Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/323

Rh equally unwarrantable assumption, to exclude from rationalism all that belongs to ethics.

Now I say plainly this is juggling. Mr. Kidd packs the cards in favor of social efficiency, which means ethics, which means a fund of altruism, which means supernatural sanctions, which means religious dogmatism, which means Protestantism. The great discovery that the real aim of social evolution is the development of higher social efficiency and the survival of races in proportion to their social efficiency, is nothing else than a purely verbal proposition. It does not need a big book to tell us that the object of social development is to develop social qualities.

All this mixed thought comes from dabbling in a brand new physiological theory like that of Weismann, which, at any rate in the strict form in which Mr. Kidd accepts it, stands upon the miraculous position that a portion of the human organism, to wit, the germ plasm, can be in organic connection with the rest of the body and yet can remain wholly unaffected by the chemical and physiological experiences that body undergoes during a life time—that this germ plasm is sustained by the body and is yet untouched by the influences which affect the quality of its sustenance, an assumption which for pure effrontery has no parallel outside the Athanasian creed, and which no amount of direct inductive evidence could establish or even render conceivable.

What then is the interest and worth of this book? Setting aside the literary skill, which is considerable, and the thoughtful handling of many interesting modern topics which lie across the path of the argument, there is evidently something in Mr. Kidd's central theory which appeals strongly to a large number of fairly educated people. What is it? The answer I think is this. There has been a rapidly growing feeling among large numbers of those who still cleave to the orthodox churches, that the intellectual foundations of religion have slipped away. They are not rationalists, most of them have never seriously examined the rational basis of their creed, but the disturbing influences of rational criticism have reached them in the shape of this vague uneasy feeling. Now these people, morally weak because they have relied upon dogmatic supports of conduct, are ready to