BOOKS.

IT was not possible in our first notice to give much more than an introduction to Mr. Kidd's work. That being so, we said little of any defects it may possess. It is not without -faults. The style is sometimes a little laboured and diffuse, the diction in one or two instances not a little odd. The formulae in which the main positions are summed up and the transitions of the argument made, are rather awkwardly expressed, notably perhaps in the last and crotvn- ing instance. But when quite new thoughts are struggling to condense themselves into strict definitions this is not un- natural. There is, too, a good deal of repetition ; but this, again, is in some ways as much of a help as a hindrance when the mind has to hold certain principles not easy of distinct conception or statement constantly in view. And all these minor blemishes are of little importance compared with the drift and sweep of the whole, which are irresistible. If the formulation halts, the general argument develops itself with great and growing force ; if here and there the writing is inadequate, the general eloquence is very marked, and kindles again and again into a glow of beauty and intensity.

What is of more importance is the variety of points touched, the novelty and breadth of the hypothesis and its application. It is no less than a new Philosophy of History. Doubtless Mr. Kidd, like other framers of hypotheses, is tempted to make everything fit into his scheme, and we are almost startled by the completeness of his system. In our first notice we spoke of his explanation of the past, tracing the stream of history as it has rushed onward, ever increasing in volume and momentum, showing how combination after combination has formed itself and then burst in the moment of completion. Gradually the individual has withered and the world has become more and more as the family, the tribe, the city, the nation, the Empire, have formed in turn the successive terms of the series. For this is the enthralling interest of his theory, that it accounts for the very moment at which we stand to-day in the process of the world's develop- ment.

The essence of Mr. Kidd's argument is, then, that two, or strictly speaking, three, interests, all necessarily mutually con- nected, have continually battled in moulding the life and progress of all living beings, and among them of man,—the interests of the past, the present, and of the future. Each generation in realising itself and satisfying its own appetite finds itself hampered by the past, by the arrangements made selfishly in its own interest by the preceding generation ; and unless it acts and feels differently towards its children it becomes in turn their tyrant. Its own selfish instinct is to free itself from the past, to be careless of the future. " Posterity ! What has posterity ever done for me ? Why should I do anything for posterity ? " This is a reasonable, if selfish, question; and if, as Hume and Bentham put it, morality demanded, not self-denial, but only "just calculation of self- interest well understood," there could be but one answer. But the instinct of humanity has always been larger than this just calculation, and this larger instinct has been right. Again and again selfishness has seemed to prevail, but in the moment of prevailing it has perished. To say "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," is, indeed, to die on the morrow, for moral suicide is followed by physical death. "They pros- pered while they fought for victory ; they perished when they had achieved it." This stern dictum of Aristotle's about the Spartans of old is true not of Sparta only but of Rome, and of every race and nation which has been satisfied to think only of enjoying the spoils of victory. As Lord Rosebery put it the other day, "the nation which is content is lost." Looking back over the long record of the past, Mr. Kidd is perhaps inclined to exaggerate the difference between the predominance of the interest of the present in ancient history, and the growth of the predominance of the interest of the future in later days. As he himself Beth, both have from the first existed side by • • nisei*. of Western Civilisation: being the First V01141114 of a System of Boolistionary Philosophy. By Benjamin Kidd. London: Macmillan and Co. Da.] side in the germ. But each has had its turn of pre- dominance. Certainly the interests of the future were little

in evidence until the advent of Christianity. That was indeed a new departure, a real "conversion" of the world's mind from past and present to future. In the rhetoric of the French poet-

" Una immense esp6 ranee a traverse lea clear, lifalgre nous vers lea astres taut lever lea year."

The hope may have been all an illusion, but alas ! if it was so, for it made men for ever discontented with the present. "It opened," in Mr. Kidd's language, "an antithesis in the mind never again to be closed."

Rome at first resisted Christianity, then she embraced it. But now the interests of the present again revived, and Christianity itself took on the form of a selfish, worldly, we may almost say pagan, policy. Yet another upheaval was necessary. Once more the instinct of man for some wider aim and juster scheme broke out. This is the real meaning alike of Renaissance and Reformation. Yet both, being human, retained the taint of selfishness. The Renaissance in men like Machiavelli sought to revive paganism. The Re- formers in systems like Calvinism strove to repeat in a narrow sphere the worldly and persecuting domination of the Church.

Only late did the idea of toleration as a religious duty, as a positive commandment and not a compromise of expediency,

win its way into actuality. Then came once more a reaction, the long reign of Utilitarianism lasting into our own memory, the reign of the old-fashioned laissez-faire Liberalism. That, too,

has had its day, and is seen now to be as bankrupt in thought as it is in practice. That it is effete in practice is becoming clearer even as we write. We see this in the concrete in the ideals of Empire, of an Empire, too, of a new sort, vaguely formulated. hardly defined, but felt intensely, as something more generous as well as more profitable than those we have outgrown.

For now, as Mr. Kidd philosophically puts it, "on the horizon of modern thought we are in sight of the fact that in the progress of the world the days of nationalities in the old sense are numbered." We are not claiming that the British Empire must necessarily succeed. It may be broken up in battle and disappear. But if it does not, some other will. Larger " combines " in politics, as in trade, will triumph, and the smaller will die out. If Mr. Kidd is right, though the application is ours, not his, the Irish may struggle like fractious children, but "Ireland a nation" is as impossible as Florence or Frankfort a. nation was yesterday, or Birmingham a nation would be to-day. Home-rule, if it means local government within an Empire,

is as possible as vigorous municipal life ; if it means in- dependence, it is contra naturam. Ireland may join, if she can, the United States, or some new arrangement

of Europe under Catholic France or Protestant Germany, or set up, if she can, an Empire of her own, but an Empire or part of an Empire she must be. In the very same way, as both sides have felt, and in a sense it is the underlying cause of the struggle, an Afrikander United States was, and con- ceivably still might be, a possibility ; the Transvaal Republic as a nation without prejudice to the British Empire could not last.

It is, however, to America we must turn if we wish to see the last word in the evolution of society "writ large." America, so often considered the paradise of Protection, has from the first enjoyed Free-trade within an area as vast and various as Europe proper. The result literally fascinates and almost appals Mr. Kidd and the reader whom be carries along with him. The fortunes of her multi-millionaires, "equalling the revenues of a first-class State " ; the enormous fighting power of her vast and ever-increasing "combines," of which an American politician says, "I am satisfied that the petitions, prayers, protestations, and profanity of sixty mil lions of people are not as strong to control legislative actior as the influence and effort of the head of a single combine with fifty millions of dollars at his back," are indeed over. powering. But to the philosophic eye the cause whick creates all this is still more significant :—

" It is the immeasurably deeper intensity of the economic and industrial conflict prevailing over the widest area of freedom hitherto cleared in the world which more than any other cause and more than all causes together, have equipped the people of the United States with the irresistible potency they are about to

exercise in the world in the economie era upon which we are entering."

What is to confront a potency like this ? "A yet more hideous monster, the yellow peril of Chinese cheap labour," say some, "spoken of by Charles Pearson, the prophet." No, replies Mr. Kidd. That prophecy was naturally alarming to those who saw only the dominance of the present and of economic interests.

Were the struggle for existence only an economic struggle, and dominated by selfish conceptions of the present, this might well be accomplished. But it is not so. The modern community of the higher races, of which the United States is the newest and largest type, carries in its breast the preserva- tive against its self-destruction. It is the unselfish ideal of the future, of sanctions and aims beyond the present. It is to be seen in the action of the State legislating against purely economic arrangements, enacting equality, forbidding child. labour, excluding the Chinese immigrant against its own economic interest, realising, to use words which Mr. Kidd borrows from a thinker for whom he has a deep regard, Professor Henry Sidgvfick, that "the distribution of wealth in a well-ordered community should aim at realising political justice."

Such, in Mr. Kidd's view, is the actual course of social evolu- tion, of ethical correcting economic development. What of its philosophic sanction ? To what kind of philosophy will the instinct as it trembles into consciousness naturally turn ? Few passages are more characteristic or more eloquent than that in which Mr. Kidd deals with the philosophy of Kant. The view

that truth and right are ultimately dependent on something "lying beyond the limit of the understanding," that they are

emphatically not empirical or utilitarian, suits exactly with his own intuition :— " By one bound," he says energetieally, the mind which has followed his argument "springs to the very centre of Kant's posit ion The meaning towards which Kant endeavoured to lift his generation has become no more than the simple com- monplace of a new era of knowledge Almost with a glance the intellectual vision takes in the whole content of the position of which Kant, central figure as he must always remain in Western thought, actually essayed te give us a plan in the gaunt and cumbrous survey of the Transcendental Philosophy."

We stand, then, to-day, in the ages, like Moses on Pisgah, or still more like stout Cortes staring at the Pacific on the peak in Darien. We gaze out westward on the illimitable ocean of the future ; we are becoming conscious, our intellect is over- taking the evolutionary process which we have so long instinc- tively pursued. The "increasing purpose "which, as the poet says, runs through the ages becomes both more apparent and more intelligible ; the far-off divine event more believable. Such is the trend and suggestion of Mr. Kidd's volume. That he has proved his position, with the multitude of observations and inferences on which it rests, it would be premature to assert. That his synthesis is final, is in its own nature, and in the nature of things and thought, impossible, and what he would neither wish nor claim. Indeed, we shall look eagerly for his own development hereafter of the theory he suggests, and for its verification or modification by further study, and still more by the progress of events. But for its suggestion, its novelty, and its brilliancy, be it even only a quarter true, we must thank him profoundly.