Now with Mr. Kidd’s views about religion we have nothing to do here. We are concerned only with the extraordinary self-contradiction involved in these his principal lines of argument, and also with the cause which has led to it, and made it possible. At one moment he says that the majority in all progressive communities have been forced to submit to conditions of life that are prejudicial to them, by a powerful minority to whom these conditions are beneficial, and who, if they chose to do so, would still be able to maintain them. At {23} another moment he says that this surprisingly patient majority could have easily “_suspended these conditions_” at any period of its history, and only failed to do so because religion prompted it to forbear. How a contradiction of this kind could have found its way into the reasoning of a really painstaking thinker, and been actually allowed to form the backbone of it, may at first sight seem inexplicable; but it is simply a typical result of the practice we are now considering—that practice, common to all our modern sociologists, of grouping the men they deal with into the largest aggregate possible, and treating mixed classes of men as one single class—“_man_.” 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.