and habit, he might reasonably have attributed the alleged improvement to such influence. But he sternly rejected that principle and proclaimed himself a rigid exponent of the Neo-Darwinian school, which attributes all racial changes to selection. He even assumed the truth of the doctrine that, in the absence of selective processes making for its improvement, every race must inevitably degenerate. It might, then, have been expected that he would have attempted to show how Christianity can be supposed to have favoured the improvement by selection of the innate religious tendencies. Yet he made no attempt in this direction. He seems to have been aware that his view encounters a great difficulty in the fact that Christianity powerfully swayed the peoples of Europe for many centuries during which little or no progress in civilisation was effected, whereas rapid and accelerating progress of many kinds has marked the last three centuries. He sought to meet this difficulty by attributing the rapid progress of recent centuries to the influence of the Protestant form of Christianity, alleging that it promotes the evolution of the religious tendencies more powerfully than other forms. Yet this view of the matter, even if it were acceptable, would leave the Reformation itself quite unexplained. Kidd seems to hint that, throughout the earlier centuries of the dominance of the Christian religion in Europe, it was slowly effecting the alleged improvement of the religious tendencies in the mass of the people, without these being able to manifest themselves in social life, until they somehow broke loose at the time of the Reformation and began for the first time to operate on a great scale and with tremendous force. The view might have some plausibility coming from the mouth of a disciple of Lamarck, but it cannot be reconciled with Kidd’s strictly Neo-Darwinian principles. There is, then, nothing in Kidd’s grandiloquent and loosely reasoned, but always interesting pages, to justify any belief in the improvement of the innate moral disposition during the historic period[144].