It is easy to see precisely how Mr. Kidd’s mind has worked. In the first part of his argument he divides progressive communities into two sections, which he calls respectively “the power-holding classes” or the “successfuls,” and the “excluded classes” or the “unsuccessfuls” and he declares that the latter would naturally desire to suspend the conditions of progress, whilst the former would naturally desire, and are also able to maintain them. But when he pushes his argument farther, and advances to the proposition that if reason had been “man’s” sole guide, the conditions of progress would have been suspended over and over again, he is enabled to take this extraordinary step only because his thought and his terminology undergo an unconscious metamorphosis. He forgets his original analysis altogether. He merges the two classes, so sharply contrasted by him, into one. He argues and {24} thinks about them both, under the single category of “man”; he builds up his conclusions by joining together the very things which, in arranging his premises, he had so carefully put asunder; and the result of his speculation reduced to its simplest terms is this—that “man” could have done, at any period of his history, and if reason had been his sole guide, actually would have done, something that was against the interests of the stronger part of him, and beyond the power of the weaker.
The reader will not find much difficulty in understanding that if sociologists persist in reasoning thus, they are hardly likely to arrive at any conclusion sufficiently definite to guide us in the practical difficulties of life. It may be urged, however, that such language as we have been considering, though used by scientific writers, is intended itself to be rhetorical rather than scientific, or that it betrays the inaccuracy of this or that individual thinker, instead of arising from a fundamental error in method. If any one thinks this, he shall soon be disabused of his opinion. The reader shall now be presented with a brief summary of the method deliberately followed, and of some of the conclusions arrived at by that distinguished thinker who has done more than any one else to impart to sociology the character which it at present possesses; and the error which lies at the bottom of the reasoning we have been just considering shall there be exhibited, systematically exemplified, and explicitly and elaborately defended. It is perhaps {25} hardly necessary to say that the thinker thus referred to is Mr. Herbert Spencer.
We will then follow Mr. Spencer’s reasoning from the beginning, as set forth in his works; and before consulting his monumental Principles of Sociology we will turn to his Study of Sociology, a smaller and preparatory treatise, in which the methods adopted by him in his main inquiry are explained. He opens this treatise with declaring that until recent years any scientific treatment of social phenomena was impossible; and it was impossible, he says, for two definite reasons. These were the prevalence of two utterly false theories, both of which precluded the idea that anything like law or order of a calculable kind were prevalent in the social sphere. One of these theories was “the theocratic theory,” the other what he calls “the great-man theory.”
The theocratic theory is that which explains all social change by reference to the direct and arbitrary interference of a Deity; and if this be adopted, Mr. Spencer has no difficulty in showing that anything like a social science must be necessarily looked on as impossible: for the only thread by which social phenomena are connected will in that case be hidden in the will of an inscrutable Being, which may indeed be made known to us by revelation, but which is not susceptible of being either observed or calculated. This theory, however, in its cruder form, at all events, is, says Mr. Spencer, being fast discarded by everybody—even by the theologically {26} orthodox; and the really important foe which social science has to fight against is the great-man theory, not the theocratic. Accordingly, it is by a criticism of the great-man theory that he introduces us to the theory of society, which is in his estimation true, and which alone presents social phenomena to us as amenable to scientific treatment.
The great-man theory is summed up by him in the following quotation from Carlyle: “As I take it, universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” “This,” observes Mr. Spencer, “not perhaps distinctly formulated, but everywhere implied, is the belief in which nearly all are brought up”; and it is, he declares, as incompatible as the theocratic theory itself with any belief in the possibility of a social science, or any comprehension of what such a science is; for either the great man is regarded as the miraculous instrument of the Deity, a kind of “deputy-God,” in which case we have “theocracy once removed”; or else his greatness, though regarded as a natural phenomenon, is regarded as one whose occurrence is so far fortuitous, that a great man of any given kind of greatness might appear in one age or nation just as well as in another; and in this case, if social changes depend on the great man’s actions, these changes will be as fortuitous as the great man’s own appearance, and will as little admit of any scientific calculation.
If, however, the great man is regarded as a {27} natural phenomenon at all, if he is not to be looked upon as a species of incalculable angel, this idea of his fortuitous appearance is, says Mr. Spencer, plainly quite untenable. The great man, unless he differs miraculously from other men, is produced as they are, in accordance with natural laws, and, like them, owes his greatness to his near and remote progenitors, just as a negro owes to his, his facial angle, his blackness, and his woolly hair. “Who would expect,” Mr. Spencer asks, “that a Newton might be born of a Hottentot family, or that a Milton might spring up among the Andamanese?” The theory, then, which explains social changes by referring them to the great men whose names are connected with their initiation, will, unless it is regarded as a theory of perpetual miracle, be recognised as inadequate, even by those who have hitherto held it, when once they have realised the absurd supposition which it implies. The great man, whatever his seeming influence, is merely the agent of other influences which are behind him. He merely transmits a shock, like a man pushed by a crowd. Even supposing what Mr. Spencer entirely denies to be the case, that he could really “remake his society,” his society none the less must have previously made him, and supplied him with those conditions which rendered his career possible; and therefore, of any changes which he may popularly be said to have caused, he is merely “the proximate initiator,” not the true cause at all; and “if,” says Mr. Spencer, “there is to be anything {28} like a real explanation of such changes, it must be sought (not in the great man himself), but in the aggregate of social conditions, out of which he and they have arisen.” Except, perhaps, in the military struggles of primitive savage tribes, “new institutions, new activities, new ideas, all,” he says, “unobtrusively make their appearance, without the aid of any king or legislator; and if you wish to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it, should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the Greedy, and Napoleon the Treacherous.” And he points his moral by observing, with a certain philosophic tartness, that there is no surer index of a man’s “mental sanity” than the degree of contempt which, as a scientific thinker, he feels for the class of facts which the biography of individuals offers him.
Such, then, being Mr. Spencer’s theory of the way in which social phenomena must be regarded, if we mean to make them the subject of anything like scientific study, let us turn to his magnum opus, The Principles of Sociology, and see how, and with what results, he puts his theory of study into practice. This immense work, full of encyclopædic detail as it is, contains certain general and comparatively simple conclusions, which can with sufficient clearness be expressed in a short summary, and which are typical of the character and the contents of Mr. Spencer’s sociology as a whole. These general conclusions constitute in {29} outline the entire history of human progress from the dawn of man’s existence to the industrial civilisation of to-day.
The determining factors in all social phenomena are, says Mr. Spencer, primarily of two kinds—the “external” and the “internal.” The former consist of some of the various physical circumstances in which each community or collection of men is placed; the latter consist of the characters and constitutions of the men themselves. In the history of each community the chief of the external factors are these: the climate of the region which the community occupies; the cultivability of this region; its geological and geographical character; the way in which the fauna and flora natural to it are distributed; and the character of the other communities by which the community in question is surrounded. One of the first generalisations, says Mr. Spencer, to which social science leads is this—that progress can begin only in climates and regions where the production of the necessaries of life is sufficiently easy to leave men leisure and energy available for other work; and all progress did as a fact begin in those parts of the earth where the maintenance of life was easy.
He goes on to show, however, that the initiation of progress does not require only that the men concerned in it should inhabit a region in which the production of necessaries is easy and leaves them abundant leisure. It is equally essential that the men themselves should possess an energetic {30} temperament, which will not suffer them to devote their leisure to idleness, but will make it the starting-point for some further activity. Now this energetic temperament is the special gift of climate. So, to a great extent, is the ease with which necessaries are obtained from the soil; but whilst the fertility of the soil is dependent on the climate being hot, the requisite energetic temperament is dependent on the climate being dry. “The evidence,” says Mr. Spencer, “justifies this inference. . . . On glancing over a general rain-map of the world, there will be seen an almost continuous area, marked ‘rainless district,’ extending across North Africa, Arabia, Persia, and all through Thibet and Mongolia; and from within, or from the borders of this district, have come all the conquering races of the Old World.”
But the full operation of climate on human progress is not intelligible till a further climatic fact is considered. Though in hot and dry climates the production of necessaries is easy, in climates that are hot and moist their production is still easier. It is these last that are really the gardens of the world, and that offered to primeval man the easiest and most attractive homes. The original inhabitants, however, of these favoured localities not only profited by their conditions, but also ultimately suffered from them. Whilst the fertility of their habitat pampered them, its moisture destroyed their energy; and in process of time they were subjugated by other races, who, cradled in drier climates, {31} retained their energy unimpaired. In this natural descent of the stronger races on “the richer and more varied habitats” of the weaker, and the consequent super-position of one race over another, we see the origin of slavery, and of all the ancient civilisations that reposed upon it.