The Science of Power

Abstract

THIS posthumous book is a vigorous, sometimes impassioned, statement of convictions, rather than a reasoned argument. In fact, the author did not believe much in reason; he did not find that it led to a knowledge of Truth. The general thesis is that we are at the beginning of a world-revolution; we have reached the limit of a disastrous pagan retrogression; Western knowledge has proved a cultural failure; we have to begin afresh. This time our ideal must be social integration, not individual efficiency as fighting animals; the integrating principle must be found, not in reason, but in collective emotion—“the emotion of the ideal”; we must cease concentrating attention on our “inborn heredity”; we must realise the limitless importance of “social heredity”; we must turn from man to woman as the psychic centre of power in the new social integration; we must seek first, not the kingdom of man, but the kingdom of heaven. There is good counsel here, we think; but the book offends even the sympathetic reader by its extremism.

The Science of Power.

By Benjamin Kidd. Pp. 306. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1918.) Price 6s. net.