Reference has been made already to Mr. Kidd’s work on _Social Evolution_, which, on its publication, attained an extraordinary popularity, and which, whatever its value otherwise, is interesting as a type of contemporary sociological reasoning. It is peculiarly interesting as illustrating the point which we are now discussing. Most of Mr. Kidd’s reasoning, especially in the crucial parts of it, is not {18} only conducted, but is actually represented by a terminology which refers everything to “the race,” “the age,” or “man.” And it would be hard to find better examples in the works of any other writer of the condition of thought underlying the use of these phrases, and of the extraordinary consequences to which it leads. Three examples will be enough. The two first shall be from two other writers, whom Mr. Kidd quotes with admiration; the third shall be from himself. We will begin with the following passage, taken from a contemporary economist, which Mr. Kidd singles out for emphatic approval as “_a very effective statement_” of one of the truths of social science. “_Man_,” so the passage runs, “_is the only animal whose wants can never be satisfied. The wants of every other living thing are uniform and fixed. The ox of to-day aspires no more than did the ox when man first yoked him. . . . But not so with man [himself]. No sooner are his animal wants satisfied, than new wants arise. . . . [He] has but set his feet on the first step of an infinite progression. . . . It is not merely his hunger, but taste, that seeks gratification in food. . . . Lucullus will sup with Lucullus; twelve boars roast on spits that Antony’s mouthful of meat may be done to a turn; every kingdom is ransacked to add to Cleopatra’s charms; and marble colonnades, and hanging gardens, and pyramids that rival the hills, arise._” This passage is taken from Mr. Henry George. {19} Our second example shall be a passage which Mr. Kidd has borrowed from a far more educated thinker—M. Emile de Lavelaye. Mr. Kidd quotes M. de Lavelaye as saying that the eighteenth century brought the following message to “_man_.” “_Thou shalt cease to be the slave of the nobles and despots who oppress thee. Thou shalt be free and sovereign._” But the realisation of the promise thus given has, in the present century, he goes on to say, confronted us with this strange problem, “_How is it that the Sovereign often starves? How is it that those who are held to be the source of power often cannot, even by hard work, provide themselves with the necessaries of life?_”