The cause of both definiteness and permanence he finds in the prolongation of infancy, necessitating a relatively long-continued parental care of offspring. The relations so established among near kindred have conserved and strengthened the feelings of affection and the sense of solidarity. Mr. Darwin recognized Mr. Fiske's theory as an important contribution to the subject. It must be said in criticism, however, that Mr. Fiske did not see all the implications of prolonged infancy, or develop his theory into all its possibilities. Admitting that the prolongation of infancy was probably a factor in the evolution of stable family relationships, and therefore played a part in strengthening the social sentiments, we must remember that the actual social life and solidarity of the gregarious group was probably a chief cause of the prolongation of infancy itself. Demanding, as it did, a relatively keen exercise of brain and nervous system in communication, imitation and cooperation, it operated to select for survival those individuals that varied in the direction of high brain power and its correlated long infancy. But this is to say that society was a factor in the evolution of man before man became a factor in the evolution of society, and the difference is important.
Moreover, Mr. Fiske's theory no more explained the actual origins of sympathy and cooperation than Bagehot's and Darwin's theories had done. Neither, for that matter, did Sutherland's account of "The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct,"[1] although Sutherland got somewhat farther back when he called attention to the reaction of parental care of offspring upon the evolution of ganglia making up the sympathetic nervous system.
At this stage the Darwinian interpretation of social origins had arrived when, in 1894, there was published a work which had an almost sensational reception. Hailed as a new gospel by minds desiring above all things to find some solid ground for religious convictions that had seemingly suffered violence in the course of evolutionist warfare, this book by scientific critics was treated with scant respect. These critics, I venture to think, were in error. For, in fact, the "Social Evolution" of Benjamin Kidd raised a profoundly important question, and gave an answer to it which, while half wrong, was probably half right, and the half that was right was a real and important contribution to knowledge. Stated in the fewest possible words, Mr. Kidd's query was this: Since natural selection saves the few and kills the many, why does not the great majority of mankind try to curb competition and put an end to progress? Thus presented, Mr. Kidd's question is the radical and fearless form of a question which socialism asks in a form that, by comparison, is conservative and half-hearted. And Mr. Kidd's answer,
- ↑ Published in 1898, a worthy product of Australian scholarship, which its author described as largely a detailed expansion of the fourth and fifth chapters of "The Descent of Man."
