CHAPTER III

GREAT MEN, AS THE TRUE CAUSE OF PROGRESS

It is evident that an error of the kind now in question does not represent the carelessness of the untrained thinker. It is nothing if not deliberate; and indeed Mr. Spencer admits that it is altogether in opposition to the opinions which men naturally hold. Accordingly, the arguments by which he and his followers justify it, and have actually imposed it on all the sociological thinkers of their generation, require, before we reject them, to be examined with the utmost care.

Let us then turn our attention once again to the grounds on which Mr. Spencer refuses to admit the great or exceptional man as a true factor in the production of social change. If the reader will reflect upon the account that has been already given of Mr. Spencer’s arguments in connection with this point, he will find that Mr. Spencer rejects the great man for two reasons, which are not only distinct, but are, when interpreted closely, not entirely consistent with each other. One of these reasons is that the great, or exceptional man does {56} not really produce those great changes of which he is nevertheless “_the proximate initiator_”; the other is that, outside the sphere of primitive warfare, he does not even proximately initiate any great changes at all. The first of these two contentions is expressed with sufficient clearness in his statement “_if there is to be anything like a real explanation_” of those changes of which the great man is the “_proximate initiator_”—changes, to quote an example which he himself gives, such as those produced by the conquests of Julius Cæsar—this explanation must be sought not in the great man himself, but “_in the aggregate of social conditions out of which he and they_ (i.e. _the changes commonly supposed to have been produced by him_) _have arisen_.” Mr. Spencer’s second contention is expressed in the following passage, the concluding words of which have been quoted already, but on which it will be presently necessary for us to insist again. “_Recognising_,” he says, “_what truth there is in the great-man theory, we may say that, if limited to the history of primitive societies, the histories of which are histories of little else than endeavours to destroy one another, it approximately expresses fact in representing the great leader as all-important. But its immense error lies in the assumption that what was once true was true for ever, and that a relation of ruler and ruled which was good at one time is good for all time. Just as fast as the predatory activity of early tribes diminishes, just as fast as large aggregates are formed, so fast do societies {57} begin to give origin to new activities, new ideas, all of which unobtrusively make their appearance without the aid of any king or legislator_.”

It will be necessary to deal with these two contentions separately; and we will begin with the second, as set forth in the words just quoted. We shall find it valuable as an example of that singular confusion of thought by which all the reasoning of our sociologists with regard to this question is vitiated. Mr. Spencer speaks of an “_immense error_” which he is pointing out and correcting. The “_immense error_” in reality is to be found in his own conception. It is hard to imagine anything more arbitrary and more gratuitously false than the contrast which he here draws between the actions of men in primitive war, for the success of which he admits a great leader to have been essential, and their various actions and activities as manifested in peaceful progress, which, he contends, neither require leadership nor exhibit traces of its influence. We are at this moment altogether waiving the question of how far the great leader, when he is the proximate cause of the military successes of his tribe, is their cause in any deeper sense. It is enough for us now to take Mr. Spencer’s admission that the leader is really the cause, in some sense or other, of the social changes connected with early warfare; and, keeping to this sense, let us consider in what possible way less causality can be attributed to the actions of great men and leaders in the sphere of peaceful progress. {58}

“_A primitive society_,” if it is to become powerful in war—this Mr. Spencer admits—must have a great leader to direct it. But what precisely is it that such a leader is and does? Such a leader leads, because he is one mind or personality impressing for the moment its superior qualities on many minds or personalities. He supplies the fighting men of his society with an intelligence not their own—often with a courage, a presence of mind, and a resolution. He dictates to them the directions in which their feet are to carry them; the manner in which they are to group themselves; the movements of their hands and arms. He gives the word, and a thousand men dig trenches. He gives the word again, and a thousand men wield swords; now he makes them advance; now he makes them halt; and the measure of his greatness as a leader is to be found in those results which, by directing the action of all these men, he elicits from it.

And now from the triumphs of war let us turn to those of peace. “_These_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_unlike the former, make their appearance unobtrusively, without the aid of any king or legislator_.” It may, no doubt, be true that they do appear unobtrusively in the sense that they are not accompanied by trumpets and drums and tom-toms. A factory for the production of toffee, or of trimmings for ladies’ petticoats does not require an Ivan the Terrible to direct it, nor are Mr. Spencer’s sentences as he writes them punctuated by discharges of artillery. But if the essence of kingship and {59} leadership is to command the actions of others, the larger part of the progressive activities of peace, and the arts and products of civilisation, result from and imply the influence of kings and leaders, in essentially the same sense as do the successes of primitive war, the only difference being that the kings are here more numerous, and though they do not wear any arms or uniforms, are incomparably more autocratic than the kings and czars who do.

As a particularly clear illustration of this important truth, let us take Mr. Spencer himself, and place him before his own eyes as an autocratic king or ruler. In certain respects he is so; and it is only because he is so that he has been able to give, through his books, his thoughts and theories to the world. For let us examine any one of his volumes and consider what it is, in so far as it differs from any other volume—let us say from a treatise on the cutting of trousers, or an attack on the Spencerian philosophy—which is printed in similar type on pages of the same size. It differs solely in the order in which the letters have been arranged by the hands of the compositors; and its value as a work of philosophy consequently depends altogether on a certain complicated series of movements which the hands of the compositors have made. And how has this prolonged series of minute movements been secured? It has been secured by the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer, through his manuscript, has given the compositors a prolonged series of orders, which their hands, day after day, have been obliged to obey {60} passively. He has been as absolute a master of all their professional actions as ever was the most arbitrary general of the professional actions of his soldiery; and there is absolutely no difference in point of command and obedience between the compositors who, at Mr. Spencer’s bidding, put into type the words “_homogeneity_” and “_the Unknowable_” and the Guards who charged the French at the bidding of the Duke of Wellington.

Precisely the same thing is true of all scientific inventions—not indeed of inventions as mere ideas and discoveries, but of inventions and discoveries applied practically to the service of civilisation. The mere discovery of certain properties belonging to material substances, or the thinking out of some new machine or process, may be the work of one man, who has command over nobody except himself. But the moment he proceeds to make his machine or process useful—to apply it to the purpose of actual business or manufacture—he is obliged to secure for himself an entire army of mercenaries, who act under his orders in precisely the same way as soldiers act under the orders of the military leader, or as the compositors act under the orders of Mr. Spencer. When the electric telegraph was supplemented by the invention of the telephone, telephones were produced, and could have been produced, only by a multitude of men performing a series of manual actions which were different in detail from anything they had performed before, and which, if it had not been for the inventor, would never {61} have been performed at all. They filed or they cast pieces of metal into new shapes; with these pieces of metal they connected in new order pieces of other materials, such as wood and vulcanite, the shape of these last being new and special also; and every piece of material shaped or connected with another piece was the exact resultant of so many manual movements made in passive obedience to the inventor’s autocratic orders. It was only because his orders were obeyed with such humble fidelity and completeness that these movements resulted in telephones, enriching the world with a new convenience, and not in the old-fashioned telegraphic machines, or in penholders, or vulcanite inkstands, or even in useless heaps of shavings and brass filings. And the same is the case with every invention or contrivance which has helped to build up the fabric of modern material civilisation.

Civilisation, however, even in its most material sense, does not consist of contrivances and inventions only. “_The one operation_,” says Mill, “_of putting things into fit places . . . is all that man does, or can do, with matter. He has no other means of acting on it than by moving it._” But valuable as this formula is, it is not sufficiently comprehensive; for there is another economic process which, to the ordinary mind at all events, is hardly suggested by such a phrase as “_to move matter_.”

The process referred to consists in the moving of men. What is meant by the distinction here drawn is this—that the industrial efficiency of a community {62} does not depend solely on the muscles of the manual workers being given a right direction, so that they shall shape material objects in such and such a way; but it depends also on the movements which are prescribed to the men, being prescribed to the men best fitted to perform them, and being prescribed to them in such order that when each movement has to be made, the men told off to make it shall be ready to make it at the moment. Here we see part of the secret of the success of the great contractor.

The importance of these considerations becomes all the clearer to us when we reflect on the fact that the mere production of commodities, and the production of the means of production, form but a part of the processes which advance, maintain, and indeed constitute civilisation. A part almost equally large consists in the rendering of various personal services, which often, no doubt, involve the utilisation of improved appliances, but which almost as often are neither more nor less than the performance of actions of a simple and ordinary kind, the merit and demerit, the wastefulness or the economy of which depend on their being performed with absolute punctuality and despatch. A good example of this is the case of a large hotel. Whether a large hotel is carried on at a profit or at a loss depends almost entirely on this question of personal management. The success of a successful manager does not depend on his capacity for inventing new methods of waiting, of cooking, or of making beds. It depends on his {63} capacity for organising his staff of cooks, waiters, and chamber-maids. This is well expressed by that most significant American saying, “He’s a smart man, but he couldn’t keep a hotel”; the meaning being that one of the most important, and at the same time one of the rarest faculties required for maintaining a complicated civilisation like our own is the faculty by which, given a number of tasks, one man governs a number of men in the act of cooperatively performing them.

Examples of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied, but those just adduced are quite sufficient to prove the sole point insisted on at the present moment—namely, that whatever be the part (and Mr. Spencer admits it to be “_all-important_”) which the great man plays as a leader in primitive warfare, a part precisely similar in kind is played by other great men in the peaceful processes, and, above all, in the progress of civilisation.

And now, having dealt with this point, let us turn to Mr. Spencer’s other contention—his contention namely that, whatever the part may be, and however seemingly important, which the great man plays in producing social changes, he is, in any case, nothing but their “_proximate initiator_”;—that “_they have their chief cause in the generations he descended from_”;—and that if there is to be anything like a real and scientific explanation of them, it must be sought in the aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen, and not in the great man’s personality as revealed to us by any {64} records of his life, or by any analysis of his peculiar faculties.

We have already seen in a general way how this feat of merging the great man in “_the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen_” is performed by Mr. Spencer himself. Let us now turn for a moment to three other writers who, though differing from him as to certain of his conclusions, have with regard to this particular point done little else than popularise and apply his teaching.

“_It needs only a little reflection_,” writes Mr. Kidd, “_to enable us to perceive that the marvellous accomplishments of modern civilisation are primarily the measure of the social stability and social efficiency, and not of the intellectual pre-eminence of the peoples who have produced them. . . . For it must be remembered that even the ablest men amongst us, whose names go down to history connected with great discoveries and inventions, have each in reality advanced the sum of knowledge by only a small addition. In the fulness of time, and when the ground has been slowly and laboriously prepared for it, the great idea fructifies and the discovery is made. It is, in fact, the work not of one, but of a great number of persons. How true it is that all the great ideas have been the products of the time rather than of individuals may be the more readily realised when it is remembered that, as regards a large number of them, there have been rival claims put forward for the honour of authorship by persons who, working quite independently, have arrived at like results almost {65} simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims have been made for the discovery of the differential calculus . . . the invention of the steam engine, . . . the methods of spectrum analysis, the telegraph, the telephone, as well as many other discoveries._” And then Mr. Kidd proceeds to quote with approval the following sentence from an essay which was written by an American socialist, Mr. Bellamy; and the sentence has been repeated with solemn and triumphant unction in half the socialistic books which have been given to the world since. “_Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of every man’s produce are the result of his social inheritance and environment.” “This is so,_” remarks Mr. Kidd, “_and it is, if possible, even more true of the work of our brain than of the work of our hands._” To these passages we must add one from Mr. Sidney Webb, who is, intellectually, a favourable example of a modern English socialist. Referring to the socialistic proposal that all kinds of workers, no matter what their work, should be paid an equal wage, “_this equality_,” he says, “_has an abstract justification, as the special ability or energy with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent._”

Here we have then, in the words of these four writers, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Kidd, Mr. Bellamy, and {66} Mr. Sidney Webb, the case against the great man set fully before us; and we may accordingly proceed to analyse it. We shall find that it divides itself into four separate arguments, which are constantly recurring in some form or other in all the works of our modern sociological writers, and especially in the works of those who are democratic or socialistic in their sympathies. Firstly, there is the argument that in any advanced civilisation not one of the improvements made during any given epoch would have been possible if a variety of other improvements and the accumulation of various knowledge had not gone before it; and that thus the man who is called the inventor or author of the improvement is merely the vehicle or delegate of forces outside himself. Secondly, there is the argument that the inventor or author of the improvement, even if we attribute to him some special ability of his own, is in respect of his own congenital energies merely the product and expression of preceding generations and circumstances. Of the four arguments in question, these are the most important; but they are constantly reinforced by two others. One is drawn from the fact that several independent workers often arrive simultaneously at the same discovery. The other is drawn from the fact—or what is alleged to be the fact—that the interval which divides even the greatest man from his fellows, alike in respect of what he is and of what he accomplishes, is really extremely slight, and not worth considering. {67}

For convenience’ sake, we will deal with these two latter arguments first, and put them out of the way before we approach the others. We will begin with the argument drawn from the fact that the same discovery is often made simultaneously by independent workers. This would perhaps hardly be worth discussing if it were not used so constantly by such a variety of serious writers. The fact is true enough, but what is the utmost that it proves? If two or three men make the same discovery at once, this does not prove, as it is supposed to do, that all men are approximately equal, but that two or three men, instead of one man, are greater than the rest of their fellow-workers. If three horses at a race out-distance all competitors, and pass the winning-post within the same three seconds, this does not prove that a cart-horse is as swift as the Derby favourite. As a matter of fact, that more men than one should reach at the same time the same discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect, when we consider what discovery is. The facts of nature which form the subject-matter of the discoverer are in themselves as independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men who attempt to scale it. They are indeed precisely analogous to a peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact that three men make the same discovery simultaneously does no more to show that any of their neighbours could have made it, and that it is made in reality, not by them, but by {68} their generation, than the fact that the three most intrepid cragsmen in Europe meet at last on the same virgin summit, which other adventurers had sought to scale in vain, would prove the feat to have been really accomplished by the mass of tourists at Interlaken, who had never climbed anywhere except by the Rigi railway, and whose stomachs would be turned by a precipice of twenty feet.

Let us now turn to the argument that the inequalities between men’s abilities are small, that the work accomplished by even the ablest is small also, and that the exceptional man as a separate subject of study may, in the words of a writer who will be quoted presently, be in consequence “_safely neglected_.” The answer to this is that whether an inequality be great or small depends altogether on the point from which the total altitude is measured. If a child who is three feet high, and a giant who is nine feet high, are both of them standing on the summit of Mont Blanc, the difference between the elevation of their respective heads above the sea-level will be infinitesimal; but no one who was discussing the question of human stature would say that little children and giants were of approximately the same height. Similarly, if our object is to compare men in general with all other living creatures, no doubt the difference between the ordinary man and a microbe is incomparably greater than the difference between an ordinary man and Newton; but if our object is to compare men with men, in relation to this or that mental capacity—let {69} us say the capacity for scientific and mathematical discovery—the difference which separates one ordinary man from another is insignificant when compared with the difference by which Newton is separated from both of them. And it is this latter sort of difference which alone concerns the sociologist. The difference which separates men from microbes is nothing to him. And what is true of what men are, is equally true of what they do. The addition made by any one great man to knowledge may be small when compared with the knowledge, regarded in its totality, which has been gathered together by all other great men preceding him; but it may at the same time be incalculably great when compared with the additions made by the ordinary men, his contemporaries.

Let us make this matter yet clearer by reference to one more authority, who, though endeavouring to confirm the very argument which is here being exposed, is, little as he perceives it, assassinated by his own illustrations. In Macaulay’s essay on Dryden there occurs the following passage, a part of which anticipates the exact phraseology of Mr. Spencer. “_It is the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age. . . . The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected._” The passage is quoted for the sake of this last simile. For those who study the human destiny as a whole—who {70} survey it as speculative and remote observers—the inequalities of intellect may, it is quite true, be neglected as safely as the inequalities of the surface of a planet are neglected by the astronomer who is engaged in calculating its revolutions. But because these latter inequalities are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. To the astronomer the Alps may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence, but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are all the dykes in Holland? But they are all the difference to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one.

And the same difference, even in its most minute details, holds good between speculative, or as we may call it star-gazing, sociology and sociology as a practical science; for is it not one of Mr. Spencer’s most important and interesting contentions that these very irregularities of the earth’s surface—these lands, seas, plains, valleys, and mountains—which, when compared with the mass of the earth, are so absolutely inappreciable, constitute some of the most important of the “_external factors_” of human history and civilisation? And the same holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. They may be nothing to the social star-gazer, but to the social politician they are everything.

So much, then, for two of the most shallow sophisms that ever imposed themselves on presumably serious reasoners. We will now turn to {71} those two other arguments in which the case against the great man finds its main support, and which, however misleading they may be, must be examined at greater length. In both of these the distinctly exceptional character of the great man is assumed, or at all events is not denied, but it is represented as being, if it exists, not properly the great man’s own. The first argument refers it to aggregates of external conditions—the knowledge accumulated for the great man’s use, the character of his fellow-citizens, who are ready to carry out his orders, and generally to what Mr. Bellamy calls his “_social inheritance and environment_.” The second argument refers it to the great man’s line of ancestors, insisting that he inherits from them his own exceptional capacities, which capacities his ancestors acquired by being members of society, and of which it is accordingly contended that society is ultimately the source.

Now on both these arguments, before we consider them in detail, there is one broad criticism to be made, which applies to both equally. There is a certain sense—a remote and speculative sense—in which they are both of them quite true, and indeed are almost truisms; but for practical purposes they are either not true at all, or if true, are altogether irrelevant; and it is necessary to show the reader, by a few simple examples, that in the doctrine that statements can be at once true and not true there is no philosophical hair-splitting, and no Hegelian paradox, but merely the assertion of a {72} fact which, when once attention has been called to it, common sense will perceive to be as obvious as it is important.

It was just now observed that the same thing can be great and not great, according to the things with which we compare it. In the same way the same statement may be true or not true, according to the nature of the discussion on which it is brought to bear. Let us take as an example those familiar statements of fact which are given in terms of averages. If the vast majority of any given population vary in height between the limits of five feet six and six feet, the statement that a man’s average height is from five feet seven to five feet eight would be a truth most important to the producers of ready-made overcoats. But if half the population were two feet high, and half rather more than nine feet, to give the average stature as something like five feet seven would be for the coatmakers the most absurd misstatement imaginable, and would lead them to make, if they acted on it, garments that would fit nobody.

Let us turn from the question of the truth of a statement to the question of its mere relevance; and we can illustrate what has been said by an example equally homely. In the transference of goods by rail, these have to be sorted according to bulk, weight, shape, fragility, perishability, and so forth. In deciding which are to be sent by fast trains, and which by slow, the primary question will be that of perishability. When the perishable and {73} the non-perishable shall have been separated, and they are being placed on the trains allotted to them, the primary questions will be those of shape, weight, and fragility. But so long as the preparatory separation is in progress, to assert that the goods possess any of these latter characteristics will be wholly irrelevant, no matter how true. Boxes of fish will not be put with book parcels because neither of them are fragile, or because they are both oblong; and each characteristic, and every classification based on it, will be either relevant or irrelevant, full of meaning or meaningless, according to what question, out of a considerable series, has to be answered at the moment by the officials who superintend the business.

And now let us go back to the two arguments that are before us; and we shall be prepared to see how, though true for the speculative philosopher, they have no meaning, or only a false meaning, for any practical man.

We will first take that which is expressed with sufficient plainness in the passage quoted from Mr. Sidney Webb, and which insists on the great man’s debt to society generally, not for his external circumstances, but for his personal character and capacities. The idea involved in it is very easy to grasp. The great man’s congenital superiority is an inheritance from his superior ancestors; but his ancestors would not have had it to hand on to him if they had not been forced to develop such superiorities as they possessed by exerting them in a competitive struggle {74} with the great mass of their contemporaries. Thus the mass of their contemporaries formed a strop or hone on which the superior faculties of these men were sharpened; and the great man of to-day, to whom the superior faculties have descended, owes them accordingly, not to his own ancestors only, but to the mass of inferior men who struggled with them, and were worsted in the struggle. In other words, the greatness of the exceptional man has really been produced by the whole body of society in the past; and the results of it ought to be divided amongst the whole body of society in the present.

Now that the above line of argument has a certain kind of truth in it, it is hardly necessary to observe; and for biologists, psychologists, and speculative philosophers generally, such truth as it possesses may no doubt be of value; but that this truth has no relation whatever to practical life, and no applicability to any one of its problems, can be seen by considering the kind of results we shall arrive at, if, adopting the reasoning of Mr. Webb and his friends, we merely carry it out to the more immediate of its logical consequences.

Let us begin with their reasoning, so far as it concerns the past. If the inferior competitors who were beaten by the great man’s ancestors are to be credited with having helped to produce the talents by which they were themselves defeated, and must therefore be held to have had a claim on the wealth which these talents produced, which claim has descended to the inferior majority of {75} to-day, the same claim might be advanced by any weaker nation which, after a series of battles, succumbs finally to the stronger. In the Franco-German War the French might have said to the Germans, “You acquired by fighting with us, the faculties which have enabled you to conquer us. Your strength therefore, in reality, belongs to us, not you; and hence justice requires that you should give us back Alsace.” In the same way it might be urged that all the idle apprentices of the past have, by the warning they afforded, stimulated the industry of the industrious, and therefore in abstract justice had a claim on their earnings.

Let us now take Mr. Webb’s reasoning so far as it concerns the present, and we shall find that it results in similar fantastic puerilities. If the great man of to-day owes his greatness to society as a whole, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, the dishonest man his dishonesty; and if the great man who produces an exceptional amount of wealth can, with justice, claim no more than the average man who produces little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both due to society, and society, not he, must suffer. And the same thing holds good of every form of economic incompetence.

The absurdity of Mr. Webb’s position will be seen yet more clearly when we see how it looks {76} when stated in the language of Mr. Bellamy. “_Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of every man’s produce are the result of his inheritance and his environment._” Now if this proposition has any practical application, it must mean that the whole living population—great men and ordinary men, labourers and directors of labour—who are commonly held to be the producers of the income of Great Britain to-day, really produce of it only one farthing in the pound; and hence, if we still persist in considering the proposition a practical one, we shall be forced to conclude that the whole of the living population might at any given moment stop work altogether, or fall into a trance like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and the production would continue with hardly an appreciable diminution.

Again, if the proposition has any practical bearing on economics, it must necessarily have a bearing precisely similar on morals. If a man of to-day produces only a thousandth part of what he seems to produce, it is equally evident that he does only a thousandth part of what he seems to do. Let us see, if we accept this theory, to what sort of conclusions it will lead us. One conclusion to which it will lead us at once is the following—that each of us is responsible only for a thousandth part of his actions; and from this will follow others more remarkable still. Since the holiest man has elements of evil in him, and the worst man elements of good, the good deeds for which we honour the saint may {77} really be the result of his antecedents, and his few faulty deeds may be all that we are to attribute to himself; whilst, conversely, the criminal’s antecedents may have been the cause of all his crimes and vices, and he may himself have done nothing but some acts of unnoticed kindness. It will be thus impossible to form any true judgment of anybody; for the real St. Peter may have been merely a false and truculent ruffian, and the real Judas Iscariot may have been fit for Abraham’s bosom. And yet even these conclusions deducible from the premises of Mr. Bellamy are sane when compared with those deducible from the premises of Mr. Sidney Webb; for Mr. Bellamy would allow a man to be responsible for a thousandth part of his actions at all events, whilst Mr. Sidney Webb would not allow that anybody either did or was responsible for anything.

And now, finally, let us turn to that other argument which seeks to eliminate the causality of the great man, not by proving that he owes his superior brain-power to society, but by proving that superior brain-power has little to do with his achievements, their principal cause being the appliances, the opportunities, and the accumulated knowledge at his command; and that these, at all events, are due not to himself, but others—to the efforts of past generations, and the legacy they have left to the present. This is the argument which is mainly relied upon by Mr. Spencer. He insists on the fact that none of the great inventors or discoverers could have made their discoveries or {78} inventions if centuries of past progress had not prepared the way for them. “_A Laplace, for instance_,” he says, “_could not have got very far with the_ Mécanique Céleste _unless he had been aided by the slowly developed system of mathematics, which we trace back to its beginnings amongst the ancient Egyptians_”; and his many other illustrations are all of the same kind.

If we consider the meaning of this argument carefully we shall see that its logical outcome is not to deny to the great man all superiority whatsoever, but to exhibit his superiority as being less than it is usually supposed to be. Laplace, Mr. Spencer would say, may have been personally a little above the level of his contemporaries, but he owed most of his elevation to sitting on the shoulders of his predecessors. Now if this reduction of the great man’s reputed greatness to such very small proportions has any practical meaning, it must mean that greatness is not only less than it is supposed to be, but is also a great deal commoner, and more easily procurable. Whatever any particular great man has done, could have been done, if he had not done it, by an indefinite number of others. Let us then take as an illustration some definite task, and see how far such reasoning has any practical application. Our illustration shall be taken from the domain of art; for the great artist, according to Mr. Spencer’s special statement, owes his greatness to the achievements of past generations, just as the great mathematician does, or the great thinker, or the great {79} inventor. Let us suppose, then, that it is desired to decorate some public hall with pictures worthy of Titian or Michael Angelo, or to open some national theatre with a new play worthy of Shakespeare. The great question will be where to find the artist or poet whose works shall even approximate to these ideals of excellence; and any one who knows anything about either pictures or poetry will know that to find him is a well-nigh hopeless task. Now what conceivable help, what conceivable meaning, would there be in Mr. Spencer’s coming forward and telling the public that the greatest poet or artist is the product of the same conditions that have produced any one of themselves? Mr. Spencer has actually made this precise statement. Let us therefore refer to the terms in which he has done so. “_Given a Shakespeare_,” he says, “_and what dramas could he have written, without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life—without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?_”

Mr. Spencer could not have put his own case more clearly; and the more clearly it is put, the more easy it is to answer it, and to show that for practical men it has no meaning whatsoever. The answer to the question he asks is not only obvious, but contains at the same time the solution of the whole problem we are discussing. It will inevitably take the form of another question. Given the {80} conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced dramas like _King Lear_ and _Hamlet_, unless England had happened to possess that unique phenomenon—a Shakespeare? Could a Bottom have written these dramas, or a Dogberry, or a Sir Toby Belch? Or could Sir Thomas Lucy, or any of the “poetasters” satirised by Ben Jonson? Or could the actors, Kemp, Jones, and Bryan, who assisted in the representation of these dramas upon the stage? The answer is, of course, No. And yet these men inherited the same language that Shakespeare did; the three last had the advantage of knowing his finest passages by heart. The weaver, the bellows-mender, the constable, the Justice of Peace, had behind them the same traditions that Shakespeare had, and were surrounded by the same “_multitudinous conditions_” of civilisation. But out of these conditions one man alone was capable of eliciting the results elicited by Shakespeare. The real explanation of the whole difficulty—the difficulty involved in the fact that whilst the argument of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bellamy is, in a speculative sense, not merely true but a truism, it is utterly untrue in any practical sense—is as follows: Every human being living at any given time is, as Mr. Spencer says, an inheritor of the past; but men inherit the past in very different degrees. They inherit the knowledge of the past only according to the degree to which they acquire it; the language of the past only according {81} to their skill in manipulating it; the inventions of the past only according to their skill in reproducing and using them.

The extraordinary confusion of thought involved in Mr. Spencer’s position is focalised in an argument constantly employed by socialists—that “_inventions once made, become common property_.” Except the earliest and simplest of them, they no more become common property than the countless facts and figures buried in Parliamentary Blue-Books become the property of every new member of Parliament, or than encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; or than the power of deciphering the hieroglyphics which are preserved in the British Museum becomes the property of every cabman who drives his vehicle along Great Russell Street. It is perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge enables men to acquire it who never might have discovered it for themselves; but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated, the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased difficulty in acquiring all, or even in assimilating those which are practically connected with one another. A mechanic, for instance, could with ten minutes’ attention comprehend the principle involved in a cantilever bridge, but to design and construct a bridge such as that which now spans the {82} Forth, with its spans of six hundred yards and its altitudes of aerial steel, implies an assimilation of our multitudinous existing knowledge, such as is hardly to be found in a score of engineers in Europe. Or to turn once more to Mr. Spencer’s example of Shakespeare, whilst all Shakespeare’s contemporaries had the same antecedents that he had, the same line of thinkers behind them, and the same developed vocabulary, Shakespeare’s mind was capable of absorbing much of the national inheritance, whilst the great mass of his contemporaries could comparatively absorb very little.

We are thus brought back to the point from which we set out—namely, the differences in capacity by which men are distinguished from one another; and we see that all the reasonings of our modern sociologists have, for practical purposes, left these differences undiminished. The difference between the great man and the ordinary man is not made less by the fact that they both of them owe much to a common past, any more than the difference between a hogshead of water and a wine-glass is made less by the fact that both have been filled from the same stream.

The conclusion, therefore, of the whole matter is as follows. In the first place, whatever may be the speculative significance of Mr. Spencer’s contention, which Mr. Bellamy expresses with the arithmetical precision of an accountant, that each living generation does only a minute fraction of what it seems to do, or of arguments like Mr. Sidney Webb’s, that {83} each living generation does nothing at all of what it seems to do, the mass of living men at all events do something, in the very real sense that if they did not do it they would die; and the doing of this something is for them the whole of life, and all practical problems depend on the manner in which they do it. Such being the case, it follows, in the second place, that however much the ordinary man does, the great man does a great deal more. Therefore, if the ordinary man does any of the things that he seems to do, and causes any of the events that he seems to cause—if he ploughs the farm that he seems to plough, and lays the bricks that he seems to lay—indeed we may add, if he eats the dinners that he seems to eat—the great man in a precisely similar sense is the cause of those changes and of that progress which he seems to cause. Hence of these changes he is, for the practical sociologist, not merely the proximate initiator, whose action and peculiarities may be neglected, but a true and primary cause, on which the attention of the sociologist must be concentrated; and just as in action it is impossible to do without him, so in practical reasoning it is impossible to go behind him.

The reader has now been shown the absolute futility of that train of reasoning by which even so keen a thinker as Mr. Spencer has persuaded himself that he can get rid of the causality of the great man, and in which every socialistic reformer who has risen above the level of a demagogue has attempted to find a scientific foundation for his {84} impossible castle in the air. But the demolition and exposure of these mischievous and miserable fallacies shall not be entrusted only to the arguments that have been brought to bear on them. The validity of these arguments shall now be finally substantiated by direct appeal to a sociologist whose identity may surprise the reader. This is none other than Mr. Spencer himself, who, when he forgets to be the conscious expositor of his theory, and turns aside to illustrate some particular point by examples drawn from the experience of common life, is constantly contradicting, in a most remarkable but entirely unconscious way, the fundamental principle which he has deliberately set himself to establish.

In the seventh chapter of his _Study of Sociology_, being incidentally concerned to insist on the iniquity and the mischievousness of war, he describes how Europe, during the earlier years of this century, was visited by certain disasters, far-reaching and horrible, from the consequence of which the world has hardly yet recovered. These disasters consisted of slaughter, plunder, pestilence, agony, rape, and ruin; and to say nothing of their results on those whom they left alive, they resulted in some two million violent and unnecessary deaths. And how does Mr. Spencer explain these appalling phenomena? He who declares that we should learn nothing about social causation “_should we read ourselves blind over the biographies_” of all the great rulers of the world, explains them by tracing them to one sole and single cause; and this, he says, was the genius {85} and personality of Napoleon. “_Out of the sanguinary chaos of the Revolution_,” he writes, “_rose a soldier whose immense ability, joined with his absolute unscrupulousness, made him now general, now consul, now autocrat. The instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call moral sentiments. . . . And all this slaughter, all this suffering, all this devastation was gone through—_” Let us pause and ask why it was gone through, according to Mr. Spencer. Does he say it was gone through because of “_aggregates of past conditions_” and the influence of antecedent generations? Far from it. He says, “_All this was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men._”

But perhaps Mr. Spencer may have a defence ready. He may tell us that the influence of Napoleon was merely that of a military leader, which influence he has excepted from his theory of general causes. To this it must be answered in the first place that Napoleon was at all events not a leader in “_early_” or “_primitive_” warfare, to which Mr. Spencer’s exception is specifically and emphatically limited. Mr. Spencer consequently shows us, by his own practical reasoning, that this theoretical limitation of which he made so much cannot be maintained for a moment, and that whatever is true of great leaders in a primitive war, he himself recognises—all his theories notwithstanding—as equally true of them in the most advanced stages of civilisation. But a far more important {86} answer, and one taken from himself, is still in reserve—an answer which clenches the whole matter, and shows us that Mr. Spencer, in his dealings with practical life, really recognises great men as exercising in the arts of peace precisely the same kind of causality which Napoleon exercised in war.

Let us turn to Mr. Spencer’s treatise on _Social Statics_, and to the section of it in which he treats of patents—or as he himself describes them, “_the rights of property in ideas_.” He begins by complaining that the right of patenting “_inventions, patterns, or designs_” is not recognised as being based on any moral right at all, but is generally regarded as a kind of “_privilege_” or “_reward_.” “_The prevalence of such a belief_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_is by no means creditable to the national conscience. . . . To think_,” he exclaims, “_that a sinecurist should be held to have a ‘vested interest’ in his office, and a just title to compensation if it is abolished; and yet that an invention over which no end of mental toil has been spent, and on which the poor mechanic has laid out perhaps his last sixpence—an invention which he has completed entirely by his own labour and with his own materials—has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind—should not be acknowledged as his property_!”

_Social Statics_ is one of Mr. Spencer’s earlier works. Let us now consult his latest, the third and final volume of his _Principles of Sociology_; and here we shall find this same admission that the {87} great man’s achievements are wrought not out of aggregates of conditions, but “_out of the very substance of his own mind_,” emphasised by him as a practical truth, with all the vigour of a practical man. In his chapter on the “_Interdependence and Integration of Industrial Institutions_” he dwells with much eloquence on the almost incalculable benefits that have resulted, and extended themselves through the whole industrial world, from certain improvements introduced into the manufacture of steel. And to what were these improvements due? Mr. Spencer answers this question not merely by admitting, but by insisting with the fervour of a hero-worshipper, that they were due to the genius of one single man, namely Bessemer; and so obvious does this truth appear to him, that he devotes an indignant footnote to denouncing the governing classes for not being sufficiently alive to it, and for conferring on a man who, “_out of the very substance of his own mind_,” had wrought such gigantic and universally beneficial changes, no higher reward than the title of Sir Henry Bessemer—“_an honour_” he says, “_like that accorded to a third-rate public official on his retirement, or to a provincial mayor on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee_.”

After this, what more need be said? Here we have Mr. Spencer himself, the moment he touches the practical side of life, contemptuously brushing aside the whole of his speculative theory and admitting, or rather insisting, with the most unhesitating and uncompromising vigour, that “_the phenomena of {88} social evolution_,” even if they do not result entirely, as Carlyle would have it, from the actions of great men, yet cannot, at all events, be possibly explained without them; and that great men, their natures, and the details of their active lives, are primary factors to be studied by every practical sociologist, and are not to be merged in “_society_,” in “_antecedents_,” and in “_aggregates of conditions_.”

The practically independent character of the great man’s causality will be yet more apparent at another stage of our argument, and we shall see that the whole structure of all civilised societies depends on it. But we may, for the present, regard it as being sufficiently established, and the absurd and unreal character of the attempts to get rid of it demonstrated. So much, then, being assumed, we will, in the following chapter, consider two objections of a character very different from any of those of which we have now disposed. They are objections which will very possibly have suggested themselves to the reader’s mind, but which, instead of conflicting with the truth which has been just elucidated, will be found, when examined carefully, to emphasise and to enlarge its significance.

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