CHAPTER IV

THE GREAT MAN AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THE PHYSIOLOGICALLY FITTEST SURVIVOR

The two objections to which reference has just been made are connected with two doctrines, neither of which has thus far been submitted to any detailed examination, and one of which has indeed been hardly so much as alluded to, but which are both intimately associated, in the estimation of the world at large, with contemporary science, and more especially with contemporary sociology. One of these doctrines is that of the survival of the fittest. The other is that which, more or less distinctly, is suggested at the present time by the much-abused word “evolution.” When the reader thinks of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, when he reflects on the fact that Mr. Spencer is an avowed disciple of Darwin, and that Mr. Spencer’s own disciples are constantly making allusion to “_the rivalry of existence_” and the “_successfuls and the unsuccessfuls_,” he may be tempted to ask himself if it can be really true that Mr. Spencer has eliminated the great man from his system after all. On the other hand, when the reader thinks of _evolution_, {90} which, whatever it may mean, at all events means a progress essentially different from the achievements of particular individuals, he may wonder in what way the doctrine of evolution can be reconciled with any doctrine which has the achievements of individuals for its basis.

We will take these two points in order. With regard to the survival of the fittest in the competitive struggle for existence, the great fact which it is necessary to make clear is as follows; and it is one which our contemporary sociologists have altogether failed to perceive. In the evolution of societies, just as in the evolution of species—in the evolution of man as a social being, as in the evolution of man as an animal—the struggle for existence has played an important part; but in social evolution the part played by it is very far from being that which is popularly supposed, nor does the survival of the fittest in any way correspond with the position and influence claimed for the great man. Certain of the phenomena of progress are no doubt produced by it, but they are as different from those which the great or exceptional man produces, as is the movement of the earth round the sun from its movement round its own axis. In order to understand this, let us first consider carefully how progress, as the result of the struggle for existence, is explained by our contemporary sociologists. The matter is put succinctly and very clearly in the following passage from Mr. Kidd’s _Social Evolution_.

“_Progress everywhere_,” he says, “_from the {91} beginning of life, has been effected in the same way, and is possible in no other way. It is the result of selection and rejection. In the human species, as in every other species which has ever existed, no two individuals of a generation are alike in all respects; there is infinite variation within certain narrow limits. Some are slightly above the average in a particular direction, as others are slightly below it; and it is only when the conditions prevail that are favourable to the preponderating reproduction of the former, that advance in any direction becomes possible. To formulate this as the immutable law of progress since the beginning of life has been one of the principal results of the biological science of the nineteenth century. . . . To put it in words used by Professor Flower in speaking of human society, ‘Progress has been due to the opportunity of those individuals who are a little superior in some respects to their fellows of asserting their superiority, and of continuing to live, and of promulgating as an inheritance that superiority’_.”

The entire Spencerian position as regards the social struggle for existence is here given us in a nutshell. The competitive struggle is a process which produces progress by means of the manner in which it affects men in general. In any community the means of subsistence are being constantly appropriated by the members who are a little stronger than the rest, whilst those who are weaker have an insufficient portion left them. The latter therefore die early themselves; or breed no children; {92} or breed children who die early; whilst the former live long, and breed children who live likewise; and of these children there is always a certain percentage in whom are reproduced the superior qualities of their parents. Thus the weaker members of the community are always dying out, whilst stronger members not only become more numerous, but more efficient as individuals also. In other words, the Darwinian struggle for existence produces progress by raising the general average of efficiency. It has nothing to do with a few men towering over the rest. It works by producing a simultaneous rise of all. The superior “_assert their authority_” not by commanding their inferiors, but merely by “_continuing to live_” and having children as superior as themselves. In this way, to quote an illustration from Mr. Spencer, the progressive races of Europe have reached a stage of development which makes possible amongst them the appearance of men like Laplace or Newton, an event which could not occur amongst the Hottentots or the Andaman islanders. It will thus at once be clear that the theory of the survival of the fittest explains progress by reference to an order of facts totally distinct from those involved in the influence claimed for the great man. Whilst the theory of survival is illustrated by the superiority of Europeans to Hottentots, the great-man theory is illustrated by, and depends on, the superiority of men like Newton to the great mass of Europeans.

What relation, then, do these two explanations {93} bear to each other? In a direct way they are not related at all. They neither conflict with each other nor overlap each other. They are both of them true; but true as explaining different sets of phenomena. One of the great errors of which our modern sociologists are guilty consists in their failure to perceive that social progress is not a single movement but the joint result of two, which differ from each other—to repeat what was said just now—quite as much as do the two movements of the earth. The difference between them will become instantly clear to us if we will turn our attention merely to the single obvious fact that the two take place at different rates of speed, the one set of changes being slow, like the succession of years; the other set of changes being rapid, like the succession of days. The general rise in capacity which distinguishes the modern civilised nations from primitive man, or from the lowest savages of to-day, and which has been due to what Mr. Kidd calls “_the preponderating reproduction of individuals slightly above the average_,” has been the work of an incalculable number of centuries. It has been so slow that, in many respects at all events, it has been indistinguishable during the course of several thousand years. The great thinkers amongst the ancient Egyptians were not congenitally inferior to the great thinkers of to-day. The brain of Aristotle was equal to the brain of Newton; whilst the masons whose hands constructed the Coliseum and the Parthenon knew as much of their craft as those who {94} constructed the Imperial Institute. But with this slowness in the rise of the general level of capacity let us compare the progressive results achieved within some short period. We cannot do better than take the past hundred years, and consider the progress made in the material arts of life. How the whole spectacle changes! Within that short period, at all events, no one will venture to maintain that the average congenital capacities of our own countrymen have been enlarged. We are not wittier than Horace Walpole, more polite than Lord Chesterfield, more shrewd and sensible than Dr. Johnson; whilst it is easy to see by reference to those trades, such as the building trade, which science and invention have done comparatively little to alter, that the natural efficiency of the average workman is no greater now than in the days of our great-great-grandfathers. And yet during that short period what an astounding progress has taken place! To sum it up in a bald economic formula, whilst the capacities of the average Englishman have remained altogether stationary, the economic productivity per head of the population of this country has during the past century trebled, and more than trebled itself.

This remarkable comparison between the rapidity of actual progress and the extreme slowness of the biological development resulting from the survival of the fittest in the Darwinian struggle for existence, will be enough to show anybody that progress is not one movement but two; and whilst the survival of {95} the fittest explains the slow and almost imperceptible movement, the rapid and perceptible movement is explained by the leadership of the greatest. It is with the rapid movement alone that the practical sociologist is concerned; and hence for him the great man, not the fittest, is the important factor.

Let us now consider what is meant by the process called social evolution, regarded as something distinct from those intentional advances made and maintained by the genius of great men. To understand this, we must consider what is meant by evolution generally. Mr. Spencer defines it in terms of “_the homogenous_” and “_the heterogenous_”; and from his own point of view we may accept his definition as correct. But facts have many aspects; and according to the purpose with which we deal with them they will require different definitions, which, though none of them are incompatible with the others, will have between themselves no apparent resemblance. Thus the biologist’s definition of a man will be quite distinct from the theologian’s; and the dangerous illness of a great party leader will be one phenomenon for his followers, and quite another for his doctor. In the same way Mr. Spencer’s definition of evolution, however admirable it may be from a certain point of view, is not exhaustive. It entirely leaves out of sight those characteristics of the process which it is necessary before all things that the practical sociologist should understand.

To reach a definition that will include these {96} let us begin by fixing our attention on that order of facts which formed the special study of Darwin, and in connection with which the theory of evolution became first known to the world; and let us ask what was the greatest and the most notorious effect produced by Darwinism on human thought generally. Its greatest and most notorious effect was to disprove, or rather render superfluous, the old theory which explained the varieties of organic life by referring them to the design of some quasi-human intelligence. According to the old theory, every species of living thing, from the lowest to the highest, was produced by the power and purpose of one supreme Mind, who adapted the frame and faculties of each to a prearranged set of circumstances and the fulfilment of certain needs. According to the theory of evolution, associated with the name of Darwin, these results were accomplished by purpose and intelligent power likewise, only not by the power and purpose of one supreme external Mind, but by the power and purpose of the living things themselves. Each living thing chose its mates, reproduced its kind, hunted for food, fought with rivals, and either conquered or was conquered by them, in obedience to the promptings of its own instinctive purposes. These were the motive power of the whole evolutionary process. The variety and development of organic life, as we know it, did not result indeed from one great intention, but it did result from an infinity of little intentions. {97}

Now so far the theory of design and the theory of evolution very closely resemble each other; but here we come to the point of essential difference between them. According to the theory of design, the varieties and gradations of organic life were not only the result of intention in the supreme Mind, but were also themselves the exact result intended. According to the evolutionary theory, although they were the result of an infinity of intentions, not one of the living things, from whose intention they resulted, intended them. They were the by-product of actions undertaken for entirely different ends—that is to say, for the benefit of the individual creatures who undertook them. This is the essential and this is the peculiar character with which the theory of evolution invested them. It presented to the mind the extraordinary phenomenon of a single series of actions producing a double series of results—the intended and the unintended, the latter of which, though entirely different from the former, was equally orderly, equally reasonable and coherent. Evolution, in fact, as revealed to us in the physiological world, is, for the philosopher, neither more nor less than this—the _reasonable sequence of the unintended_.

But this definition of evolution does not apply only to development in that world of facts studied by Darwinian science. It is equally applicable to the process of social evolution also. Indeed social evolution is even more strikingly, though not more truly, than physiological evolution, the reasonable {98} sequence of the unintended. How this is can be easily made plain; and when once the idea is grasped, which the definition embodies, it will be seen that social evolution, although it is no doubt different from all or from any of those changes deliberately produced by the agency of the great man, instead of excluding these changes, or eliminating the great man as the cause of them, is a process which depends altogether upon him and them, and that, instead of obscuring the great man’s importance, it only exhibits it in a stronger and clearer light.

Let us take then our definition of evolution as the reasonable sequence of the unintended, and apply the idea embodied in it to that aggregate of conditions, either in our own or any similar period, amongst which the great man works. All these conditions, such as the knowledge which he finds accumulated, the inventions which he finds in use, the political and the economic conditions of his country, are, taken as a whole, the result of no one man’s genius. It is equally obvious that they do not, in their incalculably complex entirety, represent any one man’s intention, or even the joint intention of any number of men acting in concert. Printing, for example, and railway travelling have produced a number of social results never dreamed of by the men who perfected our locomotives and our steam printing presses. Accordingly, when any great man of to-day initiates some fresh social change, whether as an inventor, a director of industry, a politician, or {99} a religious teacher, a large part of his achievement consists in his manipulation and refashioning of results of past human action, which can be set down to the credit, or ascribed to the intentions of no individual, and no body of individuals. The society of the past intended these no more than the great men of the past. They are results, that is to say, which come all under the heading of the unintended. But when we consider the great man’s achievement thus, we shall not only witness the grouping of many of the factors essential to it into one heterogeneous but logically coherent class, as the unintended. When such a grouping has taken place, we shall see that there remains behind an equally coherent and equally striking residuum—namely, the social results and conditions that have been obviously and notoriously intended. These may not be found existing apart from the former; but though in conjunction or combination with them, they will be visible as a distinct and separate element, and their true importance as a factor in social progress will begin to be apparent to the mind the moment their specific peculiarity, as just described, is apprehended.

Let us take a few examples which, owing to their magnitude and familiarity, will be at once intelligible. Our first shall be taken from the histories of art and of speculative philosophy. In each of these domains of human activity and achievement we find those phenomena of development to which it is now customary to apply the name of evolution. Thus we hear of the evolution of philosophy from the {100} crude guesses of Thales to the elaborate system of Aristotle. We hear of the evolution of the Greek drama from the exhibitions of Thespis with his cart to the tragedies of Æschylus and of Sophocles; and similarly we hear of the evolution of the English drama from such exhibitions as miracle plays or _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ to tragedies such as _Hamlet_ and comedies such as _As You Like It_. And to all such examples of development the word _evolution_ is applied with perfect accuracy; for there is in each an obvious and orderly sequence of the unintended. Aristotle’s philosophy was in part derived from that of his predecessors. He employed existing materials so as to produce a result which was not intended, indeed was not even imagined, by those who originally got them together and fashioned them, and which would never have been reached by Aristotle himself, if his predecessors had not thus unintentionally assisted him. None the less, however, does the Aristotelian philosophy, as its author gave it to the world, embody the deliberate intention of his profound and unrivalled genius; and it is only because it embodies this intended element that it constitutes an advance on the philosophies that went before it. Similarly, though Sophocles and Shakespeare, in constructing their dramas, each profited by the achievements of the dramatists who had gone before them, and though the art of each would doubtless have been more crude and imperfect had he come into the world a generation or two before he did, yet the part played {101} by evolution in the production of _Hamlet_ and _Antigone_ is totally distinct from, and is altogether dwarfed by, the part played by the genius and the intentions of their great authors.

Let us now turn to invention and applied science; and the history of social progress, as connected with and derived from them, will show the same two elements—the unintended and the intended, similarly related and similarly coexistent. A brilliant illustration of this fact is provided for us, in one of his books, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, though he himself, with a curious blindness and perversity, uses it not to illustrate but to obscure the point on which we are now dwelling. The illustration referred to is the history of the press by which the _Times_ is printed, which implement, according to Mr. Spencer, is the result altogether of evolution. “_In the first place_,” he says, “_this automatic printing machine is lineally descended from other automatic printing machines . . . each pre-supposing others that went before. . . . And then, in tracing the more remote antecedents, we find an ancestry of hand printing presses._” He further points out that this press implies not only an ancestry of former presses, but also the existence of the machinery used in making it, and again how this machine-making machinery has a distinct ancestry of its own, which includes the fact of the abundance of iron in England. Geometry, physics, chemistry also, he says, played their part in the process; and he winds up by referring to purely social causes. {102} Why, he asks, was the Walter press produced? In order that “_with great promptness_” it might “_meet an enormous demand_.”

It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than this of the part played by evolution in the domain of mechanical invention. It is perfectly evident that the mass of discoveries and inventions which preceded and paved the way for the final invention in question were due to men who had no idea in their heads of such a machine as a steam-driven printing press at all. When printing was first invented, steam-power was undreamed of. When the steam-engine was being perfected as a means of driving machinery, the inventors had no specific intention of applying this force to the printing press. The men whose genius and energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid the foundation of the English iron trade, and with it, as Mr. Spencer says, the foundation of “_machine-making generally_,” in all probability never even saw a newspaper, and could not have conceived the possibility of collecting enough news daily to fill as much as one page of the _Times_. The mathematicians and chemists to whose work Mr. Spencer alludes most probably never gave a thought to the practical application of their discoveries, and knew as little of the process of printing as they did of Chinese grammar. But let us give to these facts all the weight we can. Let us accept the antecedents that made the Walter press possible as not only sequences but also concurrences of the unintended; and yet the part played {103} by the great man remains as essential, and remains as large as ever. The fact that the Walter press could never have existed unless Caxton’s press had existed, and that Caxton never foresaw the future development of his apparatus, does nothing to disprove the fact that in the development of printing generally, genius like Caxton’s was an indispensable agent, and one which stamped its character on the whole sequence of inventions which it inaugurated. Nor again does the fact that an invention like the Walter press implies not only a direct sequence of inventions and discoveries, but also a concurrence of many separate sequences, such as the invention and discoveries of chemists, of machine-makers, and producers of iron, do anything to disprove the importance and the necessity of the part played by the men to whose genius the press was directly due. For although the co-existence of the separate sequences referred to—the parallel march of progress in many separate arts and sciences—may have been altogether unintended by any of those concerned in them, what was emphatically not unintended was their final concurrence—the fact of their being brought together for one definite purpose. This was due to the deliberate intention of exceptional men with strong synthetic powers, who appropriated and connected the achievements of various other men. Chemistry, geometry, the production of iron, and the development of machinery for machine-making would never have worked together to produce an automatic {104} printing press had the immediate inventors of such an implement not coerced them into their service, and forced them to contribute to a deliberately planned result.

The state of the case is this. Let us take any civilised society at any period we will, and examine it in the act of advancing to the next stage of its development. We shall find that its existing conditions consist partly of results intended by particular great men whose past actions have produced them, and partly of results neither foreseen nor intended by anybody. Thus at the present day amongst our social conditions we have the telegraph and the railway system—both of them results intentionally produced by individuals; and we have also a variety of new wants and habits, new methods of conducting trade and government, which have been produced by these, but which were neither intended nor even thought of by the inventors of the locomotive, or by Wheatstone and Cooke when their wires at last realised the long-forgotten dream of the Italian Jesuit Strada.† Thus, though social conditions at any given time are a compound of intended results and unintended, and even though we may admit that at any given time these last are more widely diffused than the former, these last {105} are themselves the children of intention once removed. Great men may not have meant to produce them, but they have arisen from conditions which great men did mean to produce; and they could not have arisen in any other way. And here we are brought to a fact more obvious and more important still. Before any further advance in social civilisation can be made, other existing conditions, whether intentionally produced or not, require to be intentionally re-combined and acted on by men whose enterprise, whose intellect, and whose constructive imagination mark them out from their fellows as the pioneers of the future. We are thus once more confronted with the fact already insisted on—that the social conditions of a time are the same for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can make exceptional use of them, and turn them into a stepping-stone on which their generation may rise higher.

† Strada, an Italian Jesuit, in the seventeenth century invented, or rather imagined, communication by electric telegraph; and his idea actually comprised the use of two needles moved by two magnets, these magnets being connected in such a way that, by the movement of either of them, the needle actuated by the other could be made to point to such and such letters on a dial.

Social evolution, therefore, in so far as it is other than biological, may be defined as the unintended result of the intentions of great men; and this definition at once brings us back to the truth which was urged in the first chapter as the starting-point of our argument, and which can now be put before the reader with an added force and clearness.

It was said in the first chapter that sociologists have succeeded in dealing with those wider social phenomena which are exhibited by social aggregates as wholes, and which are interesting and significant {106} to the speculative or religious philosopher. The truth of this statement is illustrated by what has just been said about evolution. If evolved phenomena are phenomena which exhibit a reasonable sequence, and have yet been intended by no animal or human mind, it is open to the thinker to argue that they must have been intended by the mind of some higher power; and a new gate is opened into the Eden of theological speculation, from which man was driven when he first ate of the tree of scientific knowledge.

But whilst the business of the speculative philosopher is solely with the phenomena that have been unintended, the business of the practical sociologist is solely with the phenomena that have been intended. A moment’s reflection will convince the reader that this must be so. The meaning of the words “practical science” is a science from which we can draw practical advice; but all advice implies an intended end; and every attempt to solve social problems scientifically must be concerned with results which we may deliberately set ourselves to produce, and not with by-products which, _ex hypothesi_, are beyond our calculation. We may study these by-products of intention as they have shown themselves in the past; but if we do this, it will be with the object of becoming able to foresee them in the future. So soon as we can foresee them, we shall be able to intend their production; and when this happens they will cease to belong to the unintended. The great man will then consciously aim at them, and {107} not leave them to the incalculable chances of evolution. It may safely be said, no doubt, that, let us study human conduct as we may, unintended, or evolved phenomena will always continue to form a large part of what we mean by social progress; but, as practical inquirers, we must put them on one side, and confine our attention to those factors in the problem which either embody some definite human intention themselves, or on which we can found, by studying them, some definite intention of our own. And of such factors the chief is the great man, whose importance is enhanced rather than dwarfed by the fact that his intellect and his energy are the causes not only of great results which he intends, but also of those others—wider, if not more important—which, though neither intended nor foreseen by himself or by anybody else, would, if it were not for him, never take place at all.

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