 
 futes it, or (3) hold that the dogma is a priori credible as the 
 revealed Word of God, no matter what science may say against 
 it. Stating it in this way, it will be seen how inevitably the 
 Christian who does not wish to surrender his belief altogether, 
 nor to take up the preposterous attitude of believing two- 
 contradictory propositions, is driven to the sophistical position 
 that the truth of the dogma is certified by a higher faculty 
 than reason, on which reason can make no impression. Thus
 
 8 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 we find Savonarola saying at one moment that " we must 
 accept no authority save that of our own experience and 
 reason," that 'we must not run counter to reason," and at the 
 next, that the Bible still remains the great authority in matters 
 of opinion, and that "we may not comprehend this book by 
 the intellect alone, but muot also bring our heart and soul to 
 the task. Thus only can we enter without peril into this 
 infinite world of the Holy Spirit, and obtain the light needed 
 for our salvation. But not unto all is this gift equally granted. 
 From time to time God sends upon earth men favoured with 
 a stronger light than others, and it is their part to enlighten 
 the darkened minds of the multitude." Savonarola, of course, 
 was one of these " favoured " men ; there never was a Christian 
 minister yet who was not firmly convinced that God had 
 endowed him with more grace and understanding than any 
 other minister, though he has generally had some difficulty in 
 inducing the others to agree with him. But why, after telling 
 his hearers that they could not comprehend the Bible by the 
 intellect alone, should he attempt to convince them, by means 
 of an appeal to their intellect, that his reading of the Bible 
 was the one which God intended them to adopt ? And why, 
 after making this appeal to them, and after telling them that 
 God sent certain men upon earth " to enlighten the darkened 
 minds of the multitude," and thus bring them into the way of 
 salvation, should he further tell them that faith is ''a super- 
 natural gift from God"? In his work on The Triumph of the 
 Cross, again, when he comes to deal with faith and natural . 
 reason, he opines that there are " things which are beyond the 
 grasp of reason, and yet only to be known by its aid, and by 
 admitting, or assuming as the point of departure, the necessary 
 and supernatural works of Christ and His Church ". " By 
 reason alone," again, " we may attain to the knowledge of 
 God's existence ; but never to that of the Trinity, save by first 
 assuming the truth of its marvellous and supernatural opera-
 
 Introduction. 9 
 
 tions," which piece of primitive thimble-ridging is only one 
 01" Mr. Balfour's arguments in a crude and comparatively 
 innocent form. And finally, we are not surprised to find 
 Savonarola, after laying it down that " the force of reason 
 cannot avail against things beyond the reach of reason," and 
 that the Christian doctrines are "intangible to reason," pro- 
 ceeding to give his readers, in the usual way, the "reasons" 
 for the Incarnation. 1 
 
 Savonarola, then, was simply falling into the inevitable 
 snare when he tried to show, by means of reason, that we 
 must believe in certain doctrines because they are beyond 
 reason. Subtler minds than his, indeed, have been driven by 
 their religion into the same net of fallacy and self-contradic- 
 tion. Compare with the above extracts, for example, the 
 following quotations taken almost at random from Pascal's 
 Pensees : 
 
 " La derniere demarche de la raison, c'est de connaitre 
 qu'il y a une infinite de choses qui la surpassent. Elle est 
 bien faible si elle ne va jusque-la." 2 
 
 " II n'y a rien de si conforme a la raison que le desaveu de 
 la raison dans les choses qui sont de foi." s 
 
 " Ceux a qui Dieu a donne la religion par sentiment de 
 cceur sont bienheureux et bien persuades. Mais pour ceux 
 qui ne 1'ont pas, nous ne pouvons la leur procurer que par 
 raisonnement, en attendant que Dieu la leur imprime lui- 
 meme dans le coeur ; sans quoi la foi est inutile pour le salut. 
 . . . Ce n'est pas par les agitations de notre raison. mais par 
 le simple soumission de la raison, que nous pouvons veritable- 
 ment nous connaitre." 4 
 
 " Toutes les religions et routes les sectes du monde ont eu 
 
 1 See Villari's Savonarola, vol. i., pp. 103, 104, 106, 108, 119, 174 ; and vol. 
 ii., chaps, iii. and iv. 
 
 2 Pascal, Pensees, in (Euvres, vol. ii., p. 257. Paris. 1819. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 259. 4 Ibid., p. 366.
 
 io Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 la raison naturelle pour guide. ... II y a trois moyens de 
 croire ; la raison, la coutume et 1'inspiration. La religion 
 chretienne, qui seule a la raison, n' admet pas pour ses vrais 
 enfants ceux qui croient sans inspiration : ce n'est pas qu'elle 
 exclue la raison et 1-a coutume ; au contraire, il faut ouvrir son 
 esprit aux preuves par la raison, et s'y confirmer par la cou- 
 tume ; mais elle veut qu'on s'offre par 1'humiliation aux 
 inspirations, qui seules peuvent faire le vrai et salutaire 
 efTet." 1 
 
 " Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas : on 
 le sent en mille choses. C'est le coeur qui sent Dieu, et non 
 la raison." 2 
 
 Here the antithetical sharpness of statement brings into 
 prominent relief the confusion that runs throughout the 
 argument. One has, of course, in the case of Pascal, to con- 
 sider the temperamental diathesis before passing judgment 
 upon his system of ideas ; but it is at least certain that the 
 Christian religion wrought for intellectual evil in him as in so 
 many other men of dialectical acuteness, by setting him upon 
 the suicidal course of defending doctrines which he knew were 
 contrary to reason, by reasoning that they were above the 
 jurisdiction of reason. And where such minds as Pascal's 
 have gone astray, it is hardly surprising that minds like Mr. 
 Kidd's should have become completely lost. Mr. Kidd, 
 indeed, seems to have been doubly unfortunate ; for not only 
 has he failed to see the manner in which he confutes himself 
 time after time, as when he tells us that men have not been 
 and will not be influenced by what scientists may say as to 
 the effect of their conduct on future generations, when all the 
 time his own book is an attempt to influence men in this way, 
 but his ten years of reading have not given him any warning 
 that other men before him have trod the same path of primi- 
 
 1 Pascal, Pensees, in (Enures, vol. ii., p. 386. Paris, 1819. 
 
 2 /6/W., p. 390.
 
 Introduction. 
 
 1 1 
 
 tive fallacy. We need not pursue the historical side of the 
 question any further. Any one who has even an average 
 acquaintance with the history of opinions must be able to 
 supply further evidence in the same direction. Mr. Kidd, 
 who sometimes -speaks of Kant and other philosophers with 
 an assurance that would almost make us think he had read 
 them, might have discovered, before he began his -book, that 
 his thesis of the inferiority of reason was merely another form 
 of the sophistical argument by which Kant attempted to give 
 to reason with the one hand and to take away with the other. 
 Second-rate as well as first-rate German minds have trod the 
 same path, and third-rate English minds have not been slow 
 to follow them. Dr. Julius Kaftan's Truth of the Christian 
 Religion is simply a more subtle form of the argument of Mr. 
 Kidd and Mr. Balfour, done, as only a German can do it, with 
 elaborate and futile completeness. " It strives," says Professor 
 Flint in his introduction to the English translation, " to repre- 
 sent Christian faith as its own sufficient foundation. It seeks 
 to secure for religion a domain within the sphere of feeling 
 and practical judgment into which theoretical reason cannot 
 intrude." The division of the human mind into the dual 
 faculties of "practical judgment" and "theoretical reason" is, 
 of course, simply so much Kantian apriorism. Nor does it 
 help Dr. Kaftan in the least, for his justification of Christianity, 
 such as it is, is merely an appeal to reason, by the argument 
 that Christianity is justified by history, or else that the 
 Christian consciousness of faith is sufficient proof of the truth 
 of the religion. Bad as the reasoning is, it is still an appeal 
 to the reason, and Dr. Kaftan's deplorable sophistry in his 
 attempts to define " truth " so as to make it equal Christian 
 " truth," ought to be a warning to any future theologian who 
 attempts to discredit reason by reason. In our own day 
 Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent, which contains 
 almost everything that is worth noticing in Mr. Ralfour's
 
 1 2 Pseudo-Philosophy, 
 
 Foundations of Belief, has striven to set religious convictions 
 apart from others as regards their psychological genesis, and 
 has failed. All, indeed, that the modern i nationalist can say 
 was long ago expressed in the naive words of Luther, that 
 " Before faith and the knowledge of God, reason is mere 
 darkness ; but in the hands of those who believe, it is an 
 excellent instrument. All faculties and gifts are pernicious, 
 exercised by the impious, but most salutary when possessed 
 by godly persons ; " which amusing piece of theological imper- 
 tinence is Social Evolution and TJie Foundations of Belief in 
 a nutshell. Let us, however, betake ourselves to the detailed 
 consideration of the books of the three irrationalists, com- 
 mencing with that of Mr. Kidd.
 
 MR. KIDD'S SOCIAL EVOLUTION.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 IN the same way that we learn more of a man's real nature 
 from his face in those moments when he is unconscious of 
 being observed, than in the moments when he is aware of our 
 observation of him, we can discover the inherent weakness of 
 a writer's mind by his unconscious betrayals no less than by his 
 more formal fallacies. If, for example, we find him making 
 the most elementary errors of history and of argument, and 
 repeating them time after time, we shall have little hesitation 
 in pronouncing him fundamentally incompetent to do any 
 valuable work in science. It is not a question, be it observed, 
 of writing down a man as incompetent because he does not 
 agree with us ; it is simply a question of whether a man who 
 can perpetrate the most childish fallacies on page after page of 
 his book and yet remain utterly unconscious of them and of 
 their bearing upon his main positions, can be held a priori 
 capable of thinking correctly for five consecutive minutes 
 upon any subject whatever. We find Mr. Kidd, for example, 
 falling time after time into the most elementary of all logical 
 errors purely verbal fallacies that strike the reader at once 
 by their gross confusion ; we find him using perfectly meaning- 
 less phrases with an air of solemn wisdom, until it becomes 
 evident that he has been hypnotised by the mere collocation 
 of the words ; we find him setting up distinctions that do not 
 exist, and confusing conceptions that are really distinct ; and 
 
 (15)
 
 1 6 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 over and above all, he is utterly unconscious of the fact that 
 the characteristics he attributes to certain human phenomena 
 are equally predicable of other and very opposite phenomena. 
 Apart from the intellectual quality of his argument, this spec- 
 tacle defines Mr. Kidd's mental type so accurately, shows so 
 clearly the fundamental looseness and flaccidity of his mind, 
 that we are justified in saying at once that an intellect of this 
 type is radically incapable of looking at any problem whatever 
 in a thoroughly scientific manner. Let us, however, turn from 
 the abstract to the concrete, and see the actual working of 
 Mr. Kidd's mind as exhibited in his book. 
 
 He begins, as Professor Drummond begins, by calling 
 attention to what he supposes to be the shortcomings of 
 present evolutionary science. Mr. Kidd, like his fellow-irra- 
 tionalist of the north, is deeply impressed by the idea that he 
 is a Daniel come to judgment, and that it has been reserved 
 for him at once to correct the errors and supply the deficiencies 
 of the Darwinian theory as we have hitherto understood it, and 
 to lay the foundations of the wiser evolutionary doctri-ne of the 
 future. To say this of Mr. Kidd is not to thrust greatness 
 upon him. His estimate of his own work is evident upon 
 every other page of the book. He speaks in a tone of pained 
 commiseration of the shortcomings of our present science ; 
 he draws our attention to the fact that the meaning of the 
 development of certain epochs and the function of certain prin- 
 ciples have not been really comprehended until now, i.e., until 
 Mr. Kidd's penetrating glance sought out their inmost being ; 
 he refers everywhere to the true scientist, the true student of 
 human history, the true evolutionist, the biologist, in such a 
 way that, in spite of his modesty, these terms are clearly seen 
 to be meant for himself. Altogether, Mr. Kidd appears to 
 have no doubt that he is a man with a mission. Unfortu- 
 nately, there are certain things that even the man with a 
 mission cannot dispense with if he wishes to bring conviction
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution' '. 17 
 
 to the minds of others ; he must have a better reasoning 
 faculty than Mr. Kidd's, and he must have not only more 
 knowledge than Mr. Kidd, but he must have acquired that 
 knowledge at first instead of at second hand. He must not 
 attempt to square accounts between religion and science if he 
 is incapable of avoiding the most glaring verbal fallacies when 
 he comes to use those words ; nor must he try to philosophise 
 upon the history of ancient and modern Europe upon the 
 strength of a smattering of Mr. Lecky, Mr. Mahaffy, and 
 George Henry Lewes. This is not the way great and original 
 minds go to work upon their subject, but it is the way of Mr. 
 Kidd. And where he is not wrong, he is so solemnly accurate 
 that the effect is even still more grotesque. To read Mr. 
 Kidd's carefully laboured statement of a fact which every 
 schoolboy knows, is an education in the art of futile impres- 
 siveness ; if Mr. Kidd wished to tell us, for example, that 
 Queen Anne was dead, he would say that " the true student of 
 history will not improbably venture to assert, with an ever- 
 increasing conviction of the truth of his assertion, that Queen 
 Anne is no longer living " ; if he wishes us to realise that two and 
 two make four, he will tell us that " it will not improbably be 
 recognised by science, at no very distant date, that two and 
 two make four". Mr. Kidd's intellectual virtues, in fact, are 
 even more depressing than his vices, and reveal, just as effec- 
 tually as these latter, the hopeless lack of alertness that is 
 characteristic of his mind. 
 
 What is Mr. Kidd's theory of social evolution ? We will 
 find it expounded in the first five chapters of his book. 
 Briefly, it is as follows : 
 
 In the first chapter, " The Outlook," he lays it down that 
 science has been quite unsuccessful in its treatment of the 
 great question of social evolution, in that it has thrown little 
 or no light upon the past, and can throw little or none upon 
 the future. More especially is science to blame for her
 
 1 8 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 attitude towards religion. Science has never really under- 
 stood the function of religious beliefs in the evolution of 
 societies. " The general mind, so often more scientific than 
 our current science, seems to feel that there is something 
 wrong in the attitude of science towards the subject of 
 religion, that the most persistent and universal class of pheno- 
 mena connected with human society cannot be thus lightly 
 disposed of, and that our religious systems must have some 
 unexplained function to perform in the evolution which 
 society is undergoing, and on a scale to correspond with the 
 magnitude of the phenomena" (p. 17). It is quite an error to 
 imagine that religious beliefs are dying out, or that they arc 
 destined to die out in the future. " No greater mistake can be 
 made than to imagine that there is anything in evolutionary 
 science at the end of the nineteenth century to justify such con- 
 clusions. On the contrary, if these beliefs are a factor in the 
 development which society is undergoing, then the most notable 
 result of the scientific revolution begun by Darwin must be 
 to establish them on a foundation as broad, deep and lasting 
 as any that the theologians have dreamt of. According to 
 the laws which science has herself enunciated, these beliefs 
 must then be expected to remain to the end a characteristic 
 feature of our social evolution " (p. 22). Science, in fact, has 
 dealt fairly with most products of nature, but has been exceed- 
 ingly ungenerous towards religion, and " the time is certainly 
 not far distant when she must look back with surprise, if not, 
 indeed, with some degree of shamefacedness, to the attitude 
 in which she has for long addressed herself to one of the 
 highest problems in the history of life" (p. 19). "From the 
 beginning science finds [man] under the sway of forces new 
 to her, and with one of the strongest of these forces she herself 
 at a very early stage comes into conflict. He holds beliefs 
 which she asserts have no foundation in reason, and his 
 actions are controlled by strange sanctions which she does
 
 Mr. Kidds ' ' Social Evolution ". 1 9 
 
 not acknowledge" (pp. 19-20). Thus science has always been 
 wrong in her attitude towards religion. " These religions of 
 man form one of the most striking and persistent of the 
 phenomena of life when encountered under its highest forms, 
 namely, in human society. Yet, strange to say, science seems 
 to have taken up and to have maintained, down to the present 
 time, the extraordinary position that her only concern with 
 them is to declare (often, it must be confessed, with the heat 
 and bitterness of a partisan) that they are without any founda- 
 tion in reason" (p. 21). 
 
 Science, however, has not only been wrong in relation to 
 religion, it has failed to throw any real light upon the great 
 questions of the day ; and the duty of the true scientist is to 
 investigate the evolution of man from the standpoint of all 
 the sciences, but from that of biology in particular. " Each 
 of the departments of knowledge which has dealt with man 
 in society has regarded him almost exclusively from its own 
 standpoint. To the politician he has been the mere oppor- 
 tunist ; to the historian he has been the unit which is the 
 sport of blind forces apparently subject to no law ; to the 
 exponent of religion he has been the creature of another 
 world ; to the political economist he has been little more than 
 the covetous machine. The time has come, it would appear, 
 for a better understanding and for a more radical method ; 
 for the social sciences to strengthen themselves by sending 
 their roots deep into the soil underneath from which they 
 spring, and for the biologist to advance over the frontier and 
 carry the methods of his science boldly into human society, 
 where he has but to deal with the phenomena of life where he 
 encounters life at last under its highest and most complex 
 aspect" (pp. 29-30). 
 
 In his second chapter, entitled "Conditions of Human 
 Progress," Mr. Kidd will " as far as possible, unbiassed by 
 preconceived ideas, endeavour, before we proceed further, to
 
 2O Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 obtain some clear conception of what human society really is, 
 and of the nature of the conditions which have been attendant 
 on the progress we have made so far" (p. 31). What follows 
 is simply a retelling of the old, old story of natural selection, 
 of the excessive multiplication of organisms, the struggle for 
 life, the survival of favoured variations, and " progress " as the 
 result of it all. But Mr. Kidd is careful to insist, for his later 
 purposes, that the laws " which have operated in shaping the 
 development of life elsewhere have not been suspended in 
 human society"; and that if progress is to continue, it must 
 always proceed upon the same material as in the past, i.e. exces- 
 sive procreation relatively to the means of subsistence must give 
 natural selection the wherewithal to work upon. " Progress 
 everywhere from the beginning of life has been effected in 
 the same way, and it is possible in no other way. It is the 
 result of selection and rejection" (p. 36). " The first condition 
 of existence with a progressive form is, therefore, one of con- 
 tinual strain and stress, and along its upward path this con- 
 dition is always maintained. Once begun, too, there can be 
 no pause in the advance ; for if by any combination of 
 circumstances the rivalry and selection cease, then progress 
 ceases with them, and the species or group cannot maintain 
 its place ; it has taken the first retrograde step, and it is 
 immediately placed at a disadvantage with other species or 
 with those groups of its own kind where the rivalry still goes 
 on, and where selection, adaptation and progress continue 
 unchecked" (p. 41). " The law of life has been always the 
 same from the beginning ceaseless and inevitable struggle 
 and competition, ceaseless and inevitable selection, ceaseless 
 and inevitable progress " (p. 42). 
 
 When man comes upon the scene the old strife is still 
 carried on, but two new factors have come into play man's 
 reason and " his capacity for acting in concert with his fellows 
 in organised societies ". In war and in peace the struggle for
 
 Mr. KidcCs " Social Evolution". 21 
 
 existence always goes on. One race may oust another by 
 exterminating it in war, or it may gradually drive it from the 
 earth under all the forms of peace, as is being done with the 
 Indian in North America and with the Maori in New Zealand. 
 The one law still persists ; progress is being achieved through 
 struggle, through selection and rejection. In civilised societies, 
 in fact, the strife is not less but greater than it was in uncivil- 
 ised societies. " In the later type of civilisation the condi- 
 tions of the rivalry have greatly changed ; but if we look 
 closely at what is taking place, we may see that there has been 
 no cessation or diminution of the rivalry itself. On the 
 contrary, the significance of the change has consisted in the 
 tendency to raise it to a higher level, to greatly enlarge its 
 scope and its efficiency as a cause of progress by bringing all 
 the members of the community into it on more equal terms, 
 and to render it freer and fairer, but, therefore, still more 
 strenuous " (p. 57). 
 
 In his third chapter, bearing the title " There is no Rational 
 Sanction for the Conditions of Progress," Mr. Kidd leaves the 
 safe ground of other men's labours and begins speculation on 
 his own account. " It becomes necessary ... to notice for 
 the first time a fact which, later, as we proceed, will be brought 
 into increasing prominence. As man can only reach his high- 
 est development and employ his powers to the fullest extent 
 in society, it follows that in the evolution we witness him 
 undergoing throughout history his development as an indi- 
 vidual is necessarily of less importance than his development 
 as a social creature. In other words, although his interests 
 as an individual may remain all-important to himself, it has 
 become inevitable that they must henceforward be subordi- 
 nated whether he be conscious of it or not to those larger 
 social interests with which the forces that are shaping his 
 development have now begun to operate " (pp. 64, 65). Thus 
 the individual's concern is only with himself and with the
 
 22 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 present, while evolution is concerned with the social organism 
 and with the future. " There is, therefore, one feature of the 
 situation which cannot be gainsaid. If it had been possible at 
 any time for all the individuals of any form of life to have 
 secured themselves against the competition of other forms, it 
 would, beyond doubt, have been their interest to have sus- 
 pended amongst themselves those onerous conditions which 
 thus, by sacrificing the present welfare of individuals to the 
 larger interests of their kind in the future, prevented large 
 numbers from reaching the fullest possibilities of life. The 
 conditions of progress, it is true, might have been suspended, 
 but this could not have caused the present individuals any 
 concern. The result would, in any case, only have been 
 visible after a prolonged period, and they could not therefore 
 be expected to have appeared to existing members as of any 
 importance when weighed against their own interests in the 
 present " (pp. 66, 67). How is it, then, that man, endowed 
 with reason, has not put an end to progress by putting an end 
 to the struggle for life? "It would seem that a conclusion, 
 strange and unexpected, but apparently unavoidable, must 
 present itself. If the theories of evolutionary science have 
 been, so far, correct, then this new factor which has been born 
 into the world must, it would appear, have the effect of ulti- 
 mately staying all further progress " (p. 67). " How is the pos- 
 session of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will 
 to submit to conditions of existence so onerous, requiring the 
 effective and continual subordination of the individual's wel- 
 fare to the progress of a development in which he can have no 
 personal interest whatever?" (p. 69). 
 
 There can, Mr. Kidd argues, be no rational sanction for the 
 conditions of progress for all those upon whom the burden of 
 natural selection presses most heavily. If the individual had 
 followed the dictates of his own reason he would have put 
 an end to the struggle for life (which is only of use for the
 
 Mr. Kidds " Social Evolution". 23 
 
 development of future generations), and devoted his energies 
 to making his own existence comfortable while it lasted. " If 
 we ask ourselves, therefore, what course it is the interests of 
 the masses holding political power in our advanced societies 
 to pursue from the standpoint of reason, it seems hardly pos- 
 sible to escape the conclusion that they should, in self-interest, 
 put an immediate end to existing social conditions. . . . The 
 interest of the masses . . . appears . . . clearly to be to draw 
 a ring fence round their borders ; to abolish competition within 
 the community ; to suspend the onerous rivalry of individuals 
 which presses so severely on all ; to organise, on socialistic 
 principles, the means of production ; and lastly, and above all, 
 to regulate the population so as to keep it always proportional 
 to the means of comfortable existence for all. In a word, to 
 put an end to those conditions which the evolutionist perceives 
 to be inevitably and necessarily associated with progress now 
 and to have been so associated with it, not only from the 
 beginning of human society, but from the beginning of life " 
 (pp. 80, 8 1). 
 
 It is a characteristic of Mr. Kidd that he repeats his argu- 
 ments, and even his phrases, time after time. Not content 
 with having stated the above dilemma, or supposed dilemma, 
 half a dozen times already, he brings it forth once more, pre- 
 facing it this time with the remark that " the extraordinary 
 character of the problem presented by human society begins 
 thus slowly to come into view ". " There emerges now clearly 
 into sight a fundamental principle that underlies that social 
 development which has been in progress throughout history, 
 and which is proceeding with accelerated pace in our modern 
 civilisation. It is that in this development the interests of the 
 individual and those of the social organism to which he 
 belongs are not identical. The teaching of reason to the indi- 
 vidual must always be that the present time and his own 
 interests therein are all-important to him. Yet the forces
 
 24 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 which are working out our development are primarily con- 
 cerned not with these interests of the individual, but with those 
 of the race, and more immediately with the widely different 
 interests of a social organism subject to quite other conditions 
 and possessed of an indefinitely longer life. . . . And in the 
 development which is in progress it is a first principle of evo- 
 lutionary science that it is these greater interests that must be 
 always paramount. The central fact with which we are con- 
 fronted in our progressive societies is, therefore, that : The 
 interests of the social organism and those of the individuals coin- 
 prising it at any time are actually antagonistic ; they can never 
 be reconciled ; they are inherently and essentially irreconcilable" 
 (pp. 84, 85). Thus, Mr. Kidd sums up, "there can never be 
 found any sanction in individual reason for conduct in societies 
 where the conditions of progress prevail ". On what, then, 
 does progress really depend? Mr. Kidd gives the answer in 
 his fourth chapter " The Central Feature of Human History ". 
 After the usual wearisome repetitions of what he has said 
 fifty times already, we discover that the central feature of 
 human history is religion ; and Mr. Kidd enforces this dictum 
 by imagining the psychological effect of the sight of all our 
 temples, churches, cathedrals and religious societies upon a 
 visitor from another planet. " Such a visitor, at length, would 
 not fail to be deeply impressed by what he had observed. He 
 would be driven to conclude that he was dealing with pheno- 
 mena, the laws and nature of which were little understood by 
 the people amongst whom he found himself; and that what- 
 ever might be the meaning of these phenomena they 
 undoubtedly constituted one of the most persistent and 
 characteristic features of human society, and not only in past 
 ages but at the present day " (p. 94). The visitor begins to 
 read the various definitions of religion that have been given, 
 from Seneca to Dr. Martineau, and finds them all wanting. 
 At length, "there is a feature of the subject which might be
 
 Mr. KidcCs " Social Evolution' '. 25 
 
 expected ultimately to impress itself upon his imagination. 
 The one idea which would slowly take possession of his mind 
 would be that, underneath all this vast series of phenomena 
 with which he was confronted, he beheld man in some way in 
 conflict with his own reason. ... It would be perceived that 
 it was these forms of religious belief which had supplied the 
 motive power in an extraordinary struggle which man had 
 apparently carried on throughout his whole career against 
 forces set in motion by his own mind a struggle, grim, 
 desperate, and tragic, which would stand out as one of the 
 most pronounced features of his history" (p. 98). It is, in 
 fact, man's religion that has supplied the antidote to his 
 reason, and given him a sanction for social conduct. " One 
 of the most remarkable features which the observer could not 
 fail to notice in connection with these religions would be, that 
 under their influence man would seem to be possessed of an 
 instinct, the like of which he would not encounter anywhere 
 else. This instinct, under all its forms, would be seen to have 
 one invariable characteristic. Moved by it, man would appear 
 to be always possessed by the desire to set up sanctions for 
 his individual conduct, which would appear to be super-natural 
 against those which were natural, sanctions which would 
 appear to be //ra-rational against those which were simply 
 rational. Everywhere he would find him clinging with the 
 most extraordinary persistence to ideas and ideals which 
 regulated his life under the influence of these religions, and 
 ruthlessly punishing all those who endeavoured to convince 
 him that these conceptions were without foundation in fact. 
 At many periods in human history also he would have to 
 observe that the opinion had been entertained by considerable 
 numbers of persons, that a point had at length been reached 
 at which it was only a question of time, until human reason 
 finally dispelled the belief in those unseen powers which man 
 held in control over himself. But he would find this anticipa-
 
 26 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 tion never realised. Dislodged from one position, the human 
 mind, he would observe, had only taken up another of the 
 same kind, which it continued once more to hold with the 
 same unreasoning, dogged and desperate persistence" (p. 99). 
 And Mr. Kidd lays renewed stress on the fact that man's 
 religious beliefs are in opposition to his reason. "The one 
 fact which stands out clear above it all is that the forces against 
 which man is engaged throughout the whole course of the 
 resulting struggle are none other than those enlisted against 
 him by his reason. . . . Throughout all the centuries in which 
 history has him in view, we witness him driven by a pro- 
 found instinct which finds expression in his religions unmis- 
 takably recognising a hostile force of some kind in his own 
 reason" (p. 103). 
 
 The fifth chapter, "The Function of Religious Beliefs in 
 the Evolution of Society," develops the theme of the fourth, 
 with, of course, the usual "damnable iteration". "The 
 pregnant question with which we found ourselves confronted 
 was, therefore : What has then become of human reason ? It 
 would appear that the answer has, in effect, been given. The 
 central feature of human history, the meaning of which neither 
 science nor philosophy has hitherto fully recognised, is appar- 
 ently the struggle which man, throughout the whole period of 
 his social development, has carried on to effect the subordina- 
 tion of his own reason. The motive power in this struggle has 
 undoubtedly been supplied by his religious beliefs. The 
 conclusion towards which we seem to be carried is, therefore, 
 that the function of these beliefs in human evolution must be 
 to provide a super-rational sanction for that large class of 
 conduct in the individual, necessary to the maintenance of the 
 development which is proceeding, but for which there can 
 never be, in the nature of things, any rational sanction " 
 (pp. 107-108). 
 
 It necessarily follows that " there can never be . . . such
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution' '. 27 
 
 a thing as a rational religion. The essential element in all 
 religious beliefs must apparently be the #//ra-rational sanction 
 which they provide for social conduct. When the fundamental 
 nature of the problem involved in our social evolution is 
 understood, it must become clear that that general instinct 
 which may be distinguished in the minds of men around us is 
 in the main correct, and that : 
 
 " No form of belief is capable of functioning as a religion in 
 the evolution of society which does not provide an ultra-rational 
 sanction for social conduct in the individual. 
 
 "In other words : 
 
 " A rational religion is a scientific impossibility, representing 
 from the nature of the case an inherent contradiction of terms " 
 (p. 109). 
 
 So that all previous theories of social evolution have gone 
 astray. " The social system which constitutes an organic 
 growth, endowed with a definite principle of life, and un- 
 folding itself in obedience to laws which may be made the 
 subject of exact study, is something quite different from that 
 we have hitherto had vaguely in mind. It is not the political 
 organisation of which we form part ; it is not the race to which 
 we belong ; it is not even the whole human family in process 
 of evolution. It would appear that the organic growth en- 
 dowed itrith a definite principle of life, and unfolding itself in 
 obedience to law, is the social system or type of civilisation 
 founded on a form of religious belief. . . . Throughout the 
 existence of this system there is maintained within it a conflict 
 of two opposing forces ; the disintegrating principle represented 
 by the rational self-assertiveness of the individual units ; the 
 integrating principle represented by a religious belief providing 
 a sanction for social conduct which is always of necessity ultra- 
 rational, and the function of whicli is to secure in the stress of 
 evolution the continual subordination of the interests of the in- 
 dividual units to the larger interests of the longer-lived social
 
 2 8 Pseudo - Ph ilosophy. 
 
 organism to 'i.vhich they belong. It is, it would appear, primarily 
 through these social systems that natural selection must reach 
 and act upon the race. It is from the ethical systems upon 
 which they are founded that the resulting types of civilisation 
 receive those specific characteristics which, in the struggle for 
 existence, influence in a preponderating degree the peoples 
 affected by them. It is in these ethical systems, founded on 
 super-rational sanctions, and in the developments which they 
 undergo, that we have the seat of a vast series of vital pheno- 
 mena unfolding themselves under the control of definite laws 
 which may be made the subject of study. The scientific in- 
 vestigation of these phenomena is capable, as we shall see, of 
 throwing a flood of light not only upon the life-history of our 
 Western civilisation in general, but upon the nature of the 
 developmental forces underlying the complex social and polit- 
 ical movements actually in progress in the world around us " 
 (pp. no, in). 
 
 The rest of the chapter is devoted to proving that at all 
 times and in all places the sanctions for conduct have always 
 been ultra-rational ; and Mr. Kidd proposes, in his next 
 chapter, to apply to the history of Western civilisation this 
 new conception of sociology. " If it is in the ethical system 
 upon which a social type is founded that we have the seat of 
 a vast series of vital phenomena unfolding themselves in obedi- 
 ence to law, then we must be able to investigate the pheno- 
 mena of the past and to observe the tendencies of the current 
 time with more profit than the study of either history or soci- 
 ology has hitherto afforded. Let us see, therefore, with what 
 prospect of success the biologist, who has carried the principles 
 of his science so far into human society, may now address 
 himself to the consideration of the history of that process of 
 life in the midst of which we are living, and which we know 
 under the name of Western civilisation" (p. 127). We will
 
 Mr Kidds " Social Evolution" . 29 
 
 postpone, however, this fascinating excursion under the per- 
 sonal guidance of Mr. Kidd, until we have seen what his 
 guidance is worth. Before going on to consider the appli- 
 cation of his new principle to history, let us see what element 
 of truth, if any, there is in the principle itself.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WHEN we read, upon an early page of Mr. Kidd's book, that 
 " the general mind, so often more scientific than our current 
 science, seems to feel that there is something wrong in the 
 attitude of science towards the subject of religion," we begin 
 to be suspicious that we are in the presence of a mind in- 
 herently deficient in every quality that goes to make an ac- 
 curate reasoner. Such a sentence as this defines at once the 
 intellectual type ; and it is an easy matter to foresee the 
 manner in which Mr. Kidd will afterwards come to deal with 
 the questions of religion and science, of natural selection and 
 evolution, of progress and its cause, of the individual and 
 society. It is evident that in every argument he brings 
 forward he will stumble over some very simple verbal fallacies, 
 that he will misunderstand the meaning of the words he is 
 using, and that he will contradict and stultify himself at 
 every turn. 
 
 So that we are not surprised, at the outset, to find him 
 discussing the relations of science and religion in the old 
 sweet way of the Christian Evidence advocate. He is not 
 above referring to " the aggressive and merely destructive 
 form of unbelief which finds expression in England in opinions 
 like those of the late Charles Bradlaugh, and in America in 
 the writings and addresses of Colonel Ingersoll " (p. 17). If 
 he knew anything of the ideas of the men whose names he 
 uses with such glib impertinence, he would know that Mr. 
 Bradlaugh's work was constructive in the highest degree ; and 
 
 (30)
 
 Mr. Kidd 1 s " Social Evolution" . 31 
 
 if he had the smallest glimmer of the faculty of self-criticism 
 he would not fall into the vulgar fallacy of calling any new 
 ideas " aggressive and merely destructive ". I will not waste 
 time in showing the inanity of the current phrase " merely 
 destructive," nor do more than point out that a " destructive " 
 attack on a doctrine is really " constructive," in that it aims at 
 substituting a new and presumably more correct doctrine for 
 that which it attacks. There is little need to call attention to 
 these very obvious points, for they are now recognised by all 
 minds but those of the type of Mr. Kidd's. I would rather 
 call Mr. Kidd's attention to the fact that the impertinence of 
 his use of the word " aggressive " is equalled only by its in- 
 appropriateness. If ever there was a book which might with 
 justice be called aggressive, it is surely his own, attacking as 
 it does the whole received doctrine of evolution, and en- 
 deavouring to prove that all former concepts of evolution and 
 of history are wrong. If this is not " aggressiveness " it is 
 difficult to say what deserves that title ; and a mind of any 
 alertness, engaged upon such a book as this, would at once 
 have seen the absurdity of making any allusion to the " ag- 
 gressive " opinions of others. 
 
 There would be little use in detaining the reader over such 
 a trifling point as this but for the fact that it reveals, as I have 
 said, the intellectual type. It prepares us for much that fol- 
 lows ; for wherever Mr. Kidd goes wrong, the error is of the 
 same primitive kind and springs from the same primitive 
 inability to analyse the connotations of the most ordinary 
 words. Of this kind is his fallacy about the nature and func- 
 tion of religion, and its relation to science and to civilisation. 
 And as Mr. Kidd's errors here are part and parcel of his 
 whole argument, it is worth while to follow him somewhat 
 more closely than the threadbare theme would otherwise 
 warrant. A single sentence will serve the dual purpose of 
 showing the drift of his argument and of exhibiting the con-
 
 3 2 Pseudo-Pk ilosophy. 
 
 genital laxity of his mind. " The time is certainly not far 
 distant," he writes, " when she (i.e. science) must look back 
 with surprise, if not, indeed, with some degree of shamefaced- 
 ness, to the attitude in which she has for long addressed 
 he;self to one of the highest problems in the history of life " 
 (p. 19); i.e., to religion and the "function" of religion in the 
 evolution of mankind. And he goes on to argue that " she," 
 i.e. science, has always been more unfair to religion than to 
 any other mental or social phenomenon : " We live at a time 
 when science counts nothing insignificant. She has recognised 
 that every organ and every rudimentary organ has its utilita- 
 rian history. Every phase and attribute of life has its meaning 
 in her eyes ; nothing has come into existence by chance. 
 What then are these religious systems which fill such a com- 
 manding place in man's life and history? What is their 
 meaning and function in social development? To ask these 
 questions is to find that a strange silence has fallen upon 
 science. She has no answer. Her attitude towards them has 
 been curious in the extreme, and widely different from that in 
 which she has regarded any other of the phenomena of life. 
 From an early stage in her career we find that she has been 
 engaged in a personal quarrel with these religions, which has 
 developed into a bitter feud. In any other circumstances it 
 would probably have occurred to science at the outset to ask 
 whether this struggle had not itself some meaning, and 
 whether it was not connected with some deep-seated law of 
 social development which it would be her duty to investigate. 
 But this aspect of the position seems hitherto to have received 
 scarcely any attention. These religions of man form one of 
 the most striking and persistent of the phenomena of life when 
 encountered under its highest forms, namely, in human society. 
 Yet, strange to say, science seems to have taken up, and to 
 have maintained, down to the present time, the extraordinary 
 position that her only concern with them is to declare (often,
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution' '. 33 
 
 it must be confessed, with the heat and bitterness of a partisan) 
 that they were without any foundation in reason " (pp. 20-21). 
 To see the futility of writing of this kind, we have only to 
 reverse the terms of Mr. Kidd's denunciation. Anybody 
 might say of religion, if he were foolish enough, just what Mr. 
 Kidd has said of science. " From an early stage in her career," 
 we might write, "we find that religion has been engaged in a 
 personal quarrel with science, which has developed into a 
 bitter feud." We might say that religion should have .asked 
 "at the outset whether this struggle had not itself some 
 meaning, and whether it was not connected with some deep- 
 seated law of social development ". We might say that science 
 was one of the most striking and persistent of the phenomena 
 of social life, and that all that religion has done up to the 
 present has been to oppose science with " all the heat and 
 bitterness of a partisan ". To do this would simply be to 
 philosophise in the manner of Mr. Kidd, and would be finally 
 as fruitless as his own laborious demonstrations. He is very 
 emphatic, throughout his book, on the need of the ques- 
 tion of social evolution being taken up by really scientific 
 minds ; and on the very next page to that from which I 
 have just quoted, he lays it down that " to any one who has 
 caught the spirit of Darwinian science, it is evident that this 
 is not the question at issue at all ". As if any one with a 
 scientific mind could talk as Mr. Kidd talks of religion and 
 science! As a matter of fact, science the "she" of Mr. 
 Kidd's demonstration has never maintained any attitude 
 whatever towards religion, for the simple reason that science 
 is not an entity, and cannot preserve an attitude towards 
 anything. What Mr. Kidd is confusedly driving at is that 
 there has always been an antagonism between men of science 
 and men of religion ; but that is a very different thing from 
 saying that " science " has behaved with " the heat and bitter- 
 ness of a partisan " towards " religion ". We may say in 
 
 3
 
 3 4 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 popular language that science and religion are naturally 
 antagonistic, just as we may say that arithmetic and bank- 
 ruptcy through bad book-keeping are naturally antagonistic ; 
 but to speak in that way is merely to use a convenient 
 formula, and no thinker would dream of basing an argument 
 upon terms employed so loosely as this. When we come to 
 discuss the question seriously, we have to guard ourselves 
 against the ambiguities of words, and to state our proposition 
 accurately. Stating it thus, we see that between the spirit 
 represented by the religious man, which tends to repose upon 
 tradition or a supposed revelation, and to decry human reason, 
 and the spirit represented by the scientific man, which tends 
 to think out all questions afresh, there always has been and 
 always will be an antagonism. Whether the. scientific men 
 have been right or wrong has nothing to do with the matter ; 
 it still remains that Mr. Kidd is hopelessly confused when he 
 speaks of the invariable attitude of " science " towards " re- 
 ligion," and that when he speaks of science looking back "with 
 surprise, if not, indeed, with some degree of shamefacedness," 
 to her former dealings with religion, he becomes simply 
 absurd. Yet it is the man who is capable of philosophising 
 in this juvenile manner who undertakes to rewrite for us the 
 inner meaning of history, and to lay the foundations of the 
 truly scientific theory of social evolution ! 
 
 The fallacies thicken as we read. Mr. Kidd prides himself 
 on his astuteness in perceiving that religions must have some 
 " function " to perform in evolution, because they are among 
 " the most striking and persistent of the phenomena of life ". 
 He does not perceive, however, that in the very terms of his 
 own argument, unbelief, as he would call it, is equally justified 
 by evolution. Religion itself is not a more noticeable element 
 in human history than scepticism ; and wherever we find a 
 community most of whose members profess a certain form of 
 religious belief, we also find some who do not share that
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution" . 35 
 
 belief. Scepticism has dogged the footsteps of religion from 
 time immemorial, and yet, in the eyes of this founder of a 
 new sociology, it is religion alone that forms " one of the most 
 striking and persistent of the phenomena of life " ; while 
 unbelief is something with which, apparently, nature and 
 evolution have had nothing to do, and which has sprung into 
 existence through the wickedness and ignorance of men. If, 
 as Mr. Kidd says, " we live at a time when science counts 
 nothing insignificant," his own science might surely warn him 
 that the persistence of the scientific attack on religion is just 
 as universal and just as "significant" as religion itself; and 
 if, as he -writes again, "no one who approaches the subject 
 with an unbiassed mind in the spirit of 'modern evolutionary 
 science, can for a moment doubt that the beliefs represented 
 must have some immense utilitarian function to perform in 
 the evolution which is proceeding" (p. 23), then the utilitarian 
 function of scepticism ought to be equally apparent to him. 
 If nature has made the one she has made the other ; it is 
 only with Mr. Kidd that the one and not the other has "some 
 immense utilitarian function to perform " ; only with Mr. Kidd 
 is it a case of heads, belief wins tails, unbelief loses. 
 
 This grotesque misconception at once of religion and 
 science appears once more when he alleges that science 
 declares religious beliefs " to be without any foundation in 
 reason".. "From the beginning," he says, "science finds him 
 {i.e., man] under the sway of forces new to her, and with one 
 of the strongest of these forces she herself at a very early stage 
 comes into conflict. He holds beliefs which she asserts have no 
 foundation in reason; and his actions are controlled by strange 
 sanctions which she does not acknowledge" (pp. 1 9-20). I f science 
 ever asserted that religious beliefs had no foundation in 
 reason, " she," as Mr. Kidd calls it, was arguing as loosely as 
 Mr. Kidd himself; but we cannot believe so badly of science. 
 Certainly no scientific man would ever lay it down that
 
 36 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 religious beliefs were not founded on reason ; he would say, 
 on the contrary, that they were in reality based upon reason, 
 but upon an inaccurate and confused process of reason. He 
 might call religion irrational, as Mr. Kidd repeatedly does, 
 but in so doing he would be merely using that word in its 
 popular sense ; he would simply mean, for example, that the 
 belief in the Immaculate Conception . is so absurd as to be 
 irrational in comparison with other and saner beliefs. But he 
 would never blunder so egregiously as Mr. Kidd, and argue 
 that religious beliefs were in no sense based on reason. He 
 would never bring himself to set down in cold print such 
 sentences as these : 
 
 "... this extraordinary instinct which had thus driven 
 successive generations of men to carry on such a prolonged 
 and desperate struggle against forces set in motion by their 
 own intellect " (p. 92). 
 
 "... the conflict . . . waged between these religions and 
 the forces set in motion by human reason " (p. 93). 
 
 "... underneath all this vast series of phenomena . . . 
 he beheld man in some way in conflict with his oivn reason " 
 (p. 98). 
 
 "... it was these forms of religious belief which had 
 supplied the motive power in an extraordinary struggle which 
 man had apparently carried on throughout his whole career 
 against forces set in motion by his own mind" (p. 98). 
 
 " The one fact which stands out clear above it all is that 
 the forces against which man is engaged throughout the whole 
 course of the resulting struggle are none other than those 
 enlisted against him by his reason" (p. 103). 
 
 " Throughout all the centuries in which history has him in 
 view, we witness him driven by a profound instinct which finds 
 expression in his religions, unmistakably recognising a hostile 
 force of some kind in his own reason " (p. 103). 
 
 " The central feature of human history, the meaning of
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution" . 37 
 
 which neither science nor philosophy has hitherto fully 
 recognised, is apparently the struggle which man, throughout 
 the whole period of his social development, has carried on to 
 effect the subordination of Jiis own reason. The motive power 
 in this struggle has undoubtedly been supplied by his religious . 
 beliefs" (pp. 107, 108). 
 
 It surely is hardly necessary to point out in further detail 
 the absurdity of Mr. Kidd's application of the term "irrational" 
 to religious beliefs. The smallest acquaintance with psycho- 
 logy would have shown him the folly of importing the old dis- 
 tinction between " instinct " and " reason " into a philosophical 
 discussion such as this. If it is instinct that makes the religious 
 man believe in his religion, then it is equally instinct that 
 prompts the unbeliever to demolish the superstition ; and if it 
 is by reason that unbelief is maintained, it is none the less 
 true that religious beliefs themselves are based upon reason. 
 If a man does not believe in the existence of a Deity, that, 
 according to Mr. Kidd, is due to the operation of his reason ; 
 if, however, he does believe in the existence of a Deity, that is 
 due to an " instinct " which " recognises a hostile force of some 
 kind in his own reason ". As if the believer did not justify his 
 belief by reason ! If he believes in a God, it is because he 
 reasons from natural phenomena to a supposed creator of 
 them ; if he believes in a future life, it is because he imagines 
 he has some reasons for holding that the mind does not perish 
 with the body. In neither of these cases can the belief be 
 said to be irrational in the strict sense of the word ; it is really 
 rational, only imperfectly so. Mr. Kidd's fallacy arises from 
 the common error of setting up " ideas " as opposed to " feel- 
 ings " the error into which Comte fell, and into which Mr. 
 Spencer has so strangely followed him at times, losing sight of 
 his own demonstration as to the real relations of feelings and 
 ideas. The latter are, in the strict psychological sense, com- 
 pounded out of feelings and instincts ; and most of the con-
 
 3 8 Pseiido- Ph ilosophy. 
 
 ceptions by which our daily life is regulated are an amalgam 
 of the three. But scientifically speaking, there is no point at 
 which it can be said that feeling or instinct ceases and reason 
 takes its rise ; and Mr. Kidd's wholesale ascription of religion 
 to " instinct " and of scepticism to " reason " is merely a piece 
 of pre-scientific blundering. It bears, however, upon his whole 
 book. To prove his main thesis at all he has to assume that 
 while science is rational, religion is irrational ; and the quality 
 of the superstructure can be fairly well anticipated from the 
 quality of the foundation. What the foundation is we have 
 already seen ; let us now view the superstructure. We have 
 seen (i) that Mr. Kidd is hopelessly unscientific in the use of 
 popular words, though all the time he is dinning it into our 
 ears that he is the pioneer of a new science ; (2) that he has 
 no conception of the strictness necessary in the use of popular 
 terms when a philosophical argument is in question ; (3) that 
 he misapprehends the historical relations of science and re- 
 ligion ; (4) that he is capable of the most primitive psychological 
 confusions, as shown in his remarks that religious beliefs are 
 irrational, that they depend upon instinct, and that this 
 instinct sets man " in conflict with his own reason ". Such 
 is the quality of mind, and such the attainments, of the man 
 who tells us that there is as yet no science of sociology, and 
 who himself undertakes to throw " a flood of light not only 
 upon the life-history of our Western civilisation in general, but 
 upon the nature of the developmental forces underlying the 
 complex social and political movements actually in progress 
 in the world around us" (p. in). Let us follow our new 
 guide, and see what are the wonders he is going to reveal 
 to us.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WE are all familiar by this time with the account given by 
 modern science of the evolution of life upon this globe. No 
 one now disputes the main facts of the evolutionary theory, 
 that all organisms tend to reproduce in excess of the means of 
 subsistence, and that some are consequently crowded out of 
 life ; that the favoured survivors leave offspring resembling 
 themselves, and possessing those characters that led to their 
 survival ; and that this process has gone on through all the 
 forms of life from time immemorial. Mr. Kidd tells us all 
 this once more, and then draws the conclusion that since pro- 
 gress has been achieved by natural selection and rejection in 
 the past, it must be achieved in the same manner in the future. 
 He does not pause, be it observed, to define progress ; Mr. 
 Kidd is above such small considerations as defining his words. 
 But if he had observed this trifling preliminary he would have 
 discovered (i) that his argument about progress is a mere 
 cirailus in probando, and (2) that his forecast of the future 
 is as erroneous as his reading of the past. Let us address 
 ourselves to his argument in detail. 
 
 Progress, presumably, means the constant survival of the 
 fittest. This is apparent from Mr. Kidd's own words : " From 
 time to time we find the question discussed by many who only 
 imperfectly understood the conditions to which life is subject, 
 as to whether progress is worth the price paid for it. But we 
 have really no choice in the matter. Progress is a necessity 
 from which there is simply no escape, and from which there 
 
 (39)
 
 4O Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 has never been any escape since the beginning of life. Look- 
 ing back through the history of life anterior to man, we find it 
 to be a record of ceaseless progress on the one hand and 
 ceaseless stress and competition on the other" (pp. 37, 38). 
 Progress, then, is equivalent to the constant survival of the 
 fittest. But progress, as distinguished from mere change, 
 signifies a change for the better ; so that when Mr. Kidd 
 speaks of natural selection as leading to progress, he means 
 that it leads to better forms of life. The question then arises, 
 Better for what ? What is the standard ? It is evident that 
 organism A is "better" than organism B simply' because A 
 survives while B is crowded out of life. But why is it better ? 
 Only because it survives. No other standard is possible. So 
 that " better" really = more fitted to survive ; " the survival of 
 the fittest " simply = survival of the fittest to survive ; and pro- 
 gress is simply the name for this. In other words, to speak 
 of " progress" in organic nature is to beg the question of a 
 standard of merit or value. Such a standard, from the very 
 nature of things, can never be found ; so that it is illegitimate 
 to speak of evolution as a " progress " if by that word we 
 mean "improvement". All we can scientifically assert of 
 nature is that it is constantly changing. Mr. Kidd agrees 
 that there is ceaseless competition among organic forces ; that 
 is, the environment is constantly acting upon the organism. 
 In all except the highest forms of life, which can mould their 
 own surroundings to a certain extent, the character of the 
 environment must determine the character of the organism. If 
 it is capable of such reaction in response to the new stimulus 
 as will enable it to live in harmony with the changed condi- 
 tions, it will survive ; if it is incapable of so reacting, it will 
 perish. But organisms being in excess of the means of 
 subsistence, and there being innumerable slight differences 
 between the members of the same species, it is clear that some 
 must perish and some must survive. This does not argue any
 
 Mr. Kidd's "Social Evolution". 41 
 
 inherent " superiority,'' in Mr. Kidd's sense of the word, in 
 those that survive, because the word " superiority " has here 
 no ethical meaning ; it simply implies that a given environ- 
 ment selects, so to speak, certain forms and rejects others. 
 Since, then, an organism is called " better" merely because it 
 survives, and since the chance of survival depends upon the 
 environment, it is evident that progress would be a term 
 equally applicable to environments as well as organisms, if there 
 were any sense in applying it to either. The upshot of it all is 
 that Mr. Kidd has made an initial blunder in not examining 
 the philosophical meaning of the word " progress," and that 
 the whole of his future argument as to there being no rational 
 sanction for progress, and as to the functions of religious 
 beliefs in bringing about progress, must be held to be damaged 
 from the beginning. To tell us, as he does, that we must do 
 certain things in order to keep progress going no matter 
 what it is he tells us to do is simply to lose sight of his own 
 previous words that " we have really no choice in the matter. 
 Progress is a necessity from which there is simply no escape" If 
 that be so, what is the object of Mr. Kidd's book ? If there 
 must be progress, whether \ve like it or not, and whatever we 
 do or do not do, why should Mr. Kidd be so painfully anxious 
 to prove that we must preserve our old irrational religion, 
 because progress depends upon irrational beliefs, and not upon 
 reason ? Even on so fundamental a question as this funda- 
 mental, that is, for his own book he cannot refrain from 
 the grossest and most palpable self-contradiction. But for 
 once he is right with one of his propositions, though it is not 
 the one with which his argument is concerned. There will 
 always be progress, for the simple reason that " progress " 
 means nothing more than the survival of some organisms and 
 the death of others. 
 
 All this, indeed, is evident from Mr. Kidd's own words 
 or would be evident to anybody but Mr. Kidd. " The progress
 
 42 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 of savage man, such as it is, is born strictly of the conditions 
 in which he lives. Aimless as his history might seem when 
 viewed from the level on which it is enacted, there can be no 
 doubt of the progress made. But as to the nature of the pro- 
 gress there can also be no mistake. It is at once both 
 inevitable and involuntary, the product of the strenuous 
 conditions under which he lives" (p. 45). What is this but to 
 admit that " progress " has no other meaning than that certain 
 things that must happen do happen ? We cannot pronounce 
 the new state of things to be better than any other state, be- 
 cause we have no possible standard of comparison apart from 
 our own minds : and our own minds, being products of this 
 development, are therefore incapable of interpreting " better " 
 in any other terms than those which lead to our survival. It 
 only needs, in order to realise this, to imagine the course of 
 evolution to have gone differently, owing to some enormous 
 change in the physical environment. After many thousands 
 of centuries we should have had the Mr. Kidd of those days 
 looking back upon the past, seeing that organisms had been 
 compelled to adapt themselves to their environment or else 
 perish, and informing the world that evolution, i.e., that 
 particular evolution, meant constant progress. All that evolu- 
 tion means, however, is constant change ; the survival of the 
 fittest is not the survival of the " best," but simply of the fittest 
 to survive. And let us suppose for a moment that Mr. Kidd's 
 arguments up to this point have been correct ; and let. us 
 further grant him his point that reason is inimical to progress, 
 and that if we give up our irrational religious beliefs progress 
 will come to an end. We may grant him all this, and yet it 
 remains that his conception of progress as improvement is 
 altogether unscientific. The contest now, be it observed, is 
 between what we will, from courtesy, call the correct ideas of 
 Mr. Kidd and the wrong ideas of rationalists. Suppose the 
 latter to prevail, and to win ever more and more adherents.
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution' '. 43 
 
 What does this signify, on Mr. Kidd's own terms ? Simply 
 that since they survive while his ideas perish, they are there- 
 fore the better, and their survival = progress. Whether they 
 may be philosophically right or wrong does not matter. The 
 point is that they survive; they have been selected and his 
 ideas rejected, and, on his own terms, this constitutes the 
 survival of the fittest, and therefore progress. His doctrine is 
 not even consistent with itself.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE next point that calls for discussion is Mr. Kidd's assertion 
 that " there is no rational sanction for the conditions of 
 progress ". Two new forces have made their appearance with 
 man " his reason and the capacity for acting, under its 
 influence, in concert with his fellows in society". Further, 
 " as man can only reach his highest development and employ 
 his powers to the fullest extent in society, it follows that in 
 the evolution which we witness him undergoing throughout 
 history, his development as an individual is necessarily of less 
 importance than his development as a social creature. In 
 other words, although his interests as an individual may remain 
 all-important to himself, it has become inevitable that they 
 must henceforward be subordinated whether he be conscious 
 of it or not to those larger social interests with which the 
 forces that are shaping his development have now begun to 
 operate " (pp. 64, 65). 
 
 This is a passage typical of all the defects of Mr. Kidd's 
 mind. When he said (p. 38) that "every part, organ, or 
 quality of these plants which calls forth admiration for its 
 beauty or perfection . . . has been acquired to ensure success " 
 in the struggle for life, we recognised at once that Mr. Kidd 
 was addicted to those remnants of the old teleology that have 
 survived the shock of the Darwinian theory. To speak of 
 organs having been acquired in order to ensure success in the 
 struggle for life is obviously to read nature backwards ; it is 
 not that the organs have been acquired for this purpose, but 
 
 (44)
 
 Mr. Kidd 's " Social Evolution" . 45 
 
 that when they have been acquired they have ensured success 
 in the competition of life ; and the question of how they were 
 produced remains still open. This is the manner in which 
 Weismann reasons time after time ; and one can only surmise 
 that it is a form of fallacy inseparable from the theistic mind, 
 which runs naturally into teleological explanations even when 
 apparently writing from the standpoint of science. But if this 
 defect leads to such errors in an intellect like that of Weismann, 
 the 'effects are still more dreadful in an intellect like that of 
 Mr. Kidd, whose crude teleology is all the more amusing be- 
 cause of the talk, in the very next sentence to that quoted 
 above, of " the evolutionist who endeavours to obtain a funda- 
 mental grasp of the problems which human society presents " 
 that model evolutionist, of course, being Mr. Kidd himself. 
 
 The argument now runs as follows : Progress has always 
 and everywhere been the result of a struggle for existence, in 
 which some have gained the victory and some have been 
 worsened. Now " if it had been possible at any time for all 
 the individuals of any form of life to have secured themselves 
 against the competition of other forms, it would, beyond 
 doubt, have been their interest to have suspended amongst 
 themselves those onerous conditions which thus, by sacrificing 
 the present welfare of individuals to the larger interests of 
 their kind in the future, continually prevented large numbers 
 of their kind from reaching the fullest possibilities of life. The 
 conditions of progress, it is true, might have been suspended, 
 but this could not have caused the present individuals any 
 concern. The results would, in any case, only have been 
 visible after a prolonged period, and they could not, therefore, 
 be expected to have appeared to the existing members 
 as of any importance when weighed against their own in- 
 terests in the present " (pp. 66-67). Arid looking at man 
 at the stage of evolution to which he has now arrived, we find 
 him "differing in one most important respect from all that
 
 46 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 have gone before him. He is endowed with reason." And 
 now " it would seem that a conclusion, strange and unexpected, 
 but apparently unavoidable, must present itself. If the theories 
 of evolutionary science have been, so far, correct, then this 
 new factor which has been born into the world (!) must, it 
 would appear, have the effect of ultimately staying all further 
 progress." The reason is, that " his interests as an individual 
 have, in fact, become further subordinated to those of a social 
 organism, with interests immensely wider, and a life indefinitely 
 longer than his own. How is the possession of reason ever to 
 be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions 
 of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual 
 subordination of the individual's welfare to the progress of a 
 development in which he can have no personal interest what- 
 ever?" (p. 69). 
 
 The object of all this, of course, is to lead up to the de- 
 monstration that (i) progress has not been due to a rational 
 but to an irrational factor, and (2) that the essence of religion 
 being irrationalism, it is religion that has really kept progress 
 going in human societies. Now Mr. Kidd's inherent confusion 
 of terms is apparent at the outset of his argument. " Natural 
 selection," he practically says, " aims at the survival of the 
 fittest, i.e., progress. But this force is really antagonistic to 
 the interests of man as he conceives them by the light of his 
 reason. If then his reason were the main factor in evolution, 
 he would resist natural selection, and sacrifice the future of 
 the race to his own present." That is, Mr. Kidd conceives 
 " natural selection " to be a " force " acting upon man against 
 his own interests. In reality, however, the strife of evolution 
 is not between man and natural selection, but between men 
 themselves, and natural selection is only the name for the result 
 of this conflict. Mr. Kidd's conception of the case is equivalent 
 to saying that when a theatre is on fire, and every one rushes 
 for the door, the balance of those who survive and those who
 
 Mr. KidcCs " Social Evolution' '. 47 
 
 are killed acts as an impelling " force " upon the audience. 
 The real struggle is between man and man inside the theatre, 
 and the balance of living and dead bodies, when all is over, is 
 just the summing up of the. result of the struggle. Mr. Kidd, 
 in fact, in setting up " natural selection " as a force acting in 
 one direction, and " human reason " as a force acting in an- 
 other direction, is simply exhibiting once more that inherent 
 clumsiness of mind that will always unfit him for good work 
 in any department that requires a nice discrimination between 
 the meanings of words, and a careful watch upon the fallacies 
 that underlie the use of concrete terms in a purely abstract 
 manner. He conceives man " or the masses," as he some- 
 times puts it acted upon by " natural selection " on the one 
 side, and upon the other side by " reason," the former " force " 
 making for progress, the latter making against it. Now he 
 himself has already told us (p. 62) that " from these strenuous 
 conditions of rivalry the race as a whole is powerless to escape," 
 and again, that the racial struggle results " from deep-seated 
 physiological causes, the operation of zvhick we must always 
 remain powerless to escape " (p. 63). This, of course, is in 
 direct and grotesque contradiction to his future thesis, that if 
 man's reason were allowed full play, he would put an end to 
 these " strenuous conditions of rivalry" ; for (i) if he can put 
 an end to them, Mr. Kidd'-s remark that we must ahvays re- 
 main powerless to escape them is simply absurd ; and (2) if 
 we cannot put an end to them, if it is really the truth that we 
 must always be unable to escape this struggle which makes 
 for the desirable end called " progress," then the whole of 
 Mr. Kidd's book is a mere superfluity, being a recommenda- 
 tion to us not to let our reason do what it is essentially in- 
 capable of doing, in order not to stop a natural course of 
 evolution which cannot possibly be stopped. It seems, how- 
 ever, that Mr. Kidd is quite unconscious of this contradiction, 
 and we must therefore take his third chapter to mean what it
 
 48 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 really says, viz., that reason, if its dictates were followed by 
 the masses, would sacrifice the future to the present, would put 
 an end to the struggle for existence, and would thus check 
 progress. 
 
 Now to any one who does not lump his philosophic terms 
 together as Mr. Kidd is in the habit of doing, it is at once 
 apparent that so far from reason being a force antagonistic to 
 natural selection, it is in reality only one of the forces with 
 which natural selection has to do ; it is merely one of the 
 great contending factors of evolution, the final result of whose 
 contest is known as " natural selection ". If men perversely 
 acted upon the dictates of reason, as Mr. Kidd hopes they 
 will not do, this would simply be adding another to the already 
 existing elements of the struggle, and " progress " would in- 
 fallibly ensue, because the actual result could not be called by 
 any other name. And, in the second place, Mr. Kidd is once 
 more lumping terms that ought to be carefully discriminated 
 when he talks of it being to the interest of men to " suspend 
 the onerous conditions of existence ". The question is, To the 
 interest of which men ? Mr. Kidd ingenuously supposes all 
 men to be on the one side, " natural selection " on the other ; 
 the men are thinking of the present, " natural selection " is 
 thinking of the future. But the simple fact is that there is 
 no such symmetrical ranging of the battle as this. On the 
 contrary, the struggle is really between men of the same 
 society, men of different views and different interests, whose 
 rivalry is one of the factors of evolution. " If we ask ourselves, 
 therefore," says Mr. Kidd, " what course it is the interests of 
 the masses holding political power in our advanced societies 
 to pursue from the standpoint of reason, it seems hardly 
 possible to escape the conclusion that they should in self- 
 interest put an immediate end to existing social conditions. 
 The interest of the masses in such societies ap- 
 pears, therefore, clearly to be to draw a ring fence round
 
 Mr. Kidd' s " Social Evolution" . 49 
 
 their borders ; to abolish competition within the community ; 
 to suspend the onerous rivalry of individuals which presses 
 so severely on all ; to organise, on socialistic principles, the 
 means of production ; and lastly, and above all, to regulate 
 the population so as to keep it always proportional to the 
 means of comfortable existence for all. In a word, to put 
 an end to those conditions which the evolutionist [save the 
 mark !] perceives to be inevitably and necessarily associated 
 with progress now, and to have been so associated with 
 it, not only from the beginning of human society, but 
 from the beginning of life" (pp. 80-81). That is, Mr. 
 Kidd assumes that all " the masses," if they began to 
 think about these things, would be of one mind on the ques- 
 tion. The notorious fact is that they are not so, and to talk 
 as if "reason" would suggest to "the masses" the desirability 
 of doing the things Mr. Kidd has just suggested, is to forget 
 (i) that "the masses" do not acquiesce in the present social 
 system because they have not reasoned about it and because 
 a force unknown to them is carrying them on, but because a 
 great many of them see, by means of reason, that their very 
 existence depends on the existence of society, while many of 
 them reason about the matter enough, but are restrained from 
 unsocial action by a sense of impotence ; and (2) that the 
 argument that " self-interest " would prompt the masses to fly 
 in the face of social conditions ignores the fact that it is 
 actually self-interest on the part of the " classes " that has 
 made and keeps our social conditions what they are ; i.e., there 
 is no such contest as Mr. Kidd imagines between the rational 
 self-interest of man on the one side and the irrational forces 
 of natural selection on the other, but that society is shaped 
 by the contending self-interests of individuals, the biological 
 name for the result of this contest being what is unphilosophi- 
 cally called "progress". Mr. Kidd's confusion is further 
 shown in his remark (p. 84) that " the interests of the in'di- 
 
 4
 
 50 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 vidual and those of the social organism to. which he belongs 
 are not identical ". The absurdity of speaking of individuals 
 and the social organism as opposing entities, the interests of 
 which are in conflict, and the absurdity of speaking of the 
 individual as being pitted against the social organism, in face 
 of the facts that there is no such thing as the individual, but 
 simply individuals of varying interests and motives, and that 
 each individual in turn, along with all the rest but one, forms 
 the environment to that one, and so on ad infinitum J these 
 absurdities are so patent to any one who reflects upon the 
 meaning of the terms which Mr. Kidd flings about in such 
 gay irresponsibility, that it is unnecessary to labour the point 
 any further. It is only necessary to mention what will fre- 
 quently have to be mentioned in this examination that Mr. 
 Kidd's whole book is a practical demonstration of the fatuity 
 of his own arguments. When he states that the interests, i.e. r 
 the reason, of individuals are antagonistic to " the forces which 
 are working out our development," he forgets that reason is 
 just one of these forces. Then either his own book is power- 
 less to affect the course of evolution, in which case he might 
 have saved himself the trouble of writing it and us the trouble 
 of reading it, or else it is able by its reasoning to affect the 
 course of evolution, in which case Mr. Kidd has simply com- 
 mitted philosophic suicide. If, a^ he states (p. 86), "all 
 
 1 Mr. Kidd remarks on the next page (84) that " if the interests of a pro- 
 gressive society as a whole, and those of the individuals at any time comprising 
 it, are innately irreconcilable, it is evident," etc. What are the interests of a 
 " society," as distinct from the interests of the individuals composing it, Mr. 
 Kidd would probably find a difficulty in saying. The cause of his confusion 
 here is, however, quite apparent. He has been speaking of the interests of the 
 individual as being opposed to " the forces which are working out our develop- 
 ment " (pp. 68, 83, etc.) ; but this abstract antagonism being insuflicient for the 
 purposes of his argument, he has, perhaps unconsciously, transformed it into a 
 more concrete antagonism between the interests of " the individual " and those 
 of " the social organism," never once pausing either to notice that he had 
 changed the terms of his argument, or to ask himself what meaning, if any,, 
 those terms had.
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution". 51 
 
 methods and systems alike, v.hich have endeavoured to find 
 in the nature of things any universal rational sanction for 
 individual conduct in a progressive society, must be ultimately 
 fruitless," then the writing of his own book has been a trebly 
 futile performance ; for is not its avowed object to teach men 
 the true principles of evolution, to prevent them checking 
 over-population and the struggle for existence, and so to 
 afford a " rational sanction " for this kind of individual con- 
 duct ? And if he succeeds in doing this, if he succeeds in 
 inducing men to be irrational, and to give in to natural 
 selection in the old style, under the seductive influence of the 
 reasoning of his own book, what is this but showing that 
 reason is not only not antagonistic to progress, but is a very 
 important factor in it ? And if he really thinks, as he says on 
 page 75, that "men never have been, and are not now, influ- 
 enced in the least by the opinion of scientists or any other 
 class of persons, however wise, as to what the result of present 
 conduct, apparently calculated to benefit themselves, may be 
 on generations yet unborn," we may reply with the question 
 whether men are influenced by " the opinions of scientists or 
 any other class of persons " as to what the result of present 
 conduct, apparently calculated not to benefit themselves, may 
 be on generations yet unborn. If they are not so influenced, 
 what can be the use of Mr. Kidd's book placing him, for 
 the sake of argument, among th ; " scientists or any other 
 class of persons, however wi^e " ? and if they are so influenced, 
 then clearly reason is precisely that motive force in evolution 
 which Mr. Kidd has been striving so laboriously to prove it 
 is not. Either way his position is an absurdity.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE object of Mr. Kidd's third chapter has been to show that 
 progress depends not upon a rational, but upon an irrational 
 force. The object of the next two chapters, entitled re- 
 spectively "The Central Feature of Human History" and 
 " The Function of Religious Beliefs in the Evolution of 
 Society," is to prove that this irrational force is religion, which 
 alone can be relied upon to keep up the progress of the race. 
 He finds what he rightly calls "the extraordinary spectacle 
 of man, moved by a profound social instinct, continually 
 endeavouring, in the interests of his social progress, to check 
 and control the tendency of his own reason to suspend and 
 reverse the conditions which are producing this progress ". 
 Here the humble inquirer may be tempted to ask : What is 
 this " social instinct," and what is its purpose in evolution ? 
 Mr. Kidd's argument is that man's reason, concerned solely 
 with the happiness of the individual and of the present 
 moment, would stop progress if it were not for this " profound 
 social instinct," which makes him play into the hands of 
 evolution, so to speak, by acting irrationally. Then why is 
 this social instinct a good one, and why should we be expected 
 to bow down and worship it ? And what are the " interests 
 of social progress " ? Either the " interests of social progress " 
 means the happiness of mankind or not. If not, why should 
 Mr. Kidd wish us to be so anxious about them ? If yes, then 
 what becomes of Mr. Kidd's contention that this irrational 
 social instinct is necessary in order to counteract the influence 
 
 (52)
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution". 53 
 
 of reason, which would sacrifice progress to happiness ? For 
 surely even Mr. Kidd, with all his passion for abstract biology, 
 and all his confusion of terms, would not write an elaborate 
 book merely to persuade men that they ought to sacrifice 
 their own happiness of the moment for a purely abstract state 
 of affairs which he calls "the interests of social progress". 
 And on his own showing, be it observed, these "interests of 
 social progress," which we are so sedulously to guard, are a 
 mere chimsera. He himself has argued that evolution can 
 never cease, that natural selection must always go on, and 
 that the social misery attendant upon the process must there- 
 fore always continue. On these terms, then, the next genera- 
 tion will not be one whit the better for any self-abnegation on 
 our part. If we check the foolish dictates of reason, that 
 prompt us to put an end to the dreadful strife, and make the 
 best of the world while we are in it, the next generation will 
 simply be delivered over, bound hand and foot, to the tender 
 mercies of natural selection ; and if Mr. Kidd's advice is still 
 acted on, generation after generation will be born into the 
 same conditions of struggle and of misery. Then what, in the 
 name of common sense, is Mr. Kidd's precept good for? 
 Accepting his argument as true, does he seriously think men 
 will calmly lie down to external natural selection in the future, 
 as they have had to do in the past, and put up with perpetual 
 misery, in order not to alleviate the misery of any future 
 race of men, but to keep " progress " going, to subserve some 
 mysterious " interests of social progress," which are not the 
 interests of any individual or any mass of individuals, but 
 simply the abstract interests of an abstract process called 
 "evolution," ending in an abstract result called "progress"? 
 We are to refrain from eating our cake now, not in order that 
 some one else may be able to eat it in the future, but in order 
 that there may always be the abstract cake to be eaten by an 
 abstract humanity in the future that never comes ! This is
 
 54 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 the upshot of Mr. Kidd's brilliant argument about " social 
 instincts ". 
 
 The gist of these two chapters is, briefly, that religious 
 beliefs have always existed among men, that they have been 
 the central feature of history, that they are super-rational, 
 that they thus provide a sanction for individual conduct which 
 reason cannot provide, and that their function is thus to check 
 the disintegrating influence of reason, and so to keep progress 
 going. A few characteristic extracts, showing Mr. Kidd's 
 conception of psychological processes, are worth quoting here 
 (some of them for the second time), as illustrating the grossly 
 unscientific way in which he sets about to prove a most 
 important part of his theory. 
 
 "... this extraordinary instinct which had thus driven 
 successive generations of men to carry on such a prolonged 
 and desperate struggle against forces set in motion by their 
 own intellect " (p. 92). 
 
 "... the conflict . . . waged between these religions 
 and the forces set in motion by human reason " (p. 93). 
 
 Religious movements are " not only independent of, but 
 in direct conflict with the intellectual forces " (p. 94). 
 
 " The one idea which would slowly take possession of 
 his mind would be that, underneath all these vast series of 
 phenomena with which he was confronted, he beheld man 
 in some way in conflict with his own reason " (p. 98). 
 
 " The one fact which stands out clear above it all is that 
 the forces against which man is engaged throughout the 
 whole course of the resulting struggle are none other than 
 those enlisted against him by his reason " (p. 103). 
 
 " Throughout all the centuries in which history has him 
 in view, we witness him driven by a profound instinct which 
 finds expression in his religions, unmistakably recognising a 
 hostile force of some kind in his own reason " (p. 103). 
 
 " The central feature of human history, the meaning of
 
 Mr. KidcCs "Social Evolution'". 55 
 
 which neither science nor philosophy has hitherto fully 
 recognised, is, apparently, the struggle which man, throughout 
 the whole period of his social development, has carried on to 
 effect the subordination of his own reason " (pp. 107, 108). 
 
 It would be discourteous to any reader's intelligence to 
 deal in detail with such utterances as these, with their amateur 
 psychology, their loose phrasing and their reiteration of a 
 meaningless cant formula of which Mr. Kidd either cannot or 
 will not see the futility. To any reader of average intelli- 
 gence, indeed, the question must inevitably suggest itself: 
 How can any man who is capable of philosophising in this 
 primitive manner undertake, as Mr. Kidd has done, to lay 
 afresh the whole foundations of sociological science, and to 
 elucidate for us the whole past history of the human race? 
 For Mr. Kidd's errors are not those of a great inquirer feeling 
 his way darkly and painfully along a hitherto untrodden path. 
 New as he thinks his theory is, it and his errors are simply 
 the vulgar fallacies of the man in the street, stumbling over 
 his own words, and building up elaborate edifices of argument 
 on the sandy foundation of a mere misconception of his terms. 
 Never once in the whole course of his inquiry has Mr. Kidd 
 paused to inform his reader, or indeed himself, what he means 
 by such words as " progress," " society," " social instinct," 
 " reason," " super-rational," " ethical sanction " words upon 
 the precise definition of which his whole theory depends, and 
 through whose confusion of meanings that theory becomes 
 such a hodge-podge of wasted argument. Nowhere is it more 
 important to define one's terms than in the case of words 
 which are part of the every-day language of men, and which 
 have consequently a score of meanings or shades of meaning 
 enclosed within them. Phrases like " the social organism," 
 for example, which are merely the rough-and-ready symbols 
 of ordinary conversation, need to be defined with the most 
 rigorous precision when they are made the basis of a socio-
 
 56 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 logical argument. Yet Mr. Kidd pursues his happy, ingenu- 
 ous way among them, much as the proverbial bull pursued his 
 way through the proverbial china-shop, and handles the most 
 evasive philosophical terms much as a hodman might handle 
 a delicate electrical instrument. 
 
 It has already been pointed out that Mr. Kidd, in speaking 
 of religion as being one of the most universal and character- 
 istic features of social evolution, ignores the fact that scepti- 
 cism is no less universal and no less characteristic ; and that 
 the sociologist who attempts to build up a theory upon the 
 one fact while ignoring the other, who regards the prevalence 
 of religious beliefs as proving that they have some " function " 
 to perform, while scepticism has no such function, is simply 
 making argument a farce. Here we find Mr. Kidd conduct- 
 ing his thesis in a similar manner. He argues as if the 
 " instinct " convenient word ! that leads men to believe in 
 religion were something universal, while all the time his very 
 argument implies that a great number of the race do not 
 possess this instinct. " Moved by it," he writes (p. 99), " man 
 would appear to be always possessed by the desire to set up 
 sanctions for his individual conduct, which would appear to 
 be .ra/^T-natural against those which were natural, sanctions 
 which would appear to be #//ra-rational against those which 
 were simply rational." Now this, if it means anything, means 
 that " man " holds these beliefs quA man ; that is, they are or 
 ought to be the common property of all men. This seems to 
 be the argument as Mr. Kidd originally intended it, a view of 
 the case which is borne out by his next chapter, in which he 
 tells us that, from the lowest savage to the most civilised races 
 of the present, socially preservative actions have depended 
 upon religious beliefs. 1 But even Mr. Kidd is bound to be 
 aware that in every society there have been men who rejected 
 
 1 See, for example, p. 115 : " But if, on the one hand, we find primitive man 
 thus everywhere under the sway of customs," etc.
 
 Mr. Kidd 's " Social Evolution ". 57 
 
 the current religion ; and so, in the very next sentence to that 
 quoted above, he proceeds- to get his argument into the 
 customary tangle. " Everywhere he would find him clinging 
 with the most extraordinary persistence to ideas and ideals 
 which regulated his life under the influence of these religions, 
 and ruthlessly punishing all those who endeavoured to con- 
 vince him that these conceptions were without foundation in 
 fact " (p. 99). 
 
 Thus calmly does Mr. Kidd sweep aside every tendency 
 that makes against the symmetry of his theory. According 
 to him, these persecuted beings and the opinions they repre- 
 sent have simply nothing whatever to do with evolution, 
 which is apparently kept going entirely by those who hold 
 the current religious beliefs. These justify the utility of their 
 beliefs, and at the same time preserve the standard of morality 
 intact (for Mr. Kidd informs us that he agrees with Mr. Lecky 
 that utilitarian theories are " profoundly immoral "), by slaying 
 and persecuting all who do not share the religious opinions of 
 the majority, which is quite a new light on ethics. " Man " 
 holds the religious beliefs by instinct, and " he " (whoever 
 " he " may be) persecutes those who do not agree with him. 
 As Mr. Kidd goes on to remark, " At many periods in human 
 history also, he would have to observe that the opinions had 
 been entertained by considerable numbers of persons, that a 
 point had at length been reached, at which it was only a 
 question of time, until human reason finally dispelled the 
 belief in those unseen powers which man held in control over 
 himself (sic). But he would find this anticipation never 
 realised. Dislodged from one position, the human mind, 1 he 
 would observe, had only taken up another of the same kind, 
 which it continued once more to hold with the same unreason- 
 ing, dogged and desperate persistence" (pp. 99, 100). Here 
 Mr. Kidd has come to the length of denying to sceptics even 
 
 1 Italics mine.
 
 5 8 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 a human mind ! Who it is does the dislodging, and what it 
 is that is dislodged, is not quite clear. If "the human mind" 
 will not give up its religious beliefs, whose minds are they 
 that embrace scepticism ? If sceptics exist, as Mr. Kidd 
 admits, what does he mean by saying that the human mind 
 will never give up its religious beliefs ? And, crowning 
 absurdity of all, if in spite of all attempts to dislodge the 
 human mind from its fortress of super-rational beliefs, it only 
 continues to hold this fortress with " unreasoning, dogged and 
 desperate persistence," is not Mr. Kidd's book the object of 
 which is to make people stick to these beliefs something of 
 a superfluity, a generous but unnecessary helping of a machine 
 that went on triumphantly for ages before Mr. Kidd's book 
 was written, and will go on triumphantly for ages after it is 
 forgotten ? And once more, if Mr. Kidd holds that his book 
 is not a superfluity, that by its reasoning it may induce people 
 to be religious and so save "progress," then men are not helping 
 out evolution by "the social instinct" and the rest of it, but by 
 reason pure and simple, and Mr. Kidd's thesis about the dis- 
 integrating force of reason has gone the way of all absurdity. 
 
 It will be admitted that Mr. Kidd has here got his argu- 
 ment into a very pretty tangle. Satisfied with it, however as 
 is evident from his complacent remark that " there is not, it is 
 believed, anything which is unreal or exaggerated in this view 
 of one of the chief phases of human evolution," he proceeds 
 to elucidate for us, in still closer detail, " the function of 
 religious beliefs in the evolution of society ". As was to be 
 expected, he stumbles at the very beginning over that constant 
 pitfall of the amateur sociologist the false analogy between 
 the life of the individual and the life of a society. He agrees 
 with the historian, 1 "the popular imagination," and "public 
 
 1 " It may be observed, too," he writes, " that this idea of the life, growth, 
 and decline of peoples is deeply rooted. It is always present in the mind of the 
 historian " (p. 106). The historian is characteristic of Mr. Kidd.
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 59 
 
 speakers and writers in the daily press," a sweet concourse 
 of authorities! that "social systems are endowed with a 
 definite principle of life," which is hardly the sort of expres- 
 sion we would expect to hear from one who prides himself on 
 his scientific intelligence. Gold, we presume, is similarly 
 endowed with a definite principle of aureity, and water with a 
 definite principle of aquosity. But Mr. Kidd, in that inexor- 
 able, lucid way of his, sets himself now to inform us what this 
 " definite principle of life " really is. In his own words, he is 
 going to "open up a new and almost unexplored territory". 
 Premising that " no form of belief is capable of functioning as 
 a religion in the evolution of society which does not provide an 
 ultra-rational sanction for social condiict in the individual'''' ; or 
 " in other words, a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, 
 representing from the nature of the case an inherent contradiction 
 of terms" (pp. 109, no), he proceeds thus: "We come, it 
 would appear, in sight of the explanation why science, if social 
 systems are organic growths, has hitherto failed to enunciate 
 the laws of their development, and has accordingly left us 
 almost entirely in the dark as to the nature of the develop- 
 mental forces and tendencies at work beneath the varied and 
 complex political and social phenomena of our time. The 
 social system which constitutes an organic growth, endowed 
 with a definite principle of life, and unfolding itself in obedience 
 to laws which may be made the subject of exact study, is 
 something quite different from that we have hitherto had 
 vaguely in mind. It is not the political organisation of which 
 we form part ; it is not the race to which we belong ; it is not 
 even the whole human family in process of evolution. It 
 would appear that : 77ie organic growth endowed with a definite 
 principle of life, and unfolding itself in obedience to law, is the 
 social system or type of civilisation founded on a form of religious 
 belief. It would also appear that it may be stated as a law 
 that : Throughout the existence of this system there is maintained
 
 6o Pse^ldo- Philosophy. 
 
 within it a conflict of two opposing forces ; the disintegrating 
 principle represented by the rational self-assertiveness of the 
 individual units ; the integrating principle represented by a 
 religious belief providing a sanction for social conduct ivhich is 
 always of necessity ultra-rational, and the function of which is 
 to secure in the stress of evolution the continual subordination of 
 the interests of the individual units to the larger interests of the 
 longer-lived social organism to which they belong" (pp. no, ill). 
 Observe here the looseness and inexactitude of the phras- 
 ing, just where the argument ought to be expressed in the 
 clearest and most rigid terms it is possible to find. We have 
 "social systems" which are "organic growths," endowed with 
 " a definite principle of life " ; these social systems, again, 
 are " founded " on a form of religious belief, and within them 
 there is an " integrating principle " pulling one way, and a 
 "disintegrating principle" pulling another way. Can any 
 one seriously believe that the writer who is capable, at this 
 time of the nineteenth century, of framing a proposition in 
 this way, and then claiming that he is talking science where 
 all other men have only talked vanity, is fit to do proper 
 scientific work in any department whatever of human thought ? 
 These sentences, which are the very corner-stone of Mr. 
 Kidd's book, are simply the merest shoddy, the pseudo-science 
 of the half-educated curate instructing an evening class at a 
 Y. M. C. A. Mr. Kidd's pet phrase is on a par with that of 
 the man who should say that the individual is a system 
 endowed with a definite principle of life, founded on a form of 
 activity, and the scene of a conflict between two opposing 
 forces, a disintegrating principle tending to the discontinu- 
 ance of life, and an integrating principle tending to its 
 continuance. The hollowness of a proposition like this is seen 
 when applied to an individual organism ; it is only when it is 
 applied to the " social organism " that its very emptiness gives 
 it a factitious appearance of profundity, and earns for those
 
 Mr. Kidds " Social Evolution'' '. 61 
 
 who indulge in this style of verbosity the reputation of new 
 and original thinkers on sociology. 
 
 The remainder of Mr. Kidd's fifth chapter is a monument 
 of confusion of terms and fallacy of reasoning. He himself is 
 apparently never conscious that he begins with the word 
 " supernatural " as characteristic of religious beliefs, and after- 
 wards uses his favourite word " ultra-rational " as if it bore 
 precisely the same meaning. He has, of course, no difficulty 
 in showing to his own satisfaction that all religions have origi- 
 nated in beliefs in the supernatural ; but this is a very different 
 matter from showing that these beliefs are ultra-rational. If a 
 savage believes in the existence of ghosts, he does so because 
 he has reasons for his beliefs ; to repeat the argument that has 
 already been used, he believes in ghosts not because he does 
 not reason, but because he reasons badly. In the strict psy- 
 chological sense his belief is founded as much on rational 
 processes as the contrary belief that ghosts do not exist. 
 Similarly, the belief of a Theist in the existence of a Supreme 
 Being, the belief of a Christian in the Immaculate Conception, 
 are beliefs in a supernatural, but are not ultra-rational beliefs. 
 This is the simple distinction which Mr. Kidd is incapable of 
 making; this is the primitive verbal confusion on which he has 
 elected to build an important section of his argument. When 
 he quotes his favourite Mr. Lecky to the effect that "all re- 
 ligions which have governed mankind have done so ... by 
 speaking, as common religious language describes it, to the 
 heart," and not to the intellect, he is simply using the cant 
 formulas of everyday life to prove a philosophical proposition. 
 A little preliminary psychological analysis would show him 
 that the distinction between "heart" and "head" is purely 
 fanciful ; that there are no beliefs springing from the one with- 
 out any participation from the other ; and that either the 
 belief in a Deity is as " rational " as most of our beliefs, or the 
 term "ultra-rational" used as distinguishing the so-called
 
 6 2 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 instinctive perceptions from the so-called intellectual percep- 
 tions must be applied to a vast number of everyday beliefs as 
 well as those of religion. But it is characteristic of Mr. Kidd 
 to base an important argument on a mere indistinctness of 
 terms that any intelligent schoolboy could have made clear 
 for him ; and it is also characteristic of such a mind that it 
 should tell us that " the deep-seated instincts of society have a 
 truer scientific basis than our current science ". Once more, it 
 is not from an intellect of this type that a revolution in socio- 
 logy is to come. Further analysis of this chapter of Mr. 
 Kidd's book is superfluous. " However these beliefs may 
 differ from each other or from the religions of the past," he 
 writes, " they have the one feature in common that they all 
 assert uncompromisingly that the essential doctrines which 
 they teach are beyond reason, that the rules of conduct which 
 they enjoin have an ultra-rational sanction, and that right and 
 wrong are right and wrong by divine or supernatural enact- 
 ment outside of, and independent of, any other cause what- 
 ever " (pp. 122, 123). That religions have a supernatural ele- 
 ment in them is sufficient proof for Mr. Kidd's accommodat- 
 ing mind that their codes of ethics are wholly ultra-rational. 
 Of the " significance," as he would call it, of the fact that re- 
 ligious systems of ethics are so largely based upon intuitive 
 theories, Mr. Kidd seems to have no scientific perception. He 
 appears to know as little of the psychological and social 
 genesis of moral sentiments, and theories of moral sentiments, 
 as he does of biology or history or sociology. A quotation 
 from that dubious authority, Mr. Lecky, a few primitive con 
 fusions of terms, and a comprehensive ignorance of the labours 
 of hundreds of writers who have gone before him these are 
 sufficient for Mr. Kidd to build up a new theory in any depart- 
 ment of human thought. No one, of course, quarrels with him 
 for his imperfections of mind or temperament ; but it is surely 
 permissible for us to protest against his writing a book from
 
 Mr. Kidcfs " Social Evolution' '. 63 
 
 the depths of these imperfections, against his complacent 
 remarks that no previous writer has understood this or that 
 problem of human evolution, and against his no less com- 
 placent references to himself as " the evolutionist," " the thinker 
 who has caught the true spirit of evolutionary science," and 
 the rest.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THIS, then, is the'end of Mr. Kidd's introduction to his work. 
 He has given us the theoretical bases ; he now proceeds to 
 apply these principles, and to elucidate the history of Western 
 Europe by them. This is the purpose of his sixth and seventh 
 chapters. 
 
 Briefly, his argument is this : our civilisation, " as a con- 
 tinuous growth," begins "its life-history" in "the early cen- 
 turies of our era". That is, there is an immense difference 
 between Greek and Roman and modern civilisation, and the 
 latter begins with Christianity. The Roman world was every- 
 where decaying, until there came " the new force which was 
 born into the world with the Christian religion" (p. 133). 
 This " new force "was indeed a marvel among forces. " The 
 original impetus was immense. The amorphous vigour of life 
 was so great that several centuries have to pass away before 
 any clear idea can be obtained of even the outlines of the 
 growth which it was destined to build up out of the dead ele- 
 ments around it. From the beginning the constructive prin- 
 ciple of life was unmistakable ; men seemed to be transformed ; 
 the ordinary motives of the individual mind appeared to be 
 extinguished. . . . Amid the corruption of the time the new 
 life flourished as a thing apart ; it took the disintegrated units 
 and built them up into the new order, drawing strength from 
 the decay which was in progress around it " (pp. 133, 134). 
 And " we have to note also that the new force was in no way 
 the product of reason or of the intellect. No impetus came 
 
 (64)
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 65 
 
 from this quarter. As in all movements of the kind, the intel- 
 lectual forces of the time were directly in opposition " (pp. 134, 
 135). This gigantic force carries all before it, until in the 
 fourteenth century all Europe exhibits the spectacle of " the 
 growth and development of a stupendous system of other- 
 worldliness. The conflict against reason had been successful 
 to a degree never before equalled in the history of the world. 
 The super-rational sanction for conduct had attained a strength 
 and universality unknown in the Roman and Greek civilisa- 
 tions " (p. 139). 
 
 Ignorant historians, who have not had the inestimable 
 advantage of being taught their history by Mr. Kidd, are 
 now admonished of their error in speaking of the dark ages 
 as "a time of death and barrenness". This is "to totally 
 misunderstand the nature of the movement we are dealing 
 with. The period was barren only in the sense that every 
 period of vigorous but immature growth is barren. The fruit 
 was in the centuries to come. Science has yet scarcely learned 
 to look at the question of our social evolution from any stand- 
 point other than that of the rationalism of the individual ; 
 whereas, we undoubtedly have in .these centuries a period in 
 the lifetime of the social organism when the welfare, not only 
 of isolated individuals, but of all the individuals of a long series 
 of generations, was sacrificed to the larger interests of genera- 
 tions at a later and more mature stage" (p. 140). Now, 
 " it will have been evident from the last chapter, if the con- 
 clusions there arrived at were correct, that we may state it 
 as an historical law that : The great problem with which every 
 progressive society stands continually confronted is : How to 
 retain the highest operative ultra-rational sanction for those 
 onerous conditions of life which are essential to its progress ; 
 and at one and the same time to allow the freest play to tlwse 
 intellectual forces which, while tending to come into conflict zvith 
 this sanction, contribute nevertheless to raise to the highest de- 
 
 S
 
 66 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 gree of social efficiency the whole of the members" (p. 141). 
 These two desirable tendencies find full freedom in Christian- 
 ity, or, as Mr. Kidd calls it in his scientific way, " the ethical 
 system upon which our civilisation is founded ". Ancient 
 society was one of caste to a great extent, and wide altruistic 
 and humanitarian sentiments were almost foreign to it. " As 
 for any conception of duty or responsibility to others outside 
 the community," says Mr. Kidd glibly of the Greek state, " it 
 did not exist. Morality was of the narrowest and most egotist- 
 ical kind. It never, among the Greeks, embraced any con- 
 ception of humanity ; no Greek, says George Henry Lewes, 
 ever attained to the sublimity of such a point of view" (p. 145). 
 Under the conditions of life as they held in the Greek and 
 Roman states there could never be any progress ; this has 
 been brought about by Christianity, which is possessed of a 
 fund of altruistic feeling which has tended to make men 
 equal, thus ensuring a greater stress of competition, and a 
 consequently higher level of the race through natural selection. 
 " Nothing can be more obvious, however, as soon as we begin 
 to understand the nature of the process of evolution in pro- 
 gress around us, than that the moving force behind it is not 
 the intellect, and that the development as a whole is not in 
 any true sense an intellectual movement" (p. 157). The 
 movement has really been super-rational, deriving its force 
 from the Christian religion. This, as Mr. Kidd goes on to 
 repeat, brought into Europe an altruistic ideal infinitely 
 higher than any of which the world had previously had 
 knowledge. It was, indeed, this excess of virtue that led to 
 the persecution of the early Christians by the Roman state. x 
 
 1 Mr. Kidd has achieved some good things in the comic writing of history, 
 but he has nowhere surpassed these pages on the persecution of the early 
 Christians. " What it is, however," he writes, " of the highest importance to 
 note here is that it was those same altruistic ideals, which seem so altogether 
 exemplary in our eyes, that filled the minds of the lower classes of the Roman 
 population (who were not permeated with the intellectual scepticism of the
 
 Mr. Kidds "Social Evolution". 67 
 
 And since the time when Christianity came to itself, so to 
 speak, and really began to do its proper work in society, 
 it has been consistently helping evolution along. With its 
 immense fund of altruistic feeling it abolished caste, it abolished 
 slavery ; it is always breaking down the power of the govern- 
 ing and wealthy classes, and strengthening the hands of the 
 masses. Thus it is working towards the time when there 
 shall be no social distinctions, when all shall be admitted to 
 the struggle of life on terms of equality, when the competition 
 will be fiercer and more strenuous, and when natural selection 
 will have a really good opportunity of picking out the fittest 
 and slaying the unfit, all in the cause of progress. And as 
 the sanctions of Christianity are not rational but super- 
 rational, our civilisation is built upon a super-rational basis. 
 " The conception of the native equality of men which has 
 played so great a part in the social development that has 
 taken place in our civilisation is essentially irrational. It 
 receives no sanction from reason or experience ; it is the 
 characteristic product of that ultra-rational system of ethics 
 upon which our civilisation is founded " (p. 197). 
 
 Such is Mr. Kidd's summary of the history and the 
 developmental tendencies of the Europe of the last twenty- 
 five centuries. There is nothing new in it ; new as he fondly 
 imagines it to be, it is what we have heard for many a year 
 past from the average Christian Evidence lecturer. One 
 hardly knows what to be most surprised at in Mr. Kidd's 
 exposition the amazing historical and psychological ignor- 
 
 educated classes) with vague but deep-seated distrust and hatred of the new 
 religion and its adherents. The profound social instincts of the masses of the 
 people then, as nearly always, possessing a truer scientific basis than the merely 
 intellectual insight of the educated classes recognised, in fact, in the new ideals 
 which were moving the minds of men, a force, not only different in nature and 
 potentiality to any of which the ancient world had previous experience, but 
 one which was fundamentally antagonistic to the forces which had hitherto 
 held together that organisation of society which had culminated in the Empire " 
 (p. 162).
 
 68 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 ance which it displays, or the audacity with which this 
 schoolboy's composition is put forward as a philosophical 
 account of the evolution of European society. Nowhere is 
 Mr. Kidd's lack of adequate training for his task more notice- 
 able than here. For his sweeping generalisation on the 
 characteristics of pagan and Christian civilisation, he relies 
 altogether on the precarious authorities of Mr. Froude, Mr. 
 Lecky and Mr. Mahaffy, unconscious all the while of the 
 logical defects of the first, and the hopelessly subversive 
 contradictions of the second and the third. There is not a 
 shred of evidence that Mr. Kidd has made any first-hand 
 study of the ancient civilisations which he so glibly dis- 
 parages, while there is every possible evidence to the con- 
 trary. What are the facts as to the humanitarian feelings in 
 ancient Greece and Rome and Christian Europe? Mr. Kidd 
 has told us, on the authority of Mr. Lecky's History of Euro- 
 pean Morals, that Christianity brought a new force into the 
 world ; that " the new religion evoked, to a degree before 
 unexampled in the world, an enthusiastic devotion to its 
 corporate welfare, analogous to that which the patriot bears 
 to his country " ; that " there sprang from it a stern, aggressive, 
 and at the same time disciplined enthusiasm, wholly unlike 
 any other that had been witnessed upon earth " ; that " amid 
 the corruption of the time the new life flourished as a thing 
 apart " ; that " there has probably never existed upon earth a 
 community whose members were bound to one another by 
 a deeper or purer affection than the Christians in the days 
 of the persecution. Self seemed to be annihilated. The 
 boundaries of classes and even of nationalities and of races 
 went down before the new affinities, which overmastered the 
 strongest instincts of men's minds;" that with Christianity 
 " a spirit of utter self-abnegation had been born into the 
 world " ; that in ancient Greece, " as for any conception of 
 duty or responsibility to others outside the community, it did
 
 Mr. Kidds "Social Evolution". 69 
 
 not exist. Morality was of the narrowest and most egotistical 
 kind. It never among the Greeks embraced any conception 
 of humanity ; " that the Christian movement " involved from 
 its inception the very highest conception of the altruistic ideal 
 to which the human mind has in any general sense ever 
 obtained " ; that " any impartial observer would describe the 
 most distinctive virtue referred to in the New Testament as 
 love, charity or philanthropy. It is the spirit of charity, pity 
 and infinite compassion which breathes through the Gospels. 
 The new religion was from the outset ... a proclamation of 
 the universal brotherhood of man ; " that " the noble system 
 of ethics, the affection which the members bore to each other, 
 the devotion of all to the corporate welfare, the spirit of 
 infinite tolerance for every weakness and inequality, the con- 
 sequent tendency to the dissolution of social and class barriers 
 of every kind, beginning with those between slave and master, 
 and the presence everywhere of the feeling of actual brother- 
 hood were the outward features of all the early Christian 
 societies " ; that " in the altruistic conceptions of Christianity 
 all the bonds of race, nationality and class were dissolved " ; 
 that it proclaimed "the uncompromising doctrine of the 
 innate equality of men" ; that "compared with ours even the 
 noblest Greek ethics were of the narrowest kind, and 'Greek 
 morality, as already observed, at no period embraced any 
 conception of humanity " ; that " the two doctrines which 
 contributed most to producing the extinction of slavery were 
 the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of the equality of 
 all men before the Deity," and so on. 
 
 As to the beautiful characters of the early Christians, their 
 love for each other, their devotion to the common welfare, let 
 Mr. Lecky's own self-contradictory pages and the Pauline 
 Epistles serve for answer. As to the proclamation of the 
 brotherhood of man, which the Gospels are said to contain, 
 does it require to be pointed out that the religion there pro-
 
 70 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 claimed is an essentially exclusive one, granting salvation to 
 those only who will believe in Jesus, and damning all the rest ; 
 that Jesus himself exhibited at times the narrowest sectarian 
 spirit ; that he made a distinction between the Jews and the 
 Gentiles ; that he expressly forbade his disciples on one 
 occasion to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles and the Sa- 
 maritans ; * and that he threatened with the most dreadful 
 punishment the cities that would not accept the teaching of 
 twelve ignorant fishermen ? As to the point about slavery, 
 the writer who at this time of day can point to Christianity as 
 the motive force in its abolition is almost past arguing with. 
 " Mr. Kidd," writes one critic, " shows that he is aware that 
 slavery has flourished down almost into our own times under 
 the auspices ... of an Anglo-Saxon community ; but the 
 knowledge has no effect on his sociology. As little is that 
 affected by the knowledge he has presumably gathered from 
 Mr. Lecky, that in the Christianised Roman empire, living 
 under the flawlessly irrational creed of salvation, there were 
 probably more slaves than under paganism, and not more 
 manumissions. It is needless, therefore, to inquire whether 
 he knows that the first decisive modern blow at slavery was 
 dealt by the French Revolution, at a time when the Christian 
 doctrine of salvation had nearly as little hold on the minds 
 of those actively concerned as it has on the minds of French 
 politicians to-day. . In this case, perhaps, Mr. Kidd would 
 withdraw the trump card of ' salvation ' and play that of 
 ' equality of all men before the Deity/ making out that the 
 ' aggressive ' Paine and the devout Robespierre in their 
 different ways were thus after all satisfactorily irrational, 
 
 1 I am well aware of the existence of the text commanding the disciples to 
 go forth and teach all nations ; but apart from any critical theories as to the 
 date of this text, the Christian apologist obviously has to reconcile it with those 
 mentioned above. If the character of the Gospel Jesus is a composite one, and 
 his utterances contradictory, so much the worse for the Christian.
 
 Mr. Kidds " Social Evolution" . 71 
 
 though Paine's fellow-deists in the United States were not 
 irrational enough to take up his testimony against slavery." 
 
 And finally, as to the thesis that altruistic and humani- 
 tarian feelings, in their widest aspect, are purely outgrowths 
 from Christianity, the slightest acquaintance with pagan litera- 
 ture would have shown Mr. Kidd that he was merely talking 
 the vulgarest commonplaces of the vulgarest school of Christian 
 apologists. He has stated that Greek morality never rose to a 
 conception of humanity ; and in a stricture of this kind he 
 must of course be understood as including Roman morality in 
 his condemnation, as his argument is that world-wide altruism 
 is the specific product of Christianity. What, then, are the 
 facts ? The facts are that pagan literature is superior to the 
 sacred Christian books in their precepts of this kind, just as 
 the pagan moralists as a whole were superior to the early 
 Christian writers in almost every quality of humanism, of 
 serenity, of toleration ; and that the very idea of the innate 
 equality of all men, which Mr. Kidd so ignorantly ascribes to 
 Christianity, was Stoic in its origin. Though the labouring of 
 these points is simply the retelling of a thrice-told tale, I am 
 constrained to give some evidence for them, selecting, as the 
 most convenient and most concise summary, the comparison 
 of pagan and Christian morality in Mr. J. A. Farrer's Pagan- 
 ism and Christianity : 
 
 " To live as if he knew himself born for others," says Mr. 
 Farrer, " has already been alluded to as one of the character- 
 istics in Seneca's picture of the ideal Stoic ; and his other 
 references to the subject deserve attention. ' It is required of 
 a man to be of benefit to man, to many if he can, failing that 
 to a few, failing that to those nearest him, failing those to 
 himself. No man can live happily who regards himself alone, 
 who turns everything to his own advantage ; it behoves you to 
 live for another, if you would live for yourself.' And, com- 
 paring the Stoic with the Epicurean views of happiness, he
 
 72 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 says : ' Our pleasure is to benefit others, even at our own 
 labour, provided we lighten the labour of others ; or at our 
 own peril, provided we save others from peril ; or at our own 
 loss of fortune, provided we alleviate the necessities and dis- 
 tresses of others '. . . . Aurelius, too, never wearies of remind- 
 ing himself that man is by nature a rational and social animal, 
 whose function and true work is to labour for his fellow-man, 
 his fellow-kinsman, as the child of the same God. It is utterly 
 false to say that this idea of the brotherhood of all men rests 
 on the teaching of Christianity. It was one of the dominant 
 ideas of philosophy, especially of Stoicism, long before the 
 foundations of the Church were laid. Marcus Aurelius rises 
 from the conception of the political community to that of the 
 wider community of humanity with a breadth of spirit that at 
 no time of her history has belonged to the Church, regarding, 
 as she ever has done, all who are ignorant of or indifferent to 
 her teaching as aliens and enemies and outcasts. ' The whole 
 world is in a manner a state,' he concludes ; and ' my .city and 
 country as far as I am Antoninus is Rome, but so far as I am 
 a man it is the world. The things then which are useful to 
 these cities are alone useful to me.' The idea of humanity as 
 a whole, of all mankind as one fraternity, independent of all 
 barriers of race or language, was first, grasped by the philoso- 
 phers ; the hold of it was rather relaxed than tightened by 
 the Church ; and the narrow nationalism of modern Europe 
 contrasts poorly with the cosmopolitanism of the pre-Christian 
 world. The supreme pontiff of pagan Rome offered up prayers 
 for the whole human race. We have the testimony of Plutarch 
 that the pagan priests prayed not only for whole communities, 
 but for the whole state of mankind. It was Cicero, and no 
 Christian, who said : ' Nature ordains that a man should wish 
 the good of every man whoever he may be, and for this very 
 reason, that he is a man '. When Socrates was asked to what 
 city he belonged, he answered, ' To the world ' ; nor was his
 
 Mr. Kidds " Social Evolution" . 73 
 
 conception of moral duty as conterminous with humanity ever 
 afterwards lost. It was upheld by Diogenes the Cynic, as by 
 Zeno the Stoic. Seneca only professed an axiom of philosophy 
 when he wrote : ' We ought to devote our soul to no particular 
 place. This is the conviction with which we must each live. 
 I was not born for one corner, my country is the whole world.' 
 Plutarch, speaking of the lost work of Zeno, called the Repub- 
 lic^ says: ' The much admired Republic of Zeno aimed singly at 
 this, that neither in cities nor towns we should live under dis- 
 tinct laws one from another, but should look on all men as our 
 fellow-countrymen and citizens, observing one manner of life 
 and kind of order, like a flock feeding together with equal 
 rights in common pasture '." x 
 
 Passages like these might of course be greatly multiplied, 
 but sufficient has been said to show the absurd ignorance of 
 Mr. Kidd's statement that pre-Christian ethics were narrow 
 and egotistical compared with Christian ethics. And while 
 we are at this point, it may be worth while to show in greater 
 detail the error of supposing that the doctrine of the innate 
 equality and brotherhood of men emanated from Christianity. 
 For this purpose I quote from the section on Stoicism in Mr. 
 Benn's Greek Philosophers : 
 
 " The third great idea of Stoicism was its doctrine of 
 humanity. Men are all children of one Father, and citizens 
 of one state ; the highest moral law is, Follow Nature, and 
 Nature has made them to be social and to love one another ; 
 the private interest of each is, or should be, identified with the 
 universal interest ; we should live for others that we may live 
 for ourselves ; even to our enemies we should show love, and 
 not anger ; the unnaturalness of passion is proved by nothing 
 more clearly than by its anti-social and destructive tendencies. 
 Here, also, the three great Stoics of the Roman empire 
 Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius rather than the 
 
 1 Paganism and Christianity, pp. 173-176.
 
 74 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 founders of the school, must be our authorities ; whether it be 
 because their lessons correspond to a more developed state of 
 thought, or simply because they have been more perfectly 
 preserved. The former explanation is, perhaps, the more 
 generally accepted. There seems, however, good reason for 
 believing that the idea of universal -love the highest of all 
 philosophical ideas next to that of the universe itself dates 
 further back than is commonly supposed. It can hardly be 
 due to Seneca, who had evidently far more capacity for 
 popularising and applying the thoughts of others than for 
 original speculation, and who on this subject expresses himself 
 with a rhetorical fluency not usually characterising the exposi- 
 tion of new discoveries. The same remark applies to his illus- 
 trious successors, who, while agreeing with him in tone, do not 
 seem to have drawn on his writings for their philosophy. It is 
 also clear that the idea in question springs from two essen- 
 tially Stoic conceptions : the objective conception of a unified 
 world, a cosmos to which all men belong ; and the subjective 
 conception of a rational nature common to them all. These, 
 again, are rooted in early Greek thought, and were already 
 merging into distinctness at the time of Socrates. Accord- 
 ingly we find that Plato, having to compose a characteristic 
 speech for the Sophist Hippias, makes him say that like- 
 minded men are by nature kinsmen and friends to one another. 
 . . . The most one can say is that the fiction of original 
 liberty was imported into Roman jurisprudence through the 
 agency of Stoic lawyers, and helped to familiarise men's minds 
 with the idea of universal emancipation [i.e. from slavery] 
 before political and economical conditions permitted it to be 
 made a reality." x 
 
 So much, then, for Mr. Kidd's knowledge of the history of 
 morals a knowledge likely to impress only those who can 
 still regard Mr. Lecky as an authority on the question. Of 
 
 1 Benn's Greek Philosophers, vol. ii., pp. 36-40.
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 75 
 
 Mr. Kidd's philosophy and history, however, nothing can be 
 said that would do justice to its futility. If you ask him why 
 the wonderful " force " which came into the world with 
 Christianity took so long to do any good, why it plunged 
 Europe for twelve centuries into the appalling misery and 
 ignorance of the dark ages, he answers that this was necessary 
 " for the sake of the future," that these centuries were " a 
 period in the lifetime of the social organism when the welfare, 
 not only of isolated individuals, but of all the individuals of a 
 long series of generations, was sacrificed to the larger interests 
 of generations at a later and more mature stage" (p. 140); 
 which is more grotesque as an explanation of an historical 
 sequence than anything that even Kingsley perpetrated ; or 
 he will tell us that the ethical system of Christianity was " at 
 a later stage in suitable conditions calculated to raise the people 
 coming under its influence to the highest state of social 
 efficiency ever attained ". He will speak of " the social 
 revolution which it is the destiny of our civilisation to 
 accomplish " ; and he will tell us that this " must proceed .by 
 the most orderly stages, and must reach its completest expres- 
 sion " among the peoples with whom the Reformation move- 
 ment "followed its natural order": as if the Reformation had 
 not followed in each country its " natural order," that is, 
 the only order possible to it under those particular circum- 
 stances : as if, it being our "destiny" to accomplish a certain 
 social revolution, we could do anything else but accomplish 
 it ; and as if his own book were not, on these lines, a pure 
 superfluity. But Mr. Kidd is strong on destinies and forces. 
 In these he lives and moves and has his being. " It is in the 
 period of the post-Reformation development," he tells us, 
 " that it became the destiny of the religious system, upon 
 which our civilisation is founded, to release into the practical 
 life of the world the characteristic product which constitutes such 
 a powerful motive influence enlisted in the cause of progress" 1
 
 76 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 (p. 199) ; which is perhaps the most humorous sentence in a book 
 that is brimful of humorous things. 1 Particularly grotesque, 
 too, are Mr. Kidd's notions of the continuity of history ; his 
 utterances on this point are instructive as coming from the 
 writer who speaks of himself as the student of human history, 
 the biologist, the evolutionist, and who undertakes to bring a 
 vain and erring pseudo-scientific world to a comprehension of 
 the true course of things. First of all he begins with the 
 assumption that " our civilisation," as he calls it, dates from 
 the beginning of the Christian era. Of the influence of pre- 
 Christian thought and civilisation upon modern Europe, he 
 has apparently no conception whatever, though he tells us 
 plainly that in order to understand the last hundred years at 
 all we' must study the centuries that have gone before which 
 is a respectable proposition not open to dispute, though not, 
 perhaps, very new or very illuminative. " It would appear 
 that those who think about these problems, while rightly 
 perceiving that we in reality live in the midst of the most 
 rapid change and progress, forthwith become so impressed 
 with the magnitude of the change, that they overlook the con- 
 nection between the present and the past, and form no true 
 conception of the depth and strength of the impression which 
 the centuries that have preceded our own have produced on 
 the age in which we are living" (p. 130); which would be 
 very distressing if it were true. The only man who " overlooks 
 the connection between the present and the past," however, is 
 Mr. Kidd himself. He speaks of "the essential unity and 
 continuity of the vital process which has been in progress in 
 our civilisation from the beginning," as if this process were not 
 continuous with processes that were in existence before the 
 
 1 In the earlier editions of Mr. Kidd's book it was even worse. It read 
 thus : "... to release into the practical life of the world that product which 
 constitutes the most powerful motive influence ever enlisted in the cause of 
 progress ".
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 77 
 
 Christian era ; while only eight lines later he is actually 
 capable of saying that " in the French nation of the present 
 day we have the extraordinary spectacle of a whole people 
 who have cut themselves off from the past in the ivorld of tliought, 
 almost as completely as they have done in the world of politics" 
 the "essential unity and continuity of the vital process" 
 having- here apparently come to grief, ceasing to be essential, 
 one and continuous. He polishes off the complex history of 
 twelve centuries in a paragraph, with the jaunty formula : 
 " We reach at length the twelfth century ; " and now we learn 
 that " the triumphs of the ancient civilisation are as though 
 they had never existed ; they are not only forgotten ; there is 
 simply no organic continuity between the old life and that which 
 has replaced it" (p. 138). Once more the essential unity and 
 continuity of the vital process has become rather erratic in its 
 conduct. 
 
 Then, in a momentary aberration into correctness, Mr. 
 Kidd gravely tells us that " so far from our civilisation tending 
 to produce an interruption of, or an exception to, the cosmic 
 process which has been in progress from the beginning of life, 
 its distinctive and characteristic feature, he : observes, must 
 be found in the exceptional degree to which it has furthered 
 it " (p. 153). It is, at all events, consoling, after some of Mr. 
 Kidd's utterances, to be assured that the cosmic process is 
 going on all right, and is not in any immediate danger ; and 
 we duly appreciate his warning to some persons, though we 
 cannot say to whom his warning is addressed, to think of the 
 social revolution as one, " the significance of which is perceived 
 to lie, not, as is often supposed, in its tendency to bring about 
 .a condition of society in which the laws of previous development 
 are to. be suspended; but in the fact that it constitutes the last 
 orderly stage in the same cosmic process which has been in 
 
 1 The "he" is "the evolutionist," who, as he " ponders on this process of 
 development," gradually perceives " its immense significance".
 
 78 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 progress in the world from the beginning of life" (p. 159). 
 This also is consoling. But why should a writer so unswerv- 
 ingly, so austerely scientific as this, speak of Christianity as 
 "a force . . . different in nature and potentiality to any of 
 which the ancient world had previous experience" (p. 162)? 
 Why, after telling us that the French Revolution has not " in 
 any way added to or taken from the developmental forces 
 that are shaping" the modern world, should he tell us, only 
 ten lines later, that here was " a force utterly unlike any of 
 which the ancient world had experience" (p. 183), and speak 
 of this humanitarianism as being " a force " peculiar to 
 our civilisation from the beginning, "a force" different in 
 character from any that moved the ancient world (p. 186) ; as 
 if in the ancient world, as well as the modern, there were not 
 thousands of the power-holding classes who sympathised with 
 the hard fate of the poor and lowly ? Why, again, after 
 speaking of the essential unity and continuity of history, 
 should he say of France that " the process of social develop- 
 ment therein, although rapid, has been too irregular, and its 
 people have 'too completely broken with the past to allow of an 
 exact comparison of the relationship to each other of the de- 
 velopmental forces at present at work " (p. 207)? Why, after 
 setting Germany, France, and the United States aside in this 
 manner, as being examples of " irregular " and " disorderly " 
 evolution, outside the line of "orderly" evolution which 
 England has taken, should he tell us that : " Once we have 
 grasped the conception of our civilisation as a developing, 
 organic groivth, with a life-history which must be studied as a 
 whole, we perceive how irrational it is to regard any of the 
 units as independent of the influence of a process which has 
 operated upon society for so many centuries " (p. 258) ? 
 Contradictions and lapses of this sort are common enough in 
 Mr. Kidd's book, and when helped out by an accommodating 
 ignorance of the philosophy of history, go to make an
 
 Mr. Kidds "Social Evolution'". 79 
 
 exceedingly interesting study of pretentious fallacy. As one 
 of his critics says : " To keep this theory [of the beneficial 
 influence of Christianity upon civilisation] in countenance, the 
 thousand years of Chinese Christianity in Byzantium, the 
 absolute stagnation of Christian Abyssinia, and the collapse of 
 Christian Egypt, Africa, Syria, and Spain, before Islam, are 
 sublimely ignored. Mr. Kidd will prove his case if only you 
 let him ignore two-thirds of the leading facts of history, and 
 handle the rest in a fashion which reduces evolutionary science 
 to burlesque." 
 
 Nor is Mr. Kidd any happier in his discussion of ethical 
 developments. Instead of trying to find a scientific reason 
 for the growth of humanitarianism, he calmly attributes it all 
 to Christianity, and speaks of " the religious beliefs upon which 
 our social system is founded," and of " the fund of altruism 
 with which our civilisation is equipped ". Of the real causes 
 of the ethical changes that take place during the evolution of 
 society he could scarcely be expected to know much, these 
 being so obscure as to tax the powers of men of greater learn- 
 ing and finer logical training than he. But he might at least 
 have learned something from Buckle that would have saved 
 him from writing such a passage as this : " It has been the 
 custom to attribute the progress and the success of the move- 
 ment by which the working classes have already obtained a 
 larger share of political power, and through which they are 
 now laying the foundation of a more equal social state, to a 
 variety of causes,- to the spread of education, to the growth 
 of intelligence, to the development of the influence of the 
 press, to the progress of industrialism, to the annihilation of 
 space by the improved means of communication and the in- 
 creased opportunities for organisation resulting, and generally 
 to ' economic tendencies ' of all kinds. But it is primarily 
 due to none of these things. It has its roots in a single cause, 
 namely, the development of the humanitarian feelings, and the
 
 8o Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 deepening and softening of character that has taken place amongst 
 the Western peoples" (pp. 194-195). Or, as he puts it in an- 
 other place, " the real impelling force . . . has its seat in 
 the development the altruistic feelings have attained amongst 
 us" (p. 214). Ask him what has made the altruistic and 
 humanitarian feelings develop in this way, and he can only 
 reply that Christianity has " equipped " our civilisation with a 
 "fund " of them, which fund acts as a "force" when it is 
 " let loose ". This is indeed sublime, and when he tells us, 
 at a later stage, that " one of the most marked and character- 
 istic features of the evolutionary process which has been in 
 progress in our Western civilisation appears to be its tendency 
 to restrain intellectual development" (p. 275), we are compelled 
 to regard him as a melancholy example of the truth of at least 
 one part of his theory. But we can only reiterate that no 
 man is compelled to write a book on social evolution without 
 knowing the labours of those who have gone before him. " It 
 is so hard to write a play in five acts," said the weary French- 
 man, "and so easy not to write one." It is so hard to write a 
 good book on social evolution, and so easy not to write one, 
 we may say to Mr. Kidd. If only he had read Buckle it 
 would have dawned upon him slowly that there are reasons- 
 physical, social, commercial, industrial, military, intellectual 
 for the changes in ethical ideals and ethical practice. He 
 himself seems to have been within measurable distance of 
 stumbling upon the truth by accident in one place. We have 
 already seen that he shuffles away from the difficulty as to 
 the dark ages by saying that Christianity had not yet worked 
 out its "destiny," that the times were unpropitious for it, and 
 so on. Yet when he is compelled to face the fact that in 
 Christian Europe the proletariat were as poor, as miserable, 
 as oppressed as ever they were in pagan Europe, he gets an 
 inkling of something like the real cause, or one of the causes. 
 " No glamour," he writes, " can hide the wretchedness of the
 
 Mr. Kidds " Social Evolution" . 81 
 
 masses of the people throughout the early stages of the history 
 of the present European peoples. Their position was, at best, 
 but one of slavery slightly modified. The worse than animal 
 conditions to which they were subject, the unwholesome food 
 on which they fared, and the state of general destitution in 
 which they lived, must, in all probability, be held to be 
 associated with the general prevalence in Europe late into the 
 middle ages of widely prevalent diseases that have since be- 
 come extinct. The terrible ' plague ' epidemics periodically 
 devastated Europe on a scale and to an extent which the 
 modern world has no experience of, and which we can only 
 very imperfectly realise" (pp. 234, 235). It is in actual con- 
 crete forces like these that we must seek the reasons for the 
 fact that altruism did not spread in those days as it has done 
 in the last two centuries, and not in such pseudo-explanations 
 as that the fund of altruism with which our civilisation is 
 equipped has only just had a fair chance to do something. 
 And if Mr. Kidd had pursued his investigation along these 
 lines he would probably have discovered that the inventions 
 of science and the growth of commerce have had far more to 
 do with the growth of humanitarianism than the moral pre- 
 cepts of half a dozen ancient pious forgeries.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THERE is all the less need to dwell more minutely upon the 
 absurdities of Mr. Kidd's philosophy of history, as many of 
 his critics have called him to task upon the same score. No 
 one, I imagine, with more than a schoolboy's knowledge of 
 history, could be impressed by the chapters in which Mr. 
 Kidd undertakes to prove that a new era began with Chris- 
 tianity, that this introduced a new "force" into the world, 
 which by reason of its " fund of altruism " tended to bring 
 more and more people into the rivalry of life on conditions of 
 equality, and that Christianity has possessed this virtue by 
 reason of its super-rational qualities. The argument is as 
 futile as the history is a priori, and one may well ask whether 
 Mr. Kidd has the slightest understanding of the words he 
 uses, when we find him referring to " the success of those 
 forms which have contributed to the fullest working out of 
 that cosmic process which is proceeding throughout human 
 existence, just as it has been proceeding from the beginning 
 of life " (p. 206) ; as if there were some forms that did not 
 contribute to the " working out of the cosmic process ". Let 
 us, however, proceed to. the consideration of Mr. Kidd's eighth 
 chapter, on " Modern Socialism ". 
 
 " The uprising," he says, " known throughout Europe and 
 in America as the Socialist movement, is the most character- 
 istic product of our time." Few people, however, understand 
 the true meaning and realise the full significance of this move- 
 ment. Mr. Kidd will enlighten them. While the masses on 
 
 (82)
 
 Mr. KidcCs " Social Evolution ". 83 
 
 the one hand are acquiring more extended political and 
 economic rights, the position of the power-holding classes is 
 being silently undermined by the " fund of altruism ". " The 
 real impelling force which lies behind the political advance 
 that we . . . have been making in recent times, has its seat 
 in the development the altruistic feelings have attained 
 amongst us, and in the deepening and softening of character 
 which has accompanied the change" (p. 214). As to what 
 makes the altruistic feelings delevop, Mr. Kidd has of course 
 no reply other than that the " fund " of them with which 
 Christianity supplied " our civilisation " is now being " let 
 loose ". Under this influence the lower and weaker members 
 of the community are being gradually raised into a better 
 position for the struggle for life ; and " the question which 
 now presents itself is : What is the significance of this situa- 
 tion, and of that remarkable period of transition through 
 which political life in England, as in most countries where 
 our civilisation has reached an advanced stage, is passing?" 
 
 The fallacies begin the moment Mr. Kidd attempts to 
 answer his own question. " At the outset," he remarks, 
 " underneath all socialist ideals, there yawns the problem of 
 population. Progress so far in life has always been . . . 
 necessarily associated with the inexorable natural law over 
 which man has no control, and over which he can never hope to 
 have any control, which renders selection necessary, and which, 
 therefore, keeps up the stress of life by compelling every type, 
 as the first condition of progress, to continually press upon 
 and tend to outrun the conditions of existence for the time 
 being " (p. 222). Remembering this, we read on, and find on 
 the next page that " it is not necessary ... to deal at length 
 with the fate of any people" amongst whom restriction of 
 population is practised. " The conditions of selection being- 
 suspended, such a people could not in any case avoid pro- 
 gressive degeneration, even if we could imagine them escaping
 
 84 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 more direct consequences." So that such a community would 
 suspend the inexorable law over which we can never hope to 
 have any control ! It would check progress, although pro- 
 gress " is a necessity from which there is simply no escape " ! 
 Mr. Kidd apparently does not perceive that whether a country 
 produces a hundred thousand or a million new organisms per 
 annum is quite a matter of indifference, so far as natural 
 selection is concerned. The hundred thousand, no less than 
 the million, will react to the stimulus of the environment in 
 varying degrees some efficiently, others inefficiently ; and 
 natural selection will still be the name of the process by which 
 the latter tend to be eliminated at the expense of the former. 
 This, indeed, follows logically enough from Mr. Kidd's own 
 words as to the inexorable nature of selection and progress ; 
 he only blunders when he imagines that any community, by 
 restricting its numbers, can put an end to the law of natural 
 selection. 
 
 The object of the fallacy, however, is easily seen. Mr. 
 Kidd intends in this way to show that only the non-rational 
 forces of religion can be trusted to maintain the struggle for 
 life in all its old crudity and bitterness, and so ensure the 
 continuance of what he calls progress. Thus he is careful to 
 point out that it is no real objection to socialism that it " could 
 not last ". " These are the mere commonplaces which only 
 bring us to the crux of the subject. Impressive as such con- 
 siderations may be to those who have caught the import of 
 the evolutionary science of the time, no greater mistake can 
 be made than to think that they form any practical answer 
 to the arguments of those who would lead us on to socialism. 
 Why ? For the simple reason that, as we have throughout 
 insisted, men are not now and never have been in the least 
 concerned with or influenced by the estimates ^vh^ch scientists or 
 any other class of persons may form of the probable effects of 
 their present conduct on unborn generations" (p. 225), which is
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 85 
 
 indeed an amazing admission for Mr. Kidd to make. He is 
 arguing that to begin a socialist state for the benefit of the 
 individuals of the present generation, would check the stream 
 of progress ; that men will act only in the interests of the 
 present so long as they use their reason on the facts of life, 
 and that the interests of future generations must therefore be 
 secured by a submission to the irrational force of religion. 
 Now either men can be induced, by an appeal to their reason, 
 to act in the interests of future generations, or they cannot. 
 If they can, then Mr. Kidd's thesis is gone ; if they cannot, 
 then what is the meaning of his own book, which is a reasoned 
 appeal to them to do certain things rather than others ? This 
 is not a new fallacy for Mr. Kidd. He has already said that 
 arguments as to the hurtful character, in the long run, of 
 certain social forms, " have never been of the slightest practical 
 importance ; for . . . men in such circumstances are every- 
 where dominated, not by calculations of the supposed effects 
 of their acts or their institutions on unborn generations, but 
 by more immediate considerations of their own personal 
 advantage " (p. 179). And his contention is that it was the 
 non-rational forces of religion that made away with slavery. 
 Be it so, if Mr. Kidd will have it so ; but it only serves to 
 make his own position worse. If the non-rational forces of 
 religion are going to keep a nation from the suicidal policy of 
 limiting its population, let them do so ; but to tell the nation 
 that it ought not to adopt this course, is to appeal to the reason 
 of men, to argue with them that it is more rational to keep 
 the population increasing than to let it decrease. What is 
 Mr. Kidd's book but an attempt to induce men to act " by 
 calculation of the effects of their acts on unborn generations " ? 
 And if he wrote his book knowing that his arguments could 
 not possibly be " of the slightest practical importance," we can 
 only make once more the comment that he supplies an invidi- 
 ous personal example of one of his own theses, that the
 
 86 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 tendency of religion is to restrain intellectual development. 
 The fallacy occurs again and again ; we meet with it on page 
 254, where we are told that "the intellect has no power to 
 effect the subordination " of the interests of the individual to 
 the race, all the while that Mr. Kidd is making an appeal to 
 the intellect ; and again on page 318, where we are told that 
 " the eternal forces that are working out the destiny of the 
 race are continually effecting the subordination of the interests 
 of successive generations of men to those larger interests to 
 ivhich the individual is indifferent, . . ." Mr. Kidd apparently 
 forgetting that the mere writing of his own book is evidence 
 that he at least is not indifferent to these larger social 
 interests, and that 'to endeavour to convince other men that 
 they should follow a certain course of development is a con- 
 futation of his own thesis, that the "eternal forces" are of 
 themselves working out this development in antagonism to 
 the reason of the indifferent individual. 
 
 We need not follow Mr. Kidd through all the weary pages 
 in which he expounds what he imagines to be the true sig- 
 nificance of modern socialism. He sums up that the future 
 development of society " must complete the process of evolu- 
 tion in progress by eventually bringing all the people into the 
 rivalry of life, not only on a footing of political equality, but 
 on conditions of equal social opportunities. This is the end 
 which the developmental forces at work in our civilisation are 
 apparently destined to achieve in the social life of those people 
 amongst whom it is allowed to follow its natural and normal 
 course uninterrupted by disturbing causes " (p. 242). It would 
 be unkind to ask Mr. Kidd what he means by developmental 
 forces, and by the natural course of social development. Let 
 us rather hasten on with him to the conclusion that " we are 
 entering on a new era," in which the people shall have won 
 not only political, but social enfranchisement. It will not, 
 however, be a socialistic era. " The avowed aim of socialism
 
 Mr. KidcC s " Social Evolution' '. 87 
 
 is to suspend that personal rivalry and competition of life 
 which not only is now, but has been from the beginning of 
 life, the fundamental impetus behind (sic) all progress. The 
 inherent tendency of the process of social development now 
 taking place amongst us is (as it has been from the beginning 
 of our civilisation) to raise this rivalry to the very highest 
 degree of efficiency as a condition of progress, by bringing all 
 the people into it on a footing of equality, etc. . . . This is 
 the meaning of that evolutional process which has been 
 slowly proceeding through the history of the Western peoples " 
 (p. 253). So that Mr. Kidd not only knows what the future 
 constitution of society will be', but also sees that our society 
 has had an " inherent tendency " from " the beginning of our 
 civilisation " to carry us to this condition. Then is not his 
 own book somewhat superfluous ? Or if he still holds to it 
 that his book may be of use in helping evolution along, are we 
 to suppose that the birth of Mr. Kidd was one of the facts of 
 history which point, as Mr. Balfour would say, to " preferen- 
 tial action " on the part of God ? For if the " inherent ten- 
 dency" of evolution cannot be trusted, alone, to carry us 
 whither it is bound to carry us, the author of Social Evolution 
 must surely have been designed to assist the inherent ten- 
 dency to do what it is inherently incapable of doing. 
 
 Nor need- we dwell upon the facts that religion is not now, 
 and never has been, by any means synonymous with altruism, 
 and that the great fund of altruism of which Mr. Kidd speaks 
 only seems to have become a great fund in the century when the 
 power of religion is decaying. To this he would probably reply, 
 in his profound philosophical way, that the fund has always 
 been there, but latent ; "and that it has only lately been liberated 
 by the developmental process. Mr. Kidd, I need hardly say, is 
 at liberty to write anything he likes ; but he must not impose 
 upon his readers the difficult task of discovering meanings in 
 phrases that are " full of sound and fury, signifying nothing ".
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 I HAVE already had occasion to remark upon Mr. Kidd's 
 unfortunate habit of repetition. His next chapter entitled 
 " Human Evolution is not Primarily Intellectual " is so far a 
 mere repetition of all that he has previously said on the sub- 
 ject of social development that we need not spend much time 
 oyer its details. He argues, in a curiously inverted way, that 
 those nations have advanced most which have had the best 
 ethical systems; forgetting (i) that ethical systems are as 
 much the product of a civilisation as vice versd ; (2) that since 
 all the nations of Europe have practically the same ethical 
 system, there must be some more specific causes for the differ- 
 ences in their civilisations. When he writes again that " it 
 has not been understood or taken into account that the great 
 deep-seated evolutionary forces at work in society are not 
 operating against religious influences and in favour of the un- 
 controlled sway of the intellect. On the contrary, it seems to 
 be clear that these religious influences have been always and 
 everywhere triumphant in the past, and that it is a first prin- 
 ciple of our social development that they must continue to be 
 in the ascendant to the end, whatever the future may have in 
 store for us," he is very badly confused indeed. If he means 
 that religion is not being undermined by rationalism, he is 
 welcome to that consoling belief, though he will get very few 
 of the clergy to agree with him ; while if he really means 
 that religion is bound " to be in the ascendant to the end," he 
 
 (88)
 
 Mr. KidcTs "Social Evolution'". 89 
 
 might surely have left the " great deep-seated evolutionary 
 forces " to do their own work without his feeble assistance. 
 
 The rest of his chapter is mainly concerned with showing 
 that there has not been that continuous increase in mental 
 development which evolution would lead us to expect. He 
 cites Mr. Galton as to the high intellectual development of 
 the ancient Greeks, and remarks that " if the average mental 
 development reached by the Greeks was so superior to ours as 
 this, we have here a fact the import of which in human evolu- 
 tion has not yet been clearly perceived. If the intellectual 
 ability of the people who developed this extinct civilisation is 
 to be taken as being not only in excess of that of those 
 modern Europeans whose civilisation is winning such an 
 ascendancy in the world to-day, but as being as far Tlbove it 
 as the mental ability of these latter is above that of some of 
 the lowest of the peoples whom they have displaced through 
 the operation of natural selection, then it seems extremely 
 difficult to reconcile this fact with an unshaken belief in any 
 theory according to which intellectual development must be 
 taken as the dominant factor in human evolution " (pp. 272, 
 273). The delicious gravity of it ! and the delicious stupidity ! 
 Who, in the name of all that is holy, ever contended that the 
 most intellectual nation was bound to survive? Evolution 
 proceeds on many lines, and it is no uncommon thing for a 
 highly educated and refined race to go down before barbarism, 
 or before a more highly organised military state. When a 
 sociologist speaks of the importance of intellect in evolution, 
 he simply means that intellect is a powerful factor in the 
 struggle for life ; it is one of the most efficient means of 
 securing wider correspondence between the organism and the 
 environment. He never for a moment imagines that a small 
 and pacific race of high artistic development will be able, in 
 the absence of a good military organisation, to withstand the 
 aggression of a powerful and warlike neighbour. Mr. Kidd
 
 90 Pseuao- Philosophy. 
 
 is simply fighting his own shadow. And if he had ex- 
 amined his thesis more closely he would have seen that in- 
 tellect is in reality just as powerful a factor in the social as 
 n the individual struggle for life. Other things being equal, 
 the savage with a quicker and stronger brain has the advan- 
 tage of his duller fellows ; and other things being equal, the 
 nation with a good average brain development has an advan- 
 tage over nations with a lower brain capacity. And in our 
 modern societies the mass of men can exist, so to speak, on 
 the brains of others. A scientific invention such as the lucifer 
 match can be understood and utilised by a million Europeans 
 who would never be capable of inventing such a thing them- 
 selves ; and the power to utilise inventions of this kind, though 
 it implies no more intrinsic brain capacity than that of the 
 savage, gives the European a 1 very decided advantage in the 
 securing of a correspondence between himself and his environ- 
 ment. Curiously enough, Mr. Kidd has seen, or partially 
 seen, this very point, but without noticing its implications. He 
 has shown that the civilised man can count so much better 
 than the savage, not because his brain is any better, but 
 because our scale of numbers is really a " kind of mental tape- 
 measure, with which we are provided ready-made by the 
 society to which we belong " that is, something equivalent 
 to the mechanical inventions which we can all use when once 
 they have been invented. He quotes with approval the words 
 of Mr. Bellamy : " Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of 
 the thousand of every man's produce are the result of his 
 social inheritance and environment ;" and adds : " This is so ; 
 and it is, if possible, even more true of the work of our brains 
 than of the work of our hands ". Mr. Kidd recognises this, 
 but turns it to the account of the altogether indefensible propo- 
 sition that something else than intellect is the secret of the 
 ascendancy of the Western nations ; while if anything follows 
 from his own demonstration, it is that the second-hand know-
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution" . 91 
 
 ledge of the universe which we derive from the brains of other 
 men is almost as valuable in the struggle for life as if we had 
 obtained it by^ our own effort, and that this constitutes in the 
 secondary, though perhaps not in the primary, sense an 
 advantage over the savage who possesses no social heritage of 
 this kind. Mr. Kidd's absurd explanation of the difference 
 between civilised and uncivilised races is that the former 
 possess "high social qualities," while the latter do not which 
 is really no explanation at all, but simply an inverted form of 
 the fact to be explained. To say that we have a high civilisa- 
 tion because we possess qualities that tend to social efficiency, 
 is equivalent to saying that a man is healthy because he has a 
 body that tends to be strong. 
 
 Mr. Kidd is, of course, leading up to the conclusion that 
 religion has been the prime factor in progress. He imagines 
 that "the Teutonic peoples undoubtedly possess certain 
 equally characteristic qualities, not in themselves intellectual, 
 which contribute in a higher degree to social efficiency, and 
 which having in view the manner in which natural selection 
 is operating and the direction in which the evolution of the 
 race is proceeding must apparently be pronounced to be 
 greatly more important than these merely intellectual 
 qualities " (p. 299). The English and the Germans, in fact, 
 are more religious than the French, while in the French mind 
 "there is an indefinite something . . . of a distinctly high 
 intellectual order which is not native to either the German or 
 the English peoples ". To explain racial differences by the 
 fact of race is now generally recognised to be what John Stuart 
 Mill said it was the most vulgar of all ways of evading the 
 real question as to what has made races different. Mr. Kidd's 
 pages are yet another illustration that he has still to learn the 
 very elements of his subject ; and while no one would think 
 of arguing against so absurd a set of propositions at this 
 time of day, all will join in the wish that Mr. Kidd, before
 
 92 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 he began to write on sociology, had learned something of 
 the work of sociologists. 
 
 France is of course taken as an example of the dreadful 
 effects of intellectual prudence, as shown in the voluntary 
 keeping of the population within due limits. Mr. Kidd blindly 
 assumes that France is of " lower social efficiency " than 
 Germany or England, being evidently ignorant of the state 
 of civilisation in France or anywhere else for that matter 
 and of the real concrete causes that have made the population 
 question press upon France earlier than upon us. In his 
 hodman's way he disposes of the whole question by the mere 
 application of one senseless formula that we are more 
 socially efficient than the French because we have qualities 
 that tend to greater social efficiency, these qualities being at 
 bottom religious and irrational. And in any case Mr. Kidd's 
 own arguments are self-subversive. He speaks of the checking 
 of the population as due to the " enlightened selfishness in 
 the individual which must always lead him to rank his own 
 interests, or those of his immediate belongings, in the actual 
 present before the wider and entirely different interests of the 
 longer-lived social organism to which he belongs " ; as if the 
 population were not checked in France as much in the in- 
 terest of future generations as of the present. As for the 
 phrase about the " interests of the social organism," we have 
 already seen that to be meaningless, the interest of the " social 
 organism " having no existence apart from the interests of 
 the individuals composing it. And finally, if reason should 
 not be used in social matters, since reason tends to make us 
 take thought for the morrow, and so impede the " inexorable 
 law " of progress, how is the situation bettered by Mr. Kidd's 
 book ? He tells us, in the interests of the future, that \ve 
 must not reason about the future ; he tells us that the only 
 way to be sure we are in line with the cosmic process is not 
 to reason about it, although he has to reason with us to get
 
 Mr. KidcCs " Social Evolution" . 93 
 
 us to see that we must not reason ; and his own way of 
 securing the continuance of progress, i.e., of taking thought 
 for the morrow, is to recommend us not to take thought for 
 the morrow. And when, at the conclusion of the chapter, he 
 gravely talks some portentous nonsense about the anabolism 
 and katabolism of societies, we are compelled to admonish 
 him that a profound scientific theory is not to be built up 
 in these days by combining a smattering of scientific terms, 
 that might be picked up any evening by a sharp boy at a 
 mechanics' institute, with a capacity for illogical error that 
 would disgrace any of Mr. Kidd's most admired historians.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THOUGH there remains yet another chapter in Mr. Kidd's 
 book, it contains practically nothing that he has not said too 
 many times already. He imagines that " when the application 
 of the principles of evolutionary science to history comes to 
 be fully understood," i.e., as it is by Mr. Benjamin Kidd, there 
 will be a great revolution in our ideas of human development ; 
 and he exhibits once more his own ignorance of history and 
 sociology by supposing that until now men have regarded 
 human history " as a bewildering exception to the reign of 
 universal law ". He repeats his argument that " the forces 
 which are at work in the evolution of society are certainly, on 
 the whole, working out the greatest good of the greatest 
 number in a progressive community. But . . . the greatest 
 good which the evolutionary forces . . . are working out, 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 in- 
 dividuals are absolutely indifferent" (p. 313). One finally 
 wearies of pointing out the imbecile there is no other word 
 for them self-contradictions of Mr. Kidd. For the last time, 
 if the evolutionary forces are working out the good of the 
 social organism, they can very well be left alone at their task ; 
 if these forces are " certainly, on the whole," carrying out the 
 work they have been engaged on since the beginning of life, 
 nothing that we can do will hinder them ; if Mr. Kidd thinks 
 of the interests of unborn generations, they cannot be said to 
 
 (94)
 
 Mr. Kidd's " Social Evolution ". 95 
 
 be unthought of; if he cares about their interests, it cannot 
 be said that existing individuals are absolutely indifferent to 
 them ; and if he induces other people to think about the 
 future, after telling them that they must not think of the 
 future, if he hopes to induce men to be guided by his reason- 
 ing in those actions which affect future generations, after 
 laying it down that men are not and never have been in- 
 fluenced in these matters by any thought of the future, he is 
 simply confuting his own book and holding himself up to 
 ridicule. 
 
 Thus the dreary stream of fallacy and absurdity flows on. 
 He explains the process of development in the modern world 
 by the fact that the process of development has produced this 
 development (p. 319). He speaks of "the release into our 
 social life of an immense and all-pervading (sic) fund of 
 altruistic feeling, which has provided the real motive force 
 behind the whole onward movement with which our age is 
 identified" (p. 321), while all the time his own argument 
 against " the self-asserting rationalism of the individual " im- 
 plies that this " fund " is anything but " all-pervading ". He 
 imagines that this abundance of altruism has been generated 
 in us by Christianity, and that what distinguishes Christianity 
 from all other religions is the essential (sic) spirit that under- 
 lies (sic) it (p. 320). I cheerfully admit that a religion which 
 has its essence underneath it is indeed something distinct 
 from all others. And after all his talk about Christianity and 
 altruism, and of the extent to which the latter is indebted to 
 the former, it turns out that " when we turn to those peoples 
 amongst whom the religious movement of the sixteenth 
 century was interrupted or suppressed, and amongst whom 
 the Latin form of Christianity .prevails, we find that the 
 situation is not exactly the same. Amongst these people the 
 idea of the innate equality of all men, with the consequent 
 conception of the fundamental right of all to equal oppor-
 
 96 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 tunities, which is the peculiar product of the ethical system on 
 which our civilisation is founded, has practically reached the 
 same development as elsewhere. But the profound change 
 in social character which has accompanied this development, 
 amongst the Anglo-Saxon peoples, for instance, has not pro- 
 ceeded so far. The deepening of individual character, result- 
 ing in a certain inbred sense of integrity, which has rendered 
 the sense of wrong intolerable, and the softening process 
 which has made the Anglo-Saxon peoples so sensitive to the 
 sight of misery or suffering, have not progressed to the same 
 extent" (p. 324). The handsome tribute to the Anglo-Saxon 
 race, to which, by a curious coincidence, Mr. Kidd himself 
 belongs, may be passed over as so much vulgar elap-trap ; 
 but what are we to think of a writer who tells us in one 
 breath that Christianity is the motive force behind civilisation, 
 and in the next that Christianity has only wrought for high 
 civilisation in some places and not in others ? Thus on his 
 own admission, Christianity, though the "principle of life" 
 that was destined to work out the progress of the Western 
 nations, failed to produce anything but stagnation for many 
 hundreds of years, and then produces an altruistic civilisation 
 only in that race which has the good fortune to claim Mr. 
 Kidd as its own. Any one not incurably stupid would have 
 seen that, on such terms as these, it is rank nonsense to speak 
 of Western civilisation as being " based " on the ethical system 
 of Christianity ; and when Mr. Kidd tells us that the English 
 people alone have undergone " a natural and orderly develop- 
 ment," while among other nations the development has been 
 neither natural nor orderly, he is talking such sheer nonsense 
 that one apologises for reprinting it. His remarks on the 
 different histories of the nations since the Reformation are a 
 perpetual see-saw of ignorance and fatuity. It was among 
 the Anglo-Saxons alone, apparently, that the altruistic re- 
 ligion followed its " natural course " ; yet it was among these
 
 Mr. Kidd' s " Social Evolution ". 97 
 
 self-same Anglo-Saxons that negro slavery began and ulti- 
 mately grew to such enormous proportions. Mr. Kidd 
 imagines that what made the slave trade finally intolerable 
 and led to its suppression was the altruism generated in the 
 Anglo-Saxon race by Christianity ; what had become of 
 Christian altruism during the years when the slave trade 
 flourished, he apparently has no wish to tell us. If the 
 question were put to him, he would probably reply that 
 Christianity has only just begun to fulfil its " destiny ". 
 
 But enough of Mr. Kidd's fallacies. The remainder of his 
 final chapter is occupied with a forecast of the future state of 
 civilisation, in which the Anglo-Saxon race is to be pre- 
 dominant, and the tropics are to be administered from the 
 temperate zones. Of the concrete physical and physiological 
 causes of the decline of the lower races before the higher in 
 some quarters of the globe, he has of course not a shadow of 
 an idea. He would explain the dying-out of the Maoris, for 
 example, by the fact that they are not socially so efficient as 
 the English, a form of the circulus in probando to which Mr. 
 Kidd is very much addicted. And we may safely decline to 
 follow him in his prognostications of the future of the world. 
 The man who can turn out such a book as his on the history 
 of the past is not exactly the most reliable guide as to the 
 future. In any case it is time we took leave of him. His 
 book has had almost unbroken praise from one reviewer after 
 another, which is in itself a sign of the ease with which any 
 system of fallacy, so long as it is made to serve the interests 
 of religion, will still be swallowed by the average Anglo- 
 Saxon. In a sense, then, Mr. Kidd was right when, in a 
 lucubration which he facetiously called a reply to his critics, 1 
 he told us that there was no sociology in England at present. 
 If that remark be taken to apply to the bulk of those who 
 reviewed his book so euldgistically, it is certainly correct. 
 1 In the Nineteenth Century for February, 1895. 
 
 7
 
 98 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 The fallacies of it lie so nakedly on the surface that any one 
 who is unable to see them must be as fundamentally illogical 
 as Mr. Kidd himself; while those who failed to see the 
 grotesque absurdity of his philosophy of history are indeed 
 hopeless. What is the upshot of his book ? I give it in the 
 concise summary of Mr. Robertson : 
 
 " People who carefully apply reason to their way of life, 
 like the ancient Greeks and the modern French, tend to decline in 
 power and to die out. To prevent the application of reason to 
 the problems of life, then, is the course seen by reason to be 
 rational ; and in order to succeed in this course we must reason- 
 ably -maintain an unreasonable religious system. Systematic 
 socialism and systematic individualism are alike ruinously 
 rational, being alike the expression of the wish of the individual 
 to better his lot, which wish always prevents future betterment. 
 We must therefore take thought for the morrow by not taking 
 thought for the morrow, but follow those blind instincts which 
 our other instincts tell us ought not to be followed ; and to keep 
 everything on right lines we must believe in a religion which we 
 have no reason for believing." 
 
 It is the writer who has so laboriously made himself ridicu- 
 lous who tells us that the time has not yet come to answer 
 his critics. There has been, he says, " scarcely any attempt 
 to deal with the book as an organic unity " ; though he admits 
 that many critics have attacked certain positions in detail. 
 Yet he neither attempts to deal with these, nor to answer the 
 few who have, on his own admission, dealt with the book " as 
 an organic unity". The only inference possible is that he is 
 simply incapable of answering them. He was told by many 
 that his history was just second-hand ignorance ; yet he 
 makes no attempt to prove his critics wrong, or to justify his 
 own historical philosophy. And the reader who has been exas- 
 perated at Mr. Kidd's ignorance of history, and at the blind 
 eagerness with which he snatches at any dictum from Mr.
 
 Mr. Kidd s " Social Evolution ". 99 
 
 Lecky or Mr. Mahaffy that may help to prove his point, heed- 
 less of the other dicta in which these writers contradict the 
 first, must learn with amazement that Mr. Kidd had been 
 studying his subject for ten years before he wrote upon it. It 
 is safe to say that such reading as he has done could be got 
 through by any fairly intelligent man in less than ten weeks ; 
 and in that time he would certainly have seen that the thesis 
 of Social Evolution, instead of being the discovery Mr. Kidd 
 imagines it to be, is as old as reaction itself. As I have pointed 
 out, it is nothing more than a resuscitation, in- the garb of 
 modern pseudo-science, of the old antithesis between the 
 intellect and the emotions, between the head and the heart. 
 Mr. Kidd must have read singularly little in his ten years of 
 study if he failed to become aware of this ; and as it lies on 
 the face of his book that he knows absolutely nothing at first 
 hand of Greek, Roman, or mediaeval civilisation, that he is as 
 ignorant of psychology as if that science were not yet born, 
 and that he is quite unable even to see when he is contradict- 
 ing himself, one can only sum him up by saying that such a 
 mind as his is essentially incapable of any scientific work 
 whatever. Professor Sidgwick concluded that Mr. Kidd had 
 left social science where he found it ; J to which criticism the 
 only objection is that Mr. Kidd never did find it. His book is 
 indeed what one of his critics has called it the most ignorant 
 book of modern times. 
 
 1 See National Review, December, 1894.
 
 MR. DRUMMOND'S ASCENT OF MAN.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 To pass from Mr. Kidd to Mr. Henry Drummond is to pass 
 from the atmosphere of mere fallacy to the atmosphere of 
 theological fallacy, which, if it is somewhat denser, has the 
 compensating quality of being infinitely more exhilarating to 
 the non-theological mind. Eleven years ago Mr. Drummond 
 distinguished himself by the publication of his Natural Law 
 in the Spiritual World a volume which was assiduously 
 boomed at the time by the orthodox press, and which has 
 now deservedly gone the way of all fustian. His present per- 
 formance is easily recognisable as having come from the same 
 brain ; it exhibits the same gift for expounding the scientific 
 doctrines of other men, the same faculty of cheerful para- 
 logism, the same breadth and serenity of fallacy. Altogether, 
 Mr. Drummond is decidedly more interesting reading than 
 Mr. Kidd. The latter's errors are merely those of a well- 
 meaning man utterly unfitted by nature and by training to 
 write a thoughtful book ; Mr. Drummond's fallacies have a 
 charm that is only found in the books that have a distinctly 
 theological purpose. Of which, however, more anon. 
 
 Mr. Drummond, like Mr. Kidd, begins by mounting the 
 tripod and flinging his prophetic garment round him in folds 
 of majestic severity. He also has to complain that up to the 
 time when, unable to keep any longer from the public the 
 great thoughts that were gestating within him, he resolved to 
 write and publish The Ascent of Man, our reading of evolu- 
 tion was painfully and hopelessly inadequate. " Though its 
 
 (103)
 
 1 04 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 standpoint is evolution and its subject man," he writes in his 
 preface, " this book is far from being designed to prove that 
 man has relations, compromising or otherwise, with lower 
 animals. Its theme is ascent, not descent. It is a history, 
 not an argument. And evolution, in the narrow sense in 
 which it is often used when applied to man, plays little part in 
 the drama outlined here. So far as the general scheme of 
 evolution is introduced, . . . the object is the important one 
 of pointing out how its nature has been misconceived indeed 
 how its greatest factor has been overlooked in almost all con- 
 temporary scientific thinking. Evolution was given to the 
 modern world out of focus, was first seen by it out of focus, 
 and has remained out of focus to the present hour. Its 
 general basis has never been re-examined since the time of 
 Mr. Darwin ; and not only such speculative sciences as teleo- 
 logy, but working sciences like sociology, have been led astray 
 by a fundamental omission. An evolution theory drawn to 
 scale, and with the lights and shadows properly adjusted 
 adjusted to the whole truth and reality of nature and of man 
 is needed at present as a standard for modern thought ; 
 and though a reconstruction of such magnitude is not here 
 presumed, a primary object of these pages is to supply at least 
 the accents for such a scheme." And, as he complains a little 
 further on, " singular though the omission may seem, no con- 
 nected outline of this great drama [of evolution] has yet been 
 given us " (p. 2). 
 
 Here again, as in the case of Mr. Kidd, it will not be 
 unprofitable to inquire what are the qualifications of the 
 writer who thus condemns the work of his predecessors, and 
 volunteers to give us the true key to the comprehension of 
 the drama of the universe. Of Mr. Drummond's former 
 ludicrous performance Natural Law in the Spiritual World 
 it is charity at this time of day to say nothing ; but the 
 selection of a few sentences from the present volume, typical
 
 Mr. Drummond's " Ascent of Man ". 105 
 
 of Mr. Drummond's habit of thought, will perhaps afford the 
 reader an opportunity of judging of the scope and quality of 
 his mind, and thence a means of forecasting the likelihood of 
 such a mind completing the ambitious task that has been set 
 it. Mr. Drummond's method of exposition is, if anything, 
 even more aggravating than Mr. Grant Allen's ; if the latter's 
 method is, as one of his reviewers said of it, that of a certifi- 
 cated science teacher lecturing to a mechanics' institute, 
 Mr. Drummond's is that of a curate with a fatal felicity in 
 vapid epigram talking to the debating society of a Young 
 Men's Christian Association. Here are some characteristic 
 examples : 
 
 " Every step in the proof of the oneness in a universal 
 evolutionary process of this divine humanity of ours is a step 
 in the proof of the divinity of all lower things " (p. 3). Any- 
 body but Mr. Drummond would see that if everything is 
 divine nothing is divine. 
 
 " Evolution involves not so much a change of opinion as a 
 change in man's whole view of the world and of life. It is 
 not the statement of a mathematical proposition which men 
 are called upon to declare true or false. It is a method of 
 looking upon nature. Science for centuries devoted itself to 
 the cataloguing of facts and the discovery of laws. Each 
 worker toiled in his own little place the geologist in his 
 quarry, the botanist in his garden, the biologist in his labor- 
 atory, the astronomer in his observatory, the historian in his 
 library, the archaeologist in his museum. Suddenly these 
 workers looked up ; they spoke to one another ; they had 
 each discovered a law ; they whispered its name. It was 
 Evolution. Henceforth their work was one, science was one, 
 the world was one, and mind, which discovered the oneness, 
 was one" (p. u). From which it would appear that Mr. 
 Drummond cannot even write a paragraph of platitudes and 
 fatuities without being melodramatic.
 
 io6 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 " That the struggle for life has been a prominent actor in 
 the drama is certain. Further research has only deepened the 
 impression of the magnitude and universality of this great 
 and far-reaching law. But that it is the sole or even the main 
 agent in the process of Evolution must be denied. Creation 
 is a drama, and no drama was ever put upon the stage with 
 only one actor. The struggle for life is the ' Villain ' of the 
 piece, no more ; and, like the ' Villain ' in the play, its chief 
 function is to react upon the other players for higher ends " (p. 
 17) ; which is the epigrammatic curate with a vengeance. 
 
 " There [i.e., in the hour of birth] is the opportunity of 
 Evolution. There is an opening appointed in the physical order 
 for the introduction of a moral order. If there is more in 
 nature than the selfish struggle for life the secret can now be 
 told. Hitherto, the world belonged to the food -seeker, the 
 self-seeker, the struggler for life, the father. Now is the hour 
 of the mother" (p. 22). 
 
 " The struggle for the life of others is sunk as deep in the 
 ' cosmic process ' as the struggle for life ; 1 the struggle for life 
 has a share in the 'ethical process' as much as the struggle for 
 the life of others. Both are cosmic processes ; both are ethical 
 processes ; both are both cosmical and ethical processes " (p. 30). 
 
 " But what if morality be the main product of the cosmical 
 system of even the cosmical system ? What if it can be 
 shown that it is the essential and not the incidental result of 
 it, and that so far from being a by-product, it is immorality 
 that is the by-product?" (p. 33). 
 
 "If Evolution is simply a method of creation, why was 
 this very extraordinary method chosen ?" (p. 47). 
 
 These few elegant extracts, culled at random from the 
 introduction to Mr. Drummond's book, are typical of him. 
 
 1 This, be it remembered, after the preceding rhapsody about altruism 
 coming in with mothers, about " the opportunity of evolution," and about the 
 " opening appointed in the physical order for the introduction of a moral order".
 
 Mr. Drummond' s " Ascent of Man ". 107 
 
 Here again, as in the case of Mr. Kidd, we may feel inclined 
 to ask at the outset what are the chances of a mind of this 
 order throwing any new light on the theory of evolution, or 
 even of seeing what light already exists. After the anxious 
 exordium of the preface, in which Mr. Drummond, weary of 
 the errors of all preceding evolutionists, yearns to reconstruct 
 the whole theory on its true basis, one really feels somewhat 
 disappointed at meeting in the first fifty pages with fatuities 
 like those quoted above. Yet this is not to be understood 
 as implying that Mr. Drummond's theories are not interesting. 
 They have an interest all their own, and are well worth look- 
 ing at as a study in theological biology. For Mr. Drum- 
 mond courageously accepts the whole main body of evolution- 
 ary science as quite proven. In the early Darwinian days it 
 was the theological fashion to deride the theory of evolution 
 and to insult its adherents, as when the vulgar bishop brought 
 upon himself the dignified rebuke of Huxley. But the times 
 are changed. The theologians, learning the folly of denying 
 what every one else is asserting, have not only accepted the 
 evolutionary theory in its entirety, but have come to claim 
 it as their own ; the very God in whose name evolution was 
 denied has now become the " God of evolution " ; and theo- 
 logians like Mr. Lyman Abbott are not above assuring us 
 that God himself is subject to the evolutionary process. To 
 this school of contrition, then, Mr. Drummond may be said to 
 belong. It being impossible to deny evolution now as it was 
 denied thirty years ago, the only alternative is to accept it in 
 its scientific aspect and quarrel with its philosophy. That 
 religion should have been worsted in this its latest conflict 
 with science is rather distressing, but the day may yet be 
 won, a defeat may yet be turned into a victory, by enlisting 
 biology in the service of teleology, by turning evolution to the 
 account of religion. Let us follow Mr. Drummond in his 
 attempted performance of this feat.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " IF evolution can be proved to include man," he begins by 
 remarking, "the whole course of evolution and the whole 
 scheme of nature from that moment assume a new signi- 
 ficance. The beginning must then be interpreted from the 
 end, not the end from the beginning. An engineering work- 
 shop is unintelligible until we reach the room where the 
 completed engine stands. Everything culminates in that final 
 product, is contained in it, is explained by it. The evolution 
 of man is also the complement and corrective (sic) of all other 
 forms of evolution. From this height only is there a full 
 view, a true perspective, a consistent world. The whole 
 mistake of naturalism has been to interpret nature from the 
 standpoint of the atom to study the machinery which drives 
 this great moving world simply as machinery, forgetting that 
 the ship has any passengers, or the passengers any captain, or 
 the captain any course" (p. 12). Thus early and thus ingenu- 
 ously, by means of a couple of analogies, does Mr. Drummond 
 begin his task of making biology teleological. Surely it 
 scarcely needs to be pointed out that Mr. Drummond's 
 analogies have the common defect of all analogical reasoning, 
 together with other defects of their own ? For there is 
 absolutely no analogy between the machine and the work- 
 room on one hand and man and nature on the other, or 
 between the course of evolution and the course of a ship. 
 The essence of the former illustration is that we know the 
 
 purpose of the machine because we are external to it, and 
 
 (i 08)
 
 Mr. Drummonc? 's "Ascent of Man". 109 
 
 because the machine is made in obedience to our purpose, to 
 supply the end for which we designed it. In the case of the 
 ship, again, its course is definite and comprehensible, because 
 we have arranged it with the end already in our minds. But 
 who can look upon evolution, upon nature and man in this 
 way ? We are not external to the course of evolution, as we 
 are external to the ship, but part and parcel of it part of a 
 process which began ages before man existed upon the globe, 
 and which will continue ages after he has vanished from it. 
 We are not the final shapely fruit of nature, as the machine is 
 the final shapely form of the shapeless fragments in the work- 
 shop, but merely one among a million other forms, superior to 
 them in the one faculty of mind, but, like them, the product 
 and the battle-ground of impersonal cosmic forces, and of no 
 more importance in the story of cosmic evolution as a whole 
 than they are. And to talk of obtaining from the present 
 stage of development of man " a full view, a true perspective " 
 of evolution, is to ignore the fact that man himself is still 
 evolving along with all the other forms of life, and that 
 whatever ground there might be for a hypothetical last man 
 indulging in reflections upon the inner meaning of human 
 evolution, the indulgence in such reflections on our part is a 
 mere form of imaginative recreation. So that when Mr. 
 Drummond says that " the mistake of naturalism has been to 
 interpret nature from the standpoint of the atom," instead of 
 beginning with " the final product, man," he is simply confus- 
 ing his analogies in the interests of his religion. Naturalism 
 merely " interprets nature from the standpoint of the atom " 
 in that it reduces to scientific form our varied knowledge of 
 the universe, and arguing back from effect to cause, from 
 complex to simple, finds in " the atom," as Mr. Drummond 
 calls it, a point from which we can run lines of connection 
 through everything that exists. With " interpretation," in the 
 teleological sense in which Mr. Drummond uses the word.
 
 1 1 o Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 naturalism has simply nothing to do. Interpretations of this 
 sort come only from the theist, who, accustomed as he is to 
 reading a divine purpose into everything, must needs assume 
 an intimate acquaintance with the intentions of the Great 
 Artificer, and point to man as the final point up to which 
 evolution has all along been working. But if the ordinary 
 theistic reading of a purpose into the order of events in the 
 cosmos is illegitimate, it is none the less illegitimate when the 
 object is to show that because we are accustomed to look 
 upon man as the "highest" product of evolution, therefore 
 through him can be comprehended the " meaning " of the 
 cosmic life. The very words " meaning " and " interpretation " 
 are themselves illegitimate. 
 
 " But it is not so much in ignoring man," Mr. Drummond 
 continues, " that evolutionary philosophy has gone astray ; for 
 of that error it has seriously begun to repent. What we have 
 now to charge against it, what is a main object of these pages 
 to point out, is, that it has misread nature itself. In ' fixing 
 on a part ' whereby to ' reconstruct the ultimate,' it has fixed 
 upon a part which is not the most vital part, and the recon- 
 structions, therefore, have come to be wholly out of focus " 
 (p. 15). This error has consisted in regarding the struggle 
 for life as "the governing factor in development". There is, 
 however, " a second factor, which one might venture to call the 
 struggle for the life of others, which plays an equally important 
 part. Even in the early stages of development its contribu- 
 tion is as real, while in the world's later progress, under the 
 name of altruism, it assumes a sovereignty before which the 
 earlier struggle sinks into insignificance. That this second 
 form of struggle should all but have escaped the notice of 
 evolutionists is the more unaccountable, since it arises, like 
 the first, out of those fundamental functions of living organ- 
 isms which it is the main business of biological science to 
 investigate. The functions discharged by all living things,
 
 Mr. Drummond's " Ascent of Man ". 1 1 1 
 
 plant and animal, are two in number. The first is nutrition, 
 the second is reproduction. The first is the basis of the 
 struggle for life ; the second, of the struggle for the life of 
 others. These two functions run their parallel course or 
 spiral course, for they continuously intertwine from the very 
 dawn of life. They are involved in the fundamental nature 
 of protoplasm itself. . . . Yet, in constructing the fabric of 
 evolution, one of these has been taken, the other left" (pp. 
 17, 18). 
 
 This is Mr. Drummond's short and easy method with 
 biology. Because when an organism feeds itself it feeds 
 itself, and when it reproduces another organism it reproduces 
 another, the first of these processes is purely egoistic, the 
 second purely altruistic ! You have only got to assume, as 
 blandly as Mr. Drummond, that nutrition is wholly self- 
 regarding, and reproduction wholly other-regarding, and the 
 trick is done ; you have assumed all you have to prove, and 
 the course of the argument is henceforth smooth. Even Mr. 
 Drummond, in an unusually thoughtful moment, becomes 
 aware that reproduction, qua reproduction, scarcely deserves 
 all the good things he has said of it. " To say that reproduc- 
 tion is synonymous with the struggle for the life of others 
 conveys at first little meaning, for the physiological aspects 
 of the function persist in the mind, and make even a glimpse 
 of its true character difficult. . . . Suffice it for the moment to 
 say that the physiological aspects of the struggle for the life 
 of others are so overshadowed even towards the close of the 
 animal kingdom by the psychical and ethical that it is scarcely 
 necessary to emphasise the former at all. One's first and 
 natural association with the struggle for the life of others is 
 with something done for posterity in the plant the struggle 
 to produce seeds, in the animal to beget young. But this is 
 a preliminary which, compared with what directly and in- 
 directly rises out of it, may be almost passed over. The
 
 1 1 2 Pseudo- Philosophy, 
 
 significant note is ethical, the development of other-ism, as 
 altruism its immediate and inevitable outcome" (pp. 21, 22). 
 In other and less sophistical words, while nutrition is always 
 egoistic, reproduction is not always altruistic although Mr. 
 Drummond's argument, if it is to be worth anything what- 
 ever, ought to prove that as nutrition is egoistic, qua nutrition, 
 reproduction is altruistic, qua reproduction. Altruism has an 
 ethical meaning, or it has no meaning at all ; and if Mr. 
 Drummond wishes us to believe that altruism has its root in 
 the reproductive function, he should give us some evidence in 
 support of his theory. Instead of doing that, he first of all 
 makes the bland assumption that nutrition = egoism and re- 
 production = altruism, and then calmly assures us that repro- 
 duction is not really altruism, i.e., ethical in content until 
 we come to otherwise ethical beings ! In all but the lower 
 plant and animal kingdoms "the physiological aspects of the 
 struggle for the life of others are so overshadowed ... by the 
 psychical and ethical that it is scarcely necessary to emphasise 
 the former at all " ! And the purely physiological, i.e., non- 
 ethical, character of reproduction in the lower organisms is. 
 " a preliminary which may be almost passed over " ! And 
 though the "significant note is ethical," this "significant 
 note " is not heard at the beginning of the music, but only 
 towards the end, where it has already begun to be sounded 
 by other instruments than the one of which it is supposed to 
 be the significant note ! And all the while, be it observed,. 
 Mr. Drummond has not given a word of evidence in support 
 of the theory that egoism is the concomitant of nutrition and 
 altruism of reproduction ; nor has he noticed the futility of 
 speaking of altruism as "ethical" as if egoism were not 
 equally an -ethical factor. 
 
 " All along the line," he goes on, " through the whole 
 course of the development, these two functions act and react 
 upon one another ; and continually as they co-operate to pro-
 
 Mr. Drummond' s "Ascent of Man ". 113 
 
 duce a single result, their specific differences are never lost. 
 The first, the struggle for life, is, throughout, the self-regard- 
 ing function ; the second, the other-regarding function. The 
 first, in lower nature, obeying the law of self-preservation, 
 devotes its energies to feed itself ; the other, obeying the law 
 of species-preservation, to feed its young. While the first 
 develops the active virtues of strength and courage, the other 
 lays the basis for the passive virtues, sympathy and love. In 
 the later world one seeks its end in personal aggrandisement, 
 the other in ministration. One begets competition, self- 
 assertion, war ; the other unselfishness, self-effacement, peace. 
 One is individualism, the other altruism" (pp. 24, 25). 
 
 Here the confusion of terms is more than ever apparent. 
 Why is it so confidently laid down that nutrition engenders 
 egoism, and reproduction altruism ? Let us take a concrete 
 case. A tigress seeks her food, and finds it in an antelope. 
 That, according to Mr. Drummond, is the struggle for life, 
 mere egoism. The tigress then produces cubs. This, Mr. 
 Drummond tells us, is the struggle for the life of others, 
 altruism, or at any rate the stuff out of which altruism is after- 
 wards made. But every fresh case of reproduction simply 
 involves another struggle for nutrition, i.e., implies more 
 egoism, as Mr. Drummond would put it. For how are the 
 tiger-cubs to be kept alive? By food. And where and how 
 is the food to be obtained ? By the parent's filching it from 
 other tigers, or by preying upon weaker organisms. This is 
 certainly altruism with a vengeance ! And when the tiger- 
 cubs grow up, the old struggle for life becomes keener than 
 ever. On the terms of Mr. Drummond's argument, the more 
 cubs the more altruism. But since the cubs must have food, 
 it follows that the more cubs the more egoism ! And if all 
 other organisms go on reproducing to their fullest, i.e., 
 giving full play to their altruistic instincts, the conflict will be 
 all the keener, and the result will be an increase of egoism !
 
 1 14 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 Nay, a too altruistic tiger, that forbore to dismember an ante- 
 lope, would soon perish and make way for a tiger not so 
 afflicted with other-ism. Mr. Drummond's identification of 
 nutrition with egoism, and reproduction with altruism, is in 
 fact a mere confusion of terms, due to the use of the un- 
 fortunate phrase " struggle for the life of others ". Why 
 struggle ? The struggle for self is conceivably a characteristic 
 of organic nature. But what is the struggle for others, so 
 far as this is "synonymous with reproduction"? Who are 
 the " others," in the first place? If tiger A preys upon ante- 
 lope B, where is the altruism in A producing offspring to 
 prey upon the offspring of B ? To call this an altruistic 
 struggle for the life of others is simply to blunder over the 
 meanings both of " struggle " and of " others ". 
 
 This, of course, involves no denial of the fact that altruism, 
 or the physiological elements from which altruism develops, 
 has a place in the lower organisms. It simply means that 
 .Mr. Drummond's argument is illegitimate, in that it crudely 
 identifies nutrition with one ethical factor and reproduction 
 with another, and puts an extraneous ethical interpretation 
 upon a purely physiological function by using the phrase 
 "struggle for the life of others". He only shows that repro- 
 duction is altruistic by assuming it ; he only shows that it is 
 " other-regarding " by saying it is equivalent to struggling for 
 others. And his attempt at scientific completeness in the 
 phrase that both tendencies spring from the same protoplasm 
 is simply superfluous futility. Where else could they con- 
 ceivably spring from ? 
 
 " To say that no ethical content," he continues, "can be 
 put into the discharge of either function in the earlier reaches 
 of Nature goes without saying. But the moment we reach a 
 certain height in the development, ethical implications begin 
 to arise. These, in the case of the first, have been read into 
 Nature, lower as well as higher, with an exaggerated and
 
 Mr. Drummond 1 s "Ascent of Man" . 115 
 
 merciless malevolence. The other side has received almost no 
 expression. The final result is a picture of Nature wholly 
 painted in shadow a picture so dark as to be a challenge to 
 its Maker, an unanswered problem to philosophy, an abiding 
 offence to the moral nature of man. The world has been held 
 up to us as one great battlefield heaped up with the slain, an 
 Inferno of infinite suffering, a slaughter-house resounding with 
 the cries of a ceaseless agony" (p. 25). 
 
 Here, it will be observed, Mr. Drummond is beginning to 
 tread upon dangerous ground ; he is upon the old crux of all 
 theisms the problem of evil and suffering. How he evades 
 the difficulty will appear in the sequel. His first move is to 
 turn upon Huxley, and make out part of his own case by 
 playing off upon each other the unfortunate fallacies of the 
 unfortunate lecture on Evolution and Ethics. That lecture, 
 which contained errors worthy of Mr. Drummond himself, is 
 now quoted as a support to Mr. Drummond's own theory of 
 ethical evolution. When Huxley said that "social progress 
 means a checking of the cosmic process at every step, and 
 the substitution for it of another, which may be called the 
 ethical process," x he forgot that the " cosmic process " cannot 
 be checked, that when we attempt to check something which 
 we assume to be the cosmic process, that attempt is itself 
 simply part of the cosmic process, and that the ethical process 
 is not something distinct from the cosmic process, but merely 
 one phase of it, just as egoism is another phase. He seems 
 indeed to have recognised the fallacy of his position, for in a 
 note he reminds himself that, " strictly speaking, social life 
 and the ethical process, in virtue of which it advances towards 
 perfection, are part and parcel of the general process of evolu- 
 tion " ; but he was weak enough to leave the text as it stood, 
 though seemingly conscious that it was illogical. Huxley's 
 lecture, indeed, is of practically no importance in the discus- 
 
 1 Evolution and Ethics, p. 33.
 
 1 1 6 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 sion on evolution and ethics, and its only interest, from the 
 intellectual side, is this fundamental fallacy of assuming the 
 ethical process to be distinct from the cosmic process. Mr. 
 Drummond of course has no difficulty in pointing out the 
 fallacy, which must surely have been apparent to all who read 
 the lecture. He is thus right in his plea that Nature should 
 be regarded as a whole ; right in his protest against looking 
 upon Nature, "as far as the plant, animal, and savage levels,'* 
 as being "synonymous with the struggle for life". That is, 
 avoiding the verbal pitfalls that make his phrases so dangerous 
 to the unwary, egoism is not the " cosmic process," and altru- 
 ism an antagonistic process, but both are factors in the one 
 universal movement of life from the beginning of time. 
 
 Mr. Drummond, however, not satisfied with having stated 
 an obvious truism, must needs turn it to the account of teleo- 
 logy by attempting to discover the "purpose" of the cosmic 
 process. " What is the valid answer ? Of course that Nature 
 has put in her own ends if we would take the trouble to look 
 for them. . . . Hitherto the evolutionist has had practically 
 no other basis than the struggle for life. Suppose even we 
 leave that untouched, the addition of an other-regarding basis 
 makes an infinite difference. For when it is then asked on 
 which of them the process turns, and the answer is given ' On 
 both,' we perceive that it is neither by the one alone, nor by 
 the other alone, that the process is to be interpreted, but by a 
 higher unity which resolves and embraces all. And as both 
 are equally necessary to the antinomy, even that of the two 
 which seems irreconcilable with higher ends is seen to be 
 necessary. Viewed simpliciter, the struggle for life appears 
 irreconcilable with ethical ends, a prodigious anomaly in a 
 moral world ; but viewed in continuous reaction with the 
 struggle for the life of others, it discloses itself as an instru- 
 ment of perfection the most subtle and far-reaching that 
 reason could devise" (pp. 35-37). And as evolution goes on,
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 117 
 
 " the one struggle waxes and the other wanes. . . . Lest the 
 alleged waning of the struggle for life convey a wrong im- 
 pression, let it be added that of course the word is to be 
 taken qualitatively. The struggle in itself can never cease. 
 What ceases is its so-called anti-ethical character. . . . The 
 path of progress and the path of altruism are one. Evolution 
 is nothing but the involution of love, the revelation of infinite 
 spirit, the eternal life returning to itself" (pp. 45, 46). 
 
 Here at last the cloven hoof appears. The object of Mr. 
 Drummond's insistence upon the fundamental character of 
 altruism in the scheme of evolution has been to work in the 
 old Theistic argument that evil is not real, but only apparent. 
 He shows his hand, indeed, immediately after the passages 
 just quoted, when he gives to the next section of his introduc- 
 tion the heading "Why was evolution the method chosen?" 
 Here at once he commits himself to the position that there is 
 a Deity who has deliberately selected evolution as the best 
 manner of working out the perfection of the universe. This 
 is Mr. Drummond's proof of the proposition : 
 
 " If evolution is simply a method of creation, why was this 
 very extraordinary method chosen ? Creation tout d'un coup 
 might have produced the same result ; an instantaneous act 
 or an age-long process would both have given us the world as 
 it is. The answer of modern natural theology has been that 
 the evolutionary method is the infinitely nobler scheme. A 
 spectacular act, it is said, savours of the magician. As a mere 
 exhibition of power it appeals to the lower nature ; but a 
 process of growth suggests to the reason the work of an 
 intelligent mind. No doubt this intellectual gain is real. 
 While a catastrophe puts the universe to confusion at the start, 
 a gradual rise makes the beginning of nature harmonious with 
 its end" (p. 47). Mr. Drummond, 'however, will have none of 
 these fatuities of natural theology ; he prefers a fatuity of his 
 own. As thus :
 
 1 1 8 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 " But can an intellectual answer satisfy us any more than 
 the mechanical answer which it replaced ? As there was 
 clearly a moral purpose in the end to be achieved by evolution, 
 should we not expect to find some similar purpose in the means? 
 Can we perceive no high design in selecting this particular 
 design, no worthy ethical result which should justify the concep- 
 tion as well as the execution of evolution ? We go too far, 
 perhaps, in expecting answers to questions so transcendent. 
 But one at least suggests itself, whose practical value is 
 apology enough for venturing to advance it. Whenever the 
 scheme was planned, it must have been foreseen that the time 
 "would come when the directing of part of the course of evolution 
 would pass into the hands of man. A spectator of the drama 
 for ages, too ignorant to see that it was a drama, and too 
 impotent to do more than play his little part, the discovery 
 must sooner or later break upon him that Nature meant him 
 to become a partner in her task and share the responsibility 
 of the closing acts. . . . Nature may have entrusted the 
 further building to mankind, but the plan has never left her 
 hands. The lines of the future are to be learned from her 
 past, and her fellow-helpers can most easily, most loyally and 
 most perfectly do their part by studying closely the archi- 
 tecture of the earlier world, and continuing the half-finished 
 structure symmetrically to the top. The information neces- 
 sary to complete the work with architectural consistency lies 
 in Nature. We might expect that it should be there. When 
 a business is transferred, or a partner assumed, the books are 
 shown, the methods of the business explained, its future develop- 
 ments pointed out. All this is now done for the evolution of 
 mankind. In evolution Creation has shown her hand. To 
 have kept the secret from man would have imperilled the 
 further evolution. To have revealed it sooner had been pre- 
 mature. Love must come before knowledge, for knowledge 
 is the instrument of love, and useless till it arrives. But now
 
 Mr. Drummond's '''Ascent of Man". 119 
 
 that there is altruism enough in the world to begin the new 
 era, there must be wisdom enough to direct it. To make 
 Nature spell out her own career, to embody the key to the 
 development in the very development itself, so that the key 
 might be handed over along with the work, was to make the 
 transference of responsibility possible and rational. . . . The 
 past of Nature is a working model of how worlds can be made,. 
 The probabilities are there is no better way of making them. 
 If man does as well it will be enough. In any case he can 
 only begin where Nature left off, and work with such tools as 
 are put into his hands. If the new partner had been intended 
 merely to experiment with world-making, no such legacy of 
 useful law had ever been given him. And if he had been 
 meant to begin de novo on a totally different plan, it is unlikely 
 either that that should not have been hinted at, or that in his 
 touching and beautiful endeavour he should be embarrassed 
 and thrown off the track by the old plan. As a child set to 
 complete some fine embroidery is shown the stitches, the 
 colours and the outline traced upon the canvas, so the great 
 mother in setting their difficult task to her later children, 
 provides them with one superb part finished to show the 
 pattern" (pp. 48, 49, 50, 51, 52). 
 
 This is the great philosophy of evolution for which we 
 have been carefully prepared, and which is now sprung upon 
 us. The jargon is the jargon of pseudo-science, but the ideas 
 are the ideas of the curate at the Y.M.C.A. And what are 
 these ideas but a re-hash of the old theistic apologies for God, 
 simply translated into the language of modern evolution ? 
 The older theologians used to argue that evil would cease ta 
 appear evil to us if only we could know the purpose of it. 
 The modern theologian argues that God, supposing him to 
 be the author of evolution, is not to be blamed for the suffering 
 which evolution involves, because this suffering is an instru- 
 ment in the working out of higher perfection. " Viewed
 
 1 20 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 simpliciter" as Mr. Drummond has said in a passage already 
 quoted, " the struggle for life appears irreconcilable with 
 ethical ends, a prodigious anomaly in a moral world ; but 
 viewed in continuous reaction with the struggle for the life of 
 others, it discloses itself as an instrument of perfection the 
 most subtle and far-reaching that reason could devise." 
 
 These, alas, are not new ideas. They are as old as 
 theology itself, and will live as long as theism, simply chang- 
 ing from age to age as the form of the scientific attack 
 changes. It is just the argument of Browning, in the passage 
 from The Ring and the Book which Mr. Drummond quotes : 
 
 I can believe, this dread machinery 
 
 Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, 
 
 Devised all pain, at most expenditure 
 
 Of pain by who devised pain to evolve, 
 
 By new machinery in counterpart, 
 
 The moral qualities of man how else ? 
 
 To make him love in turn, and be beloved ; 
 
 Creative and self-sacrificing too, 
 
 And thus eventually God-like. 
 
 It is the argument by which the vacillating Romanes sought 
 to square his science and his theology : " ' The fair order of 
 nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice '. 
 Granted. But if the ' wholesale waste and sacrifice,' as ante- 
 cedent, leads to a ' fair order of nature ' as its consequent, 
 how can it be said that the ' wholesale waste and struggle ' has 
 been a failure?" 1 
 
 It is the argument of Professor Knight : " A larger good is 
 evolved through the winnowing process by which physical 
 nature casts its weaker products aside," etc. 2 
 
 It is the argument of Professor Calderwood : " Not the 
 death in the world, but the life in it, thus becomes the object 
 most conspicuous, showing the grand purpose served through 
 
 1 Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, p. 92. 
 
 2 Knight, Aspects of Theism, pp. 184-186.
 
 Mr. DrummoncCs "Ascent of Man". 121 
 
 all conflict. If animal life is being strangely sacrificed, it is in 
 order that a stronger life may fill a larger place." 1 
 
 It is, in fact, simply the latest form of the ancient theistic 
 attempt to justify the ways of God to man ; and, like all 
 former attempts, it is involved in the old dilemma of how to 
 reconcile the supposed love and omnipotence of the Deity with 
 the universal pain which he permits. No Theist has ever been 
 able to overcome this difficulty, and no Theist ever will over- 
 come it. If God can prevent the suffering and will not, he is 
 not good ; if he would prevent it but cannot, he is not omni- 
 potent. The rejoinder to this argument, that if we could see 
 the whole process and understand the whole meaning of life, 
 the apparent evil would turn out to be real good, involves the 
 error of supposing that we can ever dissociate ourselves from 
 Nature as a whole. Either God designed the whole of Nature 
 or he did not ; if he did not, Theism is absurd at its very 
 foundations ; if he did, then he designed the objector to 
 Theism as much as he designed the Theist ; if he designed the 
 evil for an ultimately good purpose, then he equally designed 
 the moral repugnance with which we regard this evil, and the 
 moral opprobrium which we attach to the creator of it. To this 
 old dilemma Theism can give no rational answer, because it 
 starts out with the fundamental fallacy of positing a Deity 
 who is at once omnipotent and all-loving, and who yet permits 
 evil to exist which he might remove. On foundations like 
 these no rational philosophy can be built ; and the attempt to 
 justify the struggle for life by the newer method is no more 
 successful than the attempts of old. For if God is omnipotent 
 he could very well have made a perfect universe to begin with. 
 To this Mr. Drummond would reply that it is infinitely 
 grander to have given the universe evolution as its principle of 
 perfection, because of the moral discipline and education it 
 gives to man. As if, supposing the universe to have been 
 
 1 Caldervvood, Evolution and Man's Place in Nature, p. 12.
 
 i 2 2 Pseudo- Philosophy, 
 
 made perfect at the outset, there would have been any one to 
 have regretted that he had not been made imperfect, on 
 account of the discipline afforded by struggle ! We only talk 
 of the beauty of struggle because the struggle is unavoidable, 
 and the only thing we can do is to make the best of a very 
 bad constitution of things. Pain is good, said the older 
 Theists, because it disciplines and chastens us, and makes us 
 realise all the more our blessedness when we are free from 
 pain. But for what does pain discipline us? Simply to 
 endure more pain. The argument is a mere circle. Nor is 
 the attempt to show that the struggle for life is good because 
 it leads to the survival of the fittest any more successful. The 
 closer examination of that theory must be reserved for a later 
 stage of this criticism ; here it is only necessary to point out 
 that to philosophise in this manner is simply to read evolution 
 backwards. The struggle for life is not an instrument of per- 
 fection. One might as well say that certain sides of the dice 
 are the more perfect because they happen to be uppermost in 
 the fall. What survives as the result of the struggle is not the 
 most, perfect, in any ethical sense, but simply the fittest; 
 that is, just as when iron and wood are thrown upon water, 
 the one sinks while the other floats, through the action of the 
 same force of gravitation upon differently constituted bodies, 
 so in the struggle for life one organism perishes and another 
 survives, simply because one can withstand better than the 
 other the combination of opposing forces which happens to be 
 dominant at the moment. But to call the one organism 
 " better " or " more perfect " than the other is as absurd as to 
 call the wood more perfect than the iron. And as for Mr. 
 Drummond's argument that God deliberately chose the method 
 of evolution because he " foresaw " that " the time would come 
 when the directing of part of the course of evolution would 
 pass into the hands of man," that is really almost too absurd 
 for serious criticism. The spectacle of a Deity, anxious to
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man" . 123 
 
 make a perfect world, carefully making it imperfect, and then 
 leaving it to struggle for countless ages in pain and misery, 
 until the earth is once more swallowed up in night, is too 
 grotesque for anything. 
 
 Reviewing, then, Mr. Drummond's arguments up to this 
 point, we may summarise our criticism thus : 
 
 1 . He volunteers to bring biology and sociology up in the 
 way they should go, yet his great new principle turns out on 
 examination to be simply the old theistic fallacy in a new 
 form. 
 
 2. Even this fallacy is not original, for it is shared by 
 almost every theistic writer of the day who has dabbled in 
 evolution. 
 
 3. There is no value in his argument that we ought to seek 
 the meaning of evolution in its end, not in its beginning, in 
 man, not in the atom, for the reason that we do not know the 
 end of evolution as yet ; and for the reason that while we are 
 external to the atom we are not external to ourselves, and so 
 cannot avoid the egoistic fallacy of interpreting the universe in 
 terms of ourselves. 
 
 4. In the same way, his analogies about the machine and 
 the workshop, and the ship and its course, are quite invalid, 
 for the reason that there is simply no true analogy between 
 these and the course of evolution. 
 
 5. He has blindly assumed that egoism has its birth in 
 nutrition, and altruism its birth in reproduction. He has 
 credited the mere physiological function of reproduction with 
 the ethical attributes of altruism, in spite of his own disin- 
 genuous protestations that he is aware such a crediting ought 
 not to be made. 
 
 6. His very phrase, " struggle for the life of others," is 
 hopelessly unscientific, in that it (a) gives wrong connotations 
 to the word " struggle," (b) gives wrong connotations to the 
 word " others," and (c) overlooks the difficulty that reproduc-
 
 124 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 tion is more egoistic than altruistic, because it is simply 
 another phase of the struggle for life itself. 
 
 7. His teleology is no more successful than the older 
 teleology, in that it evades the old difficulties of (a) whether a 
 Deity actually made the world, () whether the Deity, if he 
 made the world, is all-good, (c) whether an all-good Deity 
 would create evil, (d] whether the Deity is also omnipotent, 
 and (e) whether an omnipotent Deity who permits evil can be 
 regarded as all-good. 
 
 8. His argument that the struggle for life was consciously 
 designed as an " instrument of perfection " is open to all the 
 objections that have from time immemorial been urged against 
 the theistic contention that pain was meant by God to be an 
 instrument of perfection. 
 
 Two more points only remain to be touched upon at this 
 stage of the discussion : (i) Mr. Drummond maintains that 
 his thesis of the importance of altruism, and its fundamental 
 character as part of the cosmic process, is in substance new ; 
 and he has of course no difficulty in making whatever capital 
 there is to be made out of the astonishing fallacies and self- 
 contradictions of Huxley's lecture on Evolution and Ethics. 
 But he himself is constrained to admit, upon reflection, that 
 the thesis is not quite so new as he at first alleged it to be ; 
 and he mentions casually the names of " Fiske, Littre, 
 Romanes, Le Conte, L. Btichner, Miss Buckley, and Prince 
 Kropotkin," together with Messrs. Geddes and Thomson and 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, as writers who "have expressed them- 
 selves partly in the same direction " (p. 43). They have, 
 indeed ; the principle of the importance of altruism in organic 
 and social development is so self-evident that it would have 
 been a wonder had any thinker failed to perceive it. But if, 
 when Mr. Drummond says that these writers " have expressed 
 themselves partly in the same direction," he means that they 
 have avoided his peculiar errors and assumptions on the sub-
 
 Mr. DrummoncCs "Ascent of Man". 125 
 
 ject, there will be none to gainsay him. (2) He quarrels with 
 Mr. Kidd for maintaining that altruism must have an ultra- 
 rational sanction, and justly exposes that gentleman's igno- 
 rance of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics a book 
 which Mr. Kidd, though he frequently takes Mr. Spencer's 
 name in vain, has probably never seen. And Mr. Drummond 
 disposes of his fellow-irrationalist thus : 
 
 "What Mr. Kidd has succeeded, and splendidly succeeded, 
 in doing is to show that nature, as interpreted in terms of the 
 struggle for life, contains no sanction either for morality or for 
 social progress. But instead of giving up Nature and reason 
 at this point, he should have given up Darwin. The struggle 
 for life is not ' the supreme fact up to which biology has slowly 
 advanced '. It is the fact to which Darwin advanced ; but if 
 biology had been thoroughly consulted it could not have given 
 so maimed an account of itself. With the final conclusion 
 reached by Mr. Kidd we have no quarrel. Eliminate the 
 errors due to an unrevised acceptance of Mr. Darwin's inter- 
 pretation of Nature, and his work remains the most important 
 contribution to social evolution which the last decade has 
 seen. But what startles us is his method. To put the future 
 of social science on an ultra-rational basis is practically to give 
 it up. Unless thinking men have some sense of the con- 
 sistency of a method they cannot work with it, and if there is 
 no guarantee of the stability of the results it would not be 
 worth while. . . . We believe with Mr. Kidd that ' the process 
 of social development which has been taking place, and which 
 is still in progress in our Western civilisation, is not the pro- 
 duct of the intellect, but the motive force behind it has had its 
 seat and origin in the fund of altruistic feeling with which our 
 civilisation has become equipped '. But we shall endeavour to 
 show that this fund of altruistic feeling has been slowly funded 
 in the race by Nature, or through Nature, and as the direct and 
 inevitable result of that struggle for the life of others, which
 
 126 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 has been from all time a condition of existence " (pp. 68, 
 
 71, 72). 
 
 This is typical of Mr. Drummond's confusion of thought. 
 As against Mr. Kidd's absurd contention that we must be 
 irrational in order to progress, he is of course right ; but how 
 does he proceed to correct Mr. Kidd's view of the case ? First 
 he thinks it necessary to inform us that this " fund of altruistic 
 feeling has been slowly funded in the race by Nature" as if 
 any rational man would think of disputing the proposition 
 that " Nature " had made us altruistic. Then he lays it down 
 that this "funding" has gone on as " the direct and inevitable 
 result" of the struggle for the life of others. Previously he 
 had told us that the struggle for the life of others had its root 
 in reproduction, of which " the significant note is ethical, the 
 development of other-ism, as altruism" (p. 21) "sympathy, 
 tenderness, unselfishness, and the long list of virtues which 
 make up altruism," being " the direct outcome and essential 
 accompaniment of the reproductive process " (p. 22). If, then, 
 altruism is the " essential accompaniment " of the reproductive 
 process, how comes it that at a certain epoch there is more of 
 it than there was in previous times ? How has it been 
 "funded," and in whom? And if egoism is the essential 
 accompaniment of the nutritive process, on the terms of Mr. 
 Drummond's argument, how is it that this is diminishing as 
 he says? If nutrition = egoism, and reproduction = altruism, 
 how is it that altruism is increasing at the expense of egoism, 
 when there must always be at least as much nutrition as 
 reproduction ? The conception of egoism and altruism as 
 " forces " or " funds," one of which increases while the other 
 decreases, is simply the grossest blundering, the apotheosis of 
 bastard argument. If altruism has increased in the modern 
 world, there are concrete causes for it, and writers like Mr. 
 Kidd and Mr. Drummond, who are content to ascribe this 
 increase to the "funding" of altruism by religion, which is
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 127 
 
 the " motive force behind our civilisation," or to the reproduc- 
 tive process pure and simple, are merely reducing science to 
 the grotesque. And all the while the principle of the struggle 
 for life, at which Mr. Drummond turns up the white of a 
 clerical eye, is quite competent to take upon itself the whole 
 of the burden and the whole of the credit of evolution. For 
 the struggle for the life of others, to use Mr. Drummond's 
 jargon, if it helps to determine which organisms or societies 
 shall survive and which shall perish, is simply a phase of the 
 struggle for life. " In a moral world," he himself tells us, " the 
 fittest are the weak, the pitiable, the poor " (p. 268) ; that is, 
 to strip the phrase of its theological exaggeration, there comes 
 a time when the physically weak are not hastily weeded out 
 in the struggle for life, but are kept alive and nourished and 
 cared for by the altruism and self-sacrifice of others. But so 
 far from this process being a negation of the struggle for life, 
 it is simply part and parcel of it. The care for others, i.e., 
 altruism, always has been a factor in the preservation of 
 societies. As Mr. Spencer has put it : " The most general con- 
 clusion is that in order of obligation the preservation of the 
 species takes precedence of the preservation of the individual. 
 It is true that the species has no existence save as an aggre- 
 gate of individuals ; and it is true that, therefore, the welfare 
 of the species is an end to be subserved only as subserving the 
 welfare of individuals. But since disappearance of the species, 
 implying absolute disappearance of all individuals, involves 
 absolute failure in achieving the end, whereas disappearance of 
 individuals, though carried to a great extent, may leave out- 
 standing such numbers as can, by continuance of the species, 
 make subsequent fulfilment of the end possible ; the preserva- 
 tion of the individual must, in a variable degree according to 
 circumstances, be subordinated Kb the preservation of the 
 species, where the two conflict." * And even Huxley's own 
 
 1 Principles of Ethics, ii., 6.
 
 1 2 8 Pseudo-Pk ilosophy. 
 
 illogical assertion that " the practice of that which is ethically 
 best what we call goodness or virtue involves a course of 
 conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads 
 to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of 
 ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint," etc. 1 even 
 this is refuted by his own previous argument that a pack of 
 wolves could not exist for a single winter unless " ruthless self- 
 assertion " were subordinated to " self-restraint ". There never 
 has been, in fact, a time when the world was all egoism this 
 being the "cosmic process"; and altruism is not a new 
 " force " which has suddenly come in to counteract this cosmic 
 process. And to say, as Mr. Drummond says, that " Love is 
 not a late arrival, an after-thought, with Creation. It is not a 
 novelty of a romantic civilisation. ... Its roots began to 
 grow with the first cell of life which budded on this earth" 
 (p. 276) ; and then to tell us, only five pages later, that " from 
 self-ism to other-ism is the supreme transition of history," and 
 then once more, on the next page, that " even at its dawn life 
 is receiver and giver ; even in protoplasm is self-ism and 
 other-ism " ; to see-saw like this is merely to pay the penalty 
 of clinging obstinately to a self-contradictory theory that is 
 flawed with paralogism at its very foundation. If the first cell 
 of life contained egoism and altruism, or the potentiality of 
 them, what,, we may once more ask, has made the latter grow 
 at the expense of the former? To rhapsodise about the 
 "opportunities" and the "purposes" of evolution, and the 
 " love " that is at the back of evolution, is simply to offer the 
 thinnest theological sentiment in place of a scientific explana- 
 tion. If altruism is increasing, it is because those societies 
 which, from a variety of causes, have been able to practise it 
 and develop it have had, ceteris paribus, a very real advantage 
 in the struggle for life overteocieties in which the internecine 
 
 1 Evolution and Ethics, p. 33. See again his note on pp. 56-57, which isv 
 once more contradictory.
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 129 
 
 struggle was fiercer and more prolonged ; that is, altruism, or 
 the struggle for the life of others, as Mr. Drummond calls it, 
 is simply one factor among many others in the struggle for 
 life, and the struggle for life is the principle of evolution, of 
 which nutrition and reproduction, egoism and altruism, arid 
 all other modes of action and reaction, are but so many 
 phases.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WITH the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Mr. 
 Drummond's book entitled respectively, " The Ascent of the 
 Body," " The Scaffolding Left in the Body," " The Arrest of 
 the Body," "The Dawn of Mind," and "The Evolution of 
 Language" we have no immediate concern. They are 
 simply a resume of the best-known facts of evolution in- 
 teresting enough in its way, and rather agreeably done on the 
 whole, but containing nothing new, and therefore not calling 
 for any criticism. Our task begins again with his sixth 
 chapter, entitled " The Struggle for Life " an interesting 
 chapter, because it shows to what depths of intellectual dis- 
 honesty a worthy man can descend in his efforts to defend the 
 moral character of his Deity. The difficulty, be it observed, 
 is entirely of his own making, just as the old problem of evil,, 
 which has always beset the path of the Theist, has been made 
 a problem by the Theist himself. To posit a "problem of 
 evil " is to assume that somehow, or at some time or other, the 
 problem might be solved. The problem of evil, however, is 
 essentially incapable of solution. To adduce one reason alone 
 in proof of this, neither good nor evil is an absolute term, 
 admitting of accurate and universal definition. Each is purely 
 relative. For example : a hungry tiger chases an antelope 
 for his dinner. Two things may happen : (i) the tiger, being 
 in good health, may catch the antelope and make his meal of 
 him ; (2) the tiger, being in ill-health, may be unable to catch 
 
 (130)
 
 Mr. DrMmmond 1 s "Ascent of Man" . 131 
 
 the antelope. In the first case, the tiger will regard his 
 healthy condition during the chase as a good thing, while the 
 antelope will regard it as an evil thing ; in the second case, 
 the antelope will call the tiger's ill-health good, the tiger will 
 call it evil. Evidently opinions of good and evil are purely 
 relative, depending very much on the point of view of the 
 moralist. Here, then, for the Theist to hope to solve the 
 " problem of evil " is to forget that it is quite impossible for us 
 to know what good and evil are from a uni versal standpoint, 
 and therefore what the problem is. So that a rational man is 
 content to recognise the relative characters of good and evil, 
 and not to confuse the matter still further by introducing, as 
 the author of this system of good and evil, a Being to whom 
 he attributes the quality of infinite goodness. On these terms 
 the Theist may well have his " great and dark problem of 
 evil," for from premises so contradictory as these nothing but 
 contradiction can come. The problem, such as it is, is alto- 
 gether of his own making. 
 
 Similarly, when Mr. Drummond begins to justify the ways 
 of God to man in relation to the struggle for life, we feel con- 
 strained to admonish him, in all friendliness, that there is 
 really no need to attempt any such task. Evolution is evolu- 
 tion, and the struggle for life we all implicitly, if not explicitly, 
 condemn. If, then, Mr. Drummond chooses to say that an 
 all-good, all -wise, and all -loving Father has deliberately 
 selected the struggle for life as his instrument for working out 
 the evolution of mankind, he must surely be aware that it will 
 be no easy matter to reconcile the known facts of evolution 
 with the hypothetical character of his Deity. An attempted 
 reconciliation of this kind can be done only by sophistry 
 and, I fear I must add, by a sophistry that is not always 
 unconscious and involuntary. Nevertheless, such attempts 
 are always interesting. If they throw no light on the subject 
 of evolution, they throw a very powerful light on the mental
 
 132 Pseudo Ph ihsophy, 
 
 and moral processes of their authors. They are not exactly 
 science, but they constitute a human document 
 
 Mr. Drummond begins his criticism of the struggle for life 
 with one of those curate-at-the-Y.M.C.A. forms of exposition 
 in which he has such a fatal facility. 
 
 " Start with a comparatively unevolved savage, and see 
 what the struggle for life will do for him. When we meet him 
 first he is sitting, we shall suppose, in the sun. Let us also 
 suppose and it requires no imagination to suppose it that 
 he has no wish to do anything else than sit in the sun, and 
 that he is perfectly contented and perfectly happy. Nature 
 around him, visible and invisible, is as still as he is, as inert 
 apparently, as unconcerned. Neither molests the other ; they 
 have no connection with each other. Yet it is not so. That 
 savage is the victim of a conspiracy. Nature has designs 
 upon him (sic\ wants to do something to him. That some- 
 thing is to move him. Why does it wish to move him ? 
 Because (szc) movement is work, and work is exercise, and 
 exercise may mean a further evolution of the part of him that 
 is exercised. How does it set about moving him ? By 
 moving itself. Everything else being in motion, it is impos- 
 sible for him to resist. The sun moves away to the west, and 
 he must move or freeze with cold. As the sun continues to 
 move, twilight falls, and wild animals move from their lairs, 
 and he must move or be eaten." And so on, and so on, in the 
 most approved curatese. " Multiply these movements, and 
 you multiply him. Make him do things he has never done 
 before, and he will become what he never was before. . . . 
 The universe has to be so ordered that that which man would 
 not have done alone he should be compelled to do. In other 
 words, it was necessary (sic) to introduce into Nature, and into 
 human nature, some such principle as the struggle for life " 
 (pp. 243-245). 
 
 Here we are already in the thick of Mr. Drummond's
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man" . 133 
 
 method. First of all " Nature," which = man plus the rest of 
 the universe, is separated from " man," who apparently is not 
 part of Nature. Then Nature, which is really our name for 
 that which undergoes evolution, " wants " to bring about a 
 little evolution on its own account. It " has designs upon " 
 man. It moves him, in order to make him want to be 
 moved ! which is indeed a luminous piece of philosophising. 
 If " Nature " really acts in this manner, like Mr. Spencer's man 
 in the street who " must do something " when things would 
 go along much better if he would only refrain from doing 
 something, she is really very much to blame and the savage 
 very much to be pitied. She might as \vell have left the poor 
 devil sitting on his rock " in the sun " to conjure up Mr. 
 Drummond's arcadian picture of him with no wish to do 
 anything else than sit in the sun, perfectly contented, perfectly 
 happy. If he is in this condition he is indeed well circum- 
 stanced. But Nature has designs on him wants to move him. 
 Baby is doing nothing, in iact, and the fond mother comes 
 along i;o teH him not to. He must be moved. What happens 
 when he is moved? He begins, says Mr. Drummond, to 
 exercise muscles which he otherwise would not have exer- 
 cised. "He must either move away, and move away very 
 fast, to find the sun again ; or he must chase, and also very 
 fast, rome thick-furred animal, and kill it, and clothe himself 
 with its skin. Thus fro.n a man he has become a hunter, a 
 different kind of a man, a further man. He did not wish to 
 become a hunter ; he had to become a hunter. All that he 
 wished to do was to sit in the sun and be let alone, and 
 but for a Nature around him which would not rest, or let him 
 alone, he would have sat on there till he died." And what if 
 he had ? He would at least never have known the unhappi- 
 ness of struggle, which is all that " Nature," on Mr. Drum- 
 mond's terms, gives him. He is to become a hunter in order 
 that he may hunt, and he must hunt because he is hungry,
 
 1 34 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 and he is hungry because Nature " moves," as Mr. Drummond 
 puts it, the meal he has had in the morning. That is, I bring 
 a friend into my room. He is sitting there quietly and harm- 
 lessly, when suddenly I run a knife into him. I then proceed 
 to philosophise to him in the manner of Mr. Drummond. I 
 tell him that it is not good for him to sit there, " perfectly 
 contented, perfectly happy ". He must be moved for his own 
 good ; and the way to move him is to move something else 
 into him, a knife for preference. Now if he does not move, I 
 tell him, he will bleed to death ; so he must move and discover 
 things which will stop the bleeding, and other things which 
 will heal the wound. " Thus," I tell him, " from a man you 
 have become a medical man, a different kind of a man, a 
 further man. You did not wish to become a medical man ; 
 you had to become a medical man. ... In other words, if 
 ever you were to learn the important art of curing wounds, it 
 was necessary first to give you a wound." To this he might 
 reply, not unreasonably, that he had no ambition whatever to 
 become an expert wound-dresser ; that rather than have a 
 wound in order to teach him how to dress wounds, he would 
 rather, if it was all the same to me, not have a wound at all. 
 And to Mr. Drummond we may say that to tell us that man 
 had to become this or that in order to be this or that, is 
 simply to explain things backwards ; and to say that " it was 
 necessary " to introduce the struggle for life into the universe 
 is to raise the questions : ( i ) Necessary for whom ? (2) Necessary 
 for what purpose? (3) If the struggle for life had not been 
 inaugurated, and men had never been set in a never-ending 
 round of conflict and misery, would they ever have been con- 
 scious of having missed anything? It is as absurd as to say 
 that we must not all commit simultaneous suicide, because 
 then there would be nobody alive to carry on the business of 
 the world. If there was nobody alive, obviously no one could 
 feel very much aggrieved.
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man" . 135 
 
 Mr. Drummond proceeds to sketch the evolution of man 
 so far as this has depended on the struggle for life ; and we 
 must constantly bear in mind the plea he has already urged in 
 justification of evolution, that it was " an instrument of perfec- 
 tion the most subtle and far-reaching that reason could 
 devise". Remembering this, let us follow the theologian in 
 his exposition of the struggle for life, and its ethical function 
 in the scheme of things. He shows how certain things the 
 erect posture, the prehensile hand, for example have aided 
 him in the struggle, and how the club has been an important 
 element in evolution. Then he sketches the development of 
 weapons both of offence and defence, and finally gives us the 
 philosophy of these things. " These primitive weapons are 
 the pathetic expression of the world's first struggle. As the 
 earliest contribution of mankind to solve its still fundamental 
 difficulty the problem of nutrition they are of enduring 
 interest to the human race" (p. 251). These weapons, that is, 
 are of use in enabling man to get the better of his fellow-men 
 or of animals, and the erect posture is particularly advan- 
 tageous, because it enables him the better to club his fellows. 
 At this point Mr. Drummond, with unusual thoughtfulness, 
 becomes aware that this is not altogether a testimonial to the 
 God of Love. So he informs us that we must not miscon- 
 ceive the real meaning of this development. As for these 
 weapons, " so far from being, as one might suppose, mere imple- 
 ments of destruction, they are implements of self-preservation ; 
 they entered the world not from hate of man, but from love of 
 life ;" which is about the most humorously Jesuitical justifica- 
 tion of murder which I have yet seen. Mr. Drummond's 
 words are words of balm and comfort to all those whose hands 
 are raised against their fellows ; they can plead that when 
 their life-preserver cracks a householder's skull the motive is 
 not hate of man, but love of life. The Ascent of Man is really 
 one of those books no burglar's library should be without.
 
 1 36 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 But Mr. Drummond now plunges deeper and deeper into 
 the mire. "We see now, perhaps, more clearly why evolution 
 at the dawn of life entered into league with so strange an ally 
 as want. The evolution of mankind was too great a thing to 
 entrust to any uncertain hand. The advantage of attaching 
 human progress to the struggle for life is that you can always 
 depend upon it. Hunger never fails" (p. 255). Nature, we 
 see, is still there, at the post of duty, pale and anxious, but 
 brave and steadfast, assiduously " moving " man for his own 
 good, a sort of policemun among a loafing humanity, an Irish 
 nurse waking the patient at the stated houi in order tc make 
 him take his sleeping draught. And now Mr. Drummond 
 begins to finger his brief, and rises to exculpate his client, the 
 Deity, from the charge of murdering his own creatures. 
 
 " The association of the struggle for life with the physio- 
 logical function of nutrition must be continually borno in 
 mind. For the essential nature of the principle has been 
 greatly obscured by the very name which Mr. Darwin gave to 
 it. Probably no other was possible ; but the effect has been 
 that men have emphasised the almost ethical substantive 
 ' struggle/ and ignored the biological term ' life '." As for Mr. 
 Drummond's own phrase, "struggle for the life of others," 
 there is of course no objection to emphasising the ethical sub- 
 stantive ''struggle" to the fullest degree. You must only 
 refrain from this emphasis when it is apt to make theology 
 look foolish. " A secondary implication of the process has 
 thus been elevated into tho prime one ; and this, exaggerated 
 by the imagination, has led to Nature being conceived of as a 
 vast murderous machine for the annihilation of the majority 
 and the survival of the few. But the struggle for life, in the 
 first instance, is simply living itself (sic); at t lie best, it is living 
 under a healthily normal tuaximum of pressure ; at the worst, 
 under an abnormal maximum!' That is all ; if you are 
 handicapped by poverty and disease in the struggle for life,
 
 Mr. DrunlmoncCs "Ascent of Man" . 137 
 
 and you find yourself being painfully and ignominiously 
 snuffed out like a candle that has been lit in mistake, you are 
 not to raise vain hands to heaven and curse him who flung 
 your poor body to the wolves of his world ; you are to buy, 
 beg, borrow or steal a copy of The Ascent of Man, and having 
 learnt that all that is the matter with you is that you are 
 under an abnormal maximum of pressure, you are to console 
 yourself with this great thought, you are to congratulate Mr. 
 Drummond on his faculty for euphemism, and then make the 
 best end that is possible for you. For " as we have seen," says 
 Mr. Drummond, "initially, [the struggle for life] is but another 
 name for the discharge of the supreme physiological function 
 of nutrition. If life is to go on at all, this function must be 
 discharged, and continually discharged. . . . Whatever man 
 came ultimately to wish and to achieve for himself, it was 
 essentia 1 at first that such arrangements should be made for 
 him. The machinery for his development had not only to be 
 put into Nature, but he had to be placed in the machine and field 
 there, and brought back there as often as he tried to evade it. 
 To say that man evolved himself, nevertheless, is as absurd as 
 to say that a newspaper prints itself. To say even that the 
 machinery evolved him is as preposterous as to say of a 
 poem that the printing press made it. The ultimate problem 
 is, who made the machine ? and who thought the poem that 
 was to be printed?" (pp. 255-258). 
 
 Mr. Drummond, it will be seen, is most anxious that we 
 should realise that it is not evolution that causes the struggle 
 for life, but God. He goes on : "If you say that you do not 
 unreservedly approve of the machine, that it lacerates as well 
 as binds, the difficulty is more real. But it is a principle in 
 the study of history to suspend judgment both of the meaning 
 and of the value of a policy until the chain of sequences it sets in 
 motion should be worked out to its last fulfilment. When the 
 full tale of the struggle for life is told, when the record of its
 
 138 Pseiido- Philosophy. 
 
 victories is closed, ^vhen the balance of its gains and losses has 
 been struck, and especially when it has been proved that there 
 actually have been losses, it will be time to pass judgment on its 
 moral value" This from the man who all along has jauntily 
 given his verdict of approval upon the struggle for life ; who 
 has told us . that it, along with the struggle for the life of 
 others, was the. most perfect instrument which reason could 
 devise ! He is to slobber as he likes over the love and wisdom 
 of the Deity, but when you point to the merciless and unend- 
 ing conflict which, on his own showing, the Deity has imposed 
 upon mankind, you are told to suspend your judgment " until 
 the chain of sequences shall be worked out to its last fulfil- 
 ment " that is, until you reach the other side of eternity. 
 
 Mr. Drummond, indeed, sees for a moment the absurdity 
 of his position. "Of course," he writes, "this principle cuts 
 both ways ; it warns off a favourable as well as an unfavourable 
 verdict on the beneficence of the system of things." And yet 
 he is inconsistent enough once more to presume to give the 
 verdict in favour of " the beneficence of the system of things ". 
 "But evolution is a study in history, and its results are largely 
 known. And it would be affectation to deny that on the whole 
 the results are good, and appear the worthier the more we pene- 
 trate into their inner meaning. Men forget when they denounce 
 the struggle for life that it is to be judged not only on the ground 
 of sentiment, but of reason (sic], that not its local or surface 
 effects only, but its permanent influence on the order of the 
 world, must be taken into account" (pp. 258, 259). " That is," 
 says Mr. Drummond, "the struggle for life is good; yet, if 
 you come to look at it, there is something bad about it too. 
 So that the best thing we can do is to suspend our judgment 
 upon the matter at present, since from the very nature of 
 things we are not in a position to give a proper opinion upon 
 it. When I say we must suspend our judgment, however, I 
 mean that you must ; I am competent to give my opinion here
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man" . 139 
 
 and now ; and, looking at the matter in a way impossible to 
 you i.e., rationally I lay it down that evolution is good after 
 all, and my previous words are not to be used in evidence 
 against me." Mr. Drummond as the Hamlet of evolution- 
 funny without being vulgar is amusing enough ; but Mr. 
 Drummond as the Lady Plyant of theology is the very essence 
 of humour. 
 
 But Mr. Drummond's further remarks on this theme must 
 be quoted in full ; no selection could do them justice : 
 
 " Even on the lower ranges of Nature the unfavourable 
 implications of the struggle for life have probably been exag- 
 gerated. While it is essential to an understanding of the 
 course of evolution to retain in the imagination a vivid sense of 
 the struggle itself, we must beware of over-colouring the repre- 
 sentation, or flooding it with accompaniments of emotion 
 borrowed from our own sensations. The word struggle at all 
 in this connection is little more than a metaphor. When it is 
 said that an animal struggles, all that is really meant is that it 
 lives. An animal, that is to say, does not, in addition to all 
 its other activities, have to employ a vast number of special 
 activities, to the exercise of which the term struggle is to be 
 applied. // is life itself which is the struggle : and the whole 
 life, and the whole of the activities and powers which make up 
 life, are involved in it. To speak of struggle in the sense of 
 some special and separate struggle, to conceive of battle, or 
 even a series of battles, is misleading where all is struggle and 
 all is battle. Especially must we beware of reading into it 
 our personal ideas with regard to accompaniments of pain. 
 The probabilities are that the struggle for life in the lower 
 creation is, to say the least, less painful than it looks. Whether 
 we regard the dulness of the states of consciousness among 
 lower animals, or the fact that the condition of danger must 
 become habitual, or that death when it comes is sudden and 
 unaccompanied by that anticipation which gives it its chief
 
 1 40 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 dread to man, we must assume that whatever the struggle for 
 life subjectively means to the lower animals, it can never 
 approach in terror what it means to us. And as to putting 
 any moral content into it until a late stage in the world's develop- 
 ment, that is not to be thought of. Judged of even by later 
 standards, there is much to relieve one's first unfavourable 
 impression. With exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. As a 
 rule therein no hate in it, but only hunger. It is seldom pro- 
 longed, and seldom wanton. As to the manner of death, it is 
 generally sudden. As to the fact of death, all animals must 
 die. As to the meaning of an existence prematruely closed, 
 it is better to.be to be eaten than not to be at all. And, as to the 
 last result, it is better to be eaten out of the world and, dying, 
 help another to live, than pollute the world by lingering 
 decay. The most, after all, that can be done with life is to 
 give it to others. Till Nature taught her own creatures of 
 their o\vn free will to offer the sacrifice, is it strange that 
 she took it by force?" (pp. 259-261). 
 
 This extraordinary passage is well worth examining at 
 once for its logic and its ethics. First of all we are told that 
 we must not allow our emotions to pass moral judgment upon 
 the slaughter that attends the struggle for life. To speak of 
 it as a struggle, in fact, is somewhat to misundei stand it ; " to 
 conceive of battle . . . is misleading, where all is struggle and 
 all is battle;" that is, an animal's life is not a struggle because 
 it is all struggle. If a man's head is pounded for five minutes, 
 that constitutes assault and battery; but if it .i.<- pounded 
 regularly every day there is no assault nor battery in the case ! 
 And especially must we beware of reading our own ideas of 
 pleasure and pain into the struggle for life, and of putting a 
 moral content into it. That is, whether animals suffer or not 
 in the struggle for existence, their creator has no responsibility 
 in the matter, and we have no right to pass a moral judgment 
 upon him ; though if a human being acted in the same manner
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 141 
 
 we should be justified in calling his conduct infamous. Thus 
 does theology make for righteousness. 
 
 But following immediately upon Mr. Drummond's protest 
 that we must not introduce ethical ideas into the discussion, 
 he proceeds to introduce ethical ideas of his own into it, by 
 arguing that after all the fight is not so bad as it looks. 
 Calmly he sweeps aside the whole of what he calls " the lower 
 creation," on the plea that they really cannot suffer as much as 
 we suffer. As if that were the point at issue ! The question 
 is not whether animals suffer little or much, but whether it is 
 consistent with the wisdom which Mr. Drummond attributes 
 to his Deity that he should choose so clumsy and roundabout 
 a method of working out " perfection," and whether it is con- 
 sistent with his attribute of goodness that he should de- 
 liberately and foreknowingly inaugurate a scheme that means 
 death and suffering and frustration for so many millions of his 
 creatures. Does any human being think that the creator of a 
 worm has no moral responsibility towards a worm, simply 
 because it is not a man ? Would Mr. Drummond, to put the 
 question pertinently, claim such exemption from responsibility 
 for himself? And if not, why should he claim it for a God 
 who is supposed to be better and wiser and more compas- 
 sionate than he ? 
 
 And notice the theologian's defence of the struggle among 
 .the higher animals. " Witli exceptions, the fight is a fair fight." 
 As if the question were whether the animals were fighting 
 fairly or unfairly, and not whether a God of Love is justified in 
 setting his creatures on earth to fight ! And the " with excep- 
 tions " is positively charming, as are also the other reservations 
 of Mr. Drummond's argument. " A s a rule, there is no hate 
 in it, but only hunger. It is seldom prolonged, and seldom 
 wanton. . . . It is better to be to be eaten than not to be at all" 
 
 I cannot find words to express my opinion of the man who 
 can write such a sentence as this last, or of the theological
 
 142 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 system that makes such writing possible. That any man 
 should descend to such depths of immoral sophistry, and all 
 in the name of religion, all with the plea of subserving a moral 
 purpose, is something too infinitely saddening for anger. This 
 is the man who speaks serenely of the " lower animals," con- 
 scious, apparently, of his own superiority ! As if any ape or 
 tiger, with the lust of murder in its eye, were half so cruel a 
 satire upon this world and the wisdom of its Maker as the 
 modern theologian who thus prostitutes himself in the cause 
 of his religion. To look upon a moral type like this, and to 
 know that religion is breeding thousands like it, is almost to- 
 despair of human nature. For a man to watch the slow agony 
 of a mouse in the paws of a cat, or of a man fighting his 
 pathetic fight with the micro-organisms of consumption, and 
 then, in order to save the reputation of his God, to tell us that 
 the fight is a fair fight, that there is no hate in it, but only 
 hunger, and that it is better to exist to be eaten than not to 
 exist at all to do this and not to be conscious that he is 
 guilty of wilful and deliberate sophistry is something more 
 than I can believe. And this lying for the glory of God is 
 justified because of its services to morals ! 
 
 " There is another side to this principle," continues Mr. 
 Drummond, " from which its higher significance becomes still 
 more apparent. It follows from the struggle for life that those 
 animals which struggle most successfully will prosper, while 
 the less successful will disappear hence the well-known prin- 
 ciple of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. Waiv- 
 ing the discussion of this law in general, and the varying 
 meanings which ' fitness ' assumes as we rise in the scale of 
 being, observe the rdle it plays in Nature. The object of the 
 survival of the fittest is to produce (sic) fitness. And it does so 
 both negatively and positively. In the first place it produces 
 fitness by killing off the unfit. Without the rigorous weeding 
 out of the imperfect, the progress of the world had not been
 
 Mr. DrummoncC s "Ascent of Man", 143 
 
 possible. . . . It is only when one considers the working of 
 the struggle for life on the large scale, and realises its necessity 
 to the evolution of the world as a whole, that one can even 
 begin to discuss its ethical or teleological meanings. To 
 make a fit world, the unfit at every stage must be made to 
 disappear ; and if any self-acting law can bring this about, 
 though its bearing upon this or that individual case may seem 
 unjust, its necessity for the world as a whole is vindicated. 1 If 
 more of any given species are born into the world than can 
 possibly find food, and if a given number must die, that num- 
 ber must be singled out upon some principle ; and we cannot 
 quarrel with the principle in physical nature which condemns 
 to death the worst. By placing the death penalty upon the 
 slightest shortcoming, natural selection so discourages imper- 
 fection as practically to eliminate it from the world. The fact 
 that any given animal is alive at all is almost a token of its 
 perfectness. Nothing living can be wholly a failure" (pp. 
 263-265). 
 
 The inanity of the last two sentences, and their fatuous 
 contradiction with all that has gone before, may be passed 
 over in charitable silence. But the ethic of the remainder of 
 the passage is certainly a precious light upon the theistic 
 mind. Why, in the name of common sense, are the imperfect 
 organisms made at all by a Creator who is supposed to know 
 his own mind and to be capable of getting what he wants ? 
 The spectacle of an all-wise and all-powerful Deity deliber- 
 ately blundering in this manner, making ten organisms in 
 order to kill off five of them, and for the sole reason of 
 keeping the other five alive, is too grotesque even to arouse a 
 decent spirit of contempt. If God's purpose is "to make a fit 
 world," why should he be foolish enough to make millions of 
 
 1 How it can be vindicated as being good for the world " as a whole," when 
 in " this or that individual case " it is admitted to be bad, is more than the un- 
 instructed mind of the sceptic can understand.
 
 144 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 the unfit only to kill them? "Natural selection," says Mr. 
 Drummond, " discourages imperfection." Then what, in the 
 name of reason, encourages it ? And if the Deity is so foolish 
 as to construct a world on these principles, yhat is to be 
 thought of the theologians who affect to find in it evidences of 
 his wisdom and foresight? For, be it noted, Mr. Drummond 
 finally makes his God out to be stupid as well as wicked. The 
 object of natural selection, he says, is to produce fitness by 
 weeding out the unfit. Yet he himself argues in other places 
 (i) that " natural selection" by no means invariably works in 
 the direction of 'progress ; in parasites, for example, it has 
 " consummated almost utter degeneration." so that here God's 
 chosen instrument has apparently failed to do its work ; (2) 
 that natural selection must always go on in which case there 
 will always be the unfit as well as the fit ; and (3) that if 
 natural selection were to cease stagnation would ensue. There- 
 fore, on the lines of Mr. Drummond's own argument, either 
 the perfection God is aiming at can never come, or if it does 
 come it can only = stagnation. And while to suppose that 
 God started the world and then let things drift is bad enough 
 in all conscience, to suppose that he does all the murder of his 
 own creatures for a conscious and deliberate purpose is to 
 make him out a worse monster than ever. He is simply 
 wicked without being charming. 
 
 So much, then, for Mr. Drummond's treatise upon the 
 struggle for life. It is full of the most amazing contradic- 
 tions, the most amazing logic, and the most amazing ethic. 
 He feels that th^ struggle for life is an evil, on the supposition 
 that a good God made the world, and yet he will not admit it. 
 He tells us that we cannot pronounce moral judgment upon 
 evolution " till the full tale is told," yet he immediately pro- 
 ceeds to give his own judgment upon it. He repeats all the 
 fallacies of the old "design" argument, and adds to them a 
 few of his own ; and he finishes up with a display of ethical
 
 Mr. DrummoncCs "Ascent of Man". 145 
 
 perversion that is indeed no new thing in the history of re- 
 ligion, but is a peculiarly repulsive thing from the point of view 
 of rationalist morals. Let us now follow him in the remainder 
 of his devious course. Having expounded the philosophy of 
 the struggle for life, he will now expound the philosophy of 
 what he calls the struggle for the life of others. 
 
 10
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MR. DRUMMOND accommodatingly begins with a few fallacies 
 that reveal at once the weakness and the confusion- of his argu- 
 ment. " We now open a wholly new, and by far the most 
 important, chapter in the evolution of man," he writes. " Up 
 to this time we have found for him a body, and the rudiments 
 of mind. But man is not a body, nor a mind. The temple 
 still awaits its final tenant the higher human soul. With a 
 body alone, man is an animal : the highest animal, yet a pure 
 animal ; struggling for its own narrow life, living for its small 
 and sordid ends. Add a mind to that and the advance is 
 infinite. The struggle for life assumes the august form of a 
 struggle for light : he who was once a savage, pursuing the 
 arts of the chase, realises Aristotle's ideal man, ' a hunter 
 after truth '. Yet this is not the end. Experience tells us that 
 man's true life is neither lived in the material tracts of the 
 body, nor in the higher altitudes of the intellect, but in the 
 warm world of the affections. Till he is equipped with these, 
 man is not human. He reaches his full height only when love 
 becomes to him the breath of life, the energy of will, the 
 summit of desire" (pp. 275, 276). 
 
 This is the primitive psychology of the theological college, 
 which we do not argue against at this time of day ; we smile at 
 it, and let it pass. But it is upon this primitive psychology 
 that Mr. Drummond actually chooses to base the remainder of 
 his argument. He hovers about for a moment between the 
 thesis that love is co-eternal with life, and the opposite thesis 
 
 (146)
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 147 
 
 that love came in at some time or other to complete the life 
 of man, who until that time was only an animal. Vacillations 
 of this kind, however, are what we are accustomed to from 
 reasoners like Mr. Drummond ; and we are also accustomed 
 to his beating of the big drum as a preliminary to the 
 announcement that he will expound to us a principle which 
 science up to now has strangely and inexplicably overlooked. 
 " As the story of evolution is usually told," he writes, " love 
 the evolved form, as we shall see, of the struggle for the life 
 of others has not even a place. Almost the whole emphasis 
 of science has fallen upon the opposite the animal struggle 
 for life. Hunger was early seen by the naturalists to be the 
 first and most imperious appetite of all living things, and the 
 course of Nature came to be erroneously interpreted in terms of 
 a never-ending strife. Since there are vastly more creatures 
 born than can ever survive, since for every morsel of food 
 provided a hundred claimants appear, life to an animal was 
 described to us as one long tragedy ; and poetry, borrowing 
 the imperfect creed, pictured Nature only as a blood-red fang. 
 Before we can go on to trace the higher progress of love itself, 
 it is necessary to correct this misconception. And no words 
 can be thrown away if they serve, in whatever imperfect 
 measure, to restore to honour what is in reality the supreme 
 factor in the evolution of the world. . . . The first chapter or 
 two of the story of evolution may be headed the struggle for 
 life ; but take the book as a whole and it is not a tale of 
 battle. It is a love-story " (pp. 277-279). 
 
 With the latter conclusion we shall have to deal later on. 
 But it is necessary to point out here the extraordinary con- 
 fusion of Mr. Drummond's ideas upon evolution. Does he 
 seriously think there ever was a time in the history of the 
 higher animals when the struggle for life was entirely what he 
 calls an "animal" struggle, without any admixture of altruism ? 
 If his words do not mean this they mean nothing at all ; and,
 
 1 48 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 judging from some of the specimens we have had of his faculty 
 for verbose fatuity, the latter supposition is not improbably 
 the correct one. But when he lays it down that " science " has 
 not taken account of altruism in its reading of evolution, what 
 has become of his own earlier admission that writer after 
 writer had expressly included this factor? He himself 
 mentioned Mr. Herbert Spencer and Messrs. Geddes and 
 Thomson, along with " Fiske, Littre, Romanes, Le Conte, L. 
 Buchner, Miss Buckley, and Prince Kropotkin," and these 
 are assuredly not all. Has he forgotten his own quotation 
 from Mr. Spencer ? " What is the ethical aspect of these [altru- 
 istic] principles? In the first place, animal life of all but the 
 lowest kinds has been maintained by virtue of them. Exclud- 
 ing the protozoa, among which their operation is scarcely 
 discernible, we see that without gratis benefits to offspring 
 and earned benefits to adults, life could not have continued. 
 In the second place, by virtue of them life has gradually 
 evolved into higher forms. By care of offspring, which has 
 become greater with advancing organisation, and by survival 
 of the fittest in the competition among adults, which has 
 become habitual with advancing organisation, superiority has 
 been perpetually fostered and further advances caused." * Has 
 he forgotten his own quotation from Messrs. Geddes and 
 Thomson's Evolution of Sex, when he so serenely informs us 
 that science has been almost ignorant of the great principle of 
 altruism in evolution ? The thesis of the importance of the 
 altruistic emotions in the evolution of animal life is to be 
 found almost everywhere in the writings of evolutionists ; but 
 what these have done is simply to avoid the primitive fallacies 
 of Mr. Drummond. 
 
 Briefly, his argument is this : the two fundamental func- 
 tions of organic life are nutrition and reproduction. From 
 the former we get egoism the struggle for life ; from the 
 
 1 Principles of Ethics, ii., 5.
 
 Mr. Drummond 's "Ascent of Man". 149 
 
 latter we get altruism the struggle for the life of others. The 
 way in which a primitive unicellular organism reproduces i.e., 
 by fission is an example of self-sacrifice on the lowest ranges 
 of organic life. " There is no reproduction in plant, animal, or 
 man which does not involve self-sacrifice. All that is moral 
 and social and other-regarding has come along the line of this 
 function. Sacrifice, moreover, as these physiological facts dis- 
 close, is not an accident, nor an accompaniment of reproduc- 
 tion, but an inevitable part of it. It is the universal law and 
 the universal condition of life" (p. 290). But above and 
 beyond this there are "other gifts which reproduction has 
 bestowed -upon the world. . . . All the arrangements in 
 plant life which concern the flower are the creations of the 
 struggle for the life of others. For reproduction alone the 
 flower is created ; when the process is over it returns to the 
 dust. This miracle of beauty is a miracle of love. Its splen- 
 dour of colour, its variegations, its form, its symmetry, its per- 
 fume, its honey, its very texture, are all notes of love love- 
 calls or love-lures or love-provisions for the insect world." And 
 not only flowers but foods are the products of love. " What 
 are these grains ? Seeds stores of starch or albumen which, in 
 the perfect forethought of reproduction (/), plants bequeath to 
 their offspring. The foods of the world, especially the chil- 
 dren's foods, are the foods of the children of plants, the foods 
 which unselfish (sic} activities store round the cradles of the 
 helpless, so that when the sun wakens them to their new world 
 they may not want. Every plant in the world lives for others. 
 It sets aside something costly, cared for, the highest expression 
 of its nature. The seed is the tithe of love, the tithe which 
 Nature renders to man. When man lives upon seeds he lives 
 upon love." And so on, and so on, ad nauseam. 
 
 I do not know whether Mr. Drummond means this 
 extraordinary rhapsody to be taken seriously, but to take it 
 seriously is a compliment which few people will pay him.
 
 1 50 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 The new principle, the much-trumpeted discovery which was 
 so noisily heralded by Mr. Drummond, turns out to be nothing 
 more than a childish confusion due to an illegitimate use of 
 one or two words. He is indeed careful, in his more rational 
 moments, to tell us to beware of reading moral contents into 
 lower nature ; but he conveniently forgets his own warning 
 as soon as it suits his purpose to do so. If ever there was a 
 word that bore an ethical meaning, it is the word "self- 
 sacrifice " ; unless it is used in a purely figurative way, which 
 no competent reasoner would ever think of doing in argument, 
 it can have none but an ethical interpretation ; and for Mr. 
 Drummond to talk of the fission of a lowly organised proto- 
 plasmic cell a purely physical process if ever there was one 
 as an act of self-sacrifice, as a dying to live, is simply to assume 
 all he has to prove, by using the ethical term in a connection 
 that makes its use wholly illegitimate. Altruism may have 
 had its genesis in reproduction ; but to set out to prove this 
 proposition, and to prove it by saying that altruism comes 
 from reproduction because reproduction = altruism, is really 
 too ingenuous for any one but a theological professor. And he 
 alone could speak of "the perfect forethought of reproduc- 
 tion," and argue that flowers and seeds are love-products 
 because they attract or keep alive other organisms. On the 
 same terms it is love that makes the iron fly to the magnet, 
 and love that prompts the animal with a tape-worm to feed 
 itself in order to keep the parasite alive. It may be a very 
 pretty poetic fancy that it is love that makes the activities of 
 one substance subserve the activities of another ; but poetry is 
 not science, and the theological professor who calmly assures 
 us that the evolution theory has been blundering along in the 
 dark until now, and that he has the new light that will make 
 all clear to us, should really be above proving his case by a 
 childish confusion of terms, and a childish belief that metaphor 
 is argument.
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man" . 151 
 
 The remainder of Mr. Drummond's chapter is an interest- 
 ing example of how to read evolution backwards, and to 
 imagine you are explaining things by simply stating the mere 
 fact of the existence of the things. He points out once more 
 what every one knows already, that " looking broadly at 
 Nature, one general fact is striking the more social animals 
 are in overwhelming preponderance over the unsocial. Mr. 
 Darwin's dictum, that 'those communities which included the 
 greatest number of the most sympathetic members would 
 flourish best,' is wholly proved " (p. 305). That is, co-opera- 
 tion has been, among the organisms that practised it, an 
 important factor in the struggle for survival. Mr. Drummond 
 chooses to put it in the theological manner, thus : " But to 
 return to the more direct effects of reproduction. After 
 creating others there lay before evolution a not less necessary 
 task the task of uniting them. . . . Before any higher evolu- 
 tion can take place these units must by some means be 
 brought into relation so as not only to act together, but to 
 react upon each other." And evolution does this by means 
 of sex. If Mr. Drummond's words here mean anything what- 
 ever, they mean that evolution, or nature, invented sex in order 
 to bring about a higher altruism. 
 
 " Now what does all this mean ? To say that the sex 
 distinction is necessary to sustain the existence of life in the 
 world is no answer, since it is at least possible that life could 
 have been kept up. without it. From the facts of partheno- 
 genesis, illustrated in bees and termites, it is now certain that 
 reproduction can be effected without fertilisation ; and the 
 circumstance that fertilisation is nevertheless the rule proves 
 this method of reproduction, though not a necessity, to be in 
 some way beneficial to life. It is important to notice this 
 absence of necessity for sex having been created the absence 
 of any known necessity from the merely physiological stand- 
 point. Is it conceivable that Nature should sometimes do things
 
 152 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 with an ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance ? ... In 
 those early days when sex was instituted it was a physical 
 universe. Undoubtedly sex then had physiological advan- 
 tages ; but when in a later day the ethical advantages become 
 visible, and rise to such significance that the higher world 
 nearly wholly rests upon them, we are entitled, as viewing the 
 world from that higher level, to have our own suspicions as to 
 a deeper motive underlying the physical" (pp. 318, 319). 
 
 And again, after mentioning the views of Weismann and 
 others as to the origin of sex, he says : 
 
 " These views may be each true, and probably, in a measure, 
 are ; but the fact remains that the later psychical implications 
 of sex are of such transcendent character as to throw all 
 physical considerations into the shade. When we turn to 
 these, their significance is as obvious as in the other case it 
 was obscure. This will appear if we take even the most dis- 
 tinctively biological of these theories that of Weismann. 
 Sex, to him, is the great source of variation in Nature. . . . 
 Now this variety, though not the main object of sex, is pre- 
 cisely what it was essential for evolution by some means to bring 
 about. . . . Now, if evolution designed, among other things, to 
 undertake the differentiation of mankind, it could not have 
 done it more effectively than through the device of sex " 
 
 (pp. 320..32I). 
 
 It is impossible to take very seriously a writer who is 
 capable of penning sentences such as those italicised above ; 
 who can talk so unsuspectingly of the designs and intentions 
 of evolution and the ulterior motives of Nature, and imagine 
 all the time that he is conducting a scientific discussion. To 
 say that because sex has something to do with ethics, therefore 
 Nature invented sex in order to make men ethical, is to say 
 that because corks fit bottles, therefore Nature had an eye to 
 bottles when she made the cork-tree. It is really no explana- 
 tion at all of the genesis of anything to point to the later
 
 Mr. Drummond 1 s "Ascent of Man". 153 
 
 elements that accompany it. To do this is simply to read 
 backwards instead of forwards. Mr. Drummond, however, 
 absurd as his arguments are, may in this respect be looked 
 upon as sinning in good company ; for the profound German 
 specialist whose researches are making such havoc among the 
 older theories of heredity, is very much given to the same 
 style of unmeaning and unprofitable writing. Take the 
 following examples : 
 
 " The power possessed by fungi and mosses of reproducing 
 .a new individual from any bit of the plant under favourable 
 conditions has been supposed to contradict my view [of 
 regeneration]. But I do not see what prevents us from regard- 
 ing this power as an adaptation for ensuring the existence of a 
 species surrounded by dangers of all kinds. When the top of 
 a toadstool is knocked off, a new one is formed (Brefeld) ; and 
 this arrangement is obviously of great use in the preservation 
 of the species. An entire liverwort can be regrown from the 
 smallest fragments of the plant (Vochting). Why, therefore, 
 should the assumption be improbable that this power has been 
 acquired in order to ensure the persistence of a species the exist- 
 ence of which is threatened by every sudden drought ? " * 
 
 "... sexual reproduction has come into force in organic 
 nature in order to preserve the variability which has existed 
 since the time of the primordial beings." 2 
 
 " The tail of a lizard, which is very liable to injury, 
 becomes regenerated because (!) it is of great importance to 
 the individual, and if lost its owner is placed at a dis- 
 advantage." 3 
 
 These examples are typical of the fallacious form of 
 pseudo-reasoning into which Weismann occasionally falls, and 
 which is simply Mr. Drummond's method from first to last. 
 As one critic has put it, " Weismann, ingenious in experiment 
 and fertile in deduction as he is, has a curiously inverted way 
 
 1 The Germ Plasm, p. 215. ' 2 Ibid., p. 439. 3 Ibid., p. 122.
 
 1 54 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 of looking at processes of evolution that points to grave defects 
 in him as an all-round reasoner. Reading his first essay, that 
 on The Duration of Life which Professor Karl Pearson has 
 been good enough to admit to be ' fairly sane ' in comparison 
 with ' the arithmetico-metaphysical muddle of his theory of 
 amphimixis ' we seem to be looking at everything through 
 the wrong end of the telescope. Death is an adaptation, 
 according to Weismann ; and in order to show how death came 
 into the world as one of the conditions of organisms being 
 adapted to their environment that is, as one of the condi- 
 tions of life some very pretty contortions have to be gone 
 through. Mr. Spencer's occasional reading of a purpose into 
 the process of evolution is as nothing compared to Weismann's, 
 who is the Dr. Pangloss of biology ; there being no God but 
 adaptation, and Weismann being his prophet. And so, when 
 we read that there could not have been much variety in the 
 world so long as organisms multiplied asexually, and that 
 amphimixis, or sexual reproduction, was introduced in order 
 to ensure greater variety of forms, we are not so startled as 
 we might have been, only we begin to ask what are the odds 
 against such a reasoner interpreting the process of evolution in 
 terms of genuine cause and effect. Weismann, indeed, has a 
 curious habit of taking existent things, and then supposing 
 their existence to be due to the fact of their being existent : 
 the preliminary question of what change in the processes of 
 organic and inorganic Nature caused this new factor to come 
 into existence is quietly passed over. The consequence is that 
 his explanations of origins are mainly fictitious, and consist 
 not in showing how new structures have originated, but how 
 they were usefully related to their environment when they had 
 actually come into being. You ask the physiological cause, 
 let us say, of the hollow in the horse's back, and you are 
 invited, in reply, to observe how beautifully this hollow fits the 
 saddle ; or you ask what is the chemical structure of cork, and
 
 Mr. DrummoncTs "Ascent of Man". 155 
 
 your mentor gravely shows you the adaptation between the 
 cork and the neck of the bottle." l 
 
 This criticism applies to Mr. Drummond as much as to 
 Professor Weismann ; but in the case of the former the illogical 
 method is rendered all the more exasperating by the strong 
 infusion of theological quackery. After all Mr.lDrummond's 
 elaborate and sentimental rhapsodising about the struggle for 
 the life of others, we are just left with the old proposition that 
 altruism is, at all events in part, coeternal with reproduction. 
 All the rest is mere verbose paralogism, and the constant talk 
 about the " intentions " of Nature only serves to deepen the 
 fallacies. If Mr. Drummond were writing on the present com- 
 mercial supremacy of England he would probably say that if 
 ever England was to be supreme in commerce it was neces- 
 sary that she should be inhabited by a sturdy race, trained 
 and developed by the struggle with a not too-bountiful Nature, 
 that all parts of the interior should be within easy distance of 
 the sea, that there should be plenteous supplies of coal and 
 iron, that she should be an island somewhat removed from the 
 continent of Europe, and thus escape many of the convulsions 
 and embroilments of continental nations ; and so on, and so 
 on. And he would be quite right. The commercial supre- 
 macy of England has been due to these things among others. 
 But to show that is not to show how these things came about. 
 Mr. Drummond would say that Nature "meant" England to 
 be supreme, and arranged her coal and iron, and the rivers and 
 the seas, accordingly. To credit Nature with intentions in this 
 manner, even when they are good intentions, and to call it 
 science, is simply to make a monkey jabber through a human 
 mask and call it acting ; and Mr. Drummond's vain convic- 
 tion that he is really writing science when he is indulging in 
 these theological inversions, makes any other comparison than 
 this hopelessly inadequate to the case. 
 
 1 Mr. Ernest Newman in the Free Review, pp. 214, 215, December, 1896.
 
 156 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 With the two remaining chapters of Mr. Drummond's 
 theological biology we have no practical concern. They are 
 of the same order as those already dealt with, except that 
 they are somewhat more sentimental and somewhat more 
 foolish. Argument against them is impossible, but a few 
 quotations will show at once the drift of the exposition and 
 what it is worth. 
 
 The two chapters in que'stion are entitled respectively 
 "The Evolution of a Mother" and "The Evolution of a 
 Father". " The evolution of a mother," he writes, " . . . was 
 the most stupendous task evolution ever undertook (sic). . . . 
 Is it too much to say that the one motive (sic) of organic 
 Nature was to make mothers ? It is at least certain that this 
 was the chief thing she did. . . . In as real a sense as 
 a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, the 
 machinery of Nature is designed in the last resort to turn out 
 mothers." The note of the professional theologian being heard 
 thus early, we are prepared for the coming strains. Mr. 
 Drummond brings a sentimental tear into the corner of his 
 eye, and proceeds to ring the changes once more upon love. 
 In the lower orders of Nature there were no mothers. " That 
 early world, therefore, for millions and millions of years was a 
 bleak and loveless world. It was a world without children 
 and a world without mothers. It is good to realise how heart- 
 less Nature was till these arrived " (p 246). And when 
 " Nature" did take it into her head to make mothers, it was 
 with an eye to " the ethical effect ". " Nature is working not 
 aimlessly, not even mysteriously, but in a specific direction ; 
 . . . somehow the idea of mothers is in her mind, and . . . 
 she is trying to draw closer and closer the bonds which are to 
 unite the children of men " (p. 354). And so she brings in 
 certain devices which shall prolong the period of infantile 
 helplessness, and so make the bond between mother and 
 children all the closer and more permanent ; because, as Mr.
 
 Mr. DrummoncTs "Ascent of Man". 157 
 
 Drummond puts it, " Nature is in earnest here if anywhere," 
 and " love had no chance till the human mother came". 
 
 Leaving the mothers, Mr. Drummond proceeds to the 
 fathers ; and after telling us that the evolution of a mother was 
 the most stupendous task evolution ever undertook, and that 
 the one motive of organic Nature was to make mothers, he now 
 informs us that " there was still a crowning task to accomplish. 
 The world was now beginning to fill with mothers, but there 
 were no fathers" (pp. 374, 375). Nature, observing this 
 lamentable defect, immediately girds up her loins, so to speak, 
 and proceeds to make fathers, or rather, to make the un- 
 civilised father a civilised father, to lick him into shape, as it 
 were. As Mr. Drummond puts it : " Now here is a very 
 pretty problem for evolution. She has at once to make good 
 husbands and good fathers out of lawless savages. Unless this 
 problem is solved the higher progress of the world is at an 
 end." Nature, of course, ultimately proves equal to the task, 
 and the fathers are duly made. They then represent righteous- 
 ness, while the mothers represent love ; and so the moral order 
 is at last firmly established. 
 
 Criticism is superfluous upon this egregious piece of pro- 
 fessional curatese, and it is almost unnecessary to point out 
 that if " Nature," or the " Power behind Nature," is to be 
 credited with having at last made fathers and mothers and a 
 moral order, she or it must also be debited with the errors and 
 breakages upon the way. The human family and the human 
 virtues merely represent the survival of a very profitable 
 variation, the virtues in question being just those that were of 
 a very material advantage in the struggle for existence. Even 
 Mr. Drummond seems aware of this at times. Thus he tells 
 us in one place that one mother leaves children and another 
 does not, because the first has a sympathy which the other 
 does not possess. " On occasion sympathy will be called out 
 in unusual ways. Crises will occur dangers, famines, sick-
 
 158 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 nesses. At first the mother will be unable to meet these 
 extreme demands -her fund of sympathy is too poor. She 
 cannot take any exceptional trouble, or forget herself, or do 
 anything very heroic. The child, unable to breast the danger 
 alone, dies. It is well that this should be so. It is the 
 severity and righteous justice (!) of Nature the tragedy of 
 Ivan Ivanovitch anticipated by evolution. A mother who has 
 failed in helpfulness must leave no successor to perpetuate her 
 unworthiness in posterity. Somewhere else, however, develop- 
 ing along similar lines, there is another fractionally better 
 mother. When the emergency occurs she rises to the occasion. 
 For one hour she transcends herself. . . . Unselfishness has 
 scored ; its child has proved itself fitter to survive than the 
 child of Selfishness" (p. 371). Passing over the monstrous 
 ethic that can speak of the justice of " Nature " in killing her 
 own imperfect types, and passing over the absurdity of singing 
 hymns of laudation to the Author of Nature for making the 
 type he wanted and the type he did not want, and then 
 killing the latter to show that he did not want it what is the 
 upshot of this passage ? Simply that unselfishness is, in cer- 
 tain circumstances, a variation tending to ensure survival ; 
 that is, it is a favourable variation in the struggle for life. 
 
 So with Mr. Drummond's argument about the ultimate 
 triumph of monogamy. " The stress just laid upon the 
 ethical gains of the monogamous state as contrasted with the 
 polygamous of course only emphasises one side of the ques- 
 tion, and by the pure naturalist might be ruled out of court. 
 Were the physiologist to go over the same ground he could 
 give a parallel account of the development, and show that on 
 the merely physiological plane the transition to monogamy 
 and the rise of the family was a likely if not an inevitable 
 result. It is at least certain that during those later stages of 
 social evolution in which monogamy has prevailed, the change 
 has been in the best physical interests alike of the parents, the
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 159 
 
 offspring, and of society" (pp. 387, 388). That is,- a society 
 adopting these institutions would have an advantage in the 
 struggle for life. 
 
 Again, " For a prolonged and protective fatherhood, once 
 introduced into the world, was immediately taken charge of by 
 natural selection. The children who had fathers to fight for 
 them grew up ; those who had not were killed or starved. The 
 lengthening of the period during which father and mother 
 kept together meant double protection for the little ones ; and 
 the more they kept together for the first few days or weeks, 
 and the more the father helped to defend mother and child, 
 the more chance for all three in the end " (pp. 393, 394). 
 Once more, the animals possessing these instincts stood a 
 better chance of survival ; that is, the qualities which Mr. 
 Drummond supposes to be the peculiar characteristic of the 
 "struggle for the life of others" are simply phases of the 
 struggle for life, which remains the one formula that sums up 
 the course of evolution. And to talk of the " intentions of 
 Nature," and to say that Nature meant the loving and sympa- 
 thetic organisms to survive, is again merely to read evolution 
 backwards, to look at it through the wrong end of the tele- 
 scope. These factors have survived for the simple reason that 
 they were factors tending to survival ; that given a certain 
 combination of circumstances, no others could have survived ; 
 just as the grub that mimics the leaf it lies on has survived, 
 not because "evolution" had an eye to the survival of this 
 particular grub, but because its fellows who did not mimic the 
 leaf have been interred in the bodies of their enemies. If 
 " Nature " is to be credited with intentions in the case of one 
 survival, merely because it is a survival, she must be credited 
 with similar intentions all round ; and put in this manner, the 
 ascription of intentions at all to Nature is seen to be a theo- 
 logical, that is, an unscientific, absurdity.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 LEAVING, then, Mr. Drummond's sentimental rhapsodies to 
 the fate that lies in store for all bathos, let us glance at his 
 final chapter, entitled " Involution ". The object of this 
 chapter may be most fitly stated in the question he himself 
 poses at the outset : " Working upwards through the clay, 
 the biologist finds what he took to be an organism of the clay 
 leaving his domain and passing into a world above a world 
 which he had scarcely noticed before, and into which, with 
 such instruments as he employs, he cannot follow it. Working 
 downward through the higher world, the psychologist, the 
 moralist, the sociologist, behold the even more wonderful 
 spectacle of the things they had counted a peculiar possession 
 of the upper kingdom, burying themselves in ever attenuating 
 forms in the clay beneath. What is to be made of this dis- 
 covery? Once more, Is it a stigmaria or a sigillaria world? 
 Is the biologist to give up his clay or the moralist his higher 
 kingdom? Are mind, morals, men, to be interpreted in terms 
 of roots, or are atoms and cells to be judged by the flowers 
 and fruits of the tree?" (p. 410;. 
 
 Mr. Drummond proceeds to answer the question thus, in a 
 passage which must be quoted in its entirety : 
 
 "Yet did sigillaria grow out of stigmaria? Did mind, 
 morals, men, evolve out of matter? Surely if one is the tree 
 and the other the root of that tree, and if evolution means the 
 passage of the one into the other, there is no escape from this 
 
 conclusion no escape, therefore, from the crassest material- 
 
 (160)
 
 Mr. DrwnmoncCs "Ascent of Man". 161 
 
 ism? If this is really the situation, the lower must then 
 include the higher, and evolution, after all, be a process of the 
 clay ? This is a frequent, a natural, and a wholly unreflecting 
 (sic) inference from a very common way of stating the evolu- 
 tion theory. It arises from a total misconception of what a 
 root is. Because a thing is seen to have roots, it is assumed 
 that it has grown out of these roots, and must therefore belong 
 to the root order. But neither of these things is true in 
 Nature. Are the stem, branch, leaf, flower, fruit of a tree 
 roots ? Do they belong to the root order ? They do not. 
 Their whole morphology is different ; their whole physiology 
 is different ; their reactions upon the world around are 
 different. But it must be allowed that they are at least con- 
 tained in the root ? No single one of them is contained in the 
 root. If not in the root, then in the clay ? Neither are they 
 contained in the clay. But they grow out of clay ; are they 
 not made out of clay? They do not grow out of clay, and 
 they are not made out of clay. It is astounding sometimes 
 how little those who venture to criticise biological processes 
 seem to know of its (sic) simplest facts. Fill a flower-pot with 
 clay and plant in it a seedling. At the end of four years it 
 has become a small tree ; it is six feet high ; it weighs ten 
 pounds. But the clay in the pot is still there ? A moiety of 
 it has gone, but it is not appreciably diminished ; it has not, 
 except the moiety, passed into the tree ; the tree does not live 
 on clay nor on any force contained in the clay. It cannot 
 have grown out of the seedling, for the seedling contained but 
 a grain for every pound contained in the tree. It cannot have 
 grown from the root, because the root is there now, has lost 
 nothing to the tree, has itself gained from the tree, and at first 
 was no more there than the tree. 
 
 " Sigillaria, then, as representing the ethical order, did not 
 grow out of stigmaria as representing the organic or the 
 
 material order. Trees not only do not evolve out of their 
 
 1 1
 
 1 6 2 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 roots, but whole classes in the plant world the sea-weeds, 
 for instance have no roots at all. If any possible relation 
 exists it is exactly the opposite one it is the root which 
 evolves from the tree. Trees send down roots in a far truer 
 sense than roots send up trees. Yet neither is the whole 
 truth. The true function of the root is to give stability to the 
 tree, and to afford a medium for conveying into it inorganic 
 matter from without. And this brings us face to face with the 
 real relation. Tree and root the seed apart find their 
 explanation not in one another nor in something in them- 
 selves, but mainly in something outside themselves. The 
 secret of evolution lies, in short, with the environment. In the 
 environment in that in which things live and move and have 
 their being is found the secret of their being, and especially 
 of their becoming. And what is that in which things live and 
 move and have their being? It is Nature, the world, the 
 cosmos and something more, some One more, an Infinite 
 Intelligence and an Eternal Will. Everything that lives, lives 
 in virtue of its correspondences with this environment.' Evolu- 
 tion is not to unfold from within ; it is to infold from without. 
 Growth is no mere extension from a root, but a taking pos- 
 session of, or a being possessed by, an ever-widening environ- 
 ment, a continuous process of assimilation of the seen or 
 unseen, a ceaseless redistribution of energies flowing into the 
 evolving organism from the universe around it. The supreme 
 factor in all development is environment. Half the confusions 
 which reign round the process of evolution, and half the objec- 
 tions to it, arise from considering the evolving object as a 
 self-sufficient whole (!). Produce an organism, plant, animal, 
 man, society, which will evolve in vacua, and the right is yours 
 to say that the tree lies in the root, the flower in the bud, the 
 man in the embryo, the social organism in the family of an 
 anthropoid ape. If an organism is to be judged in terms of 
 the immediate environment of its roots, the tree is a clay tree ;
 
 Mr. DmmmoncCs "Ascent of Man". 163 
 
 but if it is to be judged by stem, leaves, fruit, it is not a clay 
 tree. If the moral or social organism is to be judged in terms 
 of the environment of its roots, the moral and social organism 
 is a material organism ; but if it is to be judged in terms of 
 the higher influences which enter into the making of its stem, 
 leaves, fruit, it is not a material organism. Everything that 
 lives, and every part of everything that lives, enters into rela- 
 tion with different parts of the environment and with different 
 things in the environment ; and at every step of its ascent it 
 compasses new ranges of the environment, and is acted upon, 
 and acts, in different ways from those in which it was acted 
 upon, or acted, at the previous stage" (pp. 412-416). 
 
 Mr. Drummond, it will be observed, is very anxious to 
 guard against the impression that " the lower includes the 
 higher," that the mind and morals of men have come from the 
 atom. This, coming from the writer who has laid such stress 
 on the continuity of evolution, who has told us that altruism 
 is merely the ethical side of what on the physiological side is 
 simply reproduction, is, to say the least, somewhat extra- 
 ordinary. But not less extraordinary is the process of reason- 
 ing by which Mr. Drummond attempts to show that the lower 
 must be interpreted in terms of the higher, not the higher in 
 terms of the lower. His illustration of the root and tree is the 
 merest trifling. A tree does not grow out of its roots, he says, 
 and does not live on the clay, or on any force contained in the 
 clay. If he means that the final tree is the root plus the clay 
 plus something else, he is merely uttering a truism ; if he 
 means that the tree is not potentially contained in the seed- 
 ling, he is simply evading a very plain logical issue. Without 
 the clay and the air and the rest the seedling no doubt would 
 not grow into the tree ; but on the other hand the clay and the 
 air and the rest would not grow into the tree without the seed- 
 ling. Logically speaking, all these factors are necessary for 
 the production of the tree ; but as there is nothing very dis-
 
 1 64 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 tinctive about the clay and the air, and as it is the particular 
 piece of matter known as the seedling that gives the key to 
 the future product, we are entitled to say that it is from the 
 seedling that the tree comes. Similarly, though the morbid 
 changes produced in the body by a micro-organism could not 
 be produced without a certain concurrence of circumstances 
 in the tissues, yet since, these circumstances remaining the 
 same in the case of ten different foreign substances, the morbid 
 changes in question follow only upon the introduction of this 
 particular micro-organism, we are justified in saying that they 
 follow upon or grow out of this. And Mr. Drummond him- 
 self, up to this stage of his argument, has not hesitated to say 
 that man has grown out of a single cell, although we might 
 answer him, in his own style, by saying that " man cannot 
 have grown out of the cell, for the cell contained but a grain 
 for every pound contained in the man ". In his anxiety to 
 prove his point by means of an analogy, he has unfortunately 
 proved too much. 
 
 His remarks on environment are not less confused. To 
 say that most evolutionists have neglected the factor of 
 environment, and to challenge them to produce "an organism 
 . . . which will develop in vacua" is simply to talk blustering 
 nonsense. Evolutionists have always recognised the factor of 
 environment were bound, indeed, by the very terms of their 
 theory to recognise it, for what does the survival of the fittest 
 mean if not that some organisms are adapted to their environ- 
 ment while others are not? Evolutionists, however, have 
 avoided the error into which Mr. Drummond so unsuspect- 
 ingly falls, of considering environment as "the supreme factor 
 in all development ". Neither organism nor environment is 
 the " supreme factor," because the one is essential to the other 
 is, indeed, a meaningless term without the other. One 
 might as well argue that when a bullet is shot horizontally 
 from a rifle, the " supreme factor " determining its parabolic
 
 Mr. Drummond' s "Ascent of Man" . 165 
 
 course is. gravitation, and gravitation alone. The relation 
 between organism and environment is just one phase of the 
 universal law of action and reaction, and the one is no more 
 the " supreme factor " than the other. Losing sight of this 
 fact, indeed, Mr. Drummond loses sight of the cognate fact 
 that his "environment," in the sense in. which he uses the 
 word, is a pure abstraction. What is the environment ? he 
 asks. " What is that in which things live and move and have 
 theii being? It is Nature, the world, the cosmos and some- 
 thing more, some One more, an Infinite Intelligence and an 
 Eternal Will." The characteristically theological snuffle of the 
 last clause may profitably be ignored, but the earlier part of it 
 is worth observing. The environment of " things " is " Nature, 
 the world, the cosmos". As if " things " were not themselves 
 " Nature, the world, the cosmos " ! Does Mr. Drummond really 
 think that a tree is a thing distinct from Nature, and that 
 nature forms an environment to it much as a bottle forms an 
 environment to the water contained in it ? It is difficult to 
 imagine that the man who undertakes to set us all right on 
 the subject of evolution can be capable of so palpable a fallacy 
 as this ; yet capable of it he assuredly is. As a matter of fact 
 there are no organisms qua organisms, and no environment qua 
 environment ; everything is in term organism and environ- 
 ment. If it be found convenient to mark off from each other 
 in broad distinction an agriculturist and his cornfield, calling 
 the one the organism and the other the environment, well and 
 good ; but we must in that case beware of looking upon the 
 environment as something that "acts" upon the man. It is 
 true that he has to adapt himself to the cornfield ; but on the 
 other hand it also has to adapt itself to him. The relation 
 between them is not one of activity on the one side and 
 passivity on the other, but of action and reaction. There 
 cannot, indeed, be action without reaction ; there cannot be 
 one part of Nature which acts as " the supreme factor in
 
 1 66 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 development," and another part which undergoes develop- 
 ment. If the bacteria of consumption enter a man's system, to 
 that extent they may be said to represent part of the environ- 
 ment of the man ; but inasmuch as they immediately stimulate 
 the phagocytes to react upon them, these phagocytes become 
 in turn their environment. It is, indeed, only by a process of 
 rough-and-ready naming that we can speak of organism and 
 environment as if the one was something that grew and the 
 other something that stimulated it to grow. It is convenient 
 to use our words in this manner, but hardly scientific ; and 
 when we come to base an argument upon the words, or 
 between the concrete relations which they are supposed to 
 connotate, we must examine their implications more carefully. 
 It then appears that to look upon either organism or environ- 
 ment as " the supreme factor " is to look upon the three or 
 the four as the supreme factor in the multiplication that is 
 to make twelve ; that either term is meaningless without the 
 other ; and that the true formula for evolution, as for every- 
 thing else, is simply action and reaction. 
 
 And notice the tangle into which Mr. Drummond has 
 finally got his argument through his anxiety to prove that we 
 must interpret the lower in terms of the higher. " If the 
 moral or social organism is to be judged in terms of the 
 environment of its roots, the moral and social organism is a 
 material organism ; but if it is to be judged in terms of the 
 higher influences which enter into the making of its stem, 
 leaves, fruit, it is not a material organism." This means, if it 
 means anything, that the environments of the roots and of the 
 tree, that is, of the " material " world and the " ethical " world, 
 are two quite distinct things. But did not Mr. Drummond 
 define the environment, "that in which things live and move 
 and have their being," as " Nature, the world, the cosmos," and 
 the rest of it? What then has become of this definition when 
 he makes his later distinction between the environment of the
 
 Mr. Drummond' s "Ascent of Man" . 167 
 
 roots and the environment of the tree ? Does he mean that 
 the cosmos is the environment of some things and not of 
 others ? Or does he mean that there was a time when the 
 environment of " things " was not what it is now, i.e., a time 
 when the cosmos was not the cosmos ? Does he mean that 
 the social tree is bathed in an environment which was not 
 round the social roots, an environment which, though it is the 
 cosmos itself, has only lately come into being, while the former 
 environment, which was also the cosmos itself, has somehow 
 ceased to be ; that is, that the cosmos was one thing in those 
 days and quite another thing now ? What are the " higher 
 influences which enter into the making of the stem," etc. ? 
 Are not these part and parcel of " Nature, the world, the 
 cosmos " ? And if so, were they not in that case the environ- 
 ment of the roots also? Mr. Drummond, indeed, seemingly 
 conscious of his fallacy in a vague sort of way, does try to 
 retrieve his position in the next sentence. " Everything that 
 lives . . . enters into relation with different parts of the 
 environment and with different things in the environment," 
 which is quite true ; " and at every step of its ascent it com- 
 passes new ranges of the environment, and is acted upon and 
 acts in different ways from those in which it was acted upon 
 or acted at the previous stage ". Quite so ; but then what 
 causes this transformation ? Why should the organism come 
 into relation with different parts of the environment from age 
 to age? For, as Mr. Drummond goes on to remark, " what is 
 most of all essential to remember is that not only is environ- 
 ment the prime factor in development, but that the environ- 
 ment itself rises with every evolution of any form of life. To 
 regard the environment as a fixed quantity and a fixed 
 quality is, next to ignoring the altruistic factor, the cardinal 
 error of evolutional philosophy " (p. 416). Whether the " some 
 One more, an Infinite Intelligence and an Eternal Will," is also 
 to be regarded as not "a fixed quantity and a fixed quality,"
 
 1 68 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 whether the Infinite Intelligence is subject to changes of 
 quantity, and so is not Infinite, and whether the Eternal Will 
 is subject to changes of quality, and so is not Eternal, I for- 
 bear to ask Mr. Drummond. I would rather ask him what 
 causes the environment to change in the manner he has 
 spoken of. The environment changes arid the organism 
 changes with it ; but the former is " the supreme factor in 
 development ". What then causes it to change ? Apparently 
 the answer must be, " Itself" ; an error which Mr. Drummond 
 would have avoided if he had recognised that there is no such 
 thing as " the environment". "There is no social question," 
 said Gambetta ; "there are social questions." Similarly, there 
 is no environment ; there are environments. Organisms and 
 environments change because of the constant integration and 
 disintegration of matter and motion, and because the slightest 
 change in one of the factors must immediately lead to a redis- 
 tribution of energy, that is, to a change in all the other factors. 
 When Mr. Drummond says that the environment must change 
 with " every evolution of any form of life," he is talking science ; 
 when he says that " the secret of evolution lies . . . with the 
 environment" and defines the environment as " that in which 
 things live and move and have their being," and this again as 
 " Nature, the world, the cosmos," he is simply confusing him- 
 self by using a particular word in a general sense, simply 
 tripping over the hem of his own garment. 
 
 The confusion, indeed, becomes worse as the exposition 
 goes on. " As in the animal kingdom," says Mr. Drummond, 
 " the senses open one by one the eye progressing from the 
 mere discernment of light and darkness to the blurred image 
 of things near, and then to clearer vision of the more remote 
 ... so in the higher world the moral and spiritual senses rise 
 and quicken till they compass qualities unknown before and 
 impossible to the limited faculties of the earlier life. So man, 
 not by any innate tendency to progress himself, nor by the
 
 Mr. Drummond 's "Ascent of Man" . 169 
 
 energies inherent in the protoplasmic cell from which he first 
 set out, but by a continuous feeding and reinforcing of the 
 process from without, attains the higher altitudes, and from 
 the sense-world at the mountain foot ascends with ennobling 
 and ennobled faculties until he greets the sun" (p. 418). 
 
 What then, he proceeds to ask, is the environment of the 
 social tree? " It is all the things, and all the persons, and all 
 the influences, and all the forces with which, at each successive 
 stage of progress, it enters into correspondence. And this 
 environment inevitably expands as the social tree expands 
 and extends its correspondences. At the savage stage man 
 compasses one set of relations, at the rude social stage 
 another, at the civilised stage a third, and each has its own 
 reactions. The social, the moral and the religious forces beat 
 upon all social beings in the order in which the capacities for 
 them unfold, and according to the measure in which the 
 capacities themselves are fitted to contain them. And from 
 what ultimate source do they come ? There is only one 
 source of everything in the world. They come from the same 
 source as the carbonic acid gas, the oxygen, the nitrogen and 
 the vapour of water, which from the outer world enter into 
 the growing plant. These also visit the plant in the order 
 in which the capacities for them unfold, and according to the 
 measure in which these capacities can contain them." 
 
 At this point Mr. Drummond seems to become aware that 
 he is drifting perilously near the rocks of folly. The conception 
 of an environment which contains a bagful of physical and 
 social and moral and religious " forces," and which sprinkles a 
 little, now of one, now of another, upon the earth according to 
 its " capacity," is really too grotesque for criticism. But Mr. 
 Drummond sets himself now to show that " the fact that the 
 higher principles come from the same environment as those of 
 the plant, nevertheless does not imply that they are the same 
 as those which enter into the plant. In the plant they are
 
 1 70 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 physical, in man spiritual. If anything is to be implied, it is 
 not that the spiritual energies are physical, but that the 
 physical energies are spiritual. . . . Call it all matter, energy, 
 tree a physical production, and have we yet touched its 
 ultimate reality ? Are we even quite sure that what we call 
 a physical world is, after all, a physical world? The prepon- 
 derating view of science (!) at present is that it is not. The 
 very term ' material world,' we are told, is a misnomer ; that 
 the world is a spiritual world, merely employing ' matter ' for 
 its manifestations" (pp. 419, 420). 
 
 Thus, although there is really speaking no physical world, 
 but only a spiritual world, yet there is a physical world and a 
 spiritual world. In the plant the energy is physical, in man 
 it is spiritual. Yet the spiritual energies are not physical, we 
 learn in the next sentence, but the physical energies are 
 spiritual. So that the energy of the plant, being physical, is 
 after all not physical but spiritual, i.e., it is of the same order 
 as that of man ; and yet, once more, the " higher principles " 
 are not the same as "those which enter into the plant". Mr. 
 Drummond, indeed, is particularly expert in fallacy of this 
 kind. Twelve years ago he was doing it in the same naked 
 arid unashamed way in his Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World. " It will be the splendid task of the theology of the 
 future," he wrote there, "to ... disclose to a waning scepti- 
 cism the naturalness of the supernatural " (p. 52). Well might 
 one of his critics say of him then, that " if the author be only 
 allowed rope enough of that description he will anticipate 
 critical justice "- 1 To argue against the man who can talk of 
 the naturalness of the supernatural, the spirituality of the 
 physical, and yet constantly treat them as distinct, is indeed 
 almost a superfluity. 
 
 We may then profitably leave Mr. Drummond's exposition 
 
 J -See the article on " Dogma and Masquerade," by Mr. John M. Robertson, 
 in the Westminster Review for July, 1885.
 
 Mr. Drummond' s "Ascent of Man". 17 1 
 
 of the function of the environment to go down the primrose 
 path by its own momentum ; and we may look for a moment 
 at the concluding stages of his book. He tells us, as we have 
 so often been told before, that " instead of abolishing a 
 creative hand, evolution demands it " ; but as he does not 
 choose to deal with the atheistic argument that a " creative 
 hand " is inconceivable, it is not worth while spending any 
 more time upon his rough-and-tumble Theism. But he is 
 very emphatic upon the point that God is accountable for the 
 whole of evolution, not merely for parts of it. " There are 
 reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and 
 the books of Science in search of gaps gaps which they will 
 fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps ? . . .If God is 
 only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we 
 be when those gaps are filled up ? And if they are never to be 
 filled up, is God only to be found in the disorders of the 
 world ? Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point 
 here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget 
 that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. 
 If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. . . . 
 Whether is all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory ? " 
 (pp. 426-428). Mr. Drummond proves too much. To posit a 
 God who only does certain things in Nature is to credit him 
 only with the good ; to look upon him as being the worker 
 and upholder of everything is to bring upon your head the 
 eternal problem of the character of the God who can permit so 
 much evil to be in the world. Even Mr. Drummond admits 
 that there has been evil, although he does not attempt to 
 square accounts between this fact and his theology. " Follow- 
 ing their movements upward through the organic kingdom, we 
 watched the results which each [i.e. selfishness and unselfish- 
 ness] achieved always high, and always waxing higher; 
 and though what we call evil dogged each step with sinister 
 and sometimes staggering malevolence, the balance when
 
 1 7 2 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 struck was always good upon the whole " (p. 430). The last 
 remark is pure assumption ; and the " what we call evil " is 
 particularly rich, for if we do not know it to be evil we 
 obviously do not know its opposite to be good, and so have no 
 right to credit the Creator with it. But the spectacle of a 
 theologian who thinks it a fair defence of omnipotence to say 
 that it has come out right " upon the whole," i.e., has hit the 
 mark about six times out of ten, is decidedly instructive. And 
 forgetting once more his dictum that matter is really spirit, he 
 tells us that " Love is the final result of evolution. . . . Evolu- 
 tion is not progress in matter. Matter cannot progress. It is a 
 progress in spirit. . . . On the biological side, as we have seen, 
 the evolution of the mammalia means the evolution of mothers; 
 on the sociological side, the evolution -of the family ; and on 
 the moral side, the evolution of love. How are we to charac- 
 terise a process which ripened fruits like these ? . . . That . . . 
 the perfecting of love is thus not an incident in Nature but 
 everywhere the largest part of her task, begun with the first 
 beginnings of life, and continuously developing quantitatively 
 and qualitatively to the close all this has been read into 
 Nature by our own imaginings, or it is the revelation of a 
 
 J DO' 
 
 purpose of benevolence and a God whose name is Love. The 
 sceptic, we are sometimes reminded, has presented crucial 
 difficulties to the theist founded on the doctrine of evolution. 
 Here is a problem which the theist may leave with the 
 sceptic." Problem for the sceptic, forsooth ! Because there 
 is love in the world, the world is the work of a God of Love ! 
 Then if there is hate in the world, is not the world the work 
 of a God of Hate ? This is the "problem" which the theist 
 leaves with the sceptic ! There is no problem in it, however, 
 for the sceptic ; the problem exists for the theist, is of the 
 theist's own making, and may be profitably left for him to 
 solve, if he can. But until he can, let him refrain from 
 hurrying through the trial of his Deity, and snatching
 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man". 173 
 
 a verdict by the presentation of one half only of the 
 case. 
 
 One wearies ultimately of this bog of assumption, fallacy 
 and self-contradiction. But we are compelled to follow Mr. 
 Drummond to the end of his volume, to the stage where the 
 inevitable Christianity is dragged across the pages. " For 
 could but all men see the inner meaning and aspiration of the 
 natural order, should we not find at last the universal religion 
 a religion congruous with the whole part of man, at one with 
 Nature, and with a working creed which science could accept ? 
 The answer is a simple one : we have it already. There 
 exists a religion which has anticipated all these requirements 
 a religion which has been before the world these eighteen 
 hundred years, whose congruity with Nature and with man 
 stands the test at every point. Up to this time no word has 
 been spoken to reconcile Christianity with evolution, or evolu- 
 tion with Christianity. And why ? Because the two are one. 
 What is evolution ? A method of creation. What is its object ? 
 To make more perfect living beings. What is Christianity ? 
 A method of creation. What is its object ? To make more 
 perfect living beings. Through what does evolution work ? 
 Through love. Through what does Christianity work ? 
 Through love. Evolution and Christianity have the same 
 Author, the same end, the same spirit " (pp. 437, 438). . . . 
 " A religion which is love and a Nature which is love can 
 never but be one" (p. 440). 
 
 To argue seriously against this amazing piece of fatuity 
 would be simply logical prostitution. One can only point out 
 the sheer dishonesty of asserting Christianity to be a religion 
 of love, in face not only of its bloody history but of the sacred 
 books in which its principles are contained. A page of this 
 volume might be filled with utterances of the Gospel Jesus, 
 some of them vile and scurrilous and intolerant beyond ex- 
 pression, all of them breathing the immemorial spirit of the
 
 174 Pseudo- Philosophy. . 
 
 ignorant sectary, all of them giving the lie to the assertion 
 that the Christian religion is a religion of love. As for the 
 good points in the character of Jesus, they are no more charac- 
 teristic of him than of any other man. And as for the rest, 
 remarks one writer, " I find from the Gospels that Jesus was 
 a narrow, exclusive Jew, who had no conception of setting 
 aside the law of Moses, and no conception of extending 
 his morality beyond the limits of the elect of the Jewish 
 nation ; he frequently alluded in terms of contempt and hatred 
 to the Gentiles ; he had no idea of reforming the world ; 
 he believed in its approaching destruction, the ' salvation ' of 
 a few elect, and the eternal damnation of the rest ; he was 
 monarchical in principle ; he discouraged honest and necessary 
 toil ; he had ideas on divorce that could not be matched for 
 ignorant brutality even in our day ; he taught non-resistance 
 to evil and indiscriminate charity to the poor ; he was the 
 malevolent foe of honest thinking, proclaiming faith in his own 
 pretensions as the passport to heaven, and damnation for 
 every honest and sensible man who had no faith ; he more 
 than once refused to heal sick persons till they convinced 
 him of their irrational and unquestioning faith in his pre- 
 tensions ; he threatened with awful punishment all who 
 should reject the ravings of his twelve ignorant disciples ; 
 his conception even of heaven was strictly Jewish ; he forbade 
 his disciples, when sending them out to preach the truth that 
 alone could save men from hell, to go into the cities of the 
 Samaritans or the Gentiles ; he lumped together all nations 
 other than the Jews in the one opprobrious term ' Gentiles ' ; 
 he categorically stated more than once that the world would 
 come to an end in that very generation ; he expressly dis- 
 claimed the purpose of bringing peace into the world, and 
 expressly proclaimed that he would sow dissension even 
 among men of the same house ; he was delighted to think 
 that the greater portion of mankind should remain ignorant
 
 Mr. DrummoncCs "Ascent of Man" . 175 
 
 of the very truths that alone could ensure their salvation ; he 
 was invariably discourteous and vituperative towards his 
 opponents ; all the while preaching to others to love their 
 enemies, his own tone towards his own enemies was one of 
 hatred and abuse ; he taught a family ethic that was below 
 even the semi-civilised ethic of our own day; he decried 
 marriage and recommended sexual asceticism ; his social and 
 economic teachings are a standing absurdity ; he never raised 
 his voice against the slavery of his time, and on one occasion 
 gave his explicit endorsement to it ". 
 
 We need not follow Mr. Drummond any further in his 
 bogus analogies between Christianity and evolution. His 
 thesis that the " object " of evolution is love is erroneous from 
 whichever side we look at it ; and his arguments as to the 
 meaning of evolution, the course of evolution, the method and 
 forces of evolution, and the testimony which all these bear 
 to the goodness of his Deity, have been shown to be not only 
 fallacies, but the most vulgar of fallacies. He has simply 
 taken the oldest and crudest arguments of the professional 
 theologian, and by a little manipulation of them, and a little 
 infusion of the jargon of second-hand science and philosophy, 
 has fitted them into the frame of evolution. His facts are just 
 the facts every one has known for years past ; his interpreta- 
 tion of them is either hopelessly fallacious or altogether 
 grotesque ; and his philosophy is the sentimental rhetoric 
 of the street-preacher. As one of his critics very pertinently 
 remarked, whatever is true in the book is not new, and what- 
 ever is new in it is not true. Let us then leave him in peace, 
 and devote ourselves to the consideration of a more intelligent 
 man.
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S FOUNDATIONS OF 
 BELIEF. 
 
 12
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WITH Mr. Balfour's book we step upon somewhat different 
 ground. Not that nine-tenths of his ideas are any better, 
 either theoretically or in their practical application, than those 
 of Mr. Kidd or Mr Drummond ; but he is at least not so 
 glaringly fallacious as these writers. His arguments have a 
 peculiar quality of their own, an amplitude of raiment and a 
 mincing delicacy of gait that make them appear of better 
 bodily texture than they really are. There can be no ques- 
 tion, of course, of the fact that his arguments have a certain 
 acuteness that distinguishes them from the clumsy blunderings 
 of his two fellow-irrationalists ; but the acuteness is not so 
 much in the direction of any real grip or thrust of thought, as 
 in that of giving to intrinsically mediocre arguments a fac- 
 titious appearance of distinction and profundity. All that 
 " sophist " has come to mean among us may safely be applied 
 to Mr. Balfour upon the strength of his literary performances 
 alone, irrespective of his political career ; in dealing with 
 doctrines that clash with his inborn and acquired prejudices, 
 his method is eristic pure and simple. He is indeed in many 
 ways an unfortunate type, one that inspires almost more regret 
 for what he might have been than anger at what he is. We 
 may not unprofitably speculate upon what his powers of 
 intellect and emotion might have grown into had he been born 
 and bred in another atmosphere than that of irrational con- 
 servatism ; had he never been subjected to the temptation of 
 forcing his reason to play second to the social prejudices of his 
 
 (179)
 
 1 80 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 class. He might not, of course, have been very much different 
 from what he is now. All his work gives the one impression 
 of a mind of no ordinary acuteness in certain departments of 
 thought, but for the most part failing in broad synthetic views, 
 and with at times an unreasoning petulance that suggests the 
 word effeminate, and recalls the limp parliamentary figure 
 that the caricaturists have made familiar to us. And along 
 with all this is a tendency to be intellectually destructive 
 rather than constructive if we may make use for a moment 
 of that somewhat fallacious distinction. How much of this fatal 
 habit of mind is due in the case of Mr. Balfour to innate pre- 
 disposition, and how much to the intellectual atmosphere in 
 which he has grown up, it is of course impossible to say. It 
 is at any rate certain that the most unpleasant of the many 
 unpleasant features which his character presents, is his con- 
 stant tendency to cry down the views of other men as being 
 open to this or that objection, when all the time, as may be 
 shown from other of his utterances, his own secret opinions 
 are practically identical with theirs. The upshot of it is that 
 he is in an environment from which he has never had the 
 courage to break loose ; an environment that coerces him into- 
 maintaining publicly, for political or class purposes of reaction,, 
 various opinions which his own reason secretly tells him are 
 fallacious. And the result is that while on a subject such as- 
 music, which, controversial though it may be in one way, sets 
 up no dividing lines of class interest, he is acute, illuminative,, 
 and suggestive, on a religious subject his utterances have about 
 them a ring of duplicity and insincerity that is fatal to their 
 acceptance among men of any intellectual honesty. 
 
 His book on The Foundations of Belief is, in a sense, a 
 dilution of his former work, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, to- 
 suit the weaker digestion of the general reader, with an added 
 flavouring of theological sentiment. It is, indeed, designed to> 
 reach a public to whom the Defence of Philosophic Doubt, by
 
 Mr. Bal fours " Foundations of Belief. 181 
 
 reason of its incursions into the mysteries of metaphysics, was 
 practically a sealed book. " It is intended," he says, " for the 
 general body of readers interested in such subjects rather than 
 for the specialist in philosophy. I do not, of course, mean 
 that I have either desired or been able to avoid questions 
 which in essence are strictly philosophical. Such an attempt 
 would have been wholly absurd. But no knowledge either of 
 the history or the technicalities of philosophy is assumed in the 
 reader, nor do I believe that there is any train of thought here 
 suggested which, if he thinks it worth his while, he will have 
 the least difficulty in following." He very considerately, how- 
 ever, recommends the "general reader" to omit one chapter, 
 which merely contains a not very profound criticism of recent 
 English idealism ; so that, it would appear, he is shrewdly 
 conscious that many of those whose assent he hopes will run 
 with him to the conclusion of his book will be breathless 
 before they get past the middle of it. For this he would pro- 
 bably not care so long as he can win their assent somehow ; 
 and there is surely no safer way of getting the ordinary 
 Christian on your side than by writing a smart book which he 
 is too dense to understand, and telling him at the end of it 
 that you, like himself, are on the side of the angels. You may 
 not be taken very seriously by the philosophers, but you are 
 sure to carry the rank and file with you. The philosophers, 
 indeed, were rather chary in their commendation of Mr. Bal- 
 four's book ; Mr. Benn, for example, remarking that while 
 those who were not students of philosophy would probably 
 not understand most of it at all, those who were would find 
 nothing in it that had not been said a great many times before. 
 But the fact that the book was incomprehensible by the ordinary 
 run of Christians only made it the more acceptable to them, 
 only made them the more rejoice that Mr. Balfour was on their 
 side. Thus the great chorus of praise came from reviewers, 
 of whom he of the Methodist Times may be taken as an
 
 1 82 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 example, who could not possibly have understood one quarter 
 of Mr. Balfour's arguments. But after plodding painfully 
 through the book they could at least lay their fingers on the 
 passages in which Mr. Balfour grows sentimental over the 
 incarnation ; and though they could not for the life of them 
 see the connection between an attack on the scientific basis of 
 naturalism and a belief in the incarnation, could not see how 
 a sceptical analysis of the ultimate conceptions or supposed 
 ultimate conceptions of science was made to prove that 
 nineteen hundred years ago a virgin gave birth to a child 
 still the fact remained that Mr. Balfour was kneeling with 
 them in the same pew, though how he got there might be a 
 mystery. As Sir Frederick Pollock expressed it in a not un- 
 friendly review of the book : " As for the plain man who wants 
 to be confirmed in his faith, I have no doubt that a certain 
 number of most worthy persons have derived great comfort 
 from being told th'at Mr. Balfour has written a brilliant book 
 which leaves the wicked men of science and the cobweb- 
 spinning philosophers with never a leg to stand on ". 1 
 
 I have spoken of the feeling with which we rise from the 
 perusal of most of Mr. Balfour's writing a feeling of the 
 hopeless insincerity of most that he has said. And in order 
 to give a concrete example of what is meant by this, it will be 
 as well before going on to consider The Foundations of Belief, 
 to look at the opinions expressed in two earlier productions 
 of his. There is a dual reason for beginning with these two 
 works ; they cast a light on what may be called the moral as 
 well as the intellectual construction of Mr. Balfour's mind, and 
 they not only anticipate many of the arguments of the later 
 book, but serve to reveal the devices by which it is attempted 
 to maintain these arguments. 
 
 The two productions in question are Mr. Balfour's papers 
 on "The Religion of Humanity" and "A Fragment on Pro- 
 
 1 Mind, p. 377, July, 1895.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 183 
 
 gress," the former of which was read to the Church Congress 
 at Manchester in 1888, while the latter was Mr. Balfour's 
 Rectorial Address at Glasgow University in 1891. Rarely 
 has a writer turned out two pieces of work of which the one is 
 in such flagrant contradiction to the other ; yet Mr. Balfour, 
 with a folly of which one would scarcely believe him capable, 
 has actually printed them side by side in his volume of Essays 
 and Addresses (1893). There they stand to-day, casting a very 
 powerful and very searching light upon the tortuous moral 
 processes of their author. In order to understand the reason 
 for the contradiction, it must be remembered that the one 
 address was given to the assembled clergy of the Anglican 
 Church, the other to the students and professors of a univer- 
 sity ; and in the former case at least the opinions bear the 
 mark of having .been specially prepared for the palates of 
 those who were to listen to them. Let us consider this one 
 first. 
 
 Ostensibly, the thesis of the paper is the contrast between 
 the emotional and social values of Christianity and positivism ; 
 but though he sometimes restricts the latter word to the 
 limited meaning of " followers of Comte," his argument on the 
 whole is not against positivism per se, but against rationalism 
 in general. As he himself says : " I rather suppose the word 
 to be used in a wider sense. I take it to mean that general 
 habit or scheme of thought which, on its negative side, refuses 
 all belief in anything beyond phenomena and the laws con- 
 necting them, and on the positive side attempts to find in the 
 ' worship of humanity,' or, as some more soberly phrase it, in 
 the 'service of man,' a form of religion unpolluted by any 
 element of the supernatural." 1 Characteristically enough, Mr. 
 Balfour declines to discuss the negative side, or, as rationalists 
 would prefer to call it, the positive side of this creed. He will 
 rather discuss the " religious element in positivism, and its 
 
 1 Essays and Addresses, pp. 283, 284.
 
 1 84 Pseudo- Philosophy, 
 
 adequacy to meet the highest needs of beings such as we are, 
 placed in a world such as ours ". Accordingly he begins by 
 laying it down that positivism is emotionally inadequate, 
 because it finds no place for the supernatural ; and he chooses 
 to state the issue between the rival creeds on the importance 
 of a belief in immortality. " The belief in a future state is one 
 of the most striking I will not say the most important 
 differences between positive and supernatural religion. It is 
 one upon which no agreement or compromise is possible. It 
 admits of no gradations, of no less or more. It is true or it is 
 false. And my purpose is to contribute one or two observa- 
 tions towards a qualitative estimate of the immediate gain or 
 loss to some of the highest interests of mankind, which would 
 follow upon a substitution of the positivist for the Christian 
 theory on the subject " (p. 288). 
 
 Observe the sheer crookedness of the argument to com- 
 mence with. He is not going to prove to us that it is right 
 and sensible to believe in a future life ; he simply invites us 
 to believe irrationally in it because of the " consequences " of 
 such a belief ! He may reply that he cannot pronounce the 
 belief to be true, although he has expressly said that it must 
 be either true or false, because experience and reason give 
 him no warrant to pronounce it true ; but in that case we may 
 rejoin that if he is content to hold to the belief irrationally, he 
 should not try to justify it to us by reason. At any rate, no 
 one can regard it as the acme of honesty to tell us that 
 although we cannot know a thing to be true or false, we must 
 believe it to be true, or delude ourselves into the belief that we 
 believe it to be true, in order that we may feel more consoled 
 than if we believed it to be false. A philosophy of religion of 
 this kind is mere spiritual dram-drinking. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, indeed, is acute enough to remember that 
 there are many people, rationalists to wit, whose lives and 
 opinions give the lie to his thesis that a belief in immortality
 
 Mr. Balfours "-Foundations of Belief'. 185 
 
 is more conducive to hopefulness than the absence of such a 
 belief. But after a characteristic piece of vacillation and con- 
 tradiction, in which it is first of all " freely conceded " that 
 there are " many persons ... to whom the knowledge that 
 there are wrongs to be remedied is a stimulus to remedying 
 them," and then maintained that these " many persons " do 
 not form a class that " is common," we are once again assured 
 that " the faith that what we see is but part, and a small part, 
 of a general scheme which will complete the destiny, not 
 merely of humanity, but (which is a very different thing) of 
 every man, woman and child born into the world, has supplied 
 and may again supply consolation and encouragement, energy 
 and hope". This sounds well, but Mr. Balfour may be left 
 to square it with his statement on the previous page, that 
 " nothing that humanity can enjoy in the future will make up 
 for what it has suffered in the past ; for those who will enjoy 
 are not the same as those who have suffered ; one set of 
 persons is injured, another set will receive compensation ". 
 Evidently the argument is becoming a trifle chaotic. 
 
 The thin, sentimental rhetoric dribbles on, through " the 
 love of man " and " the love of God " to the question, Is life 
 worth living ? and the cognate question of the ideal ends of 
 action as presented to the positivist and to the Christian. 
 Natural selection will do little to ensure the ultimate perfec- 
 tion of the world, for degeneration is as common a pheno- 
 menon in the history of races as progress. " To me, there- 
 fore, it seems that the ' positive ' view of the world must needs 
 end in a chilling scepticism concerning the final worth of 
 human effort, which can hardly fail to freeze and paralyse the 
 warmest enthusiasm and the most zealous energy " (p. 305). 
 The ideal stimulus to action, presumably, is a belief in a 
 heaven to which you may not go, and a hell to which you are 
 pretty certain to go. 
 
 And after using an argument which reappears in the later
 
 1 86 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 Foundations of Belief, namely, that every religion and every 
 philosophy that " insists on regarding man as merely a 
 phenomenon among phenomena, a natural object among other 
 natural objects, is condemned by science to failure as an effec- 
 tive stimulus to high endeavour," he offers up his usual apology. 
 He is conscious that he has really said very little about 
 Christianity itself and its doctrines, that he has merely 
 inquired " which is the religion most fitted, in the face of 
 advancing knowledge, to concentrate in the service of man 
 those high emotions and far-reaching hopes from which the 
 moral law, as a practical system, draws nourishment and 
 strength. That such a method of treatment is essentially in- 
 complete is of course obvious. It arbitrarily isolates, and 
 exclusively deals with, but a small fraction of the question at 
 issue between supernaturalism and naturalism. // leaves out 
 of account the greatest question of all, namely, the question of 
 comparative proof, and directs attention only to the less august 
 problem of comparative advantaged Unthinking people may 
 object to this, but Mr. Balfour assures them that when man- 
 kind learns to look at these things from the proper standpoint, 
 then " adaptation to the moral wants and aspirations of 
 humanity will not be regarded as wholly alien to the 
 problems over which so many earnest minds are at present 
 disquieting themselves in vain " (p. 312). 
 
 This, then, is the argument of the address to the Church 
 Congress : that Christianity may or may not be true, but 
 even if it be false, it is worth believing in, or worth fancying 
 we believe in it, because it is a useful sort of belief to have. 
 With it, a man is enabled to do his duty in life and to have 
 some stimulus for acting for the good of future generations ; 
 while naturalism not only fails to supply any such stimulus, 
 but by its teaching that man is only a phenomenon among 
 phenomena, and that in the evening of the world he will pass 
 out of existence like a tale that is told, it dwarfs the moral
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief" . 187 
 
 sense and paralyses the spiritual energies. Christianity is 
 hope ; naturalism is despair. And now for the conclusion. 
 Positivism " cannot penetrate and vivify the inmost life of 
 ordinary humanity. There is in it no nourishment for 
 ordinary human souls, no comfort for ordinary human sorrow, 
 no help for ordinary human weakness. Not less than the 
 crudest irreligion does it leave us 'men divorced from all 
 communion with God, face to face with the unthinking 
 energies of Nature which gave us birth, and into which, if 
 supernatural religion be indeed a dream, we must after a 
 few fruitless struggles be again resolved " (p. 314). 
 
 So much for the address on " The Religion of Humanity". 
 Remembering its thesis and its arguments, let us now turn to 
 the " Fragment on Progress," which, it must be borne in mind, 
 was not delivered to a clerical audience. The opening words 
 are : " There is no more interesting characteristic of ordinary 
 social and political speculation than the settled belief that 
 there exists a natural law or tendency governing human 
 affairs by which, on the whole, and in the long run, the 
 general progress of our race is ensured ". And Mr. Balfour's 
 concern is to show that there is no logical ground for this 
 belief. He points out the decline of mighty states, and the 
 arrested development of others ; he shows that natural selec- 
 tion gives us no warrant for supposing that the movement of 
 evolution is a continuously upward one to perfection ; that 
 heredity is no more favourable to our hopes, especially if 
 Weismann's doctrines be true ; that if we cannot reckon on 
 improved "organisms," neither can we look forward to the 
 perfection of the race being worked out by means of improved 
 " environments " ; that there are limits to our knowledge ; that 
 the state can do little for progress ; that even supposing the 
 state might be disposed to create a new and better environ- 
 ment, yet the community will probably not have the requisite 
 knowledge for this, nor, if it has the knowledge, will it have
 
 1 88 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 the power to turn it to account ; that it is " a great delusion " 
 to imagine that " we have only got to reason more and to 
 reason better, in order speedily to perfect the whole machinery 
 by which human felicity is to be secured " ; that a state in 
 which the community should consciously make new experi- 
 ments in sociology would be " in a condition of unstable 
 equilibrium," and would be " in danger of far-reaching 
 changes " ; not, of course, that the changes must necessarily be 
 unsuccessful, but they are " beyond our powers of calculation " ; 
 that " we are therefore driven to the conclusion that, as our 
 expectations of limitless progress for the race cannot depend 
 upon the blind operation of the laws of heredity, so neither can 
 they depend upon the deliberate action of national govern- 
 ments " ; that we cannot estimate the remoter consequences 
 of individual actions, " neither can we tell how they will act 
 and re-act upon one another, nor how they will in the long run 
 affect morality, religion and other fundamental elements of 
 human society ". 
 
 This is the argument ; now note the conclusion. " The 
 future of the race is thus encompassed with darkness. No 
 faculty of calculation that we possess, no instrument that we 
 are likely to invent, will enable us to map out its course or 
 penetrate the secret of its destiny. It is easy, no doubt, to 
 find in the clouds which obscure our path what shapes we 
 please ; to see in them the promise of some millennial paradise, 
 or the threat of endless and unmeaning travel through waste 
 and perilous places. But in such visions the wise man will put 
 but little confidence ; content, in a sober and cautious spirit, 
 with a full consciousness of his feeble powers of foresight, and 
 the narrow limits of his activity, to deal as they arise with the 
 problems of his own generation " (pp. 279, 280). And in a 
 postscript dealing with the objection that " the treatment of the 
 subject was unsuited to the occasion, and to the age of many 
 among my audience ; that it was calculated to chill youthful
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief'. 189 
 
 enthusiasm and to check youthful enterprise " ; after remark- 
 ing that " much optimistic speculation about the future is 
 quite unworthy the consideration of serious men," he lays it 
 down that " any state is tolerably secure from decay in which 
 the greater private and civic virtues go hand in hand with a 
 desire for knowledge ". 
 
 Not a word here of the consoling virtues of Christianity. 
 " I am no pessimist," he tells the Church Congress. " The 
 future of the race is encompassed with darkness," he tells the 
 Glasgow students. The practical philosophy of the rectorial 
 address is precisely what has always been held by the majority 
 of rationalists ; yet Mr. Balfour tells the Church Congress that 
 this, his own philosophy, is powerless to regenerate humanity. 
 Where there is no motive for maintaining opinions he does 
 not really hold, it turns out that his philosophy of life is not 
 only based, on naturalism pure and simple, but is rigidly 
 negative and dispiriting to a degree which few naturalists 
 would share with him. When he is addressing a clerical 
 assembly whose suffrages he wishes to win, he adapts his 
 opinions to his environment ; he tells the Congress that 
 naturalism leads only to despair, and that it is negative and 
 dispiriting, where Christianity is positive and consoling. He, 
 the Christian, or the man who wishes to be thought a Chris- 
 tian, slanders an opponent creed to his clerical audience, and 
 tells them that this creed has certain social implications for 
 evil and despair which do not go along with Christianity ; 
 while all the time it appears, from the address given three 
 years later in Glasgow, that these opinions which Mr. Balfour 
 is so concerned to denigrate are really his own. According 
 to one address, naturalism is bound to induce "a chilling 
 scepticism concerning the final worth of human effort " ; ac- 
 cording to another, Mr. Balfour himself, the avowed enemy of 
 naturalism, confesses to having a more than chilling scepticism 
 on the subject, confesses to the belief that " the final worth of
 
 1 90 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 human effort" is a thing of which we have absolutely no 
 knowledge whatever ; that " no faculty we possess " will 
 " enable us to map out its course, or penetrate the secret of 
 its destiny". It is superfluous to dwell any longer upon this 
 disingenuous tissue of contradictions ; the question may alone 
 be put whether the politician who can adapt his opinions to 
 his audience in this manner is merely a defective thinker, or 
 whether his intellectual processes deserve to be characterised 
 in stronger and less complimentary terms. In any case, he 
 is a striking testimony to the moral value of the faith whose 
 cause he champions.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THIS preliminary dissertation on Mr. Balfour's methods of 
 seeking truth will prepare us for a very similar spectacle when 
 we come to discuss The Foundations of Belief. We shall expect 
 to meet with the same urging of trivial objections against the 
 theory Mr. Balfour does not like, the same wilful blindness to 
 the good points of the theory, the same ingenious insistence 
 upon the good side only of Christianity, and the same clinch- 
 ing of a feeble argument with a piece of still more feeble 
 rhetoric. All these things we have in profusion in The Founda- 
 tions of Belief. 
 
 Defining naturalism as the belief that we may know 
 phenomena and the laws by which they are connected, but 
 nothing more, he purposes first to examine " certain of its 
 consequences in various departments of human thought and 
 emotion ". One recognises at once the note of the address on 
 ' The Religion of Humanity ". Mr. Balfour is not exactly 
 going to prove to us that naturalism is wrong and super- 
 naturalism is right. He is going to tell us that if we 
 follow our reason wherever it leads us, and believe in 
 naturalism because we honestly think it to be a true ex- 
 planation of things, certain " consequences " must inevitably 
 follow. The theme is very simple, and candour compels 
 us to say at once that it might be maintained, by a com- 
 petent and sincere reasoner, in a far more convincing way 
 than Mr. Balfour has been able to maintain it Critics who 
 have praised the brilliant logical quality of the book, have 
 
 (190
 
 1 9 2 Pseudo-Pk ilosophy. 
 
 apparently been blinded by its tenuous rhetoric to the real 
 hollowness of its argument. For Mr. Balfour, in the chapters 
 in which he attempts to show the dreadful consequences of 
 naturalism, gives no shadow of a reason for holding its asser- 
 tions to be untrue gives, indeed, a good many reasons for 
 holding them to be quite true, but simply drops into tearful 
 sentiment at the finish, and implores us not to believe in 
 naturalism, not because it is false, but because it is horrid. 
 And as this point can be better brought out in connection 
 with a subject that does not rouse any theological or anti- 
 theological rancour, we will begin with Mr. Balfour's second 
 chapter, " Naturalism and ^Esthetic," instead of with his first, 
 " Naturalism and Ethics ". As in his first chapter, he says, he 
 considered "the effects which naturalism must tend to produce 
 upon the sentiments associated with morality," so now he will 
 " consider the same question in connection with the senti- 
 ments known as aesthetic ; and as I assumed that the former 
 class were, like other evolutionary utilities, in the main pro- 
 duced by the normal operation of selection, so I now assume 
 that the latter, being (at least in any developed stage) quite 
 useless for the preservation of the individual or species, must 
 be regarded, upon the naturalistic hypothesis, as mere by- 
 products of the great machinery by which organic life is 
 varied and sustained " (p. 33). His object is " to indicate the 
 consequences which flow from a purely naturalistic treatment 
 of the theory of the beautiful " ; and in order to do this, answers 
 must be given to two questions: (i) "What are the causes, 
 historical, psychological and physiological, which enable us to 
 derive aesthetic gratification from some objects, and forbid us 
 to derive it from others?" (2) " Is there any fixed and per- 
 manent element in beauty, any unchanging reality which we 
 perceive in or through beautiful objects, and to which normal 
 aesthetic feelings correspond ? " 
 
 Taking up the first question, in connection with the art of
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief. 193 
 
 music, Mr. Balfour contends that naturalism has given us only 
 unsatisfactory and inadequate answers to it. He discards the 
 suggestion that our delight in music has originated in sexual 
 selection, equally with Mr. Spencer's theory of the association 
 between certain emotions and the contraction of the muscles 
 of the chest, abdomen, and vocal chords. With Mr. Balfour's 
 examination in six pages of the big question of the causes 
 of our delight in music and the origin of the musical sense, we 
 have here nothing to do ; on the principle that any stick will 
 do for the beating of the naturalistic dog, Mr. Balfour may 
 imagine that by stating one or two time-worn objections to 
 the association theory he has upset the whole system of evolu- 
 tional aesthetic ; but if he really does imagine that, it is not 
 worth our while to branch off into a discussion of aesthetics. 
 It is more to our purpose to follow him in his own path. He 
 fancies he has given always in six pages, be it remembered 
 " a sufficiently striking example of the unsatisfactory con- 
 dition of scientific aesthetics"; and he rightly surmises that " no 
 person who is at all in sympathy with the naturalistic view of 
 things would maintain that there anywhere exists an intrinsic 
 and essential quality of beauty, independent of the feelings 
 and the taste of the observer " (p. 42). And taking up his 
 opponent's case in a really generous way, he argues that not 
 only is there no universal standard of beauty, but that beauty 
 is not even approximately "objective" in the sense that it 
 " depends upon the fixed relations between our senses and 
 their material surroundings". Is there any evidence, he asks, 
 on the naturalistic hypothesis, that " beauty is more than the 
 name for a miscellaneous flux of endlessly varying causes, pos- 
 sessing no property in common except that at some place, at 
 some time, and in some person, they have shown themselves 
 able to evoke the kind of feeling which we choose to describe 
 as aesthetic "? There can be only one answer, he replies, to this 
 question. He shows (i) that " the variations of opinion on the 
 
 13
 
 194 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 subject of beauty are notorious "; (2) that " the ordinary critical 
 estimate of a work of art is the result of a highly complicated 
 set of antecedents," these varying, of course, from age to age 
 and from person to person ; (3) that fashion accounts for many 
 aesthetic likings and dislikings which are usually attributed 
 to uniformity of aesthetic "taste"; and so on. Now few 
 aestheticians will agree that Mr. Balfour is stating his case 
 quite fairly, and he certainly is not stating it quite completely. 
 Moreover, to. show that men's opinions of the beautiful vary 
 so much is more an argument against intuitionalism than 
 against empiricism ; for if there be a permanent, unchanging 
 principle of beauty, it is hard to conceive how this comes to be 
 misunderstood or unperceived by most of us. But Mr. Balfour 
 chooses to regard his arguments as fatal to the discovery of 
 " a theory of aesthetics in harmony with naturalism ". It 
 appears, however, as if they were equally opposed to a theory 
 of aesthetics in harmony with intuitionalism ; and Mr. Balfour's 
 method of argument here is worth observing. He carefully 
 points out once more that we do not find " permanent rela- 
 tions" in or behind the feeling of beauty; that there is no 
 ground for supposing that there is in Nature " any standard 
 of beauty to which all human tastes tend to conform, any 
 beautiful objects which all normally constituted individuals are 
 moved to admire, any aesthetic judgments which can claim to 
 be universal"; nor, he goes on, "in considering the causes 
 which produce the rise and fall of schools, and all the smaller 
 mutations in the character of aesthetic production, did we per- 
 ceive more room for the belief that there is somewhere to be 
 found a permanent element in the beautiful. There is no 
 evidence that these changes constitute stages in any process of 
 gradual approximation to an unchanging standard ; they are 
 not born of any strivings after some ideal archetype ; they do 
 not, like the movements of science, bring us ever nearer to 
 central and immutable truth."
 
 Mr. Bal fours "Foundations of Belief". 195 
 
 All this time Mr. Balfour has been arguing his opponent's 
 case for him ; stating, that is, a theory of things which he 
 himself does not hold. If he thus carefully and elaborately 
 states the reasons for the theory he does not hold, in what 
 detail, and with what rigour of triumphant logic, we may ask, 
 will he not argue out the reasons for the belief he does hold ? 
 Alas, Mr. Balfour does not argue his case at all. He adopts 
 the device he found so useful at the Church Congress ; he 
 becomes sentimental. The passage the concluding one of 
 the chapter must be given in full : 
 
 " And yet the persistent and almost pathetic endeavours 
 of aesthetic theory to show that the beautiful is a necessary 
 and unchanging element in the general scheme of things, if 
 they prove nothing else, may at least convince us that man- 
 kind will not easily reconcile themselves to the view which the 
 naturalistic theory of the world would seemingly compel them 
 to accept. We need feel no difficulty, perhaps, in admitting 
 the full consequences of that theory at the lower end of the 
 aesthetic scale, in the region, for instance, of bonnets and wall- 
 papers. We may tolerate it even when it deals with important 
 elements in the highest art, such as the sense of technical 
 excellence, or sympathy with the craftsman's skill. But when 
 we look back on those too rare moments when feelings stirred 
 in us by some beautiful object not only seem wholly to absorb 
 us, but to raise us to the vision of things far above the ken of 
 bodily sense or discursive reason, we cannot acquiesce in any 
 attempt at explanation which confines itself to the bare 
 enumeration of psychological and physiological causes and 
 effects. We cannot willingly assent to a theory which makes 
 a good composer only differ from a good cook in that he deals 
 in more complicated relations, moves in a wider circle of 
 associations, and arouses our feelings through a different sense. 
 However little, therefore, we may be prepared to accept any 
 particular scheme of metaphysical aesthetics and most of
 
 1 96 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 these appear to me to be very absurd we must believe that 
 somewhere and for some Being there shines an unchanging 
 splendour of beauty, of which in Nature and in Art we see, 
 each of us from our own standpoint, only passing gleams and 
 stray reflections, whose different aspects we cannot now 
 co-ordinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend, but 
 which at least is something other than the chance play of sub- 
 jective sensibility or the far-off echo of ancestral lusts" (pp. 
 64-66). 
 
 This is Mr. Balfour's defence of his faith ; this is the a 
 priori manner in which he smites naturalism hip and thigh. 
 We need not pause to remark on the striking duplicity of his 
 analogies ; what is more to the purpose is the logic of this 
 extraordinary passage. There is no reason for holding that 
 the naturalistic view of beauty is wrong ; yet we must hold it 
 to be wrong. There is no reason to be alleged in support of 
 the other view ; yet we must hold it to be right. We may, 
 indeed, give in to the naturalist so long as he confines himself 
 to the lower regions of life and art ; that is, so long as -he does 
 not come into collision with our cherished emotions; but 
 when he does come into collision with these we are to protest 
 against his intrusion, on the ground of half a dozen prepos- 
 terous analogies. If naturalism shows that there is no perma- 
 nent element in beauty, it must be told of the " persistent and 
 almost pathetic endeavours of aesthetic theory" to show that 
 there is ; as if the naturalistic view of the case was not an 
 " aesthetic theory," and as if its endeavours also were not per- 
 sistent. Mankind will not easily reconcile themselves to the 
 naturalistic view as if it was not " mankind " that held this 
 view. Most metaphysical theories of aesthetic are very absurd, 
 and though we cannot prove any of these theories to be 
 correct, yet we must believe that somewhere and for some 
 Being, etc., etc. 
 
 This is Mr. Balfour's mode of what he facetiously calls
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief'. 197 
 
 argument in the department of aesthetics. Let us now turn 
 back to his treatment of ethics, and observe how he applies 
 the method there. He begins by affirming two propositions : 
 " (i) That, practically, human beings being what they are, no 
 moral code can be effective which does not inspire, in those 
 who are asked to obey it, emotions of reverence ; (2) that, 
 practically, the capacity of any code to excite this or any 
 other elevated emotion cannot be wholly independent of the 
 origin from which those who accept that code suppose it to 
 emanate" (p. 13). It will be noticed thus early in which 
 direction the argument is drifting ; stress will evidently be 
 laid on the fact, or the supposed fact, that since naturalism 
 asserts that the moral sense is bound up with the general 
 beginning of things and the general course of evolution, it 
 must therefore denude the moral sense of any feeling of 
 emotional reverence with which we have been wont to regard 
 it. " How, on this view," remarks Mr. Balfour, " is the ' beauty 
 of holiness ' to retain its lustre in the minds of those who know 
 so much of its pedigree? In despite of theories, mankind 
 even instructed mankind may, indeed, long preserve uninjured 
 sentiments which they have learned in their most impression- 
 able years from those they love best ; but if, while they are 
 being taught the supremacy of conscience and the austere 
 majesty of duty, they are also to be taught that these senti- 
 ments and beliefs are merely samples of the complicated 
 contrivances, many of them mean and many of them 
 disgusting, wrought into the physical or in-to the social 
 organism by the shaping forces of selection and elimination, 
 assuredly much of the efficacy of these moral lessons will 
 be destroyed, and the contradiction between ethical sentiment 
 and naturalistic theory will remain intrusive and perplexing, a 
 constant stumbling-block to those who endeavour to combine 
 in one harmonious creed the bare explanations of biology and 
 the lofty claims of ethics" (pp. 18, 19). To which it may be
 
 1 9 8 Pseudo-Ph ilosoph) >. 
 
 sufficient to reply with the question, What then does Mr. 
 Balfour propose to do ? To put it briefly, either biology 
 is right or it is wrong. If it is wrong, Mr. Balfour should 
 show us how and why it is wrong, and we will give up 
 our theory. If it is right, what harm can there be in 
 teaching men the truth? If it is right, and the opposing 
 view is wrong, why should we teach people the wrong 
 view and not the right, on the ground that the wrong 
 view will make people more moral ? And does Mr. 
 Balfour really think that he is serving the cause of ethics 
 by using arguments like these ? 
 
 Branching off into a digression on free will, he maintains 
 that determinism is calculated to produce moral impoverish- 
 ment no reasons, of course, being given to induce us to 
 believe that determinism is erroneous in theory. And he 
 warns us that " the persistent conflict between that which 
 is thought to be true, and that which is felt to be noble 
 and of good report, not only produces a sense of moral 
 unrest in the individual, but makes it impossible for us to 
 avoid the conclusion that the creed which leads to such 
 results is, somehow, unsuited for ' such beings as we are in 
 such a world as ours ' ". It is naturalism, apparently, which 
 " leads to" such results ". There need, of course, be no conflict 
 whatever between what we have always felt to be noble and 
 what we now feel to be true ; but if such a conflict should 
 arise, why should we give up the belief which we can verify, in 
 favour of a feeling for which we have only the authority of 
 tradition ? To say, as Mr. Balfour says, that " there is thus an 
 incongruity between the sentiments subservient to morality, 
 and the naturalistic account of their origin," is simply to 
 employ the device of the most vulgar religious catchpenny. 
 The question as to what has really been the origin of certain 
 beautiful sentiments is not worth considering in relation to so 
 thoroughly dishonest an argument as this of Mr. Balfour's ; nor
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 199 
 
 need we pause to consider whether there is or is not the 
 antagonism which he alleges. The fact remains that in 
 phrasing his proposition so as to suggest the surrender of 
 our knowledge to an old tradition, the wilful blinding of 
 cur eyes to facts that are beyond dispute, he is, in the 
 very act of gushing over the cause of morals, committing a 
 profoundly immoral act. And it becomes absurd in addition 
 when we recognise that, under the guise of an acute modern 
 argument against naturalism, he is simply employing one of 
 the oldest and most vulgar of devices. From time immemorial 
 the religious man has told the sceptic that even if the sacred 
 books are not true, they should be taught to the people as 
 true, because ethical conduct has always been dependent upon 
 them. Juvenal complains, in one of his satires, that ever 
 since the decline in the belief in gods, perjury had become 
 more common in Rome. Supposing, for the sake of argument, 
 that the two phenomena are related as cause and effect, did 
 the Roman poet really think that the true remedy was to 
 persuade people to believe in theism in order to terrify the 
 potential perjurer ? If the belief in gods is irrational, it is to 
 that extent harmful to society ; and to offer no argument in 
 favour of the rationality of the belief, but to uphold it on the 
 ground that the belief may be irrational but will make men 
 good, is to blunder no less morally than intellectually. 
 
 Or, to illustrate the position here maintained, let us take 
 another example, drawn this time from the theory of heredity. 
 It has always been the opinion of the mass of men that 
 physical and mental characteristics acquired during the life- 
 time of a parent were transmitted to his offspring ; that if he 
 led a healthy life in body and mind his children would benefit 
 by it, and vice versa. Suppose now a man to be thoroughly 
 convinced by Weismann that this theory is altogether 
 erroneous, to believe that whether he stores his mind with 
 philosophy or pornography his son will be none the worse,
 
 2OO Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 and, the previous motive for avoiding disgusting literature 
 being removed, to prefer the reading of pornography. Now 
 to tell this man of the dreadful consequences of his manner of 
 living might be useful ; but a conscientious reasoner, if he 
 firmly believed that the man's evil conduct depended on an 
 erroneous view of heredity, would try to upset this before 
 recommending him to reform. That is, if certain new modes 
 of living are found to spring from a new mode of belief, the 
 only sure way of changing the former is to change the latter. 
 In the long run we must adapt our conduct to our knowledge, 
 not our knowledge to our conduct. And so for Mr. Balfour 
 and his colleagues to warn us of the dreadful consequences 
 that will follow upon the spread of naturalistic principles, is 
 really to spend their breath unprofitably. If these principles 
 are wrong they must be shown to be wrong ; if they are right, 
 and certain old emotions clash with them, in the long run 
 these emotions must learn to adapt themselves to their new 
 environment. 
 
 Most striking of all the examples of Mr. Balfour's insin- 
 cerity of method is the passage in which he contrasts the creeds 
 of naturalism and supernaturalism. " I offer the following 
 pairs of contrasted propositions, the first members of each 
 pair representing current teaching, the second representing the 
 teaching which ought to be substituted for it if the naturalistic 
 theory be accepted : 
 
 " A. The universe is the creation of reason, and all things 
 work together towards a reasonable end. 
 
 " B. So far as we can tell, reason is to be found neither in 
 the beginning of things nor in their end ; and though every- 
 thing is predetermined, nothing is fore-ordained. 
 
 " A. Creative reason is interfused with infinite love. 
 
 " B. As reason is absent, so also is love. The universal 
 flux is ordered by blind causation alone " (pp. 83, 84). And 
 so on.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 201 
 
 Mr. Balfour does not attempt to show that his one set 
 of propositions is right and the other set wrong. As he 
 himself says : " The doctrines embodied[in the second member 
 of each of these alternatives may be true, or may at least 
 represent the nearest approach to truth of which we are at 
 present capable. Into this question I do not yet inquire." 
 He has, in fact, an easier method of disposing of the theories 
 that are repugnant to him. He works the artificial lump into 
 his throat, and the sentiment comes forth, broken by sobs : 
 " But if they are to constitute the dogmatic scaffolding by 
 which our educational system is to be supported ; if it is to be 
 in harmony with principles like these that the child is to 
 be taught at its mother's knee, and the young man is to build 
 up the ideals of his life, then, unless I greatly mistake, it will 
 be found that the inner discord which exists, and which must 
 gradually declare itself, between the emotions proper to 
 naturalism and those which have actually grown up under 
 the shadow of traditional convictions, will at no distant date 
 most unpleasantly translate itself into practice " (pp. 79, 80). 
 What are the dreadful consequences to which we must thus 
 look forward, Mr. Balfour is considerate enough not to tell us. 
 But it is worth noticing that this tearful outburst of hysteria 
 is induced merely by the name of a system which Mr. 
 Balfour does not like. Let us hope, however, that naturalism 
 may be exposed and defeated, and supernaturalism gain the 
 day. The service to moral conduct will be undoubted ; and 
 perhaps the child, when it has left its mother's knee and come 
 to years of discretion, may be able to exhibit the results of 
 its irrational but ethical training, by maintaining at a Church 
 Congress opinions obligingly made to order, and by oppor- 
 tunely blackening the character of men he does not like, for 
 holding a faith which he himself in secret also holds, and 
 which he will expound when there is nothing to be gained by 
 expounding the opposite.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 AT this point Mr. Balfour seems to become conscious that his 
 polemic against naturalism has not altogether been conducted 
 on the best possible lines. " So far," he writes, " we have 
 been occupied in weighing certain indirect and collateral 
 consequences which seem likely to flow from a particular 
 theory of the world in which we live. The theory itself was 
 taken for granted. No attempt was made to examine its 
 foundations or to test their strength ; no comparison between 
 its different parts was instituted for the purpose of determin- 
 ing how far they really constituted a coherent and intelligible 
 whole. . . . This course is not the most logical ; and it might 
 appear a more fitting procedure to reserve our consideration of 
 the consequences of a system until some conclusion has been 
 arrived at concerning its truth " (p. 89). Mr. Balfour has 
 certainly caught to perfection the theological trick of slander- 
 ing an antagonistic doctrine instead of confuting it ; and the 
 section of his book which we have just been examining differs 
 in no way from the rant of a Christian-Evidence orator in 
 a park, except in the superior amenity of the tone. Intellec- 
 tually, the arguments are on the same level. And the 
 rationalist comment upon Mr. Balfour's first section is that 
 it well illustrates the prevailing dishonesty of the controversial 
 school to which Mr. Balfour has chosen to attach himself. A 
 really sincere reasoner would not ask whether a consideration 
 of the consequences or supposed consequences of a certain 
 belief ought to come before or after an examination of its 
 
 (202)
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief'. 203 
 
 truth or falsity ; he would simply decline to raise such a 
 question at all, feeling sure that if the belief is true it must 
 ultimately prevail, be the consequences what they may to 
 society. 
 
 But Mr. Balfour has a further reason for postponing the 
 discussion of the basis of naturalism to this later stage of his 
 inquiry ; " a reason based on the fact that, had I begun these 
 notes with the discussion on which I am about to embark, 
 their whole character would probably have been misunder- 
 stood. They would have been regarded as contributions to 
 philosophical discussion of a kind which would only interest 
 the specialist ; and the general reader, to whom I desire 
 particularly to appeal, would have abandoned their perusal in 
 disgust. For I cannot deny, either that I am about to ask 
 him to accompany me in a search after first principles ; or 
 (which is, perhaps, worse) that the search is destined to be 
 ineffectual. He will not only have to occupy himself with 
 arguments of a remote and abstract kind, and for a moment to 
 disturb the placid depths of ordinary thought with unaccus- 
 tomed soundings, but the arguments will be to all appearance 
 barren, and the soundings will not find bottom " (p. 90). That 
 is, Mr. Balfour did not talk philosophy because he was afraid 
 his readers would not understand him ; but as he wanted the 
 votes of his readers, he made sure of these in the first place by 
 appealing to their unphilosophical fears and prejudices. One 
 hardly knows which to admire the more the ingenious insin- 
 cerity of Mr. Balfour's dialectic, or the candour with which he 
 reveals its hollowness. 
 
 In this chapter, then, Mr. Balfour is going to examine the 
 philosophic basis of naturalism ; and though he doubts the 
 plain man's acquaintance with philosophy, and though he con- 
 siderately prints a chapter on idealism in small type and begs 
 the plain man not to read it, he seems to anticipate sufficient 
 knowledge of philosophy on the part of the plain man to carry
 
 2O4 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 him through the discussion, or at all events to carry him as far 
 as Mr. Balfour wants him to go. Now an examination of the 
 basis of naturalism requires a fairly complete knowledge both 
 of philosophy and of science ; and the plain man is as little 
 competent to judge of the matter without a philosophic training 
 as he is to judge of the merits of a single metallic standard of 
 money without a previous training in economics. The general 
 reader, then, is simply wasting his time in endeavouring to 
 master the subject from the superficial treatment given to it 
 in Mr. Balfour's pages ; and the specialists in science and 
 philosophy, it need hardly be said, have not yet shown any 
 surprise at the novelty of Mr. Balfour's arguments, or any 
 terror at their logical quality. They do not in fact seem to be 
 very much impressed with arguments which, so far as they 
 have anything in them, have been repeated to weariness 
 before ; while some have bluntly warned Mr. Balfour of the 
 danger of a criticism of science without a decent knowledge of 
 science. 1 
 
 I do not propose to examine here in detail Mr. Balfour's 
 attack on the foundations of science. His thesis is that we 
 have really no more rational grounds for believing in the 
 fundamental dicta of science than we have for believing in the 
 fundamental assertions of theology. With the real question of 
 the philosophy of science we are not here concerned, but simply 
 with the bearing of Mr. Balfour's negative polemic upon the 
 positive side of his book that is, with the extent to which 
 any sceptical attack upon science, be it fifty times as acute as 
 that of Mr. Balfour, can be made to rehabilitate the discredited 
 dogmas of theology. 2 Some attention, however, must be 
 
 1 See Mr. Karl Pearson's Reaction, p. 12, etc. : " Mr. Balfour will hardly be 
 able to disguise from any scientific reader that his acquaintance with science is 
 of a very limited character ". 
 
 The purely philosophical aspect of Mr. Balfour's argument will be briefly 
 ealt with in the final chapter, in connection with the criticisms of Mr Spencer, 
 Mr. Huxley and Mr. Pearson.
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief" . 205 
 
 given to Mr. Balfour's thesis here, and that chiefly with a view 
 to pointing out how frequently Mr. Balfour can contradict 
 himself, and how glibly he can assume without compunction, 
 when it suits his purpose to do so, everything which he disputes 
 the right of the enemy to assume. 
 
 At the end of his chapter, after attempting to show that 
 empiricism "fails us," that "as in the case of our judgments 
 about particular matters of fact, so also in the case of these 
 other judgments, whose scope is co-extensive with the whole 
 realm of Nature, we find that any endeavour to formulate 
 a rational justification for them based on experience alone 
 breaks down" (p. 132), and that "a purely empirical theory 
 of things, a philosophy which depends for its premises in the 
 last resort upon the particulars revealed to us in perceptive 
 experience alone, is one that cannot rationally be accepted " 
 (P- 1 33)> ne assures us that this criticism merely draws down 
 naturalism, and does not, as some might suppose, drag down 
 science as well. "Science preceded the theory of science, and 
 is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will 
 survive it." Yet in the course of the argument itself he has 
 constantly employed science and naturalism as if the two terms 
 were synonymous ; he has spoken (p. 121) of " the great oddity 
 of the creed which science requires us to adopt respecting the 
 world in which we live " ; and he has attempted to show, 
 from a consideration of the "primary" and "secondary" 
 qualities of matter, that science practically commits suicide 
 when it attempts to justify its assertion of an external world 
 corresponding to our ideas of it. 
 
 This note of inconsistency is maintained throughout. 
 When Mr. Balfour wants to impress the plain man with the 
 metaphysical difficulties in the way of science, he triumphantly 
 challenges the man of science to prove the reality of the world 
 in which he believes ; when he wants to discredit the scientific 
 reading of the world, he unhesitatingly assumes the reality of
 
 206 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 it, and points to the fallacious distinction between the so-called 
 primary and secondary qualities of matter. Thus he argues 
 (i) that according to science our knowledge of the world 
 comes from experience ; (2) that the perception of " a green 
 tree about fifty yards off," is an extremely complex series of 
 causes and effects, and that " among these innumerable causes, 
 the thing ' immediately experienced ' is but one, and is more- 
 over, one separated from the ' immediate experience ' which it 
 modestly assists in producing by a very large number of 
 intermediate causes which are never experienced at all " ; that 
 " anything . . . which would distribute similar green rays on 
 the retina of my eyes in the same pattern as that produced by 
 the tree, or anything which would produce a like irritation of 
 the optic nerve or a like modification of the cerebral tissues, 
 would give me an experience in itself quite indistinguishable 
 from my experience of the tree, although it has the unfor- 
 tunate peculiarity of being wholly incorrect"; that "we can 
 hardly avoid being struck by the incongruity of a scheme of 
 belief whose premises are wholly derived from witnesses 
 admittedly untrustworthy, yet which is unable to supply any 
 criterion, other than the evidence of these witnesses them- 
 selves, by which the character of their evidence can in any 
 given case be determined " ; that " we need only to consider 
 carefully our perceptions regarded as psychological results, in 
 order to see that, regarded as sources of information, they are 
 not merely occasionally inaccurate, but habitually menda- 
 cious," because "nine-tenths of our immediate experiences of 
 objects are visual ; and all visual experiences without excep- 
 tion are, according to science, erroneous. As everybody 
 knows, colour is not a property of the thing seen ; it is a 
 sensation produced in us by that thing. The thing itself 
 consists of uncoloured particles, which become visible solely 
 in consequence of their power of either producing or reflecting 
 ethereal undulations." So that although Mr. Balfour quarrels
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 207 
 
 with naturalism for saying that all our knowledge comes from 
 experience, and though he holds in a semi-Kantian kind of 
 way that "experience" cannot produce "knowledge," he him- 
 self is quite willing to utilise experience in order to damage 
 the scientific citadel. We cannot prove our experiences to be 
 correct, he maintains ; yet he uses experience itself to prove 
 that certain experiences are " mendacious," as if a standard of 
 mendacity were possible without a standard of veracity ; as if, 
 that is, the sceptic could make use of the supposed falsity of 
 certain experiences to prove that there was no criterion of 
 truth, without thereby tacitly admitting and employing a 
 criterion of truth. Mr. Balfour, in his sceptical mood, would 
 not admit that we were justified in speaking of matter as a 
 real something outside us ; but Mr. Balfour, in his anti- 
 scientific mood, is quite willing to fasten upon the distinction 
 between the colour of matter and its substance, laying it down 
 that " colour is not a property of the thing seen" but that " the 
 thing in itself consists of uncoloured particles". 1 
 
 Mr. Balfour's scepticism, in fact, has come down from so 
 many centuries that it has become rather thin in transit. It 
 may terrify the plain man, and drive him to take shelter 
 under the wing of the politician who can talk so learnedly 
 about matter and space and time and causation ; but the 
 student of philosophy is inclined to yawn over it, and the 
 scientist quietly ignores it. It does not matter one whit to 
 scientific men whether there are " things in themselves " or 
 not, or whether the idea of causation can or cannot be acquired 
 
 1 As Mr. Karl Pearson points out, the "primary" qualities of matter are no 
 more " real " than the secondary, if by real be meant something existing inde- 
 pendently of our subjective manner of receiving impressions. " The theory of 
 light makes the degree of brightness depend on the energy of vibration ; the 
 kinetic theory of pressure would, I presume, also reduce the resistance we term 
 hardness to a motion of the cohering particles ; and why the energy measured 
 by one nerve is to be real, and that measured by another ' no part of reality,' I 
 fail to understand " (Reaction, p. 29, note).
 
 208 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 solely from experience. All that the scientific man does is to 
 deduce from the past a probability as to the future, and the 
 accuracy of his anticipation is in its turn verified by experi- 
 ence. Outside this circle, indeed, we cannot get, and Mr. 
 Balfour is perfectly right on that head ; but then we do not 
 want and do not need to get outside the circle. A passage 
 from Mr. Benn, h propos of the Greek sceptics, will not be out 
 of place here in reference to Mr. Balfour's attack on naturalism. 
 "Timon would not admit of such a thing as first principles. 
 Every assumption, he says, must rest on some previous 
 assumption, and as this process cannot be continued for ever, 
 there can be no demonstration at all. This became a very 
 favourite weapon with the later sceptics, and, still at the 
 suggestion of Aristotle, they added the further ' trope ' of 
 compelling their adversaries to choose between going back 
 ad infinitum and reasoning in a circle ; in other words, prov- 
 ing the premises by means of the conclusion. Modern science 
 would not feel much appalled by the sceptical dilemma. Its 
 actual first principles are only provisionally assumed as ulti- 
 mate, and it is impossible for us to tell how much farther their 
 analysis may be pursued ; while, again, their validity is 
 guaranteed by the circular process of showing that the con- 
 sequences deduced from them agree with the facts of experi- 
 ence." x Mr. Balfour, indeed, when he endeavours to pit 
 science against the philosophy of science, or a philosophy of 
 science, loses sight of the fact that it is not the latter, but 
 science itself, with which the assertions of theology come into 
 conflict, and of the fact that there can really be nothing more 
 than a purely provisional philosophy of science so long as the 
 advance of knowledge is continually altering our notions of 
 the universe, and consequently of the terms in which we try 
 to express the leading features of the universe. Will any one 
 allege, for example, that the term matter bore anything like 
 
 1 A. W. Benn, The Greek Philosophers, vol. ii., p. 139.
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief". 209 
 
 the same significance to the ancient Greek that it does to the 
 modern physicist, or that the ancient and the modern could 
 view the problem of causation from the same standpoint? 
 The question may indeed be raised whether there can ever be 
 a philosophy of science in the sense in which Mr. Balfour uses 
 the phrase. But whether there can or cannot be such a 
 science, it remains undoubted that we cannot construct it yet, 
 nor would it, if constructed, in any way alter our position 
 towards the dogmas of theology. Mr. Balfour, indeed, would 
 have been better occupied in building his own theological 
 house than in casting stones at the temple of science. Even 
 if he had proved his point about the basis of naturalism, that 
 would not give the slightest support to the basis of theology. 
 To prove Darwinism wrong would not prove Genesis to be 
 right, though some theologians appear to think it would ; and 
 any amount of cannonading at the foundations of science will 
 not make us swallow the fundamental proposition of theology, 
 " There is a God," without some positive argument in its 
 favour. If the argument is strong enough to prove it, well 
 and good ; if it is not, we cannot look upon it as proved 
 because a piece of ancient scepticism riddles another piece of 
 ancient metaphysic. 
 
 To linger longer over the arguments of Mr. Balfour would 
 be a work of supererogation. The metaphysician who is 
 capable of writing that " the plain lesson taught by personal 
 observation is not the regularity, but the irregularity of 
 Nature," without perceiving that the so-called irregularities of 
 Nature are accounted for by science as much as the regularities, 
 seems singularly ill-fitted to lead an attack upon the foun- 
 dations of science. And when he tells us in one breath that 
 " as for the general mass of mankind, so far are they from 
 finding, either in their personal experiences or elsewhere, 
 any sufficient reason for accepting in its perfected form the 
 principle of universal causation, that, as a matter of fact, this 
 
 14
 
 2 1 o Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 doctrine has been steadily ignored by them up to the present 
 hour," and in the next that " we bring to the interpretation of 
 our sense-perception the principle of causation ready made," 
 we may admire the dexterity by which the phrasing of the 
 first proposition is calculated to hide its contradiction with the 
 second, but we recognise the hand of the unscientific meta- 
 physician, who ignores anthropology in his psychological 
 investigations, and attempts to construct mental science in 
 vacuo. And, characteristically enough, Mr. Balfour concludes 
 his chapter with self-contradiction. " Who would pay the 
 slightest attention to naturalism if it did not force itself into 
 the retinue of science, assume her livery, and claim, as a kind 
 of poor relation, in some sort* to represent her authority and to 
 speak with her voice ? Of itself it is nothing. It neither 
 ministers to the needs of mankind, nor does it satisfy their 
 reason. And if, in spite of this, its influence has increased, is 
 increasing, and as yet shows no signs of diminution ; if more 
 and more the educated and the half-educated are acquiescing 
 in its pretensions, and, however reluctantly, submitting to its 
 domination, this is, at least in part, because they have not 
 learned to distinguish between the practical and inevitable 
 claims which experience has on their allegiance, and the 
 speculative but quite illusory title by which the empirical 
 school have endeavoured to associate naturalism and science 
 in a kind of joint supremacy over the thoughts and consciences 
 of mankind " (pp. 135, 136). 
 
 From which it appears that in spite of all the unkind 
 things Mr. Balfour has said about experience, its " practical 
 and inevitable claims upon our allegiance " are undisputed ; 
 that although science becomes so painfully entangled when it 
 tries to explain itself, it must still be looked upon as giving 
 us a substantially correct reading of the world ; that science 
 is all right, but naturalism is merely an impostor ; that " in 
 itself it is nothing," neither ministering to the needs of mankind
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 211 
 
 nor satisfying their reason ; that although it cannot satisfy our 
 reason, the educated and the half-educated are taking more 
 kindly to it every day, 1 and although it cannot minister to our 
 needs, " its influence has increased, is increasing, and as yet 
 shows no signs of diminution ". It is difficult to know exactly 
 what Mr. Balfour means to imply by this farrago of self- 
 contradiction ; but it may safely be said that no ordinarily 
 educated person could be deluded into accepting his con- 
 clusions on the strength of such arguments, and that if the 
 plain man is seduced into accepting them, that estimable 
 being is really so painfully stupid that the only place for 
 him is on the side of the angels. 
 
 1 The uneducated presumably drifting into Mr. Balfour's camp.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WE need not pause to consider in detail Mr. Balfour's chap- 
 ter on " Philosophy and Rationalism," in which he lays it down 
 that " naturalism ... is nothing more than the result of 
 rationalising methods applied with pitiless consistency to the 
 whole circuit of belief," and protests against " the assumption 
 that consistency is a necessity of the intellectual life to be pur- 
 chased, if need be, at famine prices " (pp. 172, 173). Consist- 
 ency, if we may judge from The Foundations of Belief and the 
 Essays and Addresses, is certainly not a virtue for which Mr. 
 Balfour would feel impelled to make any great .sacrifice ; 
 though it is rather difficult to understand why, after disparaging 
 it in this way, he should tell us, half a dozen lines farther on, 
 that " it is impossible to regard any theory which lacks self- 
 consistency as either satisfactory or final ". " But principles 
 going far beyond admissions like these are required to compel 
 us to acquiesce .in rationalising methods and naturalistic results 
 to the destruction of every form of belief with which they do 
 not happen to agree. Before such terms of surrender are 
 accepted, at least the victorious system must show, not merely 
 that its various parts are consistent with each other, but that 
 the whole is authenticated by reason" (p. 174). So that while 
 Mr. Balfour is willing enough to discredit reason in favour of 
 authority when reason makes onslaught upon the pretensions 
 of theology, he is equally willing to make every use of reason 
 when he thinks he can in that manner attack the methods and 
 
 (212)
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 213 
 
 results of rationalism. This, to be sure, can scarcely be looked 
 upon as a practical use of the canon of consistency ; though 
 Mr. Balfour's theoretical regard for consistency in relation to 
 rationalism would logically end in purchasing the commodity 
 at famine prices after all. 
 
 Before coming to the constructive portion of his book, how- 
 ever, Mr. Balfour first wishes to remove some stumbling blocks 
 from the path of theology, and to warn his friends of the 
 danger of trying to give a rational demonstration of the truth 
 of their faith. With that fatal aptitude of his for finding better 
 reasons against his own creed than he can- find for it, he points 
 out that there are many difficulties in the way both of natural 
 and of revealed religion, and that while the former can only 
 be deduced by reason from the observed facts of Nature, the 
 latter can only be proved by reason from certain facts of history. 
 " Now it must be conceded that if this general train of reason- 
 ing be assumed to cover the whole ground of ' Christian Evi- 
 dences,' then, whether it be conclusive or inconclusive, it does 
 at least attain the desideratum of connecting science on the 
 one hand, religion 'natural' and 'revealed' on the other, into 
 one single scheme of inter-connected propositions. But it 
 attains it by making theology in form a mere annex or 
 appendix to science ; a mere footnote to history ; a series of 
 conclusions inferred from data which have been arrived at by 
 precisely the same methods as those which enable us to pro- 
 nounce upon the probability of any other events in the past 
 history of man or of the world in which he lives. We are no 
 longer dealing with a creed whose real premises lie deep in the 
 nature of things. It is no question of metaphysical specula- 
 tion, moral intuition, or mystical ecstasy with which we are 
 concerned. We are asked to believe the universe to have been 
 designed by a Deity for the same sort of reason that we believe 
 Canterbury Cathedral to have been designed by an architect, 
 and to believe. in the events narrated in the Gospels for the
 
 2 1 4 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 same sort of reason that we believe in the murder of Thomas a 
 Becket" (p. 178). 
 
 To many, indeed, it would appear that if natural theology 
 could give us proofs of the existence of a Deity as strong as 
 the proofs that Canterbury Cathedral was designed by an 
 architect, or if revealed religion could really convince us of 
 the historical truth of the events narrated in the Gospels, the 
 whole victory would be won for them. The rationalist who 
 claims to regulate his beliefs according to the evidence for 
 them would certainly believe, for example, in the story of the 
 immaculate conception if the balance of proof were in its 
 favour. But he declines to believe in it because immaculate 
 conceptions in general have never been observed in the human 
 race, because those who allege this particular conception to 
 have occurred can give no evidence whatever in favour of it, 
 because the documents in which the story is told are not 
 authenticated by historical criticism, because virgin births were 
 so common in the religions of antiquity, and for many other 
 equally cogent reasons. Let the Christian show all these 
 reasons to be wrong or insufficient, and give us in addition 
 strong positive proof that the event really did occur, and we 
 will believe in the virgin birth of Jesus as firmly as we believe 
 that Socrates drank the poison. If religion is strong enough 
 to meet its critics on this ground, by all means let it do so. 
 But the adherents of religion know too well that, tried by any 
 test of reason, their creed crumbles wherever it is touched. 
 And accordingly, as Mr. Balfour puts it, "more than this is 
 desirable more than this is, indeed, necessary. For however 
 good arguments of this sort are, or may be made, they are not 
 equal by themselves to the task of upsetting so massive an 
 obstacle as developed naturalism ; " of upsetting, that is, a 
 creed which of itself is nothing, as Mr. Balfour himself has 
 assured us ; a creed which neither ministers to the needs of 
 mankind nor satisfies their reason. "They have not, as it
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 215 
 
 were, sufficient intrinsic energy to effect so great a change. 
 They may not be ill directed, but they lack momentum. They 
 may not be technically defective, but they are assuredly prac- 
 tically inadequate" (p. 179). In other and less sophistical 
 words, since theology cannot prove its assertions by an appeal 
 to reason, a verdict must be snatched by less open and more 
 disingenuous means. 
 
 For Mr. Balfour himself goes on to show that a naturalistic 
 philosopher, trained in science, in anthropology, and in the 
 history of religions, will easily pick holes in the threadbare 
 logic by which the natural religionist tries to demonstrate 
 the existence of a First Cause, and will run amuck through 
 the historical evidences of Christianity, considered as a super- 
 naturally revealed religion. "Thus, slightly modifying Hume, 
 might the disciple of naturalism reply. And as against the 
 rationalising theologian, is not his answer conclusive ? The 
 former has borrowed the premises, the methods, and all the 
 positive conclusions of naturalism. He advances on the same 
 strategic principles and from the same base of operations. 
 And though he professes by these means to have overrun a 
 whole continent of alien conclusions with which naturalism 
 will have nothing to do, can he permanently retain it? Is it 
 not certain that the huge expanse of his theology, attached by 
 so slender a tie to the main system of which it is intended to 
 be a dependency, will sooner or later have to be abandoned ; 
 and that the weak and artificial connection which has been so 
 ingeniously contrived will snap at the first strain to which it 
 shall be subjected by the forces either of criticism or senti- 
 ment ? " (p. 182). That is, if theology cannot be reinstated by 
 showing its own assertions to be true, or the assertions of its 
 opponents to be false, it can at least be smuggled into favour 
 again by other methods. What these other methods are Mr. 
 Balfour will show us in the third part of his book " Some 
 Causes of Belief".
 
 2 1 6 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 " No mere inferences of the ordinary pattern, based upon 
 experience," he admits, " will enable us to break out of the 
 naturalistic prison-house." Nor is it the wisest thing simply 
 to set up " side by side with the creed of natural science 
 another and supplementary set of beliefs, which may minister 
 to needs and aspirations which science cannot meet, and may 
 speak amid silences which science is powerless to break. . . . 
 To thousands of persons this patchwork scheme of belief, 
 though it may be in a form less sharply defined, has, in 
 substance, commended itself ; and if and in so far as it 
 really meets their needs I have nothing to say against it, 
 and can hold out small hope of bettering it" (p. 187) ; 
 though, of course, he has a great deal to say against 
 naturalism, which " really meets the needs " of a great many 
 people. This method of running two creeds at the same time, 
 however, has " obvious inconveniences. There are many 
 persons, and they are increasing in number, who find it 
 difficult or impossible to acquiesce in this unconsidered 
 division of the 'whole' of knowledge into two or more 
 unconnected fragments. Naturalism may be practically 
 unsatisfactory. 1 But at least the positive teaching of 
 naturalism has secured general assent ; 2 and it shocks their 
 philosophic instinct for unity to be asked to patch and plaster 
 this accepted creed with a number of heterogeneous proposi- 
 tions drawn from an entirely different source, and on behalf 
 of which no such common agreement can be claimed. What 
 such persons ask for, and rightly, is a philosophy, a scheme 
 of knowledge which shall give rational unity to an adequate 
 
 J That is, of course, to Mr. Balfour. 
 
 2 Mr. Balfour should have said " the positive teaching of science has secured 
 general assent ". His unconscious use of the word " naturalism " in this place 
 shows how insincere was his former attempt to dissociate naturalism from 
 science, and how hollow his pretence of only attacking the former while agreeing 
 with the conclusions of the latter.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 217 
 
 (sic) creed." This unity, Mr. Balfour confesses, he is not able 
 to supply ; and accordingly " we must either pursue the 
 rationalising and naturalistic method already criticised, and 
 compel the desired unification of belief by the summary 
 rejection of everything which does not fit into some con- 
 venient niche in the scheme of things developed by empirical 
 methods out of sense-perception ; or if . . . we reject 
 this method, we must turn for assistance towards a new 
 quarter, and apply ourselves to the problem by the aid of 
 some more comprehensive, or at least more manageable, 
 principle" (p. 188). 
 
 To this end Mr. Balfour begins with the reflections of an 
 imaginary observer from another planet, who should view our 
 thoughts and beliefs from the outside, and with the object not 
 so much of discovering their truth or falsity as of investigating 
 the manner in which they have come into being. After 
 observing that there were two great orders of belief those 
 that were founded upon immediate sense-perception, and 
 those that sprang from memories of the past or anticipations 
 of the future he " would soon find out that there were other 
 influences besides reasoning required to supplement the rela- 
 tively simple physiological and psychological causes which 
 originate the immediate beliefs of perception, memory, and 
 expectation. These immediate beliefs belong to man as an 
 individual. They involve no commerce between mind and 
 mind. They might equally exist, and would equally be 
 necessary, if each man stood face to face with material 
 Nature in friendless isolation. But they neither provide, nor 
 by any merely logical extension can be made to provide, 
 the apparatus of beliefs which we find actually connected 
 with the higher scientific social and spiritual life of the 
 race. These also are, without doubt, the product of ante- 
 cedent causes causes many in number and most diverse 
 in character. They presuppose, to begin with, the beliefs
 
 2 1 8 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 of perception, memory, and expectation in their elementary 
 shape ; and they also imply the existence of an organism 
 fitted for their hospitable reception by ages of ancestral 
 preparation. But these conditions, though necessary, are 
 clearly not enough ; the appropriate environment has also 
 to be provided " (pp. 192, 193). 
 
 In this environment the main group of causes is " perhaps 
 best described by the term authority". And Mr. Balfour 
 first sets himself to show that the current sense of antagonism 
 between the rival pretensions of authority and reason is due to 
 a wrong idea of the function of reason in the production of 
 belief. "Suppose for a moment," he says, "a community of 
 which each member should deliberately set himself to the task 
 of throwing off so far as possible all prejudices due to educa-' 
 tion ; where each should consider it his duty critically to 
 examine the grounds whereon rest every positive enactment 
 and every moral precept which he has been accustomed to 
 obey ; to dissect all the great loyalties which make social life 
 possible, and all the minor conventions which help to make it 
 easy ; and to weigh out with scrupulous precision the exact 
 degree of assent which in each particular case the results of 
 this process might seem to justify. To say that such a com- 
 munity, if it acted upon the opinions thus arrived at, would 
 stand but a poor chance in the struggle for existence is to say 
 far too little. It could never even begin to be ; and if by a 
 miracle it was created, it would without doubt immediately 
 resolve itself into its constituent elements " (p. 196). 
 
 Observe the sublime inconsequence of the sophistry to 
 begin with. Mr. Balfour hopes to show that theological pro- 
 positions ought to be believed although they cannot be proved 
 to be true, by showing that reason does not have conscious 
 jurisdiction over the whole of our beliefs ! We must not judge 
 by reason the propositions, " There is a God," or, " Eighteen 
 centuries ago a Jewish Virgin gave birth to a child," because
 
 Mr. Bat four's '''Foundations of Belief'". 219 
 
 any community that tried to be consciously rational in every 
 thought and action of its daily life would immediately perish ! 
 In other words, because we cannot by an effort of the mind 
 acquire control over such an automatic movement as that of 
 the heart, so as to regulate each beat of it, we must also give 
 up our right to judge that fire will burn our fingers if we thrust 
 them into it. With Mr. Balfour's demonstration that nine- 
 tenths of the convictions on which we momentarily act are not 
 the product of individual reasoning we have no .particular 
 quarrel, except in so far as he attempts to prejudice the case 
 by a sophistical use of the term authority. In the main, no 
 one would ever think of disputing the proposition that Mr. 
 Balfour so triumphantly enunciates ; but the truth of that pro- 
 position does not invalidate the use of reason where we ciin 
 use it. Sooner or later we must justify our beliefs, and they 
 can be justified in no other way than by a process of reasoning. 
 The whole point, however, is worth further and more minute 
 consideration, this being probably the most sophistical chapter 
 in Mr. Balfour's book. 
 
 The argument proceeds very much on the lines already laid 
 down. The case of morality is taken as an illustration of the 
 fact that it would be impossible for any society to examine 
 critically, in all their details, the moral maxims upon which 
 conduct was based. The whole of the population having 
 engaged in this pleasing occupation, Mr. Balfour conceives it 
 to be " highly probable that the conclusions at which on this 
 point they would arrive would be of a purely negative charac- 
 ter. The ethical systems competing for acceptance would, by 
 their very numbers and variety, suggest suspicions as to their 
 character and origin. Here, would our students explain, is a 
 clear presumption to be found on the very face of these moral- 
 isings that they were contrived, not in the interests of truth, 
 but in the interests of traditional dogma. How else explain 
 the fact that, while there is no great difference of opinion as to
 
 22O Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 what things are right or wrong, there is no semblance of agree- 
 ment as to why they are right or why they are wrong?" 
 (p. 198). ..." Now whence, it would be asked, this 
 curious mixture of agreement and disagreement? How 
 account for the strange variety exhibited in the premises of 
 these various systems, and the not less strange uniformity 
 exhibited in their conclusions ? Why does not as great a 
 divergence manifest itself in the results arrived at as we 
 undoubtedly find in the methods employed ? . . . Plainly 
 but one plausible method of solving the difficulty exists. The 
 conclusions were, in every case, determined before the argu- 
 ment began ; the goal was, in every case, settled before the 
 travellers set out. There is here no surrender of belief to the 
 inward guidance of unfettered reason. Rather is reason 
 coerced to a foreordained issue by the external operation of 
 prejudice and education or by the rougher machinery of social 
 ostracism and legal penalty" (p. 199). The conclusion being, 
 of course, that reason is a force far inferior in power to author- 
 ity. " But, in truth, it were a vain task to try to work out in 
 further detail the results of an experiment which, human nature 
 being what it is, can never be seriously attempted. That it 
 can never be seriously attempted is not, be it observed, because 
 it is of so dangerous a character that the community in its 
 wisdom would refuse to embark upon it. This would be a 
 frail protection, indeed. Not the danger of the adventure, but 
 its impossibility, is our security. To reject all convictions 
 which are not the products of free speculative investigation is, 
 fortunately, an exercise of which humanity is, in the strictest 
 sense, incapable. Some societies and some individuals may 
 show more inclination to indulge in it than others. But in no 
 condition of society and in no individual will the inclination 
 be more than very partially satisfied. Always and everywhere 
 our imaginary observer, contemplating from some external 
 coign of vantage the course of human history, would note the
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 221 
 
 immense, the inevitable, and on the whole the beneficent part 
 which authority plays in the production of belief" (p. 200). 
 
 So that it appears we are safe after all. After the dreadful 
 warnings of the fate likely to overtake any community that 
 goes in for reason pure and simple, it is consoling to learn that 
 it is quite impossible for any community to be so foolish. Just 
 as Mr. Kidd tells us in one breath that if we are rational we 
 will check progress, and in the next breath that p rogress is an 
 organic law " from which there is simply no escape," so Mr. 
 Balfour is anxious to warn us against the evils of being 
 rational in everything, all the while that he is assuring us that 
 we cannot be rational in everything. And as no one has ever 
 asserted that we could, as no one with the slightest knowledge 
 of psychology would ever think of disputing so old and 
 threadbare a proposition as this, Mr. Balfour's elaborate 
 demonstration is something of a futility. It is only in- 
 teresting so far as it relates to what follows. Mr. Balfour 
 is considerate enough to allow that some societies and some 
 individuals show more inclination to indulge in the bad habit 
 of reasoning about their beliefs than others ; but he is not 
 obliging enough to tell us how far we ought to examine the 
 speculative bases of our beliefs, and how far we ought to 
 refrain. Perhaps an outsider may be permitted to supply the 
 deficiency. It seems wrong for any one to question the bases 
 of those beliefs of theology which Mr. Balfour has so dis- 
 interestedly taken under his exiguous wing ; here we ought to 
 be content to rest upon authority. Thus the rationalist is 
 inclined to point out that the Christian scheme of theology 
 depends upon the truth of some highly disputable assertions, 
 as that (i) there is a God who took the Jews for his chosen 
 people, and who inspired the books of the Old and the New 
 Testaments ; (2) man was originally created perfect, and after- 
 wards fell ; (3) this brought the curse of sin upon all his 
 descendants ; (4) God sent his Son to remove this curse and
 
 222 Pseud o- Ph ilosophy. 
 
 redeem the world ; (5) this Son was born of a certain Virgin at 
 a certain time and in a certain place ; (6) before being cruci : 
 fied he gave utterance to a body of teaching the acceptance of 
 which is essential to salvation ; and so on. If the rationalist is 
 inclined to indulge, as Mr. Balfour puts it, in the exercise of 
 examining the truth or falsity of all these statements, he is 
 politely referred to authority. But when Mr. Balfour is con- 
 cerned to discredit the religious systems of other nations, or 
 the philosophical system of an opponent, he is perfectly willing 
 to examine with any amount of rigour the speculative bases 
 of these systems. More especially in the department of 
 science is he willing to use all the sceptical and negative 
 weapons which reason has at her command, in order to arouse 
 doubts concerning a number of common-sense beliefs about 
 the material world which are the offshoot of "authority" if 
 anything is. So that his phrase about " the immense,, the 
 inevitable, and on the whole the beneficent part which authority 
 plays in the production of belief," must only be taken to 
 apply, at all events as far as the third adjective is concerned, 
 to the beliefs to which Mr. Balfour is so anxious to afford 
 a prop. To admit, however, that authority only " on the 
 whole" plays a beneficent part, is to admit that its influence is 
 occasionally harmful. On these occasions recourse must pre- 
 sumably be had to reason ; and, this being so, Mr. Balfour, if 
 he had been really concerned to teach the public anything 
 about the relative importance of reason and authority, instead 
 of merely to throw dust in their eyes, would have attempted 
 to mark out, in a scientific manner, the spheres of the two 
 forces. This, of course, he has not attempted to do. All he 
 has done is to beat the drum ecclesiastic to the tune of an 
 ancient psychological truism, and to fall into two or three 
 characteristic pieces of self-contradiction. And in any case he 
 finally confutes himself, as does Mr. Kidd, by the mere publi- 
 cation of his own book. Either authority can be trusted to
 
 Mr. Balfour s ''Foundations of Belief". 223 
 
 keep our beliefs right or it cannot. If it cannot, then we must 
 have recourse to reason. If it can, what in the name of com- 
 mon sense is the use of such minor things as Mr. Balfour and 
 his book? And if Mr. Balfour answers that his book may aid 
 the formation of right beliefs, the rejoinder is that if it accom- 
 plishes any such purpose it does so by virtue of its reasoning, 
 and Mr. Balfour's thesis about authority comes once more to 
 the ground. And, finally, if a critical examination into the 
 basis of what Mr. Balfour thinks our wrong opinions as to 
 reason is legitimate on his part, it is surely legitimate on the 
 part of rationalists to examine critically what they conceive to 
 be the wrong opinions of the intuitionalist as to the bases 
 of religion and morality. Once more we recognise the old 
 theological sharping in the spin of the coin.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 "WE have now considered beliefs, or certain important classes 
 of them," says Mr. Balfour, "under three aspects. We have 
 considered them from the point of view of their practical 
 necessity ; from that of their philosophic proof; and from 
 that of their scientific origin." Of the first section of his book 
 we have to say that a carefully and deliberately induced attack 
 of hysteria is no argument against the truth of doctrines which 
 Mr. Balfour does not like ; of the second, that his sceptical 
 criticism of the foundations of science is quite unable to 
 damage science in any way, or in any way to rehabilitate 
 specific dogmas of religion ; and of the third, that while Mr. 
 Balfour's use of the word "authority" is altogether ille- 
 gitimate, carrying misleading connotations as it does, no 
 rationalist would dispute the main truth of what Mr. Balfour 
 has said about the function of reason in daily life, all that he 
 has said being, indeed, a mere commonplace of psychology, 
 that has no practical bearing upon the struggle between 
 religion and science. We now come to the fourth section of 
 the book, "Suggestions towards a Provisional Philosophy," in 
 which Mr. Balfour offers to abandon the club for the spade ; 
 in other words, to leave off strewing the metaphysical ground 
 with the brains of other men, and give us something of the 
 fruit of his own. 
 
 At the outset a becoming sense of modesty steals over him. 
 He has already, with the noble sob of emotion in his throat, 
 
 protested against the claims of naturalism this creed " which 
 
 (224)
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 225 
 
 is not even consistent with itself"- to force all our beliefs into 
 harmony with its premises and conclusions. That was some- 
 thing not to be tolerated. But Mr. Balfour, coming to 
 construct his own positive philosophy, gets a chill sense that 
 the task is not so easy as it formerly looked. Accordingly we 
 are reminded that his philosophy cannot possibly cover all the 
 ground, and be complete and consistent throughout ; this, be 
 it remembered, after the petulant feminine snap at science 
 and naturalism for not being consistent. " It is evident, of 
 course, that this general view, if we are fortunate enough to 
 reach it, will not be of the nature of a complete or adequate 
 philosophy. The unification of all belief into an ordered 
 whole, compacted into one coherent structure under the stress 
 of reason, is an ideal which we can never abandon ; but it is 
 also one which, in the present condition of our knowledge, 
 perhaps even of our faculties, we seem incapable of attaining. 
 For the moment we must content ourselves with something 
 less than this. The best system we can hope to construct will, 
 suffer from gaps and rents, from loose ends and ragged edges. 
 It does not, however, follow from this that it will be without a 
 high degree of value ; and, whether valuable or worthless, it 
 may at least represent the best within our reach" (pp. 233, 
 234). Which is really a very handsome testimonial to natural- 
 ism, could Mr. Balfour but see it. 
 
 " By the best," he goes on, "I, of course, mean best in 
 relation to reflective reason. If we have to submit, as I think 
 we must, to an incomplete rationalisation of belief, this ought 
 not to be because in a fit of intellectual despair we are driven 
 to treat reason as an illusion ; nor yet because we have 
 deliberately resolved to transfer our allegiance to irrational or 
 non-rational inclination ; but because reason itself assures us 
 that such a course is, at the lowest, the least irrational one 
 open to us. ... Now, the first and most elementary principle 
 which ought to guide us in framing any provisional scheme of 
 
 15
 
 226 Pseiido- Philosophy. 
 
 unification, is to decline to draw any distinction between 
 different classes of belief where no relevant distinction can as 
 a matter of fact be discovered. To pursue the opposite course 
 would be gratuitously to irrationalise (to coin a convenient 
 word) our scheme from the very start ; to destroy, by a quite 
 arbitrary treatment, any hope of its symmetrical and healthy 
 development. And yet, if there be any value in the criticisms 
 contained in the second part of these notes, this is precisely the 
 mistake into which the advocates of naturalism have invariably 
 blundered. Without any preliminary analysis, nay, without 
 any apparent suspicion that a preliminary analysis was neces- 
 sary or desirable, they have chosen to assume that scientific 
 beliefs stand not only on a different, but upon a much more 
 solid, platform than any others ; that scientific standards 
 supply the sole test of truth, and scientific methods the sole 
 instruments of discovery " (pp. 234, 235). 
 
 The drift of the argument is already becoming apparent. 
 Mr. Balfour is going to show us that when we distinguish 
 between the relative certitude of a " belief" of science and a 
 "belief" of religion, we are "drawing a distinction between 
 different classes of belief where no relevant distinction can as 
 a matter of fact be discovered " ; that is, he will argue that 
 scientific beliefs being no more capable of fundamental justi- 
 fication by reason than religious beliefs, we have no right to 
 assert the former to be more true, on rational grounds, than 
 the latter ; but that since we do believe very confidently in 
 the former, there must be some other ground of belief, say 
 faith or intuition ; and this being so, religious beliefs, which 
 indubitably are not capable of rational defence, and which do 
 certainly repose on faith or intuition, are at all events no 
 worse off than the beliefs of science. These are the lines 
 upon which Mr. Balfour's argument is going to run. 
 
 Now the first remark that will spring to the lips of every 
 scientific reader upon meeting with this argument, will be
 
 Mr. Balfou^s "Foundations of Belief '. 227 
 
 that Mr. Balfour is making an ingenious but wholly unwar- 
 rantable analogy between the psychological process, unjusti- 
 fiable by reason, let us say, by which we believe that there is 
 an external world, and the process by which we believe that 
 there is a Deity ; and he will point out that while the second 
 belief is peculiar to a few people, the second belief is universal, 
 so universal that even the sceptical philosopher who denies 
 the existence of an external world has to begin by tacitly 
 affirming it. The firs.t belief is, in fact, universal and inevit- 
 able ; the second, being neither universal nor inevitable, as is 
 shown by the fact that some men hold it while others do not, 
 is apparently the product of various special mental and physi- 
 cal and social forces. The two classes of belief thus stand 
 on different planes, the one being held by human beings qud 
 human beings, the second only by human beings who have 
 followed a certain peculiar line of mental development. 
 
 This being the most obvious criticism upon Mr. Balfour's 
 argument, the reader who knows anything of Mr. Balfour's 
 method of attack is not surprised to find in the next few 
 pages an anticipation of this criticism, and an attempt to 
 minimise its value. Not the least striking characteristic of 
 Mr. Balfour is, indeed, this very uncandid air of candour 
 which he can assume at times, an air of meeting criticism half 
 way and disarming it by concessions or by threats. The 
 method is not without its dialectical value. You have only 
 to put forward a proposition which you inwardly feel to be 
 untenable, and then, before your opponent has time to pass 
 the criticism which you know is coming, to state the criticism 
 yourself in a peculiarly mild form, and with an air of having 
 tried it carefully and found it wanting. Thus Mr. Balfour : 
 " I will not repeat the arguments which have led me to the 
 conviction that such pretensions v have no foundation in 
 
 1 I.e., the pretensions "that scientific standards supply the sole test of 
 truth, and scientific methods the sole instruments of discovery ".
 
 228 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 reason. The reader is already in possession of some of the 
 arguments which are, as it seems to me, fatal to such claims, 
 and it is not necessary here to repeat them. What is more to 
 our present purpose is to find out whether, in the absence of 
 philosophic proof, judgments about the phenomenal and more 
 particularly about the material world possess any other char- 
 acteristics which, in our attempt at a provisional unification 
 of knowledge, forbid us to place them on a level with other 
 classes of belief. That there are differences of some sort no 
 one, I imagine, will attempt to deny. But are they of a kind 
 which require us either to give any special precedence to 
 science or to exclude other beliefs altogether from our general 
 scheme ? 
 
 "One peculiarity there is which seems at first sight effectually 
 to distinguish certain scientific beliefs from any which belong, 
 say, to ethics or theology ; a peculiarity which may, perhaps, 
 be best expressed by the word ' inevitableness '. Everybody 
 has and everybody is obliged to have some convictions about 
 the world in which he lives convictions which in their narrow 
 and particular form (as what I have before called beliefs of 
 perception, memory, and expectation) guide us all, children, 
 savages, and philosophers alike, in the ordinary conduct of 
 day-to-day existence ; which, when generalised and extended, 
 supply us with some of the leading presuppositions on which 
 the whole fabric of science appears logically to depend. No 
 convictions quite answering to this description can, I think, be 
 found either in ethics, aesthetics, or theology. . . . Certainly 
 there is nothing in either of these great departments of thought 
 quite corresponding to our habitual judgments about the 
 things we see and handle ; judgments which, with reason or 
 without it, all mankind are practically compelled to entertain. 
 
 " Compare, for example, the central truth of theology 
 ' There is a God ' with one of the fundamental presupposi- 
 tions of science (itself a generalised statement of what is given
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 229 
 
 in ordinary judgments of perception) ' There is an indepen- 
 dent material world '. I am myself disposed to doubt whether 
 so good a case can be made out for accepting the second of 
 these propositions as can be made out for accepting the first. 1 
 But while it has been found by many not only possible but 
 easy to doubt the existence of God, doubts as to the indepen- 
 dent existence of matter have assuredly been confined to the 
 rarest moments of subjective reflection, and have dissolved like 
 summer mists at the first touch of what we are pleased to call 
 reality" (pp. 235-237). 
 
 Thus the poison ; now for the antidote. Mr. Balfour has 
 been constrained to admit that, while the belief in an indepen- 
 dent material world is one which all men hold, which no man, 
 indeed, can escape, the belief in the existence of a God has 
 nothing of this "inevitableness". Accordingly, Mr. Balfour 
 will try to make out that this quality of inevitableness is of 
 very small account, and that the beliefs of theology have a 
 " worthier " quality derived from their connection with our 
 " higher" nature. In the same way, it will be remembered, he 
 stated the naturalistic case in ethics and aesthetics with some 
 amount of care and accuracy, and then tried to sweep the 
 arguments away with a flood of very feminine rhetoric. Even 
 so will he now proceed to get rid of the unpleasant criticism he 
 has had to state against himself. 
 
 " Now, what are we to make of this fact ? In the opinion 
 of many persons, perhaps of most, it affords a conclusive 
 ground for elevating science to a different plane of certitude 
 from that on which other systems of belief must be content to 
 dwell. The evidence of the senses, as we loosely describe 
 these judgments of perception, is for such persons the best of 
 all evidence ; it is inevitable, so it is true ; seeing, as the pro- 
 
 1 This delightful sentence, with its air of conscious profundity and of invin- 
 cible logic held in reserve, is, of course, simply intended to bluff the plain man 
 and the religious reviewer.
 
 230 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 verb has it, is indeed believing. This somewhat crude view, 
 however, is not one which we can accept. The coercion exer- 
 cised in the production of these beliefs is not, as has been 
 already shown, a rational coercion. Even while we submit to 
 it we may judge it, and in the very act of believing we may be 
 conscious that the strength of our belief is far in excess of 
 anything which mere reason can justify" (pp. 237, 238). And 
 he further remarks that while a race that would doubt the 
 existence of an external world, "and require all its metaphysi- 
 cal difficulties to be solved before reposing full belief in some 
 such material surroundings as those which we habitually pos- 
 tulate," would quickly be eliminated by natural selection, and 
 that heredity may, therefore, have had much to do with the 
 inevitableness of our belief in a real world ; on the other hand, 
 " no such process would come to the assistance of other faiths, 
 however true, which were the growth of higher and later stages 
 of civilised development ". 
 
 " We are now in a position," he goes on, " to answer the 
 question put a few pages back. What, I then asked, if any, 
 is the import, from our present point of view, of the univer- 
 sality and inevitableness which unquestionably attach to 
 certain judgments about the world of phenomena, and to 
 these judgments alone ? The answer must (sic) be that these 
 peculiarities have no import. They exist, but they are 
 irrelevant. Faith or assurance, which, if not in excess of 
 reason, is at least independent of it, seems to be a necessity 
 in every great department of knowledge which touches on 
 action ; and which great department is there which does not ? 
 The analysis of sense-experience teaches us that we require it 
 in our ordinary dealings with the material world. The most 
 cursory examination into the springs of moral action shows 
 that it is an indispensable supplement to ethical speculation. 
 . . . The comparative value, however, of these faiths is 
 not to be measured either by their intensity or by the degree
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 231 
 
 of their diffusion. It is true that all men, whatever their 
 speculative opinions, enjoy a practical assurance with regard 
 to what they see and touch. It is also true that few men have 
 an assurance equally strong about matters of which their 
 senses tell them nothing immediately ; and that many men 
 have on such subjects no assurance at all. But as this is 
 precisely what we should expect if, in the progress of evo- 
 lution, the need for other faiths had arisen under conditions 
 very different from those which produced our innate and long- 
 descended confidence in sense-perception, how can we regard 
 it as a distinction in favour of the latter ? We can scarcely 
 reckon universality and necessity as badges of pre-eminence, 
 at the same moment that we recognise them as marks of the 
 elementary and primitive character of the beliefs to which 
 they give their all-powerful, but none the less irrational, 
 sanction. The time has passed for believing that the farther 
 we go back towards the ' state of nature,' the nearer we get to 
 virtue and to truth" (pp. 241, 242). 
 
 This is surely sophistry at its very thinnest Mr. Balfour's 
 protest against the argument that the belief in a real world is 
 universal and inevitable, while the belief in a God is neither 
 universal nor inevitable, turns out to be supported by nothing 
 stronger than the old theistic trick of labelling some feelings 
 " higher " and others " lower " the higher feelings being, of 
 course, the theist's own, the lower those of his opponents. It 
 is true, says Mr. Balfour, that every one has an unshakeable 
 belief in the existence of an independent material world. But 
 then this belief is of the lowest order, being held by philo- 
 sophers and savages alike. As we progress in civilisation, 
 other " needs " arise, which have to be satisfied by other 
 beliefs. Among these we may class the belief in the 
 existence of God ; and the fact that only certain people 
 hold that belief is due to the fact that man has to attain 
 to a certain stage of culture before the need for the belief
 
 232 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 makes itself felt. This is very charming and very ingenious, 
 but hardly convincing. Mr. Balfour knows perfectly well 
 that the " need " for belief in a deity is something totally 
 different in nature from the "need " for belief in an external 
 world. He knows that the two psychological problems are 
 so opposed in nature that to apply the unqualified word 
 "need " to both of them is simply to try to win a verdict 
 by a dexterous ambiguity of terms ; that while our reasons 
 for believing in a real world are ultimately unanalysable, and 
 the belief itself quite beyond our control, the belief in any 
 proposition of theology is a product of a number of influences 
 social, physical, mental and moral a belief that can be 
 induced or destroyed ; that so far from the belief in a deity 
 being characteristic of high mental or social development, it is 
 infinitely more characteristic of the grossest barbarism, all 
 modern forms of theism being simply defecations of the 
 primitive form ; that, on the other hand, in every com- 
 munity that has existed, there have been some men who 
 denied the validity of the belief of the majority ; and 
 that in our own civilisation great intellectual or moral develop- 
 ment is not, to say the least, usually found to go along with 
 unquestioning faith in the existence of God. Mr. Balfour 
 knows all this ; yet he is not above arguing that the super- 
 stition of the vulgar many is of a " higher " nature than the 
 rationalism of the enlightened few. No rationalist alleges 
 that " the farther we go back towards the 'state of nature' the 
 nearer we get to virtue and to truth " ; no rationalist would 
 make so absurd a contrast between one set of beliefs and 
 another, as if all beliefs were not part of Nature. But the 
 rationalist does at least claim that he should not be bowed out 
 of court by a self-constituted judge who undertakes to give his 
 own garbled version of the case. Mr. Balfour complains that 
 the adherents of naturalism " require us arbitrarily to narrow 
 down the impulses which we may follow to the almost animal
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 233 
 
 instincts lying at the root of our judgments about material 
 phenomena ". I leave it to the reader to say whether the vile 
 religious trick of blackening an opponent doctrine by the use 
 of words of mean connotation such as this phrase about the 
 "animal instincts" is, not in itself vulgar and animal in 
 the lowest degree. He is solicitous that we should " frame for 
 ourselves some wider scheme which, though it be founded in 
 the last resort upon our needs, shall at least take account of 
 other needs than those we share with our brute progenitors ". 
 Why talk of brute progenitors and animal instincts, except to 
 rouse an animal prejudice against the feared and hated 
 criticism of religion? Does Mr. Balfour seriously think that 
 to call a universal and inevitable belief in a real world an 
 " animal instinct " is to give any strength to beliefs that have 
 not this universality and inevitableness ? Does he seriously 
 think that any rational man will accept his cool assumption 
 that a theistic belief is part of our " higher " nature, and that 
 those who do not possess this belief are, in some unspecified 
 respects, nearer our brute progenitors than the theist ? It 
 may be so ; but we shall at least decline to accept a dictum 
 supported by no better argument than the upturned white of 
 a sanctimonious eye, and the Pharisaic beat upon the breast. 
 Nor is Mr. Balfour any happier, or any less disingenuous, when 
 he proceeds to remark that " the most famous masters of 
 speculation " are evidences of the fact for which he is con- 
 tending. " Though they have not, it may be, succeeded in sup- 
 plying us with a satisfactory explanation of the universe, at 
 least the universe which they have sought to explain has been 
 something more than a mere collection of hypostatised sense- 
 perceptions, packed side by side in space, and following each 
 other with blind uniformity in time. All the great architects 
 of systems have striven to provide accommodation within their 
 schemes for ideas of wider sweep and richer content ; and 
 whether they desired to support, to modify, or to oppose the
 
 234 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 popular theology of their day, they have at least given hos- 
 pitable welcome to some of its most important conceptions." 
 And he proceeds to cite Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel and Spinoza in 
 support of his contention ; laying it down that "facts like these 
 furnish fresh confirmation of a truth reached before by another 
 method. The naturalistic creed, which merely systematises 
 and expands the ordinary judgments of sense-perception, we 
 found by direct examination to be quite inadequate. We now 
 note that its inadequacy has been commonly assumed by men 
 whose speculative genius is admitted, who have seldom been 
 content to allow that the world of which they had to give an 
 account could be narrowed down to the naturalistic pattern " 
 (pp. 243, 245). 
 
 Disingenuousness surely could not farther go. Mr. Bal- 
 four's words mean, if they mean anything, that men of the 
 highest genius and noblest soul have condemned naturalism 
 as being insufficient for the higher nature of mankind. And 
 to prove this he drags out the names of three or four dead 
 metaphysicians, of whom the very latest lived at least a 
 generation before the naturalism which Mr. Balfour is attack- 
 ing had grown to anything like strength and consistency ! 
 And what are we to think of the implication of Mr. Balfour's 
 words the implication that the adherents of naturalism have 
 been men neither of supreme intellectual genius nor capable 
 of feeling the highest emotions of life ? To argue with him 
 on the former point would be to follow his own childish line ; 
 but on the second point I am compelled to say that Mr. 
 Balfour's mean suggestion is simply on a level with the whole 
 character of his book. Surely even the religious advocate has 
 learned by this time the folly and immorality of striving to 
 make out that naturalism in any way tends to moral or 
 emotional debasement. It is to be regretted that Mr. Bal- 
 four's acquaintance with and admiration for Spinoza has 
 brought him so little of that philosopher's integrity of mind
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief '". 235 
 
 and serenity of disposition ; while even from Mr. Spencer, the 
 philosopher who has the misfortune to be a naturalist, he 
 might have learned that there are better methods of argument 
 than the stab in the dark at the moral characters of opponents, 
 and that he who wishes to prove the moral superiority of his 
 own creed is in some way bound to afford personal evidence 
 of that superiority, and not to imitate the most disreputable 
 tactics of the vulgarest Christian Evidence lecturer. 
 
 At this point Mr. Balfour begins to ward off some of the 
 blows of criticism, more especially those directed against his 
 disparagement of reason. " Is not, it will be asked, the whole 
 method followed throughout the course of these notes intrin- 
 sically unsound ? Is it not substantially identical with the 
 attempt, not made now for the first time, to rest superstition 
 upon scepticism, and to frame our creed, not in accordance 
 with the rules of logic, but with the promptings of desire? It 
 begins (may it not be said ?) by discrediting reason ; and 
 having thus guaranteed its results against inconvenient 
 criticism, it proceeds to make the needs of man the measure 
 of ' objective ' reality, to erect his convenience into the touch- 
 stone of eternal truth, and to mete out the universe on a plan 
 authenticated only by his wishes." Against this criticism 
 Mr. Balfour urges that his object has not been to discredit 
 reason, because " if one consequence of this investigation has 
 been to diminish the importance commonly attributed to 
 reason among the causes by which belief is produced, it is by 
 the action of reason itself that this result has been brought 
 about" (p. 246), which is a particularly neat piece of self- 
 confutation. Say what Mr. Balfour will, his object so far has 
 been to discredit reason, and his attempt to recover ground 
 here simply makes his position worse. If by reason he was 
 able to show that our beliefs about the functions of reason and 
 authority were wrong, then so far from " diminishing the 
 importance commonly attributed to reason," he was but
 
 236 Pseudo- Philosophy, 
 
 heightening it ; and in thus claiming the right of reason to 
 exercise final supervision over all beliefs, he was simply 
 making the recognised claim of rationalism. And when he 
 writes that, " if another consequence has been that doubts have 
 been expressed as to the theoretic validity of certain univer- 
 sally accepted beliefs, this is because the right of reason to 
 deal with every province of knowledge, untrammelled by 
 arbitrary restrictions or customary immunities, has been 
 assumed and acted upon," he makes his confusion still worse 
 confounded. What has now become of the claims of authority 
 upon our beliefs ? If authority is not held to cover " univer- 
 sally accepted beliefs," what can it be held to cover ? And if 
 even universally accepted beliefs are not to be exempt from 
 criticism under the protection of authority, what is this pro- 
 tection worth to beliefs that are not universally accepted ? 
 And if it is reason that discriminates between these beliefs, 
 telling us which to retain and which to reject, what has be- 
 come of Mr. Balfour's own assertion that the rfile played by 
 reasoning in human affairs is one of " comparative pettiness " ; 
 that not only is it " authority rather than reason which lays 
 deep the foundations of social life," but that " it is authority 
 rather than reason which cements its superstructure " ? The 
 illogical see-saw is to be accounted for by no other hypothesis 
 than that Mr. Balfour has been perforce no more successful 
 than any man can be in using reason to discredit reason, and 
 that he has been even more unsuccessful than he need have 
 been, by attempting to rehabilitate the claims of reason for 
 one specific purpose after disparaging them for another. 
 
 His new-found zeal for reason is, of course, due to the fact 
 that at this stage an argument for theism can be extracted 
 from the rational nature of man not a particularly new argu- 
 ment, and not a particularly strong one. " Is it true," he 
 continues, " to say that, in the absence of reason, we have con- 
 tentedly accepted mere desire for our guide ? No doubt the
 
 Mr, Balfours ^Foundations of Belief". 237 
 
 theory here advocated requires us to take account, not merely 
 of premises and their conclusions, but of needs and their satis- 
 faction. But this is only asking us to do explicitly and on 
 system what on the naturalistic theory is done unconsciously 
 and at random. By the very constitution of our being we seem 
 practically driven to assume a real world in correspondence 
 with our ordinary judgments of perception. A harmony of 
 some kind between our inner selves and the universe of which 
 we form a part is thus the tacit postulate at the root of every 
 belief we entertain about ' phenomena ' ; and all that I now 
 contend for is that a like harmony should provisionally be 
 assumed between that universe and other elements in our 
 nature which are of a later, of a more uncertain, but of no 
 ignobler growth. Whether this correspondence is best de- 
 scribed as that which obtains between a ' need ' and its ' satis- 
 faction ' may be open to question. But, at all events, let it be 
 understood that if the relation so described is, on the one side, 
 something different from that between a premise and its con- 
 . elusion, so, on the other, it is intended to be equally remote 
 from that between a desire and its fulfilment. That it has 
 not the logical validity of the first I have already admitted, or 
 rather asserted. That it has not the casual, wavering, and 
 purely ' subjective ' character of the second is not less true. 
 For the correspondence postulated is not between the fleeting 
 fancies of the individual and the immutable verities of an 
 unseen world, but between those characteristics of our nature 
 which we recognise as that in us which, though not necessarily 
 the strongest, is the highest ; which, though not always the 
 most universal, is nevertheless the best " (pp. 247, 248). 
 
 What the last chaotic sentence may mean it is difficult to 
 say, but the argument as a whole is this : we cannot prove our 
 belief in an external world to be true, yet we are all practically 
 compelled to believe in it ; similarly, the necessity of the higher 
 parts of our nature to believe in certain super-rational things
 
 238 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 is sufficient proof of their existence. And as this is really the 
 central doctrine of the book, the piece of constructive philo- 
 sophy which Mr. Balfour puts forward as supplying the defici- 
 encies of naturalism, it will be well to look at it more closely. 
 To bring it into better relief, I may quote from a very eulogis- 
 tic article on Mr. Balfour by Professor Seth, in which he points 
 out the similarity between this argument and one of Kant's : 
 " Its true nature will be best shown by the concrete 
 examples of its use, and we shall then be better able to form 
 a judgment as to its legitimacy. It is first applied in the 
 intellectual sphere to demonstrate the implications or presup- 
 positions of the scientific view itself, or of the mere fact that we 
 know. Mr. Balfour had already pointed out, in dealing with 
 our belief in the uniformity of Nature, that this belief cannot 
 be proved by the facts, seeing that it is a postulate impliedin 
 the very idea of investigating facts. In these constructive 
 chapters he amplifies the thought in a remarkably fresh and 
 striking way. After dealing instructively with some of the 
 usual arguments for theism, he proceeds to push the question 
 a stage farther back. But ' something may also be inferred 
 from the mere fact that ive know, a fact which, like every other, 
 has to be accounted for'. And after some luminous pages 
 in which he presses home the fundamental inconsequence of 
 naturalism in requiring us to ' accept a system as rational, one 
 of whose doctrines is that the system itself is the product of 
 causes which have no tendency to truth rather than falsehood 
 or to falsehood rather than truth,' he concludes : ' I do not 
 believe that any escape from these perplexities is possible, 
 unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the 
 presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being who 
 made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in however 
 feeble a fashion, able to understand it' (p. 301). Theism is 
 thus a ' presupposition,' ' not only tolerated, but actually 
 required by science' (p. 321). It is 'forced upon us by the
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of .Belief". 239 
 
 single assumption that science is not an illusion '. As he put 
 it before, we are ' driven in mere self-defence' to the belief in 
 a Supreme Reason directing the apparently non-rational forces 
 of Nature ; we 'must' believe in Supreme Reason ' if we are 
 to believe in anything '. But this admission, if once made, 
 cannot stand alone. If we 'postulate a rational God in the 
 interests of science, we can scarcely decline to postulate a 
 moral God in the interests of morality '. And in the light of 
 this presupposition the whole process by which the ethical code 
 and the moral sentiments have been slowly developed appears 
 in a different setting, as ' an instrument for carrying out a 
 divine purpose,' as a divine education of the human race. 
 Such, without following them into details, are the important 
 conclusions which Mr. Balfour reaches by the method of argu- 
 ment he follows. When they are thus stated summarily, and 
 detached from some of the discussions which accompany 
 them, the philosophical student can hardly fail to remark the 
 striking resemblance of Mr. Balfour's mode of argument to 
 the transcendental method of Kant, and the affinity of his 
 conclusions to those of Kant's idealistic successors. . . . The 
 argument itself is in substance identical with that which Kant 
 patiently dug from the debris of rationalism, and built into a 
 system so palpably artificial in its details and so cumbrously 
 pedantic in its terminology, that the philosophical world has 
 been engaged ever since in quarrelling over its interpretation. 
 When we penetrate beneath the portentous phrases to the 
 comparatively humble truth which they labour to express, 
 Kant's ' objective unity of apperception,' as the supreme con- 
 dition of the possibility of experience, is simply the assertion 
 that the idea of ' a nature ' or a rational system is not a con- 
 clusion from particular facts, but is involved as a postulate or 
 presupposition in there being any experience of facts at all. 
 And when, at the close of his investigation, he emphasises the 
 adaptation of phenomena to our faculty of cognition as proof
 
 240 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 of a harmony between sense and understanding, that is to 
 say, ultimately a harmony between the world and the mind ; 
 when he argues that this adaptation justifies us in treating 
 reality as everywhere rationalisable, and therefore as if\t were 
 the product of a Supreme Reason ; this, in more scholastic 
 form, and with Kant's well-known reservation as to the merely 
 regulative character of the ideas of reason, is neither more nor 
 less than the argument from the mere fact that we know" l 
 
 We may pass over for the present, with a bare mention of 
 it, the absurdity of speaking of a " Supreme Reason directing 
 the apparently non-rational forces of Nature ". For either this 
 Supreme Reason directs all the forces of Nature or only some 
 of them ; if the latter, it can scarcely be regarded as supreme, 
 and if the former, then among the " forces of Nature " which it 
 directs is the force prompting the atheist to deny its very 
 existence. This fundamental absurdity, which is common to 
 all systems of theism, need not be dwelt upon in any greater 
 detail at present. It is more to the purpose here to point out 
 that Mr. Balfour's argument from needs to their satisfaction 
 is, for the reasons already given, quite illegitimate for the pur- 
 poses for which he makes use of it. Even Professor Seth is 
 constrained to remark that the words are at least unfortunate, 
 in that they carry an emotional significance into a discussion 
 from which emotion ought to be absent ; and he prefers some 
 such word as " postulate" to the word "need," as "expressing 
 admirably both this element of intellectual necessity in the 
 argument and, at the same time, the subjective element, 
 which is undoubtedly also present ". But the whole argument 
 has been developed on the strength of the word " needs," and 
 it is a little too disingenuous to throw it over when the victory 
 has apparently been won, to admit its imperfections now, and 
 to employ the safer word "postulate". For Mr. Balfour's 
 talk about that in us which is the highest and best is certainly 
 
 1 " Mr. Balfour and his Critics," in Contemporary Review, August, 1896.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief'. 241 
 
 intended to carry with it an emotional certificate ; and the 
 whole strength of the argument, such as it is, lies in the ille- 
 gitimate significance that is given to these words. Nothing, 
 indeed, as has already been pointed out, could well be more 
 philosophically invalid than to argue that the " need " to 
 believe in an independent material world and the " need " to 
 believe in a rational author of that world are in the same 
 category. 
 
 Nor is Mr. Balfour any happier in the attempt to ground 
 his belief in a supreme reason upon " the mere fact that we 
 know ". Professor Seth is historically right in pointing out 
 that the argument is just Kant's argument from the " possi- 
 bility of experience " put into simple and lucid language. 
 Perilous, however, is the descent into transcendentalism ; easy 
 as the descent into Avernus, and the return as difficult. All 
 the more perilous to the reputation of the transcendentalist 
 is the gift of writing plain English, for once the argument is 
 understood it supplies its own confutation. I venture the 
 opinion that Kant would not have bulked so largely in the 
 eyes of the philosophic world had it not been for his abominable 
 obscurity of style and the awkwardness of his terminology, 
 which have made a very simple philosophical idea appear 
 much more profound than it really was. To speak para- 
 doxically, to get to the centre of Kant's position is to get 
 beyond it ; to understand him is to see the simple and 
 fundamental fallacy of his position. The defect of all 
 transcendentalism, as has been more than once pointed out, 
 is the necessarily futile attempt to carry the head in the 
 teeth. Kant's question, "How is knowledge possible?" is 
 seen to be absurd when we realise that the answer, if it can 
 be given at all, can only be given in terms of knowledge, and 
 that we are thus as far as ever from " accounting " for our 
 knowledge of objects. His division of our perceptive cognition 
 
 into the two factors of sense and understanding, the former 
 
 16
 
 242 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 being the faculty through which objects are " given " to us, the 
 latter the faculty by which they are " thought," was not, as 
 he imagined, an explanation of how we are- able to cognise 
 objects, but just an arbitrary separation of two elements in 
 the cognition of what we already know. " Knowledge " we 
 certainly cannot get behind for the purpose of explaining 
 it, since every attempt to explain it involves the employment 
 of it. And Mr. Balfour's version of Kant is no more logical 
 than Kant's own position. When Mr. Balfour writes that 
 " something may also be inferred from the mere fact that we 
 know, a fact which, like every other, has to be accounted for," 
 we can only ask him how he can account for the fact that we 
 know except in terms of knowledge. His thesis has been 
 that the old design-argument has undoubtedly broken down. 
 " In a famous answer to that argument it has been pointed 
 out that the inference from the adaptation of means to ends, 
 which rightly convinces us in the case of manufactured articles 
 that they are not the result of chance, but are produced by 
 intelligent contrivance, can scarcely be legitimately applied to 
 the case of the universe as a whole. An induction which 
 may be perfectly valid within the circle of phenomena, may 
 be quite meaningless when it is employed to account for the 
 circle itself. You cannot infer a God from the existence of 
 the world as you infer an architect from the existence of a 
 house, or a mechanic from the existence of a watch " (p. 294). 
 A vacillating passage follows, in which Mr. Balfour, while 
 obviously unable to answer this objection, will not say so 
 outright, but rather recommends theologians not to employ 
 the design-argument ; then he lays it down that instead of 
 arguing from " the world as known," more can be achieved by 
 arguing " from the mere fact that we know ". 
 
 Now, independently of the objection that we cannot 
 possibly " account " for the fact that we know, there is the 
 further objection that from the fact that we know, we cannot
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief ". 243 
 
 legitimately infer the existence of a Supreme Reason as the 
 creator of things. And this for two reasons ; in the first 
 place, because the fact that we have reason no more proves 
 that we are created by reason whatever that may mean 
 than the fact "that there is pepper in the broth proves that 
 there is pepper in the cook " ; and in the second place, because 
 the transcendental argument as to the " rationality " of Nature 
 is itself hollow at its very foundations. Kant had argued that 
 if there were not a harmony between objects and our mode of 
 cognising them there would be no knowledge of them possible 
 at all. Objects make impressions upon our capacity for sense- 
 affection, and these impressions are then sorted out by the 
 categories of the mind, which thus reduce the blind rush of 
 sense-impressions to order and coherence. " Notions without 
 sensuous intuitions are empty ; sensuous intuitions without 
 notions are blind." It is by. means of the categories that the 
 mind is able to " think " objects, that is, to mould the mere 
 blind sense-impressions into orderly and connected knowledge ; 
 these categories not being the product of sensuous intuition, 
 but lying a priori in the mind. From the fact that these 
 correspond in their activities with the sense-impressions given 
 by objects, knowledge alone is " possible," according to Kant ; 
 and, as Professor Seth has expressed it in the passage I have 
 already quoted, " he emphasises the adaptation of phenomena 
 to our faculty of cognition as proof of a harmony between sense 
 and understanding, that is to say, ultimately a harmony 
 between the world and the mind " ; and he argues " that this 
 adaptation justifies us in treating reality as everywhere 
 rationalisable, and therefore as if it were the product of a 
 Supreme Reason ". 
 
 The attempt to find out why we can cognise objects is, 
 however, a mere pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp. To discover 
 that our cognitions correspond to objects is not to discover 
 why there is this correspondence ; and the arbitrary division
 
 244 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 of our cognitions into the two elements of sense and under- 
 standing, with phenomena outside waiting to be " known," is 
 merely a convenient form of statement of possible stages in 
 our knowledge, not of the reason for it. To give a reason for 
 our knowledge, to explain how experience is possible, is, 
 indeed, a radical impossibility ; and instead of trying to 
 account for knowledge we have just to accept the fact that 
 we have it. This, however, does not help out any attempt to 
 found the universe upon theism. We do not know because 
 there is a harmony between the world and our understanding, 
 because the world is rational, or rationalisable. The very term 
 "because" is wholly illegitimate. To speak of the world as 
 being rationalisable, i.e., one in Nature with the structure of 
 our own minds and our modes of cognition, is to assume that 
 we have some knowledge of the world as apart from these modes 
 of cognition. When Professor Seth, for example, puts it that 
 Kant " emphasises the adaptation of phenomena to our faculty 
 of cognition as proof of a harmony between, sense and under- 
 standing," the question immediately arises What do we 
 know or can we know of these phenomena apart from our 
 faculty of cognition ? To know them at all is to know them 
 in terms of this faculty ; nor can we know them in any other 
 way. We cannot get behind our own mental processes, be- 
 cause these very processes have to be employed in any such 
 attempt ; we cannot look at them at one moment, and at 
 another at Nature without them ; our knowledge of Nature 
 is just obtained through these mental processes. Any 
 endeavour, therefore, to make out that Nature is a rational 
 system because it harmonises with the rational processes of 
 our own minds, loses sight of the fact that we do not and 
 cannot know anything of Nature apart from those very 
 processes with which it is supposed to harmonise. So that 
 " the mree fact that we know " cannot be pressed into the 
 service of theology in any way, it being as absurd to deduce a
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief ". 245 
 
 rational author of the universe from the fact that we have 
 reason, as it would be to make the supposed author of the 
 universe coloured or heavy because we and Nature have 
 colour and weight. The theist interposes, of course, with 
 the objection that since reason is the highest part of us, 
 it is not illegitimate to regard the creator of us as being 
 the Supreme Reason. Such terms as highest and lowest, 
 however, are purely relative to ourselves, and have no 
 meaning except within what Mr. Balfour would call the 
 circle of phenomena. To extend its application to an 
 eternal and infinite existence that is supposed to exist 
 without this circle is as illegitimate as any other of his 
 modes of logical procedure.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OUR discussion of the ultimate bearings of Mr. Balfour's argu- 
 ment from needs to their satisfaction upon his argument from 
 a rationalisable Nature to a supreme reason, has made us 
 anticipate the later stages of his book ; and it will now be well 
 to return to the point at which we left Mr. Balfour arguing 
 that the qualities of universality and inevitableness confer no 
 precedence upon the beliefs of sense-perception, and that while 
 his philosophy " admits judgments of sense-perception to be 
 the most inevitable," it "denies them to be the most worthy " 
 (p. 249). Following upon this, he analyses the relation between 
 beliefs and the formulas that express them, and finds that 
 between the two there is a constant action and reaction, 
 which is " the most salient, and in some respects the most 
 interesting, fact in the history of thought. Called into 
 being, for the most part, to justify, or at least to organise, 
 pre-existing beliefs, they can seldom perform their office with- 
 out modifying part, at least, of their material. While they 
 give precision to what would otherwise be indeterminate, and 
 a relative permanence to what would otherwise be in a state of 
 flux, they do so at the cost of some occasional violence to the 
 beliefs with which they deal. Some of these are distorted 
 to make them fit into their predestined niches, others, more 
 refractory, are destroyed or ignored. . . . But this reaction of 
 formulas on the beliefs which they co-ordinate or explain is 
 but the first stage in the process we are describing. The next 
 
 is the change, perhaps even the destruction, of the formula 
 
 (246)
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 247 
 
 itself by the victorious forces that it has previously had in 
 check. The plastic body of belief, or some portion of it, under 
 the growing stress of external and internal influences, breaks 
 through it may be with destructive violence the barriers by 
 which it was at one time controlled. A new theory has to be 
 formed, a new arrangement of knowledge has to be accepted, 
 and under changed conditions the same cycle of not unfruitful 
 changes begins again " (pp. 253, 254). 
 
 There is, however, an important difference between science 
 and theology in this respect. In theology, " as elsewhere, 
 theories arise, have their day, and fall ; but there, far more 
 than elsewhere, do these theories in their fall endanger other 
 interests than their own. More than one reason maybe given 
 for this difference. To begin with, in science the beliefs of 
 sense-perception, which, as I have implied, are commonly 
 vigorous enough to resist the warping effect of theory, even 
 when the latter is in its full strength, are not imperilled by its 
 decay. They provide a solid nucleus of unalterable conviction 
 which survives uninjured through all the mutations of intellec- 
 tual fashion. We do not require the assistance of hypotheses 
 to sustain our faith in what we see and hear. Speaking 
 broadly, that faith is unalterable and self-sufficient. Theology 
 is less happily situated. There it often happens that when 
 a theory decays, the beliefs to which it refers are infected 
 by a contagious weakness. The explanation and the thing 
 explained are mutually dependent. They are animated as 
 it were with a common life, and there is always a danger lest 
 they should be overtaken by a common destruction " (pp. 
 255, 256). 
 
 He proceeds to illustrate this by two examples. In 
 science, the older belief that heat was a form of matter has 
 now given way to the belief that it is a mode of motion, with- 
 out thereby shaking any one's conviction that certain objects 
 have the quality of producing in us the sensation of warmth.
 
 248 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 In theology, on the other hand, the Christian theology of 
 Reconciliation with God has been so dependent upon the 
 explanations that have been given of it, that with the de- 
 monstration of the futility of these explanations the belief 
 itself is inclined to pass away. With all this, however, we 
 have no quarrel. It is only when Mr. Balfour comes to his 
 conclusion that we are compelled to part company with him. 
 Being hard put to it to find a reason for clinging to a religious 
 belief after the formula that expressed it has been damaged 
 by criticism, he finally lays it down that " the precedent set 
 ... by science is the one which ought to be followed by 
 theology ". If a belief is only held as an inference from a 
 certain chain of reasoning and observation, anything that 
 weakens this chain must of course weaken the belief propor- 
 tionately. " If, for instance, we believe that there is hydrogen 
 in the sun, solely because that conclusion is forced upon us 
 by certain arguments based upon spectroscopic observations, 
 then, if these arguments should ever be discredited, the belief 
 in solar hydrogen would, as a necessary consequence, be 
 shaken or destroyed. But in cases where tJie belief is rather 
 the occasion of an hypothesis than a conclusion from it, the de- 
 struction of the hypothesis may be a reason for devising a new 
 one, but is certainly no reason for abandoning the belief. x Nor 
 in science do we ever take any other view. We do not, for 
 example, step over a precipice because we are dissatisfied with 
 all the attempts to account for gravitation. In theology, 
 however, experience does sometimes lean too timidly on 
 theory, and when in the course of time theory decays, it drags 
 down experience in its fall. How many persons are there, 
 for example, who, because they dislike the theories of Atone- 
 ment propounded, say, by Anselm, or by Grotius, or the 
 versions of these which have imbedded themselves in the 
 devotional literature of Western Europe, feel bound ' in 
 
 1 Italics mine.
 
 Mr. Balfours " Foundations of Belief'. 249 
 
 reason' to give up the doctrine itself? Because they cannot 
 compress within the rigid limits of some semi- legal formula a 
 mystery, which, unless it were too vast for our full intellectual 
 comprehension, would surely be too narrow for our spiritual 
 needs, the mystery itself is to be rejected ! Because they 
 cannot contrive to their satisfaction a system of theological 
 jurisprudence which shall include Redemption as a leading 
 case, Redemption is no longer to be counted among the con- 
 solations of mankind!" (pp. 258, 259). 
 
 That is, in plainer language, when you have what you 
 think good reasons for a belief, the belief must ba held to be 
 damaged by anything that damages the reasons ; but when 
 you have admittedly bad reasons for your belief, and choose 
 to put these reasons forward, you can meet any attack upon 
 the belief by coolly saying that the reasons have nothing 
 whatever to do with it. If a dying consumptive, for example, 
 feeling stronger for the moment, believes that his health is 
 permanently restored, and frames a hypothesis in harmony 
 with this belief to account for his momentary return of 
 strength, then if the doctor proves to him that this latter can 
 be accounted for in another way, and that his hypothesis is 
 therefore valueless, the grounds of the consumptive's " belief" 
 must be held to be still undamaged! Here "the belief is 
 rather the occasion of the hypothesis than a conclusion from 
 it". According to Mr. Balfour, then, "the destruction of the 
 hypothesis may be a reason for devising a new one, but is 
 certainly no reason for abandoning the belief". He forgets, 
 or would wish it to appear that he did not know, that beliefs 
 which do not seem to have sprung from reason have in reality 
 been generated by rational processes of some kind. The 
 theist's belief in the existence of God, even if he cannot 
 formulate the several stages by which the belief has pro- 
 gressed, is none the less the product of rational processes- 
 vague and perhaps subconscious, it may be, but none the less
 
 250 Pseudo-Ph ilosopky. 
 
 proceeding by inference and suggestion. Now the framing 
 of an hypothesis to account for such a belief is simply bring- 
 ing the subconscious reasons into the light of day, and 
 making them conscious ; and any criticism that proves that 
 here and there an illegitimate inference has been made, must 
 be held to damage the truth of the belief to some extent. To 
 affirm, in the face of this, that the hypothesis, as Mr. Balfour 
 calls it, may be shaken, and the belief still be left standing, is 
 pure nonsense. A man puts forward a hypothesis in order to 
 show the congruity of a belief with other beliefs of his mind, 
 and in order to produce in the reader the same belief for which 
 the hypothesis was framed. If Anselm propounds a theory 
 of the Atonement, for example, it is because there are some 
 who do not believe in the Atonement at all, while others 
 believe in it, but for reasons different from those of Anselm ; 
 and the prelate's object is to bring opponents round to his 
 point of view. Either the theory is supposed to follow in its 
 demonstration the course of facts and inferences which have 
 produced the belief, and which, thus stated, may be supposed 
 to produce the same belief in other men, or it does not. If it 
 does not, what is the object of the theory? and if it does, 
 what is then its relation to the belief? Either the belief must 
 be held to stand or fall with the theory, or it must not. If 
 yes, Mr. Balfour's point is seen to be absurd ; if not, what in 
 the name of reason is the object of giving out the theory at 
 all ? Whichever way the argument is looked at it is prepos- 
 terous, while its conclusion is simply lamentable, with its 
 jejune rhetoric about redemption as a consolation to man- 
 kind. If Mr. Balfour has meant all along merely that those 
 who find " consolation " blessed word ! in a certain belief 
 should continue to cherish the belief even after it has been 
 proved absurd, he should have said so. We are all pretty well 
 accustomed to that argument by this time ; and since there is 
 very little more in Mr. Balfour's argument about beliefs and
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 251 
 
 formulas than this plea of the " consolation " it gives certain 
 sentimental people to believe incredible things, he might well 
 have spared us the wire-drawn sophistry of the rest of the 
 chapter. 
 
 Nor need we spend too much time over his next two 
 chapters on "Beliefs, Formulas, and Realities," and "Ulti- 
 mate Scientific Ideas " respectively. Here he argues that 
 there is never any very precise relation on the one hand 
 between language and belief, on the other hand between 
 belief and reality. Thus though we may all believe that Julius 
 Caesar was murdered at Rome in the first century B.C., this 
 proposition does not " mean the same thing in the mouths of 
 all who use it ". It does not, for example, rouse the same 
 mental states in the schoolboy and in the philosophic his- 
 torian ; " while any alteration in our views on the nature of 
 death or on the nature of man must necessarily alter the 
 import of a proposition which asserts of a particular man that 
 he suffered a particular kind of death " (p. 264). This ex- 
 quisite piece of futile subtlety may prepare us for what is to 
 follow, and may also serve to justify some of the criticisms 
 that have been passed upon Mr. Balfour as a man and as a 
 writer. There is perhaps no chapter in the whole of The 
 Foundations of Belief which so well illustrates the thin, femi- 
 nine, shrewish, acidulous nature of Mr. Balfour's mind the 
 mind, as one critic has put it, of " an amateur fond of casuistry 
 and delicate points, but hypersensitive in touch, and in tone 
 rather feeble, valetudinarian. . . . One may be justified in 
 reading Philosophic Doubt in order to make a study of 
 Mr. Balfour ; one would hardly be justified, or at any rate 
 rewarded, in reading it to study philosophy. We do not mean 
 to assert that it is false, for this is hardly the place to discuss 
 it ; but we can assert that it is weak, meagre, nay, attenuated 
 to a very distressing degree." 1 Another critic has said, a 
 1 Arthur Lynch, Human Documents, pp. 91, 92.
 
 252 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 propos of Mr. Balfour's article on " Cobden and the Man- 
 chester School," what one feels impelled to say of The 
 Foundations of Belief 'as a whole, and of these chapters in par- 
 ticular, that " one realises on the literary side what it is in Mr. 
 Balfour that set his Irish antagonists calling him an old maid. 
 The thin, shrewish criticism, the sidelong, pin-pricking attack, 
 partially relieved by the touches of broad estimate which come 
 to a party leader of good judgment everything but the 
 generalisation suggests a soprano voice and a soprano temper. 
 Cobden was a man ; and whenever Mr. Balfour is set against 
 a true man, even if he have at times the intellectual advan- 
 tage, it is never a masculine advantage, and his advantage 
 always tends to turn into a disadvantage by reason of his half- 
 ness, his niggling, his lack of the male tristesse which vouches 
 for character and personality." x One finishes the chapter on 
 " Beliefs, Formulas, and Realities " with a sigh of regret that 
 any man should waste. his time in an elaborate exposition of 
 a theory which, so far as it has any truth in it, is already 
 known to every one, and of which the only new feature is the 
 preposterous attempt to press it into the service of discredited 
 theological beliefs. 
 
 Thus no one would dispute his propositions that the 
 ordinary relations between language and belief and between 
 belief and reality are not precise in all their details. No one 
 would refuse to admit that, " outside the relations of abstract 
 propositions . . . neither in our knowledge of ourselves, nor in 
 our knowledge of each other, nor in our knowledge of the 
 material world, nor in our knowledge of God, is there any 
 belief which is more than an approximation, any method 
 which is free from flaw, any result not tainted with error". 
 The only point which the rationalist is concerned to dispute is 
 the assumption that this in any way helps out the dogmas of 
 religion. The rationalist asserts, for example, that there is no 
 
 1 John M. Robertson, " Mr. Balfour, a Study," Free Review, July, 1894.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief'. 253 
 
 reason whatever for believing that the immaculate conception 
 ever happened, or that the picture of the Gospel Jesus is the 
 picture of any one character, or that the miracles alleged to 
 have been performed by him ever were performed. To reply 
 to this that none of our beliefs touch reality at all points is 
 ludicrously beside the question. If all beliefs, even our funda- 
 mental beliefs as to matter and motion, must be looked upon 
 as offering only a partial correspondence to reality, nothing 
 can be extracted from this proposition to help out an indi- 
 vidual belief in a case of conflict of opinion. Since no belief 
 corresponds precisely to reality, all beliefs are in this respect 
 on a par ; and the only question remaining is, what, within this 
 circle, are the relative credentials of this belief and that ? We 
 may not know what matter is in its " reality," and we may not 
 know what colour is in its " reality," but that does not stand in 
 the way of our belief that coal was black ten thousand years 
 ago just as it is black now. Our reasons for this belief can be 
 given as against reasons for the opposite belief, and it is a 
 question, not of whether our beliefs as to " coal " and " black- 
 ness " correspond to what Mr. Balfour calls " reality," but 
 simply of which belief is the better justified, taking "coal " and 
 " blackness " to signify what our opponent and ourselves are 
 quite agreed they shall signify. Similarly, we may say that, 
 since the acceptance of the Christian religion depends upon 
 the beliefs that a certain Jew was born of a virgin ; that he 
 was divinely sent, even if he w r ere not divine himself; that 
 he performed certain miracles and gave certain moral pre- 
 cepts ; that he was crucified ; that he died, rose again the 
 third day, and ascended into heaven all this must be shown 
 to be true merely in the sense in which the term " true " is 
 always used ; that is, the Christian must prove to our satisfac- 
 tion that it is more reasonable to believe that these things 
 happened than that they did not happen, just as it is more 
 reasonable to believe that Plato wrote the Socratic dialogues
 
 254 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 than that he did not ; and any hair-splitting about the corre- 
 spondence between beliefs and realities is mere trifling. 
 
 For Mr. Balfour's argument finally, be it noted, falls back 
 once more on sentiment instead of on demonstration. He 
 warns us against assuming that our beliefs are true because 
 they are our beliefs, and our opponents' beliefs wrong because 
 they are the reverse of ours ; and he lays it down that, " how- 
 ever profound may be our ignorance of our ignorance, at least 
 we should realise that to describe (when using language 
 strictly) any scheme of belief as wholly false which has even 
 imperfectly met the needs of mankind, is the height of arro- 
 gance ; and that to claim for any beliefs which we happen to 
 approve that they are wholly true, is the height of absurdity " 
 (p. 270). The implicit, if not explicit, contention is that, since 
 Christianity " meets the needs of mankind," we must not be 
 too severe upon its shortcomings in the matter of rational 
 proof. The argument, however, unfortunately, cuts both ways. 
 If Christianity " meets the needs of mankind," so does the 
 ' rationalism which attacks it, for if rationalism did not " meet 
 the needs " of those who maintained that creed, it could never 
 have been born. So that the rationalist is as much justified in 
 his critical examination of the basis of Christianity as Mr. 
 Balfour in his examination of the basis of naturalism. To 
 that extent, then, the two systems of belief are on a par, 
 neither having any sentimental claim to precedence over the 
 other ; and the argument as to " meeting the needs of mankind " 
 ceases to be one of the bulwarks of religion. As for describing 
 any scheme of belief as " wholly false," the rationalist no more 
 does that than Mr. Balfour. Atheism and theism come into 
 conflict, not because the atheist affirms that the theist ought to 
 have full knowledge of the reality of God, while he himself need 
 have only a partial knowledge of the reality of the universe of 
 objects, but because the proofs for the existence of God fail in 
 the same way as the proofs for the existence of a four-sided
 
 Mr. Bat * fours "Foundations of Belief'. 255 
 
 triangle. All that the atheist does is to point out to the theist 
 that the term " God," when defined to mean a Supreme Reason 
 or a First Cause, is as meaningless as the term four-sided 
 triangle or square circle. If the atheist is wrong, he can be 
 shown to be wrong by confuting his reasoning, and the relation 
 of our beliefs to realities has simply nothing to do with the 
 argument. Once more it comes down, as every theistic argu- 
 ment must do, to the " illative sense " or to vague sentiment 
 about " the needs of mankind ". And once more, if these 
 beliefs that are said to meet the needs of mankind do really 
 perform that office, whence comes it that Mr. Balfour's book 
 has to point out the fact to persons whose needs are not met by 
 these belief s ? And if by his book he succeeds in inducing 
 any one to adopt these beliefs, it is because he has persuaded 
 them by his reasoning, because he has shown them that it is 
 more reasonable to hold these beliefs than to reject them ; that 
 is, he has simply won his victory by using the weapons which 
 he has all along been forbidding the rationalist to use. His 
 argument, again, that we ought not to be surprised "that we do 
 not adequately comprehend God, seeing that we can give no very 
 satisfactory account of ' a thing,'" is invalid in that it confuses 
 what is within the circle of phenomena with what is supposed 
 to lie without it ; that is, though we can hardly say what "a 
 thing" is, this does not affect our judgments about things 
 and about the relative credibility of men's assertions about 
 things. These must be tried before the bar of such reason as 
 we all possess, on the grounds of their conformity with such 
 knowledge as we all possess. Now the belief in a God does 
 not stand on the same plane as the belief in " a thing ". The 
 latter belief is irreducible and unanalysable ; the former is not. 
 The belief in a God is merely, from the rationalistic point of 
 view, an error in inference. The theist and the atheist 
 are equally ignorant of the foundations of our belief in 
 a real world ; but having agreed to this, and each sharing
 
 256 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 the belief, they are, henceforth, within the same circle. 
 Any further beliefs must be judged by their conformity 
 with reason ; and the atheist's contention is simply that the 
 theist's belief in a God is either an emotional product, due to 
 physique, environment and other influences, or else an illegiti- 
 mately conducted series of inferences from the processes of 
 Nature. So that it will not do for the theist to attempt to 
 found his belief in a God upon the same fundamental psychical 
 process as that upon which the atheist and the theist alike 
 found their belief in a real world. The theist is really upon 
 much safer ground when he plays his favourite card of senti- 
 ment. Thus Mr. Balfour concludes his chapter with the re- 
 mark that Mr. Spencer " has not seen that, if this simple- 
 minded creed * be once abandoned, there is no convenient 
 halting-place till we have swung round to a theory of things 
 which is its precise opposite ; a theory which, though it shrinks 
 on its speculative side from no severity of critical analysis, yet 
 ,on its practical side finds the source of its constructive energy 
 in the deepest needs of man, and thus recognises^ alike in 
 science, in ethics, in beauty, in religion, the halting expres- 
 sion of a reality beyond our reach, the half-seen vision of 
 transcendent truth " (p. 289). Whether Mr. Balfour's creed is 
 so impregnable to critical attack may perhaps be doubted ; 
 but when he says that his creed finds its source " in the deepest 
 needs of man," we may point out the unconscious vanity of 
 supposing his needs to be the deepest, but we shall have as 
 much difficulty in getting him to look at the matter from our 
 standpoint as we have in inducing him to look at it from others'. 
 So that, if the theist really wishes to purchase immunity 
 from the atheist, let him give up his attempts at demonstra- 
 tion and retire into the fastnesses of emotion, whither no one 
 will care to follow him up because it is not worth any one's 
 while to do so. 
 
 1 I.e., that form of agnosticism which Mr. Spencer " explicitly repudiates 
 by his theory, if not by his practice ".
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WE have now reached the final stages of Mr. Balfour's book. 
 He has always been at his best, in politics as in philosophy, 
 in sceptical criticism of the efforts of other men, and always 
 at his worst in the moments when he has attempted some 
 constructive work of his own. The remaining chapters of 
 The Foundations of Belief have only such interest as attaches 
 to the endeavours of a very .clever man to find reasons for 
 believing in very stupid dogmas. I will not yet go so far as 
 to say, with some of his critics, that Mr. Balfour does not 
 believe in the religion he has taken upon himself to de- 
 fend. That is putting it somewhat crudely ; and I prefer to 
 say, for my part, that if I could find no better reasons for 
 believing in Christianity than those which Mr. Balfour brings 
 forward, I should either believe through faith pure and simple 
 or not believe at all. 
 
 His argument for the existence of God, " drawn from 
 the mere fact that we know," has already been exam- 
 ined ; and here we need only glance at one of the corol- 
 laries of the argument. Mr. Balfour contends that " on the 
 naturalistic hypothesis, the whole premises of knowledge are 
 clearly due to the blind operation of material causes, and in 
 the last resort to these alone. On that hypothesis we no 
 more possess free reason than we possess free will. . . . These 
 conclusions are . . . absolutely ruinous to knowledge. For 
 they require us to accept a system as rational, one of whose 
 doctrines is that the system itself is the product of causes 
 
 (257) 17
 
 258 Pseudo-Ph ilosopky. 
 
 which have no tendency to truth rather than falsehood, or to 
 falsehood rather than truth. . . . Consider the following pro- 
 positions, selected from the naturalistic creed or deduced 
 from it : 
 
 " (i) My beliefs, in so far as they are the result of reason- 
 ing at all, are founded on premises produced in the last resort 
 by the ' collision of atoms '. 
 
 " (2) Atoms, having no prejudices in favour of truth, are 
 as likely to turn out wrong premises as right ones ; nay, more 
 likely, inasmuch as truth is single and error manifold. 
 
 " (3) My premises, therefore, in the first place, and my 
 conclusions in the second, are certainly untrustworthy, and 
 probably false. Their falsity, moreover, is of a kind which 
 cannot be remedied ; since any attempt to correct it must 
 start from premises not suffering under the same defect. But 
 no such premises exist. 
 
 " (4) Therefore, again-, my opinion about the original causes 
 which produced my premises, as it is an inference from them, 
 partakes of their weakness ; so that I cannot either securely 
 doubt my own certainties or be certain about my own doubts" 
 (pp. 276, 7, 8, 9). 
 
 "This is scepticism, indeed," remarks Mr. Balfour; and he 
 proceeds to express his opinion that no " escape from these 
 perplexities is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the 
 study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of 
 a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same 
 time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand 
 it. This conception does not solve all difficulties; far from it. 
 But, at least, it is not on the face of it incoherent. It does not 
 attempt the impossible task of extracting reason from un- 
 reason ; nor does it require us to accept among scientific con- 
 clusions any which effectually shatter the credibility of scientific 
 premises" (pp. 301, 302). 
 
 It is at all events gratifying to see Mr. Balfour admit that
 
 Mr. Balfour's "Foundations of Belief". 259 
 
 his theory of a Supreme Reason is not without its difficulties. 
 And as for his philosophic fright at the consequences of 
 naturalism upon the theory of knowledge, we may make some 
 return for his temporary aberration into candour by assuring 
 him that he has been scared merely by his own shadow. I 
 have already argued that Mr. Balfour's proof of the existence 
 of God fails in that it attempts an impossible feat the know- 
 ledge of Nature apart from our manner of cognising it. His 
 sceptical attack upon the naturalistic theory of knowledge fails 
 from precisely the same error. Right and wrong, truth and 
 error, are relative terms valid only within the circle of pheno- 
 mena as we know it. To assert that " atoms, having no 
 prejudices in favour of truth, are as likely to turn out wrong 
 premises as right ones," is to assume that " truth " and " error " 
 mean something which they can never mean, and to lose 
 sight of the fact that had this earth been peopled by a race of 
 different physical and mental conformation from ours, and 
 therefore having different conceptions of the world of objects, 
 truth and error, though not meaning to them what they mean 
 to us, would still be words which they would be compelled to 
 use, as signifying opposing elements in their cognitions. The 
 atoms, it is true, might at the commencement have taken 
 another course, and so produced a different physical and 
 mental world ; but with all this our conception of truth and 
 error has nothing to do. The words have no meaning for us 
 except as discriminating between different orders of that ex- 
 perience which is the only experience we can know. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, however, would not any more than another 
 man deny the truth of the scientific theory of the development 
 of the universe from the primaeval fire-mist. He would accept 
 the scientific doctrine here as elsewhere, only quarrelling with 
 the naturalistic deductions from it. Observe, however, to 
 what lengths the acceptance of the scientific doctrine itself 
 carries him. All the while that he is arguing that this theory
 
 2 60 Pseudo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 can give us no criterion of truth, he is himself employing 
 such a criterion ; for the sceptical attack which he is making 
 implies the possession of some such criterion, even if it be only 
 a negative one. He cannot, that is to say, assert that atoms 
 are as likely to turn out wrong premises as right ones without 
 admitting that this very argument of his, being ultimately the 
 product of atoms, comes under the same condemnation ; or if he 
 chooses to affirm that he is capable of pronouncing his 
 opponents' doctrine to be wrong i.e., of judging between 
 truth and error he cannot consistently urge against naturalism 
 that such a creed provides no criterion of truth and error. 
 The dilemma in which he imagines he has put naturalism, 
 however, arises, he might reply, not from the scientific hy- 
 pothesis itself, but from the naturalistic philosophy that is 
 based upon it ; i.e., from the philosophy that asserts that we 
 may know phenomena and the laws by which they are 
 connected, but -nothing more. To this I would answer that 
 the naturalistic theory of knowledge is the only one which 
 can possibly be true if the scientific theory of the origin of the 
 universe be accepted. At no point in the line of development 
 from atom to atom, from the primaeval nebula to our thoughts 
 to-day, can Mr. Balfour insert a new agency, a new non- 
 material factor in the production of thought. He can only 
 dissent from the naturalistic theory by placing that new factor 
 at the very beginning, and styling it the Supreme Reason. 
 From this four results follow. In the first place, Mr. Balfour's 
 escape from the dreadful doctrines of naturalism depends 
 wholly upon his proof of the existence of this Supreme 
 Reason, and that proof, as we have seen, is feeble in the 
 extreme ; in the second place, reason being merely the 
 term for a phenomenon among other phenomena, found under 
 certain circumstances and under no others, Mr. Balfour has no 
 right to extend its application to that which is supposed to 
 lie outside the circle of phenomena the very phrase " Supreme
 
 Mr. Balfours '''Foundations of Belief' 1 . 261 
 
 Reason " being, indeed, a contradiction in terms ; in the third 
 place, every argument that tells against the inherent tendency 
 of atoms to truth rather than falsehood has equal weight, even 
 if we assume the existence of a Supreme Reason, for the 
 veracity of this reason has in turn to be proved : such proof 
 can only be afforded by reasoning from what we know of 
 truth and error in our own experience to what we might 
 assume of the relation to truth and error of the Author of 
 experience : Mr. Balfour's own argument thus cutting its own 
 throat, for (a) we can only assume the validity of this 
 reasoning by assuming the validity of our ordinary ex- 
 periential reasoning about truth and error ; and (b) the 
 argument from truth in experience to a God of truth 
 assumes exactly what it has to prove, for it is quite possible 
 that he may be wilfully deluding us all the time as to what 
 truth really is ; so that (c) Mr. Balfour proves the truth of his 
 experience from the fact that there is a Supreme Reason, and 
 proves the fact that there is a Supreme Reason from the fact 
 that there is truth in his experience thus tracing the vicious 
 circle he accused the naturalist of tracing ; and in the fourth 
 place, if there be a Supreme Reason dominating things, he has 
 been foolish enough to start atoms with no tendency to truth 
 rather than falsehood, though from the fact that he is Supreme 
 Reason there ought to be no tendency to falsehood ; while if, 
 as Mr. Balfour says, he is not only Supreme Reason but Moral 
 Reason, he is altogether accountable for the train of circum- 
 stances that culminates in wrong beliefs, and therefore directly 
 answerable for the fact of the naturalist denying that there is 
 a Supreme Reason. 
 
 Mr. Balfour's attempt to reconcile religion and science in 
 this way breaks down, then, I imagine, at every point. He is 
 candid enough to admit the many difficulties which every 
 form of theism has to overcome ; and when he alleges that 
 "naturalism has to face ^these difficulties; in a yet more
 
 262 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 embarrassing form," it is necessary to remind him once more 
 that whether these difficulties do or do not confront natural- 
 ism, it is not with this, but with science itself that the dogmas 
 of religion come into conflict. 
 
 Let us, however, assume that Mr. Balfour's attack upon 
 naturalism has been as successful as he imagines it to have 
 been ; and let us follow him in his defence of some of the 
 main dogmas of religion in general and of Christianity in par- 
 ticular. He deals incidentally, for example, with the question 
 of evil, admitting that " from the world as presented to us by 
 science we might conjecture a God of power and a God of 
 reason, but we could never infer a God who was wholly loving 
 and wholly just. So that what religion proclaims aloud to be 
 His most essential attributes are precisely those respecting 
 which the oracles of science are doubtful or dumb" (p. 306). 
 A great problem, indeed, to settle which, if Mr. Balfour were 
 capable of it, would go a long way towards reconciling re- 
 ligion and science. Observe now how Mr. Balfour deals with it. 
 " The question therefore seems, though not, I think, quite 
 correctly, to be one which is wholly, as it were, within the 
 frontiers of theology, and which theologians may, therefore, 
 be left to deal with as best they may, undisturbed by any 
 arguments supplied by science. If this be not in theory 
 strictly true, it is in practice but little wide of the mark. The 
 facts which raise the problem in its acutest form belong indeed 
 to that portion of the experience of life which is the common 
 property of science and theology ; but theology is much more 
 deeply concerned in them than science can ever be, and has 
 long faced the unsolved problem which they present. The 
 weight which it has thus borne for all these centuries is not 
 likely now to crush it ; and, paradoxical though it seems, it is 
 yet surely true that what is a theological stumbling-block 
 may also be a religious aid ; and that it is in part the thought 
 of ' all creation groaning and travailing in pain together, wait-
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 263 
 
 ing for redemption,' which creates in man the deepest need for 
 faith in the love of God " (pp. 306, 307). 
 
 This is indeed charming dialectic. The theologian puts 
 forward for acceptance a theory of the world which includes a 
 moral God. Against this theory it is urged that the most 
 ordinary facts of life negate such a conception ; to which the 
 theologian replies that this is his problem, and that it must be 
 left to him ! He will deal with it as best he may, " undis- 
 turbed by any arguments supplied by science " ! Most of us, 
 I apprehend, would find little difficulty in dealing with any 
 problem, undisturbed by any arguments supplied by our 
 opponents ; though I am prepared to admit cheerfully that the 
 theologian is particularly expert in this kind of thing. It is 
 consoling, too, to learn that theology has been " facing" the 
 problem for all these centuries ; though considering how little 
 it has been able to make of the problem it ought to have 
 been stared out of countenance by this time. Finally, though 
 theology cannot solve the problem, we are recommended to 
 believe the original proposition about the love of God, the dis- 
 puting of which made the " problem " ; that is, at the same 
 time that theology " faces " the problem she assures us that 
 there is no problem at all. This is Mr. Balfour's first essay 
 in the reconciliation of religion and science. It is at any rate 
 not very promising for what is to follow ; and the most that 
 can be said for his future arguments is that if they are no 
 more convincing than this they are at least equally amusing. 
 One finds it, indeed, somewhat difficult to realise that the Mr. 
 Balfour who makes this pitiable exhibition of incompetency is 
 the Mr. Balfour who flourished his claymore so valiantly in the 
 face of naturalism, and called in the sight of heaven for proofs* 
 for logic, for consistency. 
 
 After having made light of the difficulty presented by the 
 existence of evil, he proceeds to deal in a somewhat similar 
 manner with the question of miracles. And, first of all, he
 
 264 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 takes up the point of the clash between the belief in miracles 
 and the belief in the uniformity of Nature. The result of his 
 analysis is the discovery that " if we would use language with 
 perfect accuracy, we ought, it would seem, either to say that 
 the same cause would always be followed by precisely the 
 same effect, if it recurred which it never does, or that, in cer- 
 tain regions of Nature, though only in certain regions, we can 
 detect subordinate uniformities of repetition which, though 
 not exact, enable us, without sensible insecurity or error, to 
 anticipate the future or reconstruct the past" (p. 311). What 
 immediately follows upon this passage is best left alone, out of 
 consideration for Mr. Balfour's reputation for some degree of 
 acuteness, for one expects something more from him than the 
 puerilities of the average park evangelist. He continues, how- 
 ever, in this strain. The real " difficulties connected with 
 theological miracles lie elsewhere. Two qualities seem to be 
 of their essence : they must be wonders, and they must be 
 wonders due to the special action of Divine power ; and each of 
 these qualities raises a special problem of its own. That raised 
 by the first is a question of evidence. What amount of evi- 
 dence, if any, is sufficient to render a miracle credible ? And 
 on this ... I may, perhaps, content myself with pointing out 
 that, if by evidence is meant, as it usually is, historical testi- 
 mony, that is not a fixed quantity, the same for every reason- 
 able man, no matter what may be his other opinions. It varies 
 and must necessarily vary with the general views, the 
 ' psychological climate ' which he brings to its consideration. 
 It is possible to get twelve plain men to agree on the evidence 
 which requires them to bring in a verdict of guilty or not 
 guilty, because they start with a common stock of presupposi- 
 tions in the light of which the evidence submitted to them may, 
 without preliminary discussion, be interpreted. But when, as 
 in the case of theological miracles, there is no such common 
 stock, any agreement on a verdict can scarcely be looked for.
 
 Mr, Balfours "'Foundations of Belief". 265 
 
 One of the jury may hold the naturalistic view of the world. 
 To him, of course, the occurrence of a miracle involves the 
 abandonment of the whole philosophy in terms of which he 
 is accustomed to interpret the universe. . . . Another may 
 believe in ' verbal inspiration '. To him . . . every miracle, 
 whatever its character ... is to be accepted with equal con- 
 fidence, provided it be narrated in the works of inspired 
 authors. ... A third of our supposed jurymen may reject 
 both naturalism and verbal inspiration. . . . Every event, there- 
 fore, whether wonderful or not, a belief in whose occurrence is 
 involved in that religion, every event by whose disproof the 
 religion would be seriously impoverished or altogether de- 
 stroyed, has behind it the whole combined strength of the 
 system to which it belongs " (pp. 313, 314). 
 
 What, the reader asks, is to come out of all this wonderful 
 subtlety ? Alas, this is all that results from it : " Many other 
 varieties of ' psychological climate' might be described ; but 
 what I have said is, perhaps, enough to show how absurd it is 
 to expect any unanimity as to the value of historical evidence 
 until some better agreement has been arrived at respecting 
 the presuppositions in the light of which alone such evidence 
 can be estimated. / pass, therefore, to the difficulty raised by 
 the second . . . attribute of theological miracles' >a (p. 315). 
 
 This is indeed a short and easy method with rationalists. 
 Difference of opinion about any matter is usually held to jus- 
 tify an examination of the truth or the falsehood of the matter ; 
 but it will be news to most people that we are exempted 
 from giving evidence for our assertions to one who disagrees 
 with us, simply because he disagrees with us. It is quite true 
 that to men of different religious or philosophical creeds the 
 question of miracles will appear in different lights. But what 
 if one cause of this difference is the different way in which the 
 historical evidence for miracles has struck them ? I cease to 
 
 1 Italics mine.
 
 266 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 believe, let us say, in the Gospel miracles because the evidence 
 for them is insufficient, and I appeal to Mr. Balfour to show 
 cause why I should go back to my old belief; and all that 
 Mr. Balfour does is to tell me that because I believe the 
 historical evidence to be insufficient, therefore he will not tell 
 me wherein he holds it to be sufficient. The naturalistic 
 view will of course make belief in miracles impossible, but in 
 the first place, if the Christian looks upon the historical evi- 
 dence for them as perfectly good, he is bound to share his 
 superior knowledge with the naturalist ; and in the second 
 place, the affording of adequate historical support to the mir- 
 acles would go far to shake the naturalist's belief in thorough- 
 going naturalism. Mr. Balfour, then, must not blame us 
 if we decline to be seduced by such obvious sophistry as 
 this, and if we are unkind enough to say that he does not 
 give us historical evidence for the miracles, not because he 
 thinks us too besotted to appreciate it, but simply because he 
 has it not to give. 
 
 Nor will I do more than mention the further points that 
 every religionist in the world might use Mr. Balfour's argu- 
 ment in defence of the miracles of his religion ; and that if 
 the " psychological climate " of the rationalist is a bar to his 
 sympathetic comprehension of this question, the " psycho- 
 logical climate" of the Christian hinders him from appreciating 
 the beauties of naturalism as well as those of another religion. 
 Let us pass on at once to the second part of Mr. Balfour's de- 
 fence. Miracles are due " to the ' special action of God ' ". " But 
 this, be it observed," he goes on, " is, from a religious point 
 of view, no peculiarity of miracles. Few schemes of thought 
 which have any religious flavour about them at all wholly 
 exclude the idea of what I will venture to call the ' preferential 
 exercise of divine power,' whatever differences of opinion 
 may exist as to the manner in which it is manifested." For 
 his own part, Mr. Balfour thinks that all these various opinions
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 267 
 
 are equally open to one form of attack, namely : " How can 
 the Divine Being who is the Ground and Source of every- 
 thing that is, who sustains all, directs all, produces all, be 
 connected more closely with one part of that which He has 
 created than with another?" (p. 317). 
 
 To this Mr. Balfour replies that ethics as well as theology 
 must have a hand in dealing with this problem. " Once 
 assume a God, and we shall be obliged, sooner or later, to 
 introduce harmony into our system by making obedience to 
 His will coincident with the established rules of conduct. . . . 
 But if this process of adjustment is to be done consistently 
 with the maintenance of any eternal and absolute distinction 
 between right and wrong, then must His will be a ' good will/ 
 and we must suppose Him to look with favour upon some 
 parts of this mixed world of good and evil, and with disfavour 
 upon others." Even the man of science ought to take this 
 view ; " for the doctrine of evolution has in this respect made 
 a change in his position which, curiously enough, brings it 
 closer to that occupied in this matter by theology and ethics 
 than it was in the days when ' special creation ' was the 
 fashionable view. I am not contending, be it observed, that 
 evolution strengthens the evidence for theism. My point 
 rather is, that if the existence of God be assumed, evolution 
 does, to a certain extent, harmonise with that belief in His 
 ' preferential action ' which religion and morality alike require 
 us to attribute to Him." 
 
 That is, though God is the author of everything that 
 happens, he is the author of some things more than others 
 whatever that may mean. Mr. Balfour's remarks on evolution 
 apparently mean that if I throw two men into the water, and 
 then pick A out and leave B to drown, I perform a " pre- 
 ferential action " with regard to A alone. My action is indeed 
 preferential as regards him, but that is only from the positive 
 standpoint ; negatively, my preferential action really covers B
 
 268 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 also. Similarly, if the positive choosing of certain individuals 
 to carry on the work of evolution indicates a preferential action 
 on the part of the Deity, for which he is to receive some moral 
 credit, he must also receive the moral discredit involved in the 
 negative half of his preferential action the suffering inflicted 
 on those whom he has rejected. To argue as Mr. Balfour 
 argues here is not exactly the best way to defend the moral 
 character of his Deity. This, however, is a side issue. The 
 main question is, what has Mr. Balfour done for miracles ? 
 The upshot of it all is, that once assume the existence of God, 
 and miracles follow as a matter of course. No doubt ! but 
 miracles have always been put forward as a proof of the 
 existence of God, and it is a little late in the day to attempt 
 to bolster up the Deity by his miracles, and the miracles 
 again by their Deity. One does not wade through The 
 Foundations of Belief merely to be regaled with the Christian 
 Evidences of two generations ago. For how are we left 
 in the end by Mr. Balfour as to the question of miracles ? 
 The rationalist makes two main objections: (i) that -there 
 is no historical evidence for the Gospel miracles, to which 
 it is replied that he is not a fit and proper person to receive 
 this evidence ; (2) that what we know of Nature negatives the 
 assumption that it is ever interfered with by a supernatural 
 being, to which it is replied that we have only to believe that 
 this supernatural being exists, and we will have no difficulty 
 in further believing that he does interfere with Nature. And 
 it is worth observing how unconsciously Mr. Balfour has slid 
 away from his own first position. He began with miracles, 
 and theological, i.e. Gospel, miracles at that ; he ends with 
 " preferential action " as shown in evolution ! Is evolution, 
 then, to be looked upon as a miracle in Mr. Balfour's meaning 
 of the term ? And if so, what is the point of similarity 
 between this and such a miracle as turning water into wine ? 
 To define one's terms and to keep to one's definitions in a
 
 Mr, Balfours "Foundations of Belief", 269 
 
 long and abstruse argument is a matter in which any man 
 may be pardoned for failing ; but to blunder so blissfully as 
 this in three or four pages is hardly what one expected from 
 the latest self-constituted defender of the faith, who has all 
 along been inviting the world to observe how severe he could 
 be upon the shortcomings of naturalism. I venture to assert 
 that no naturalistic philosopher, in his worst moments of aber- 
 ration, reasoned so badly as Mr. Balfour has been doing in 
 relation to the questions of evil and of miracles ; for which 
 the reason may be either that the naturalists have had a 
 better case to begin with, or they have confined their approval 
 to doctrines in which they altogether believed.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HAVING proved, to his own satisfaction, that science 
 requires theism as its foundation, and that we can only 
 surmount the difficulty of the origin of knowledge from 
 non -rational forces by postulating a Supreme Reason, Mr. 
 Balfour proceeds to deal with the question of inspiration. He 
 begins with a characteristic piece of confusion. There are 
 some, he says, who profess to be able to dispense with reve- 
 lation, and to be able by the use of the unassisted reason to 
 discover a satisfactory natural religion. " But, for my own 
 part," says Mr. Balfour, " I object altogether to the theory 
 underlying this distinction. I do not believe that, strictly 
 speaking, there is any such thing as ' unassisted reason '. 
 And I am sure that if there be, the conclusions of ' natural 
 religion ' are not among its products. The attentive reader 
 does not require to be told that, according to the views here 
 advocated, every idea involved in such a proposition as that 
 ' There is a moral Creator and Ruler of the world ' (which I 
 may assume, for purposes of illustration, to constitute the 
 substance of natural religion) is due to a complex of causes, 
 of which human reason was not the most important ; and 
 that this natural religion never would have been heard of, 
 much less have been received with approval, had it not been 
 for that traditional religion of which it vainly supposes itself 
 to be independent " (pp. 327, 328). 
 
 Mr. Balfour's distinction between rational and irrational 
 
 beliefs is, as I have already pointed out, thoroughly unscientific. 
 
 (270)
 
 Mr. Balfour s ''Foundations of Belief. 271 
 
 But in any case, no matter whether we call the belief in a God 
 rational or non-rational, it is quite plain that Mr. Balfour has 
 become very badly confused over " traditional " and " natural " 
 religion. He apparently imagines that the former has always 
 preceded the latter. How then came the former into being? 
 If " revealed " religion, as expounded in certain documents 
 inspired by God, preceded " natural " religion, how were those 
 who received the revelation to know that it came from God ? 
 Before, in fact, there can be any belief that the sacred books 
 have been inspired by God, there must already be the belief 
 in God ; and this belief is "natural " religion i.e., it has been 
 induced by analogical reasoning from the facts of life. To 
 suppose, as Mr. Balfour seems to do, that " traditional " 
 religion precedes " natural " religion, is to suppose that at 
 some time or other the traditional religion fell from heaven 
 and penetrated in a moment the heads of a certain number of 
 individuals without being assimilated by their reason. 
 
 This, however, is a very trifling point, and is only of in- 
 terest as exhibiting the straits to which Mr. Balfour has now 
 become reduced. As his argument proceeds he merely sinks 
 deeper into the bog of fallacy and self-contradiction. He is 
 too acute to believe that the Christian books are " inspired," 
 in the sense in which that word has always been used by 
 Christians ; yet, since he is engaged in propping up the 
 Christian faith, he has to say something in defence of the 
 theory of inspiration. Hence his inevitable confusion. He 
 begins by admitting that it is somewhat arbitrary to draw a 
 line anywhere, and say " here unassisted human knowledge 
 ends," or " here revelation begins ". " It would, no doubt," he 
 remarks, " be inaccurate to say that inspiration is that, seen 
 from its Divine side, which we call discovery when seen from 
 the human side. But it is not, I think, inaccurate to say that 
 every addition to knowledge, whether in the individual or the 
 community, whether scientific, ethical, or theological, is due
 
 272 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 to a co-operation between the human soul which assimilates 
 and the Divine power which inspires " (p. 329). On these 
 terms every utterance is inspired, the atheist's equally with the 
 theist's ; and once more we have the ridiculous spectacle of 
 a Deity assisting men to acquire a knowledge of the universe, 
 which is bound to end in their denying his very existence. 
 Here, however, Mr. Balfour becomes more cautious. " But 
 because this view involves a use of the term ' inspiration ' 
 which, ignoring all minor distinctions, extends it to every case 
 in which the production of belief is due to the ' preferential 
 action ' of Divine power, it does not, of course, follow that 
 minor distinctions do not exist." This saving clause is, of 
 course, meant to keep the way clear for Christianity at a 
 later stage. Everything is inspired, but some things are more 
 inspired than others ; and the most inspired books in the 
 world are those bound together in the Bible. You must not 
 ask for evidence of this. If you do, you will be frowned upon 
 with a remark about the weakness of unassisted human 
 reason in the production of belief; and you must be content 
 with the surmise that a Christian knows his sacred books to 
 be the most inspired of all simply because they are his sacred 
 books. 
 
 The pendulum, however, swings back once more. Mr. 
 Balfour protests against the assumption that some literatures 
 are inspired while others are not. " Inspiration ... is limited 
 to no age, to no country, to no people. . . . Wherever an ap- 
 proach has been made to truth, wherever any individual soul has 
 assimilated some old discovery, or has forced the secret of a 
 new one, there is its co-operation to be discovered." Then the 
 theologian repents of his audacity and draws back again : 
 " Now, that there may be, or rather plainly are, many modes 
 in which belief is assisted by Divine co-operation I have 
 already admitted. That the word ' inspiration ' may, with 
 advantage, be confined to one or more of these I do not desire
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief '\ 273 
 
 to deny ; " that is, some beliefs are inspired and some are not, 
 though Mr. Balfour has told us only a moment ago that 
 " every addition to knowledge " involves the assistance of God. 
 His theory is that " though the beliefs which [the Divine 
 element] assists in producing differ infinitely from one another 
 in their nearness to absolute truth, the fact is not disguised, 
 nor the honour due to the most spiritually perfect utterances 
 in aught imperilled, by recognising in all some marks of 
 Divine intervention" (p. 332). So that while God inspires all 
 beliefs, he inspires some to be right and some to be wrong 
 which is an entirely novel use of the word " inspiration ". 
 Mr. Balfour, for example, is inspired to right belief on the 
 subject of the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus, Mr. 
 Spencer to wrong belief which is one more side-light upon 
 the wisdom and the grace of God. And further, since of two 
 "inspired" beliefs one is "infinitely" nearer the truth than the 
 other, and since this difference is due to the difference in the 
 amount of God's " co-operation," why does Mr. Balfour try to 
 get the spiritually blind man to see with his eyes, that is, 
 attempt to diminish the distance which God has placed be- 
 tween them, and so attempt to alter the arrangement \vhich 
 God himself has made? Evidently, if Mr. Balfour thinks his 
 final chapter is going to bring any one into the religious camp, 
 he must have more faith in the power of reason than he has 
 been willing to admit, and must have views on the relation of 
 his reasoning to the " co-operation " of God which are, to say 
 the least, somewhat uncomplimentary to his Creator. 
 
 " But in the second place," he continues, " it may be 
 objected that inspiration thus broadly conceived is incapable 
 of providing mankind with any satisfactory criterion of 
 religious truth. Since its co-operation can be traced in so 
 much that is imperfect, the mere fact of its co-operation can- 
 not in any particular case be a protection even against gross 
 
 error. If, therefore, we seek in it not merely a Divinely 
 
 18
 
 274 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 ordered cause of belief, but also a Divinely ordered ground 
 for believing, there must be some means of marking off 
 those examples of its operation which rightfully command our 
 full intellectual allegiance, from those which are no more than 
 evidences of an influence towards the truth working out its 
 purpose slowly through the ages. 
 
 " This is beyond dispute. Nothing that I have said about 
 inspiration in general as a source of belief affects in any way 
 the character of certain instances of inspiration as an authority 
 for belief. Nor was it intended to do so ; for the problem, or 
 group of problems, which would thus have been raised is 
 altogether beside the main course of my argument. They be- 
 long not to an introduction to theology, but to theology itself. 
 . . . It is always possible to ask whence these claimants to 
 authority derive their credentials, what titles the organisation 
 or the individual possesses to our obedience, whether the 
 records are authentic, and what is their precise import. And 
 the mere fact that such questions may be put, and that they 
 can neither be thrust aside as irrelevant nor be answered 
 without elaborate critical and historical discussion, shouts 
 clearly enough that we have no business ivith them here " (pp. 
 
 333, 334). 
 
 " Audacity " is all too weak a term to describe a passage of 
 this kind. Mr. Balfour, through having taken it upon himself 
 to defend a broken cause, becomes entangled in a mass of 
 hopeless absurdities and contradictions from which the only 
 conclusion that appears to emerge is that every literature is 
 " inspired ". Challenged then to show cause why we should 
 regard the Christian books as worthy of any more admiration 
 and credence than a hundred other sacred literatures, Mr. 
 Balfour calmly tells that "we have no business" with these 
 questions here ! If he has no business with the question of the 
 authenticity of the Christian books, he should have had no 
 business with the prior question of inspiration as a whole which
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief" . 275 
 
 makes the question of authenticity inevitable. But Mr. 
 Balfour has no concern with the truth of this or that opinion ; 
 he is concerned solely to utter a few ineptitudes about the 
 Christian religion, to drag a few weaklings into his camp after 
 having stupefied them with irrelevant sophistry, and to slink 
 away with an air of injured dignity as soon as the enemy begins 
 to range himself in battle array. His display at this point is 
 one more confirmation of the fact that Mr. Balfour is only 
 interesting when engaged in snatching immaterial points from 
 his opponents, and that he is a hopeless failure from the ethical 
 no less than from the logical standpoint when he comes to the 
 justification of his own positions. 
 
 So far he has done very little for Christianity. He has 
 evaded the problem of evil and the question of the authen- 
 ticity and inspiration of the Christian records, and he has 
 handled the question of miracles in a manner bordering on the 
 burlesque. His final effort is to raise some point by which the 
 superiority of the Christian scheme can finally be established. 
 " What I have so far tried to establish," he writes, " is this 
 that the great body of our beliefs, scientific, ethical, theo- 
 logical, form a more coherent and satisfactory whole if we con- 
 sider them in a theistic setting than if we consider them in a 
 naturalistic one. The further question, therefore, inevitably 
 suggests itself, Whether we can carry the process a step further 
 and say that they are more coherent and satisfactory if con- 
 sidered in a Christian setting than in a merely theistic one? 
 The answer often given is in the negative. It is always 
 assumed by those who do not accept the doctrine of the 
 incarnation, and it is not uncommonly conceded by those 
 who do, that it constitutes an additional burden upon faith, a 
 new stumbling-block to reason. And many who are prepared 
 to accommodate their beliefs to the requirements of (so-called) 
 'natural religion,' shrink from the difficulties and perplex- 
 ities in which this central mystery of revealed religion
 
 276 Pse^{,do-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 threatens to involve them" (pp. 334, 335). To the objec- 
 tion that it is impossible to understand how the incarna- 
 tion could have occurred, he replies that " if we cannot 
 devise formulae which shall elucidate the familiar mystery 
 of our daily existence, we need neither be surprised nor 
 embarrassed if the unique mystery of the Christian faith 
 refuses to lend itself to inductive treatment," which is playing 
 sophistry very low indeed. Mr. Balfour's argument might 
 be used by any religionist in favour of the dogmas of his own 
 religion ; nor is it even a particularly ingenious device to urge 
 that we cannot understand the incarnation because it is a 
 "mystery". That argument again might be employed in 
 defence of such a doctrine as the transmigration of souls, or 
 any of the dogmas of theoscphy. We decline to believe 
 in the incarnation, however, for the plain and simple reason 
 that there is no evidence to justify belief in it. Mr. Balfour's 
 vapouring about " the familiar mystery of our daily existence " 
 will not succeed in deluding even the plain man for whom it 
 is intended. To make us believe in the incarnation four 
 things are necessary : (i) It must be shown that it is a priori 
 possible for a virgin to give birth to a child ; (2) it must be 
 shown that the Christian virgin-birth is on a different footing 
 from the virgin-births of other ancient religions ; (3) it must be 
 shown that the Gospels are worthy of credence as historical 
 records ; (4) it must be shown that Jesus was not man but 
 God. Convince the rationalist upon these four points, and he 
 will believe in the incarnation with the utmost willingness ; 
 and the first thing to do is to convince him of the historical 
 credibility of the Gospels. 
 
 Conscious of this, and conscious that he can produce no 
 such conviction, Mr. Balfour makes a characteristic attempt 
 to minimise the importance of the historical criticism of the 
 sacred books, arguing, in effect, that the unbeliever is in- 
 competent to appreciate the worth of the evidence for their
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief '. 277 
 
 credibility. He remarks that " various destructiveschoolsof New 
 Testament criticism " have dealt with this question. "Starting 
 from a philosophy which forbade them to accept much of the 
 substance of the Gospel narrative, they very properly set to 
 work to devise a variety of hypotheses which would account 
 for the fact that the narrative, with all its peculiarities, was 
 nevertheless there. . . . But it is a great, though common, 
 error to describe these learned efforts as examples of the un- 
 biassed application of historic methods to historic documents. 
 It would be more correct to say that they are endeavours, by 
 the unstinted employment of an elaborate critical apparatus, 
 to force the testimony of existing records into conformity with 
 theories on the truth or falsity of which it is for philosophy, 
 not history, to pronounce. What view I take of the particular 
 philosophy to which these critics make appeal the reader 
 already knows ; and our immediate concern is not again to 
 discuss the presuppositions with which other people have 
 approached the consideration of New Testament history, but 
 to arrive at some conclusion about our own " (p. 338). 
 
 That is, a naturalist is not competent to examine the 
 historic evidences for Christianity because he does not believe 
 in Christianity, while a Christian presumably is competent 
 because he does believe in it. This is certainly a novel way 
 of regarding the question, and if it is not particularly illumi- 
 native it is at least amusing. To take it seriously, or, indeed, 
 to suppose that Mr. Balfour wishes us to take it seriously, is 
 of course impossible. Had Mr. Balfour, however, been con- 
 tented with the humorous treatment of the subject there 
 would not have been much reason to find fault with him. 
 But when he gives the uninstructed reader to understand that 
 the critical attack on the historical basis of Christianity has 
 mostly come from those who embraced the naturalistic creed, 
 he is simply guilty of downright misrepresentation. He 
 knows as well as any one that most of the critical assault in
 
 278 Pseudo-Pk ilosophy. 
 
 this direction has come from men who were theists, and more 
 sincere in their theism than Mr. Balfour can be said to be in 
 his ; and that so far from rationalists blinding themselves to 
 the historical evidence for the Gospels simply because they 
 are rationalists, thousands of Christians have been started 
 upon the road to rationalism by their belief in the credibility 
 of the Gospels having been unable to withstand so simple a 
 process as the mere comparison of one with the other. 
 
 Unable, then, to give the slightest reason for believing in 
 the incarnation, Mr. Balfour is compelled to play his sole 
 remaining card. " In what mood of expectation ought our 
 provisional philosophy to induce us to consider the extant 
 historic evidence for the Christian story ? The reply must, I 
 think, depend, as I shall show in a moment, upon the view we 
 take of the ethical import of Christianity ; while its ethical 
 import, again, must depend on the degree to which it minis- 
 ters to our ethical needs " (p. 339). Surely by this time Mr. 
 Balfour might have learned that nothing is to be gained by 
 the argument from " needs ". If it proves anything, it proves 
 all beliefs which the believer may choose to base upon a 
 " need"; and it too blandly assumes that the " higher" needs 
 are those of Mr. Balfour and his religious associates. To 
 discuss such a point as this would simply be an unwarrant- 
 able waste of time and space ; nor need we give the slightest 
 consideration to Mr. Balfour's argument that we ought to 
 believe in the incarnation because of the fact that there is evil 
 in the world, it being a consolation to think that if we suffer 
 God also came upon earth to suffer. We have relegated this 
 kind of inanity to the pulpit, and have no particular desire to 
 come across it at the end of a lengthy pseudo-philosophical 
 treatise. And when, upon the final page of his book, Mr. Bal- 
 four remarks that " how far I have succeeded in showing that 
 the least incomplete unification open to us must include the 
 fundamental elements of theology, and of Christian theology,
 
 Mr. Balfonrs "Foundations of Belief" . 279 
 
 I leave it for others to determine," one feels impelled to reply 
 indirectly to his question by saying, with one of his critics, 
 that "an interesting moment would be made if anyone should 
 ever ask Mr. Balfour, point blank : ' This religion which you 
 defend, do you really believe it ? ' Of course he would either 
 say Yes, or protest against the question. Either way, the situa- 
 tion would be memorably dramatic." If I do not ask that 
 question here, it is perhaps because I should despair of getting 
 a straightforward answer to it. 
 
 So much, then, for Mr. Balfour's Foun ations of Belief. 
 He has sought to demonstrate that there are, if anything, 
 superior reasons for believing in Christianity than in natural- 
 ism ; and we have seen that while his attack on science con- 
 ducted under the guise of an attack on naturalism failed to 
 discredit science in any way, his own positive reasons for 
 belief in the Christian scheme have been nothing short of 
 ludicrous. It only remains to glance at one thesis of his book 
 that has been designedly omitted from our consideration until 
 now. In the course of his protest against the " consequences " 
 of the naturalistic theory upon the moral life, he had to meet 
 the objection that there are " a great many excellent people 
 who hold, in more or less purity, the naturalistic creed, but 
 who, nevertheless, offer prominent examples of that habit of 
 mind with which, as I have been endeavouring to show, the 
 naturalistic creed is essentially inconsistent " (p. 82). To this 
 Mr. Balfour replies that the moral life of such men is purely 
 parasitic ; " it is sheltered by convictions which belong not to 
 them, but to the society of which they form a part ; it is 
 nourished by processes in which they take no share. And 
 when those convictions decay and those processes come to an 
 end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be 
 expected to outlast them." This argument is also employed 
 by Mr. Kidd to meet a similar objection, though he character- 
 istically uses it in the most illogical manner, making half a
 
 2 8o Pse^ldo-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 dozen self-stultifications to Mr. Balfour's one. 1 Into the merits 
 of the argument itself it is scarcely worth while to enter. That 
 moral ideas and moral actions are to a large extent predeter- 
 mined by the existent constitution of society is what no one 
 will think of disputing ; but it is mere unscientific blundering 
 to assume that our ethical code has been created for us by 
 Christianity. Ethical conduct is simply the resultant of a thou- 
 sand forces, among which a particular set of religious dogmas is 
 but one ; nor is it the fact either that we owe our moral code to 
 Christianity, or that the ethical system of any society ever 
 remains constant. It is perpetually changing as new influences 
 become prominent and older ones recede into the background. 
 The ethical constitution of a society depends finally as little 
 upon the religious beliefs of a portion of the individuals com- 
 posing it as the physical constitution of an individual depends 
 upon the colour of his hair. The religion itself, indeed, so far 
 from being the cause of the ethical code, becomes itself, in 
 time, modified so as to harmonise with this ; that is, in an age 
 when the general body of social forces makes for humanism 
 rather than for barbarism, the more barbaric elements in the 
 religion tend to become glossed over or ignored. The relation 
 between a religious system and an ethical code is, in fact, like 
 all other relations, one of action and reaction ; the religious 
 beliefs of some men may have an influence upon their conduct, 
 while, on the other hand, a thousand silent social forces are 
 gradually altering men's attitude with respect to these beliefs. 
 Apart from theoretical considerations of this kind, however, 
 the absurdity of Mr. Balfour's position is best seen by an 
 appeal to actual experience. Does he really think that the 
 virtue of Mr. Spencer, for example, bears the same relation 
 to the virtue of Mr. Balfour as a parasite to its host? Is it 
 Christians or rationalists who fill our gaols? Is it Christians 
 or rationalists who keep all Europe in the constant dread of 
 1 See Social Evolution, pp. 256-258.
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief". 281 
 
 war? Is it Christians or rationalists who make a mere differ- 
 ence of belief the excuse for a merciless persecution of the 
 weak by the strong? Mr. Balfour and Mr. Kidd cannot be so 
 ignorant of history as not to be aware that the lead in almost 
 every humanistic movement has been taken by men who 
 claimed to have no belief in Christianity, and that the great 
 body of Christians have as a rule, in these cases, been ranged 
 on the side of oppression and reaction. Are then the parasites 
 better than the host ? Are we to understand that, while the 
 Christian creed alone can be looked to as a stimulus to moral 
 conduct, it has practically no effect upon the great majority of 
 those who believe in it, while those who do not believe in it 
 exhibit the virtues that are supposed to be its characteristic 
 product ? Such a conclusion is, indeed, absurd, yet it is one 
 that logically follows upon the thesis that the virtue of the 
 rationalist is the product, not of rationalism, but of Christianity. 
 No sensible rationalist, indeed, would urge that rationalism or 
 any other creed is per se certain to produce moral conduct. 
 He knows that conduct is a complex of many forces, inner and 
 outer, among which creeds and systems are but one ; and in 
 adopting his creed simply because he believes it to be true, he 
 has done all that duty requires of him. But it is not beside 
 the question to ask those who insist upon the dependence of 
 ethical conduct upon the Christian system to give us per- 
 sonal evidence of the consequences of their faith, to show us in 
 their own lives that the fruit of the tree is indeed so beautiful 
 as they would have the rationalist believe. Tried by such a 
 test, Christianity fails ignominiously ; it fails in the case of 
 Mr. Balfour himself. It is not for the man against whom the 
 insinuation of insincerity has been whispered by reviewer after 
 reviewer to talk of the ethical virtues that flow from the accept- 
 ance of Christianity ; it is not for the man who made so mean 
 an opposition to the admission of Mr. Bradlaugh into Parlia- 
 ment to speak of the moral desolation that follows in the wake
 
 282 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 of atheism. Tried by any standard of perfection, the Chris- 
 tian Mr. Balfour comes out but indifferently in a comparison 
 with the moral qualities of the great atheist, who, at least, was 
 no opportunist, either in religion or in politics, and who would 
 have scorned to pander to the multitude by finding irrational 
 reasons for their irrational beliefs. If it is from the fruit that 
 we are to judge the tree, well and good ; but in that case let us 
 be spared the sophistical argument that a good Christian is a 
 good man because he is a Christian, while a good atheist is a 
 good man because he is surrounded by a few thousand Chris- 
 tians, whose creed, though he does not believe in it, yet keeps 
 him from the paths of vice, while they who do believe in it are 
 not restrained by it from the commission of any sin which they 
 find it to their interest to commit.
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 WE have now passed under review the three books that made 
 so great a sensation when they appeared. The object of this 
 final chapter is to give the gist of some of the more important 
 criticisms that have been passed upon Mr. Balfour's work, for 
 we may now part company for ever, so far as the present 
 volume is concerned, with Mr. Kidd and Mr. Drummond. 
 Mr. Balfour's book, however, called forth a great number of 
 criticisms, among which were a few by men of ability and 
 eminence. It was interesting to the rationalist to note the 
 pleasure, not unmixed with perplexity, of the bulk of the 
 Christians who reviewed The Foundations of Belief, and who, 
 while congratulating themselves upon the acquisition of so 
 redoubtable a champion, were obviously uncertain in a great 
 many cases of how the champion had gone about his business. 
 When a popular lady novelist, for example, reviewed the book 
 in the columns of a popular weekly paper, one felt a strong 
 desire, after reading the review, to submit to the writer a few 
 questions with the object of discovering how much she had 
 really understood and remembered of Mr. Balfour's arguments 
 after she had closed the book. Interesting, too, was the 
 attitude of some of the Roman Catholic reviewers, who, glad 
 as they were to have an ally in Mr. Balfour, were unable to 
 think very much of his positive arguments for the existence 
 of the Deity and the truth of the Incarnation. Apart from 
 all the rest, however, stood the three criticisms of Mr. 
 
 (283)
 
 284 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 Spencer, 1 Mr. Huxley, 2 and Mr. Karl Pearson, 3 with a 
 resume of which this final chapter will be mainly concerned. 
 
 Mr. Spencer, who was reluctantly drawn into the fray by 
 the sense that if he did not answer Mr. Balfour the conclusion 
 would be drawn that Mr. Balfour's criticism was unanswerable, 
 confines himself mainly to that portion of The Foundations of 
 Belief which attacks his own agnosticism. Introductorily, 
 however, he points out the futility of Mr. Balfour's argument 
 from needs to their satisfaction, showing that this argument 
 indirectly begs the question, in that the existence of " a Ruling 
 Power such as that which the current creed asserts " has to be 
 assumed. " In the absence of the assumption that things have 
 been by some agency prearranged for men's benefit, there 
 seems no reason to expect the order of the universe to be one 
 which provides for men's mental ' needs and aspirations ' ; and 
 that the truth of a theory may be judged by the degree in 
 which it conforms to such expectation." Mr. Balfour's 
 argument, indeed, as has already been shown in the present 
 volume, proves the truth of all religions if it proves the 
 truth of any, because each religion satisfies the needs of its 
 own adherents. "Doubtless," says Mr. Spencer, "the needs 
 and satisfactions which Mr. Balfour has in view are of a 
 higher order than those " of the American Indian or the 
 Hindoo ; " but that does not alter the issue. The question is 
 whether the comforting character of a belief is an adequate 
 reason for entertaining it; and the answer to this question is not 
 to be determined by the quality of the comfort looked for, as 
 high or low. The truth is that Mr. Balfour's view ... is a 
 more refined form of that primitive view which regards things 
 as all arranged for human benefit the sun to rule the day, 
 
 1 " Mr. Balfour's Dialectics," Fortnightly Review, June, 1895. 
 2" Mr. Balfour's Attack on Agnosticism," Nineteenth Century, March, 1895. 
 3 Reaction ! A Criticism of Mr. Balfour's Attack on Rationalism. London : 
 Wm. Reeves.
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief '. 285 
 
 the moon to rule the night, animals and plants provided for 
 food, and the seasons beneficently adjusted to men's welfare." 
 This anthropocentric view must give way, in the mind of any 
 one who looks at things without foregone conclusions, to the 
 view " not that the surrounding world has been arranged to fit 
 the physical nature of man, but that, conversely, the physical 
 nature of man has been moulded to fit the surrounding world ; 
 and that, by implication, the theory of things, justified by the 
 evidence, may not be one which satisfies men's moral needs 
 and yields them emotional satisfactions, but, conversely, is 
 most likely one to which they have to mould their mental 
 wants as well as they can. The opposite assumption, tacitly 
 made by Mr. Balfour, obviously tends to vitiate his general 
 argument." 
 
 Mr. Spencer's remark that " to ask whether science is sub- 
 stantially true is much like asking whether the sun gives 
 light," was thought to be met by Mr. Balfour's question : " But 
 then, on Mr. Spencer's principle, does the sun give light?" 
 To this Mr. Spencer replies that in the first place, after Mr. 
 Balfour's sceptical arguments about a real world, it is from 
 his own principles, if from any one's, that it would follow 
 that the proposition, " The sun gives light," cannot be proved 
 to be true ; and in the second place, Mr. Balfour's scepticism 
 and logical rigour become extremely yielding when it is a 
 question of bringing in his own theology. " We cannot," he 
 says, " for example, form, I will not say any adequate, but 
 even any tolerable, idea of the mode in which God is related 
 to, and acts on, the world of phenomena. That He created it, 
 that He sustains it, we are driven to believe. How He created 
 it, how He sustains it, it is impossible for us to imagine." To 
 which Mr. Spencer replies that Mr. Balfour has no right to 
 press home the difficulty as to the ultimate incognisability of 
 the material world, yet coolly evade the cognate difficulty as 
 to the incomprehensibility of the supposed Creator of the
 
 286 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 world. " And why," he asks, " if it must continue ' impossible 
 for us to imagine ' the mode of operation of the cause behind 
 ' the ordered system of phenomena,' may it not continue ' im- 
 possible for us to imagine ' the nature of that cause ? If we 
 are obliged to assume the cause to be a ' rational Author,' since 
 otherwise our knowledge of ' the ordered system of phenomena 
 is inexplicable,' why must we not assume a certain mode of 
 action by which ' He created ' and ' sustains ' ' the ordered 
 system of phenomena,' since otherwise the creation and sus- 
 tentation of it are inexplicable ? To me it seems an inde- 
 fensible belief that while for one part of the mystery of things 
 we must assign an explanation, all other parts may be left 
 without explanation. If the constitution of matter defies all 
 attempts to understand it, if it is impossible to understand 
 in what way feeling is connected with nervous change, if 
 wherever we analyse our knowledge to the bottom we come 
 down to unanalysable components which elude the grasp of 
 thought, what ground is there for the belief that of one part 
 of the mystery, and that the deepest part, we must and can 
 reach an explanation ? Surely there is a strange incongruity 
 in holding that we have here a certainty while denying to be 
 certain that the sun gives light." 
 
 Mr. Spencer gives also a passing notice to Mr. Balfour's 
 argument as to the relative claims of reason and authority, 
 pointing out in the first place the fallacy of imagining that it 
 is possible to go completely behind reason ; " for if any 
 other ruler is raised to the throne, in part or for a time, it is 
 by reason that this is done;" and showing in the second 
 place that while, from the beginning of history, the authority 
 of science has been growing daily greater, the authority of 
 religion has been growing daily less ; for not only are its 
 positive statements being discredited by increased knowledge 
 of the world and of history, but it has conspicuously failed to 
 regulate moral conduct as it claims to do. So that if there
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 287 
 
 is anything whatever in Mr. Balfour"s contention that we 
 should follow authority, it is plainly the authority of science 
 that we should follow, and not the authority of religion. 
 
 Finally Mr. Spencer deals with Mr. Balfour's direct attack 
 upon his fundamental position. After describing Mr. Spencer 
 as holding that " beyond what we think we know, and in 
 closest relationship with it, lies an infinite field which we do 
 not know and which with our present faculties we can never 
 know, yet which cannot be ignored without making what we 
 do know unintelligible and meaningless," Mr. Balfour pro- 
 ceeds thus : 
 
 " But he has failed to see whither such speculations must 
 inevitably lead him. He has failed to see that if the certitudes 
 of science lose themselves in depths of unfathomable mystery, 
 it may well be that out of these same depths there should 
 emerge the certitudes of religion ; and that if the dependence 
 of the ' knowable ' upon the ' unknowable ' embarrasses us 
 not in the one case, no reason can be assigned why it should 
 embarrass us in the other. 
 
 " Mr. Spencer, in short, has avoided the error of dividing 
 all reality into a perceivable which concerns us, and an un- 
 perceivable which, if it exists at all, concerns us not. Agnos- 
 ticism so understood he explicitly repudiates by his theory, 
 if not by his practice. But he has not seen that, if this 
 simple-minded creed be once abandoned, there is no con- 
 venient halting-place till we have swung round to a theory of 
 things which is its precise opposite ; a theory which, though 
 it shrinks on its speculative side from no severity of critical 
 analysis, yet on its practical side finds the source of its con- 
 structive energy in the deepest needs of man, and thus 
 recognises, alike in science, in ethics, in beauty, in religion, 
 the halting expression of a reality beyond our reach, the 
 half-seen vision of transcendent truth " (pp. 288, 289). 
 
 Dialectic of this kind, says Mr. Spencer, is merely the
 
 288 Pse^ido-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 spearing of an effigy which is alleged to be the reality. He 
 
 has never denied, either directly or indirectly, that "out of 
 
 the depths of unfathomable mystery there may emerge the 
 
 certitudes of religion," for "the conclusion that by the nature 
 
 of our intelligence we are for ever debarred from forming 
 
 any conception of the reality which lies behind appearance 
 
 has the inevitable corollary that we can assign no limits to 
 
 the possibilities within it ". But he objects to Mr. Balfour's 
 
 assumption that there not only may, but actually do, emerge 
 
 the certitudes of religion. Mr. Balfour, in fact, is here simply 
 
 dealing with pseud-ideas ; the terms of his proposition have 
 
 no real meaning. "If the thought of a ' rational Author ' has 
 
 emerged out of the ' depths of unfathomable mystery,' it 
 
 must, if it is distinguishable from the mere blank form of a 
 
 thought, have some definable characters ; and unless Mr. 
 
 Balfour considers himself and men who have similar thoughts 
 
 to be fundamentally different from men in general, we must 
 
 say that thoughts having like characters have emerged into 
 
 human consciousness at large." When, however, we examine 
 
 the various conceptions that men have entertained of God, 
 
 we find scarcely two of them alike ; and this difference holds 
 
 not only between those who worship, different gods, but 
 
 between believers, like Christians, who are supposed to 
 
 worship the same God ; while many men, of course, have no 
 
 conception of God whatever. Now, says Mr. Spencer, if the 
 
 conception of a " rational Author " of the universe has 
 
 "emerged into human consciousness" from the depths of 
 
 unfathomable mystery, " there arises in the first place the 
 
 question : How came there to have so emerged the different 
 
 conceptions which men have entertained from early days 
 
 when God was said to have appeared to various persons, 
 
 down to our late days when theophany is nonsense? Then, 
 
 seeing that many of these conceptions are in direct antagonism, 
 
 there arises the question : How are we to decide which must
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief" . 289 
 
 be rejected ? And once more, if out of all of them one only 
 has truly emerged, in what manner shall we identify it ? To 
 all which unanswerable inquiries add one more. Assuming 
 that the conception of a ' rational Author ' as existing in Mr. 
 Balfour and those who are on the same high plane of thought, 
 is the only true one, then, if possession of this conception is 
 to be shown, it is requisite that there should be specified some 
 mentally-representable traits which constitute it. And if the 
 asserted traits are unrepresentable if being, as they must be, 
 abstractions of human attributes existing unlocalised and 
 multiplied by infinity, they are unthinkable then the 
 assertion of their existence becomes nothing but the blank 
 form of a thought expresses a pseud-idea." 
 
 Further, the word " emerges " implies " some medium out of 
 which some existence previously concealed gradually appears, 
 at first vaguely and at last distinctly. Can Mr. Balfour say 
 that, apart from any impressions given to him in the course 
 of education and subsequent culture, such a representable 
 emergence has taken place in him ? If so, one implication 
 is that his mind differs, not in elevation only, but in nature 
 from certain minds which have been so placed as to prevent 
 communication of theological ideas from without ; for it has 
 been shown that among deaf mutes who have received no 
 religious instruction, no idea of God exists. Hence, in the 
 absence of proof to the contrary, we must say that that high 
 conception of a Deity which exists in the minds of Mr. Balfour 
 and others has had a historical origin." That is, the original 
 savage idea of a God with human attributes has become suc- 
 cessively refined into the modern theist's idea of a God who is 
 merely " pure intelligence ". Thus the process of emergence 
 has been the exact opposite of that implied by Mr. Balfour. 
 So far from the modern idea of God being a progress " from 
 the imperceptible, through the vague, to the distinct," it has 
 been a progress " from the distinct, through the more and more 
 
 19
 
 290 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 vague, to the imperceptible, or rather to the scarcely conceiv- 
 able, or literally inconceivable " ; Mr. Balfour's whole passage, 
 in fact, being found devoid of meaning when subjected to 
 analysis. 
 
 Mr. Spencer, it will be seen, has not gone over Mr. Balfour's 
 book as a whole, contenting himself with exposing the futility 
 of its argument only on a point that concerns his own philosophy. 
 Mr. Huxley's article also was less complete than one could 
 wish. He begins by comparing the present condition of the 
 intellectual world to that of " the second century of the exist- 
 ence of Imperial Rome". Then there was, on the one hand, 
 the decay of the old religion and the spread of theosophies and 
 revivalisms, while on the other hand, the more educated classes 
 were either professed stoics or deeply tinged with stoicism. 
 Out of the clash of these rival opinions came the future history 
 of Europe. The Roman Empire has vanished, " and in all 
 this time, the struggle for mastery between the scientific spirit, 
 temporarily incarnate in Greek philosophy, and the spirits of 
 post-prophetic Judaism and of that prophetic Judaism, already 
 coloured by Hellenism, which bore the name of Christianity, 
 has gone on ; until now, Judaism stands substantially where it 
 did, while the simple Christian faith of the second century has 
 been overlaid and transmuted by Hellenic speculation into 
 the huge and complex dogmatic fabric of ecclesiastical Chris- 
 tianity. Finally, the scientific spirit, freed from all its early 
 wrappings, stands in independence of and for the most part in 
 antagonism to its ancient rivals. Its cosmology, its anthro- 
 pology are incompatible with theirs ; its ethics are independent 
 of theirs." " This," says Mr. Huxley, "is, in broad outline, the 
 state of affairs amongst us, and the future of our civilisation as 
 certainly depends on the result of the contest between science 
 and ecclesiasticism which is now a-foot as the present state of 
 things is the outcome of the former strife." 
 
 Accordingly he welcomes Mr. Balfour's book as an indi-
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief' 1 . 291 
 
 cation that our leading men have become aware of the im- 
 portance of this contest, and are endeavouring to unite the 
 scattered ends of our knowledge into one organic whole. 
 Civilisation cannot long endure while there is so serious an 
 antagonism in the world of thought as that between " natu- 
 ralism " and what Mr. Balfour calls "current teaching" 
 this latter being styled by Mr. Huxley " Demomism ". While 
 commending Mr. Balfour's purpose, however, he cannot in 
 the same degree commend his performance. And first of all 
 he falls foul of the passages in which Mr. Balfour gives his 
 own summary of the teaching of naturalism, remarking inci- 
 dentally that Athanasius was not likely " to give a definition 
 of Arianism which would be quite satisfactory to Arius," and 
 still less likely " to draw up a catechism which would prove 
 acceptable to the congregation of the Goths who, unhappily, 
 professed that heresy ". He implies, indeed, what so many 
 others have said, that " Naturalism, as defined and catecheti- 
 cally represented " by Mr. Balfour, is a body of doctrine which 
 nobody holds ; and that " if ' Naturalistic ' teaching and 
 teachers are as devoid of real existence as Hippogriffs and 
 Chimaeras, the champion of Demomism is doing battle with 
 the air ". Accordingly, Mr. Huxley claims the right to 
 use the term agnosticism where Mr. Balfour uses the term 
 naturalism. 
 
 He begins by pointing out that the germs of modern 
 agnosticism were found by him in Hamilton and Mansel. 
 Hamilton, however, perversely forgot his own doctrine as to 
 the relativity of our knowledge and the incognisability of 
 reality, when he wrote that " the Divinity, in a certain sense, 
 is revealed ; in a certain sense is concealed ; He is at once 
 known and unknown ". To write thus was simply " to con- 
 fuse the necessities of thought with the obligations of things, 
 and hypostatising nescience, [to] pretend, under the guise of 
 faith, to the possession of knowledge ". Mr. Huxley, though
 
 292 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 inclined at one time to follow Hamilton in his rhetorical eva- 
 sion of his own conclusions, soon outgrew this state of mind, 
 and settled into agnosticism pure and simple. He proceeds 
 to remark that " if our philosopher had contented himself with 
 pointing out the indubitable fact that the limitation of human 
 knowledge to the relative and the finite affords as little 
 foundation for denial as for affirmation concerning that which 
 lies beyond our cognisance ; if, by way of counterposie to the 
 proposition that it is ' blasphemy to think that God is as we 
 can think him to be,' he had added that it is preposterous to 
 assert that there is no God, because he cannot be such as we 
 can think him to be, I fancy he would have taken up a posi- 
 tion of unassailable security, and might have done something 
 to let the wind out of the bladder of dogmatic atheism V 
 
 1 It is impossible, of course, for a pugnacious atheist to let this pass without 
 comment. The atheist simply "denies" the existence of God in the way in 
 which Mr. Huxley himself would deny it ; that is, he merely says that the exist- 
 ence of a God is seen to be an impossibility as soon as the word " God " is 
 defined. Mr. Huxley, for example, would have held that a first cause was un- 
 thinkable ; then he would have denied that there existed anything corresponding 
 to the theist's idea of a first cause ; that is, he would to that extent have 
 " denied " the existence of the theist's God. Similarly, if he held, as he cer- 
 tainly would have done, that an Infinite Intelligence is unthinkable, he would 
 to that extent have denied the existence of the theist's God ; and so on with all 
 the qualities that are predicated of the Deity. Mr. Huxley would have no hesi- 
 tation in saying that a four-sided triangle or a square circle does not exist ; he 
 would not content himself with the remark that these things " lie beyond our 
 cognisance ". They are, in fact, unthinkable, just as a Deity is unthinkable ; 
 and the atheist who " denies " the existence of something which the theist 
 calls Infinite Intelligence or First Cause is simply in the position of the agnostic 
 who denies the existence of four-sided triangles. The idea of triangle excludes 
 the idea of four-sidedness ; similarly, the idea of intelligence excludes the idea of 
 infinity. The idea of circle excludes the idea of squareness ; similarly, the idea 
 of cause excludes the idea of a First Cause. The one set of propositions does 
 not any more than the other lie outside the circle of our cognitions ; they are 
 both merely phrases which cannot be translated into ideas. And if the agnostic 
 "denies" the existence of four-sided triangles, he ought in the same sense to 
 " deny " the existence of a God. It is in this sense, and this sense alone, that 
 the atheist denies any such existence. When Mr. Huxley writes that " it is 
 preposterous to assert that there is no God because he cannot be such as we
 
 Mr, Bal fours "Foundations of Belief ". 293 
 
 Mr. Huxley's purpose in thus harking back to Hamilton's 
 agnosticism is to show that Mr. Balfour's definition of 
 naturalism would apply equally well to doctrines held not 
 only by Hamilton and modern agnostics, but by Kant, 
 Hume, Berkeley, and Locke. Mr. Balfour has, in fact, in his 
 anxiety to place the detested system of his opponents in the 
 worst possible light, given to naturalism both too wide and 
 too narrow a definition : too wide in that it includes philoso- 
 phers whom no one would regard as naturalists, and too 
 narrow in that it attempts to limit " natural science" to a very 
 small portion of its legitimate territory. When Mr. Balfour, 
 for example, speaks of naturalism as having concern solely 
 with "that world which is revealed to us through perception," 
 he must mean by " perception " nothing more than " per- 
 ception through the senses " ; and apparently he thus hopes 
 to limit what he calls natural science to the sciences of as- 
 tronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, and botany. 
 Now, as Mr. Huxley proceeds to show, Mr. Balfour has no 
 
 think him to be," he is simply meaningless. The whole sentence implies that 
 we have some conception answering to the term "God," whereas the agnostic 
 himself, in his polemic against the theist, proves that every quality which the 
 theist attributes to his deity is either unthinkable or a contradiction in terms. 
 The atheist does not, any more than the agnostic, claim grounds for " denial 
 concerning that which lies beyond our cognisance". He simply says that what 
 lies beyond our cognisance is the unknowable, and not a collection of hyposta- 
 tised abstractions which men choose to label " God," and which might as well 
 be labelled X or Abracadabra. This does not lie beyond our cognisance, but is 
 merely a confused attempt to mould contradictory conceptions, drawn from 
 within the circle of our cognisance, into a consistent whole. So far as agnos- 
 ticism, by refusing the atheist's right to " deny" the existence of something like 
 Infinite Intelligence, which can no more exist than a four-sided triangle, claims 
 that it is distinct from atheism, it is simply falling a victim to its own confu- 
 sion ; while in so far as, by its own arguments, it shows (i) that the qualities 
 attributed to the Deity are unthinkable, and (2) that every form of theism is 
 only a badly-reasoned attempt to "account" for what can never be accounted 
 for, it is itself atheism pure and simple ; and there is no real need to call an old 
 creed by a new name. Mr. Huxley, in fact, always misunderstood atheism as 
 much as Mr. Spencer did in his First Principles ; but he might at least have 
 understood the implications of his own agnosticism.
 
 294 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 right so to frame a definition of natural science as to exclude 
 zoology and physiology ; while physiology leads on inevitably 
 into psychology, and so to the whole phenomena of con- 
 sciousness. And the conclusion is that not only is the 
 "natural science" of Mr. Balfour "unlike anything known to 
 men of science," but " the view of ' Naturalism ' founded on it, 
 and the conceptions of empiricism and agnosticism, which 
 are counted among the forms of Naturalism, are equally non- 
 existent". Mr. Balfour's statement of his opponent's system 
 is, in fact, either hopelessly inaccurate or a mere travesty. 
 
 Here, unfortunately, Mr. Huxley's criticism ends. Before 
 the second part of his article could be written he had passed 
 away from this world, to "join the choir invisible ". What he 
 was prevented from doing, however, has been done by Mr. 
 Karl Pearson, whose criticism of The Foundations of Belief 
 was at once the completest and most telling of all. 
 
 Mr. Pearson rightly calls attention to the fact that reaction 
 in religious matters is likely to go hand in hand with reaction 
 in political matters ; and that " the nation has yet to learn 
 may the lesson be not too bitter! that an aptitude for 
 defending Genesis or for demonstrating the truth of the 
 Incarnation is not the best test of the intellectual fibre needed 
 in a really great statesman". He points out the ambiguity of 
 Mr. Balfour's terms, and the way in which that ingenuous 
 gentleman takes full advantage of the double meanings of 
 his words. " The same word is used in many different 
 senses, often in nearly contiguous paragraphs ; different 
 words are used for the same permutation of ideas, although 
 either their scientific or popular sense, or both senses, connote 
 something very distinct from that of Mr. Balfour's usage. 
 Subtle distinctions which are none the less vital and real are 
 slurred over at one point, in order to be emphasised at a 
 second after the desired antinomy has been displayed. A 
 parade is made of philosophic terminology, which is neither
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief". 295 
 
 used in its technical sense nor in any consistent sense which 
 can be drawn from the context." Thus Mr. Balfour has 
 employed such words as epistemology, knowledge, the know- 
 able, beliefs, science, and cause, without defining them, and 
 has so been able to interpret any of them to suit his dialectical 
 purpose at the moment. Further, when he attempts to carry 
 certain doctrines through the fire of criticism by calling them 
 "higher," and the opposite doctrines "lower," he forgets that 
 these terms are purely relative, and that there is no standard, 
 external to our own prepossessions and prejudices, by which 
 individuals can compare their needs with those of other 
 individuals. 
 
 Mr. Pearson then proceeds to show that Mr. Balfour, 
 while professing to treat naturalism, science, and rationalism 
 as distinct, has in reality treated them as if they were identical ; 
 and he further inquires, " Are the foundations of science really 
 what Mr. Balfour states them to be? Mr. Balfour," he 
 continues, " will hardly be able to disguise from any scientific 
 reader that his acquaintance with science is of a very limited 
 character. No man even superficially acquainted with the 
 modern physics of the ether, would still speak of ether as ' a 
 substance which behaves as if it were an elastic solid ' ; nor 
 would even a dabbler in biology, after recent publications, 
 slip glibly over from the formation of habits to their in- 
 heritance without a sign of hesitation." And while Mr. 
 Balfour's scientific equipment is so slender, he makes the error 
 of criticising something which he labels " Naturalism," without 
 dealing face-to-face with any particular thinker who could be 
 held answerable for this particular creed : the only scientist to 
 whom Mr. Balfour refers in this connection and that only in 
 name being Professor Huxley. And the scientific creed 
 which Mr. Balfour wishes to fasten on to naturalism is nothing 
 more nor less than " the long-exploded materialism of Mole- 
 schott and Biichner," which " was never adopted by any
 
 296 Pseudo-Philosophy. 
 
 physicist of repute." 1 Whether we agree or not with Mr. 
 Pearson as to this, there is no doubt of the trenchant nature 
 of his criticism of Mr. Balfour's attempt to place the "certi- 
 tudes " of religion and the " certitudes " of science upon the 
 same footing. " We are quite prepared," he remarks, " to 
 follow Mr. Balfour and admit that ' There is a God ' and 
 ' There is a material world built up of molecules ' are equally 
 unproven statements, but the comparison between science and 
 theology ends here, for while theology is based upon a belief 
 in the former proposition, science in no way depends upon the 
 truth or falsehood of the latter proposition. The validity of 
 scientific conclusions remains untouched, if behind the veil of 
 sense-impressions, which for the Naturalist limits the field of 
 human knowledge, be postulated Dinge an sick, mediate or 
 immediate deities, mind-stuff, the unknowable, permanent 
 possibilities of sensation, or a complex of molecules ' endowed 
 with force '." And Mr. Balfour, in asserting that " the whole 
 
 1 I am compelled to express a passing dissidence from this " hard- saying " 
 of Mr. Pearson, who has yet to convince a great many people that the materialism 
 of Biichner has been long exploded. Certainly his own Grammar of Science, to 
 which many rationalists are, of course, highly indebted for a clarification of their 
 ideas on many subjects connected with physical science, has not been quite so 
 successful as he imagines in demolishing the materialism usually associated with 
 the names of Biichner and Bradlaugh. Beyond a passing reference, however, 
 this is not the place to enter into the controversy between Mr. Pearson and the 
 materialists. I can only say, for my own part, that the criticism of his position 
 in the second volume of the recent Life of Bradlaugh puts very accurately and 
 very completely what a great many of us thought when we read a certain section 
 of the Grammar of Science. Mr. Pearson has not done justice to materialism ; 
 and I may be excused for drawing attention to the conspicuous bad taste of one of 
 his Fortnightly Revieiv articles, in which he spoke of " the pages of abuse to 
 which I am treated in the second volume of Bonner's Life of Bradlaugh ". I 
 think Mr. Pearson would have some difficulty in pointing out the "abuse"; for 
 his critic simply dealt quite scientifically with Mr. Pearson's misunderstanding 
 of materialism, and the bearing of this upon his own doctrine. So trenchant a 
 polemist as Mr. Pearson, who has never spared an opponent, who has always 
 given full rein to his tongue and his pen, and whose own language has at times 
 seemed, even to rationalists, unnecessarily strong, might have known better than 
 to pass by an unanswerable criticism with the remark that it was " abuse". To 
 call it that was simply to make an exhibition of bad temper and worse taste.
 
 Mr. Balfours "Foundations of Belief ". 297 
 
 of science has been developed in the belief that its conclusions 
 applied to an independent material universe," overlooks the 
 fact that " large portions of the so-called exact sciences, which 
 for many centuries monopolised the attention of men of 
 science, not only deal with conceptual notions ideas and not 
 phenomena but were at an early period of their development 
 recognised by their devotees to be conceptual"; while "at least 
 a moiety of the scientific work and a moiety of the scientific 
 workers of to-day fall respectively into the categories of 
 admittedly conceptual reasoning and admittedly conceptual 
 reasoners ". 
 
 Science is, in fact, as Mr. Pearson goes on to show, not con- 
 cerned to explain things but to describe them. It does not deal 
 with " things-in-themselves," but merely with concepts drawn 
 from experience ; and its mission is only to provide, by means 
 of these concepts, a short-hand summary of our experiences, 
 which serves at once to make portable our knowledge of the 
 past, and to enable us to apply this to anticipations of the 
 future. Thus Mr. Balfour's criticism of science is really quite 
 beside the mark. Science, although it says nothing of " the 
 ultimate reality of things " because it is not in any way con- 
 cerned with "ultimate reality" is yet justified by the prac- 
 tical results of our reasoning on conceptual limits. Similarly, 
 Mr. Balfour's argument about experience and the law of 
 causation is seen to be invalid when we realise that the law 
 of causation is, like any other formula of science, " a conceptual 
 limit, and is not a something amid the unknowable Dinge an 
 sick " ; while the argument that the law of causation is given 
 to us a priori is rightly dealt with from the point of view of 
 anthropology and of comparative psychology, instead of from 
 that of abstract metaphysics. " That like causes are followed 
 by like effects is only a gradually learnt truth, and the con- 
 ceptual limit which we term ' the law of causation ' is only 
 reached after prolonged experience and some intellectual
 
 298 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 exercise." With the fall of Mr. Balfour's thesis of the nature 
 of science there comes to the ground also his attempt to find 
 " reasons for belief" in the leading assertions of theology. As 
 Mr. Pearson puts it : " In theology we assert something and 
 believe something not of ideas, but of an independent, super- 
 sensuous existence behind sense-impression. In science we 
 assert something of a conceptual world, and believe some- 
 thing of its relation to the dependent and sensuous." 
 
 In an acute passage Mr. Pearson shows the absurdity of 
 Mr. Balfour arguing in one part of his book that reason is of 
 very small account, compared with authority, habit, or instinct, 
 and in another-part proving the existence of the Deity from 
 the fact that man has reason, and thinking so highly of reason 
 as to make it the chief attribute of his Deity. Even so might 
 " a canine theologian . . . instinctively realise that ' physio- 
 logical co-ordination ' must be the chief attribute of the un- 
 knowable ; although the dog would be merely yelping his 
 feelings, and the man would be reasoning on his ' deepest 
 needs ' ". And Mr. Balfour's argument " that it would be im- 
 possible to reason about things, if they had not a rational 
 basis," is dealt with by a reductio ad absurdum, in this man- 
 ner : 
 
 " Let us pause for a moment to apply this type of argu- 
 ment all round. Because the clock keeps time with the stars, 
 there must be clockwork at the back of the universe ; because 
 the loom sends the shuttle flying through the maze of warp, 
 the raw wool itself must be the product of loom and shuttle ; 
 because the chaos of rubble comes out of the stone-sorting 
 machine, cleaned, sized, and sorted, there must be such a 
 machine ultimately creating rubble ; because ' physiological 
 co-ordination ' enables brute nature to guide itself through the 
 phenomenal world, instinct and reflex action must have created 
 brute and universe ; because we can digest a whole round of 
 vegetable and animal matters, organic life must be the product
 
 Mr. Balfour s "Foundations of Belief ". 299 
 
 of a Transcendental Stomach ; because human hands have 
 learnt the art of delicate design in wood and metal, forest and 
 lode are undoubtedly specimens of a Supernatural Engraver's 
 skill ; because futilities can be multiplied indefinitely, the 
 material for them as well as the minds which rejoice in them 
 must alike be the creation of a Gigantic Trifler. Not one of 
 these statements seems a whit more ridiculous from the stand- 
 point of logic than the argument of Mr. Balfour with which 
 we have prefaced them." 
 
 So again with the argument as to the origin of our ethical 
 faculties. Mr. Balfour, it will be remembered, contended that 
 it was insufficient to trace reason back to non-rational origins ; 
 we must suppose that behind these there lay the supreme 
 creating reason. Science, in fact, requires theism for its very 
 foundation ; and if we are compelled to postulate a rational 
 God in the interests of science, we are also compelled to 
 postulate a moral God in the interests of morals. See then 
 whither this leads Mr. Balfour. He " finds Nature's con- 
 trivances for protecting the species of ' some loathsome 
 parasite' to be 'most cruel and disgusting'. We presume, 
 therefore, as Mr. Balfour has beliefs as to the cruel and the 
 loathsome, which can be easily traced back to sources having 
 nothing cruel or disgusting about them, he is prepared to 
 seek behind phenomenal sources for some ultimate ground 
 with which they shall be congruous. We do not find him, 
 however, attributing cruelty and loathliness to his deity." 
 
 Here, practically, Mr. Pearson's telling criticism ends. He 
 has left few of the main positions of The Foundations of Belief 
 untouched, and has shown that what Mr. Balfour describes as 
 rationalism is a mere caricature, that the attack on science has 
 failed, that the attempt to rehabilitate theology has equally 
 failed, and that Mr. Balfour's arguments are merely superficial 
 sophistry where they are not superficial ignorance. The 
 critique ends with a timely warning to the religious Liberal
 
 300 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 press as to the dangerous political significance of such a book 
 as The Foundations of Belief, coming, as it does, from the 
 accredited leader of the Tory party in the House of Com- 
 mons. 
 
 Here this volume might end. But a few words may not 
 be out of place upon one of the most interesting, if not one 
 of the most able, criticisms of The Foundations of Belief. In 
 the Fortnightly Review to* November, 1895, there appeared an 
 article by Mr. Vamadeo Shastri, a Hindu gentleman, upon 
 " Brahmanism and the Foundations of Belief," which is ex- 
 tremely exhilarating reading for the rationalist Mr. Shastri 
 does not throw much light either upon the foundations of 
 belief or upon Brahmanism ; and his article is for the most 
 part a charmingly polite but uncritical eulogy of Mr. Balfour's 
 attack upon naturalism and reason. But it is highly interest- 
 ing as showing how a Western religion looks to the highly- 
 cultured devotee of an Eastern religion ; and incidentally it 
 places some of Mr. Balfour's arguments in a very bad position 
 indeed. Mr. Shastri begins by referring to a previous article 
 of his, in which he had commented upon " the very moderate 
 assistance obtainable from English sources by those who 
 desire to exchange their old lamps for new ones, so far as this 
 may enable them to adjust the traditional religion of India to 
 its changing intellectual environments. I was then unwillingly 
 forced to the conclusion that we had very little to learn from 
 you in the matter of profound theology, and that the system 
 of Christianity a faith for which my practical understanding 
 has the most sincere respect could not satisfy the restless, 
 inquisitive Hindu mind. Its moralising tendencies seemed 
 to me to cloud and distract the true spiritual vision ; and the 
 narrow range of its conceptions regarding the soul and a 
 future life appeared out of scale and incomplete." 
 
 Mr. Shastri, however, has had some of his troubles 
 allayed by Mr. Balfour's book, which, in his opinion, has
 
 Air. Balfours "Foundations of Belief'. 301 
 
 helped to throw up ramparts round Christianity that may be 
 of service to it in its struggle with rationalism. We need not 
 follow him too minutely in his gleeful excursions ; suffice it 
 to say that he quite agrees with Mr. Balfour that science 
 ought to be told to keep its place and not allowed to intrude 
 into the sacred halls of religion. Mr. Shastrfs delicate soul 
 rebels against this intrusion. " To a refined and cultivated 
 temperament [i.e., Mr. Shastri's temperament ; for rationalists 
 are of course never refined or cultivated] the theory that 
 exquisite tastes and emotions could have been reared by that 
 homely nurse Nature out of ' the complicated contrivances, 
 many of them mean and disgusting, wrought into the organism 
 by the shaping forces of selection and elimination,' must, I 
 agree, be tolerably repulsive." This may serve to give the 
 measure of Mr. Vamadeo Shastri's philosophic competence, 
 and we may without any great loss let the remainder of his 
 criticism of rationalism dissolve, to use one of his own ex- 
 quisite expressions, into its fontal nothingness. 
 
 Mr. Shastri is only interesting when he comes to point out 
 the superiority of Brahmanism to Christianity in the eternal 
 conflict with science. Christianity has first of all to prove 
 the existence of its Deity, and then to give historical evidence 
 that certain events happened as they are alleged to have 
 happened ; and on neither of these grounds can it hope to be 
 quite successful with science. Brahmanism is much more 
 fortunate, in that it postulates no architectonic providence, 
 and does not profess to be in any way historical. It is thus 
 able to retire before the attack of science in an orderly retreat, 
 while Christianity meets with something like utter rout. And 
 with charming ingenuousness Mr. Shastri remarks that it is 
 not altogether the interest of the Hindu to wish the Christian 
 well out of his difficulties, " seeing that Christianity is one of 
 the two religions which have taken up an active proselytis- 
 ing attitude against Hinduism. The attraction which any
 
 302 Pseudo- Philosophy, 
 
 spiritual novelty presents to our people has induced me on 
 rare occasions to listen with decorous curiosity to your 
 Christian missionaries. I have found that they almost always 
 employ against the Brahmanic teaching and tradition that 
 very argument which in this book is termed rationalistic, 
 touching the absurdity of our worships and beliefs, the 
 incredibility of our miraculous narratives, the want of 
 authenticity for our Scriptures, and so on, with appeals to 
 reason, sense perception, and the new learning generally. 
 Now, in these controversies . . . any confession that 
 your own rationalistic orthodoxy is not unassailable would 
 give us an effective rejoinder. ... I make these remarks 
 to prove that I am entirely disinterested in warning you 
 English to take care what you are about." 
 
 Comment upon this is surely needless ; it tells its own 
 story, which all who run may read. Nor need I do more 
 than compliment the ingenuous Brahman upon the security 
 afforded to his religion by the fact that it has no canon of 
 consistency and has never committed itself to any precise 
 creed. These are advantages indeed, and advantages which 
 Christianity committed, alas ! to certain very definite dogmas 
 would be delighted to acquire. The final interest of Mr. 
 Shastri's article, however, lies in his closing passages, wherein 
 he opines that Mr. Balfour and his fellows may possibly be 
 on the road that leads to the divine wisdom as it is in Brah- 
 manism. And most instructive of all are his final words, to 
 the effect that Mr. Balfour's " needs " are not his needs, 
 and Mr. Balfour's " satisfactions " are to him unsatisfactory. 
 " I wish from my heart," he says, " that we Hindus could 
 accept [Mr. Balfour's] method of satisfying our deepest 
 needs ; but if this is to be the speculative side of Mr. Balfour's 
 theory, I fear it may not altogether withstand the utmost 
 severity of critical analysis. At any rate the incurably subtle
 
 Mr. Balfours " Foundations of Belief". 303 
 
 Hindu intellect is absolutely incapable of contenting itself 
 with a Deity whose very existence seems in a manner to 
 depend on evanescent and mutable modes of human desire 
 and consciousness." 
 
 Quite so ; and thus is the rationalist justified and the 
 theologian answered. It appears that Mr. Balfour's argu- 
 ment about men's "highest needs" and their satisfaction 
 simply amounts to calling his own needs highest because they 
 are his. Just as these needs have no meaning for the ra- 
 tionalist, so have they no meaning for the devotee of another 
 religion, who has been brought up in a different psychological 
 climate. It all confirms the rationalist's argument that early 
 training and environment are the main factors in the produc- 
 tion of religious belief; and that Mr. Balfour, had he been 
 born a Hindu, would have employed in the cause of some 
 Hindu religion precisely similar emotional arguments to those 
 which he has used on behalf of Christianity. Thus also does 
 Mr. Kidd's vulgar race-vanity go by the board ; for it is 
 evident that he sings the glories and virtues of Western 
 civilisation merely because he is an occidental by birth and 
 environment. And one only needs to read an article, such as 
 this of Mr. Shastri, in which one absurd religionist, while 
 agreeing, as against the rationalist, that we must not be ra- 
 tional, uses reason against another absurd religionist, to see 
 how hopeless and inevitable is the confusion of those who 
 endeavour to divide reason against itself. The consequences 
 to philosophy of such an attempt have already been shown 
 in the previous pages of this volume, and there is no need to 
 pursue the subject any further here. I desire rather to close 
 with the warning that its consequences are no less grave in 
 the spheres of political and social life. Reason is the final 
 arbiter to which every dispute must sooner or later be sub- 
 mitted, and from whose decision there can be no appeal.
 
 304 Pseudo- Philosophy. 
 
 And the nation that will not seek reason and ensue it, that 
 will allow itself for long to be blinded by the sophistry of the 
 modern irrationalist, will not be able ultimately to avoid the 
 doom of those unfortunate animals which, as a most veracious 
 record tells us, once ran down a steep place into the sea.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Agnosticism, 287-290, 291-293 
 
 ' ' Aggressive " unbelief, 30 
 
 " Aggressiveness " of Mr. Kidd, 31 
 
 Allen, Grant, 105 
 
 Altruism and evolution, 83, 147, 148, 157 
 
 - and progress, 117, 127, 148 
 
 - and reproduction, 111-114, I2 6, 1491 
 150 
 
 - physiological basis of, 114, 128 
 Ambrose, 6 
 
 Anglo-Saxon race and civilisation, 96, 97 
 
 Anselm, 248, 250 
 
 Antiquity of the irrationalist defence of 
 
 religion, 3, 4, 6, 99 
 
 Authority of the Churches decaying, 4 
 Authority and belief, 218, 220, 221 
 
 - and reason (see Reason and author- 
 ity) 
 
 B. 
 
 Balfour's (Mr.) Foundations of Belief , i, 2, 
 5, 9, ii, 12, 179-304 
 
 - reception of, 181, 182 
 
 - Mr. Huxley on, 290-294 
 
 - Mr. Karl Pearson on, 294-300 
 
 - Mr. Shastri on, 300-303 
 
 - Mr. Spencer on, 284-290 
 
 - chameleon ethics, 183, 189 
 
 - Defence of Philosophic DoitM, 180, 
 
 251 
 
 " Fragment on Progress," 187-189 
 
 - general characteristics, 179, 180, 
 191, 251, 252 
 
 - inconsistencies, 205, 207, 210, 211, 
 222, 223, 271 
 
 - " Religion of Humanity," 182-187 
 Beliefs, formulas, and realities, 246-253 
 Bellamy, E., 90 
 
 Benn, A. W., 73, 181, 208 
 Berkeley, 293 
 
 Bible, Savonarola on the, 8 
 Biology, second-hand, 6 
 
 and social science, 19 
 Bradlaugh, C. , 30, 281, 296 note 
 Brahmanism and Christianity, 300-303 
 Browning, 5, 120 
 Biichner, 124, 148, 295, 296 note 
 Buckle, 79, 80 
 Buckley, Miss, 124, 148 
 
 C. 
 
 Calderwood, Prof., 120 
 
 " Central feature of human history," 24-26, 
 
 52-63 
 Christianity and altruism, 66, 68, 69, 79, 95 
 
 and the ancient world, 64, 68, 78 
 
 - and caste, 67, 69 
 
 - and civilisation, 96 
 
 - and the equality of men. 67, 69, 72, 
 
 73 
 
 and evolution, 67, 173 
 
 - and intellectual evil, 10 
 
 - and the masses, 67 
 
 - and progress, 66, 75, 80 
 
 - and rationalism, 183-187 
 
 - and the Roman State, 66 
 
 - and slavery, 67, 69, 70, 97 
 
 Latin, 95, 96 
 Cicero, 72 
 
 Civilisation, ancient and modern, 64 
 Classes and masses, 49, 83 
 Comte, 37 
 Conditions of human progress, 18-20 
 
 - No rational sanction for, 21-24, 
 
 44-S.i 
 
 Continuity of evolutionary laws, 20 
 Cosmic process and the ethical process, 
 
 115, 128 
 
 D. 
 
 Darwin, 18, 104, 125, 136 
 Darwinism and the Bible, 4 
 
 and the future of religion, 18 
 
 and Mr. Kidd, 16 
 
 - and the theologians, 107 
 Destructive and constructive ideas, 31 
 Diogenes the Cynic, 73 
 
 Drumm end's (Mr.) Ascent of Man, 1-3, 5, 
 16, 103-175 
 
 - assumptions, in, 112, 114, 123 
 
 - cast of mind, 104-106 
 
 - criticism of previous evolutionists, 
 104, no, 147, 167 
 
 - euphemisms, 137 
 
 - fallacies, 103, 113, 114, 122, 123, 126, 
 134, 146, 147, 150, 155, 165 
 
 - false analogies, 108, 109, 123, 164 
 
 - general characteristics, 175 
 
 Jesuitry, 135 
 
 - moral defects, 141, 142 
 
 2O
 
 306 
 
 Index. 
 
 Drummond's (Mr.) Natural Law in the 
 Spiritual World, 103, 104, 170 
 
 E. 
 
 Early Christians, characters of, 69 
 Egoism and nutrition, 111-114, I2 ^ 
 Emotions and the intellect, 5, 61, 99 
 Epictetus, 73 
 
 Ethical systems and evolution, 28, 88 
 Evil, the problem of, 3, 5, 114, 115, 117, 
 
 119-121, 130, 136-144, 171, 262, 263 
 Evolution and environment, 162-171 
 
 - and hunger, 136, 137 
 
 - and love, 117, 128, 135, 147, 149, 172 
 
 - and mental development, 89-91 
 
 and monogamy, 158 
 
 - and theism, 5, 115, 117, 119, 120, 
 
 i3 r 137-144. 171 
 
 (human) not primarily intellectual, 
 88-93 
 
 Evolutionary theory, 4 
 
 F. 
 
 Faith and heresy, 7 
 
 and reason, Savonarola on, 8 
 
 and salvation, 7, 8 
 Farrer, J. A., 71 
 Feelings and ideas, 37 
 Fiske, John, 124, 148 
 Flint, Prof., n 
 
 France and the population question, 92 
 
 French revolution (the) and slavery, 70 
 
 Froude, 63 
 
 Function of religious beliefs in social 
 evolution, 18, 26-28, 34, 35, 52-63 
 
 Fundamental principle of social develop- 
 ment, 23 
 
 G. 
 
 Gallon, Francis, 89 
 
 Geddes and Thomson, 124, 148 
 
 General mind (the) and current science, 30 
 
 Gospels, criticism of the, 276-278 
 
 Greek ethics, 66, 68, 69 
 
 - scepticism, 208 
 
 Greeks, intellectual development of the, 89 
 Grotius, 248 
 
 H. 
 
 Hamilton, 291-293 
 
 Hegel, 234 
 
 History, perverted, 6 
 
 Humanitarianism in the ancient world, 
 
 68-74 
 
 Hume, 293 
 Huxley, 107, 115, 124, 127, 284, 290-294 
 
 I. 
 
 Immaculati* conception (the), 36 
 Incarnation (the), 5, 9, 275-278 
 
 Individual and social interests, 21-24, 2 7. 
 44, 46, 48-50, 52, 53, 60, 65, 75, 84-86, 
 92 
 
 (the) and the species, 127 
 Ingersoll, 30 
 
 Inspiration, 270-275 
 Intellect in evolution, 66 
 Irrationalism, 1-3 
 
 ancient and modern, 3-6 
 
 in the past, 2, 3 
 
 J- 
 
 Jesus according to the Gospels, 70, 174 
 
 K. 
 
 Kaftan, n 
 
 Kant, 234, 238, 239, 240-243, 293 
 
 - and Mr. Kidd, n 
 Kantian apriorism, n 
 
 Kidd (Mr.) and Mr. Drummond, 103, 125 
 Kidd's (Mr.) Social Evolution, 1-7, 10-12, 
 15-99. 279, 303 
 
 - fundamental fallacy of, 6 
 
 - Mr. Robertson's summary of, 98 
 
 - confusion of thought, 15, 16, 30, 44, 
 48, 50 note, 55, 56, 84-86, 92-93 
 
 - estimate of his own work, 16, 45. 63 
 
 ignorance of psychology, 37, 38, 54, 
 61, 62, 67, 99 
 
 incompetence, 6, 17, 47, 97-99 
 
 - irrelevant distinctions, 15 
 
 meaningless phrases, 15, 55, 60 
 
 - mental type, 16, 30, 31, 55 
 
 reply to his critics, 97 
 
 second-hand knowledge of history, 
 17, 62, 67, 68, 73, 78, 82, 94, 98, 99 
 
 - self-contradictions, 41, 43, 47, 50, 
 56-58, 77, 78, 83, 84, 94, 95, 99 
 
 - verbal fallacies, 15, 17, 30, 46, 61 
 Kingsley, 75 
 
 Knight, Prof., 120 
 Kropotkin, Prince, 124, 148 
 
 L. 
 
 Le Conte, 124, 148 
 
 Lecky, Mr., 17, 61, 62, 68-70. 74, 99 
 
 Leibnitz, 234 
 
 Lewes, G. H. , 17, 66 
 
 Littre\ 124, 148 
 
 Locke, 293 
 
 Love, God as, 5, 124 
 
 Luther, 12 
 
 M. 
 
 Mahaffy, Mr., 17, 68, op 
 
 Man in conflict with his own reason, 25, 
 
 26. 36, 37 
 Mans* 1 !, 291 
 Maoris (the), 97 
 Marcus Aurelius, 72, 73 
 Martineau, Dr. J., 24
 
 Index. 
 
 307 
 
 Masses (the) and the conditions of progress, 
 
 49 
 
 Materialism, 296 note 
 Mill, J. S., 4, 91 
 Miracles, 263-268 
 Moleschott, 295 
 "' Moral purpose '' in evolution, 118 
 
 N. 
 
 Natural and spiritual, 3 
 
 Natural selection and over-population, 20, 
 
 38, 49, 83 
 
 and progress, 20, 21, 38, 40, 48, 83, 
 
 84 
 
 and reason, 48 
 
 and religion, 28 
 
 and suffering, 5 
 Naturalism, 5, 109, 191, 203, 205, 210 
 
 - and aesthetic, 192-196 
 
 and ethics, 197-201 
 
 and reason, 257-261 
 
 and religion, 215 
 
 and scepticism, 206 
 
 and science, 205, 207, 208, 210 
 Nature and man, 132, 133 
 
 " Needs" and beliefs, 231, 240 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, n 
 
 Nutrition and reproduction, in, 112 
 
 o. 
 
 Obscurantism (religious) and political 
 
 reaction, 2, 304 
 Optimism, 5 
 
 Organism and environment, 40 
 Over-population and natural selection, 20, 
 
 38, 49- 83 
 
 P. 
 
 Pagan and Christian civilisation, 68-74 
 
 morality, 71-73 
 Pain and theism, 122, 124 
 Paine, 70, 71 
 Pascal, 9, io 
 Pearson, Karl, 204 note, 207 note, 284, 
 
 294-300 
 
 Philosophy and religion in Savonnrola, 7 
 Plato, 74 
 Plutarch, 72, 73 
 Pollock, Sir F., 182 
 Pope, 5 
 Practical judgment and theoretical reason, 
 
 ii 
 
 "Problem of every progressive society," 65 
 Progress, 20, 21, 40, 41, 49 
 Pseudo-philosophy, i, 3 
 Pseudo-science (modern) and primitive 
 
 emotionalism, 4 
 " Purpose" in nature, 116, 117, 151, 152, 
 
 156- T S9 
 
 R. 
 
 Rational and irrational beliefs, 37 
 
 religion impossible, 27, 59 
 
 Rationalism and irrationalism , 2, 6, 7 
 
 and religion, 5, 6 
 Reaction, 2, 294 
 
 Reading evolution backwards, 44, 122, 134, 
 
 IS 1 - T 59 
 
 Reason and authority, 5, 212, 218-223, 236 
 
 - authority of, 3 
 
 - discrediting, 3, 6, 8, 9, 235 
 
 and dogma, 6 
 
 and evolution, 20, 22, 23, 25, 41, 46, 
 50, 51 
 
 and the individual, 22-24, 46 
 
 - and instinct, 37, 53, 54, 62 
 
 - and progress, 22, 23, 42, 46, 50, 
 
 5 2 . 9i 
 
 and religion, 18, 25, 26, 35, 36, 54, 214 
 
 - Savonarola on, 8 
 
 - and social freedom, 2 
 
 - and truth, 2 
 
 Religion as the prime factor in progress, 4, 
 27, 46, 54-63 
 
 as a sanction for social conduct, 25 
 
 - and altruism, 87 
 
 - and evolution, 24, 27, 85 
 
 - in the future, 18, 25, 88 
 
 - natural and revealed, 213, 214 
 
 and science (see Science and religion ) 
 
 - and scepticism, 56-58 
 
 - and the social system, 59 
 Robespierre, 70 
 Robertson, J. M, 98, 170 mite 
 Romanes, 120, 124, 148 
 
 S. 
 
 Sanctions, ethical, 18, 26-28, 62 
 
 - supermtural and ultra-rational, 25, 
 26, 62 
 
 Savonarola, 7-9 
 Scepticism in history, 34-36 
 Science and dogma, 7 
 
 - and religion, i, 3, 4, 17-19, 3<>35. 
 209, 223-235, 247 
 
 - and the philosophy of science, 205, 
 
 2O3 
 
 - and social evolution, 17 
 Seneca, 24, 71, 73, 74 
 
 Seth, Prof., 238, 240, 241, 243 
 
 Sex in evolution, 151-154 
 
 Sidgwick, Prof., 09 
 
 Social evolution, Mr. Kidd's theory of. 
 
 17-29 
 
 Social system, meaning of, 27, 59 
 Socialism, modern, 82-87 
 Socrates, 72, 74 
 Spencer, Herbert, 37, 124, 125, 127, 133, 
 
 148, 235, 256, 280, 284-290 
 Spinoza, 234 
 
 '' Standard of value " in evolution, 40-42 
 Stoic and Epicurean views of happiness, 71 
 Stoicism and the equality of men, 71-74 
 Struggle for existence (the), 20, 21, 106, no, 
 
 114, 116 
 
 - for life, 106, no, 125, 127, 132, 136, 
 
 142. H3
 
 308 
 
 Index. 
 
 Struggle for the life of others, 106, no, 114, 
 
 116, 125, 127, 136 
 Supernatural and ultra-rational, Mr. 
 
 Kidd's confusion of, 61 
 Survival of the fittest, meaning of, 122 
 
 T. 
 
 Teleology, 44, 45, 116 
 Theism and atheism, 254-256 
 
 - and evolution, 5, 120 
 
 fundamental fallacy of, 121, 240 
 
 - and reason, 236-245 
 Thimble-rigging, theological, 9 
 Transcendentalism, 241-244 
 Trinity (the) and reason, 8 
 
 u. 
 
 Ultra-rational and supernatural, Mr. Kidd's 
 
 confusion of, 61 
 Universality as a test of truth, 228-233. 
 
 Villari, 7-9 
 
 V. 
 
 w. 
 
 Weismann, 45, 152-154 
 Wilberforce (Bishop) and the evolutionary 
 theory, 4, 107 
 
 Z. 
 
 Zeno, 73
 
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