Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd.

  • Benjamin Kidd
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    46/408 page 34
    CHAP. it is strictly true, that if each of us were allowed by the conditions of life to follow his own inclinations, the average of one generation would have no tendency whatever to rise beyond the average of the preceding one, but distinctly the reverse. This is not a peculiarity of man; it has been a law of life from the beginning, and it continues to be a universal law which we have no power to alter. How then is progress possible ? The answer to this question is the starting-point of all the science of human society. 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. In the human species, as in every other species which has ever existed, no two individuals of a generation are alike in all respects ; there is infinite variation within certain narrow limits. Some are slightly above the average in a particular direction as others are below it; and it is only when conditions prevail which are favour- able to a preponderating reproduction of the former that advance in any direction becomes possible. To formulate this as the immutable law of progress since the beginning of life has been one of the principal results of the biological science of the nineteenth century ; and recent work, including the remarkable contributions of Professor Weismann in Germany, has all tended to establish it on foundations which are not now likely to be shaken. To put it in words used by Professor Flower in speaking of human society, “ Progress has been due to the opportunity of those individuals who are a little superior in some respects to their fellows, of asserting their superiority and of continuing to live and of pro- mulgating as an inheritance that superiority.”1 The
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