CHAPTER I

THE NATURE AND THE DEGREES OF THE SUPERIORITIES OF GREAT MEN

The causality of the great man being established, we must consider more precisely what greatness is • 111

Mr. Spencer will help us to a general definition of it • 112

He divides the human race into the clever, the ordinary, and the stupid • 113

Now if all the race were stupid, it is plain there would be no progress; • 114

nor would there be any if all the race were ordinary; • 114

therefore progress must be due to the clever, who are, as Mr. Spencer says, a “_scattered few_” • 115

This is the great-man theory reasonably stated • 115

For great men are not necessarily heroes, as Carlyle thought, • 116

nor divided absolutely from all other men • 116

Greatness is various in kind and degree, • 117

but, at all events, there is a certain minority of men who resemble each other in being more efficient than the majority • 117

We see this in poetry • 118

in singers, • 118

in the scholarship of boys at the same school, • 119

and similarly in practical life • 119

Enough men, as it is, have equal opportunities, to show how unequal men are in their powers of using them • 120

No doubt a man may be ordinary in one respect and great in another; • 120

but the majority are not great in any • 121

The measure of a man’s greatness as an agent of social progress is the overt results actually produced by him • 121

A selfish doctor, if successful, is greater than a devoted doctor, if unsuccessful • 122

The fact that many men who produce no social results seem better and more brilliant than many men who do produce them, makes some argue that these results require no greatness for their production • 122

But the most efficient forms of greatness have often nothing brilliant about them • 123

A lofty imagination is often the enemy to practical efficiency; • 124

and great efficiency is often independent of exceptional intellect • 125

Intellect _is_ required for progress, _e.g._ in invention; • 125

but the inventor by himself is often helpless, • 125

and has to ally himself with men whose exceptional gifts are unimpressive and even vulgar • 126

Greatness is not one quality, but various combinations of many • 127

Greatness, then, is merely those qualities which, in any domain of progress, make the few more efficient than the many • 127

The great-man theory, then, merely asserts that if some men were not more efficient than most men, no progress would take place at all • 128

But great men, in spite of these differences, all promote progress in the same way • 128