Note 144 — Chapter XVIII

Shortly before his death Mr Kidd published (in the year 1918) his Science of Power. In this book he showed a complete change of face on the question of the importance of innate qualities. He denied all importance to changes of innate qualities, whether for better or worse, because, as he maintained, “the social heredity transmitted through social culture is infinitely more important to a people than any heredity inborn in the individuals thereof” (p. 273); and he made in this book a violent and scornful attack upon the late Francis Galton and upon all who follow him in believing that the decay or improvement of the racial qualities of a people are of importance for its prosperity and development, and who, therefore, approve of Galton’s effort to found a science of Eugenics. Kidd did not anywhere in his last book acknowledge that he had made this very great change of principle, which completely undermines the whole argument of his Social Evolution, but complacently suggested that, as Newton and Darwin are regarded as the fathers of modern physical and biological science respectively, so in the future Kidd will be regarded as having founded anew in his Social Evolution the science of society. On reading the Science of Power after having written this chapter, I was amazed at this assumption on behalf of a book whose most fundamental doctrine the author had himself renounced, and I turned again to the earlier work to verify my brief summary of its argument. I confess that it is not easy to make sure of what the author was driving at. But I find that Kidd, in discussing the influence of religious systems, wrote (on p. 307) “Natural selection seems, in short, to be steadily evolving in the race that type of character upon which these forces act most readily and efficiently; that is to say, it is evolving religious character in the first instance, and intellectual character only as a secondary product in association with it.” On the following page I find—“The race would, in fact, appear to be growing more and more religious,” and “a preponderating element in the type of character which the evolutionary forces at work in human society are slowly developing, would appear to be the sense of reverence.” And there are many other passages which, in spite of the habitual lack of precision of Kidd’s language, can only be interpreted to mean that the improvement of moral or religious character, on which he so strongly insists as a feature of recent centuries, involves and depends upon improvement of innate qualities in the mass of the people.