theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	clover in their neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy about the English sparrow here, —whether h e kills most canker -worms, or drives away most native birds. Just so the	null
book	great man, whether he be an importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about a rearrangement, on a	null
book	large or a small scale, of the pre- existing social relations.	null
book	The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction.	null
book	We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale all about us, and on a	null
book	large scale in the case of the leaders of history. It is only following the common- sense	null
book	method of a Lyell, a Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly observe. Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house, and is committed . Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other	null
book	career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been the bett er of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the old	null
book	alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no	null
book	otherwise with nations. They may be committed by kings and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science, or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the starting -point of new policies. Just so	null
book	does a revolution, or any great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose	null
book	34 It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its educative influence, and that this constitutes a	null
book	considerable difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect this aspect of the relation here,	null
book	for the other is the more im portant. At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.	null
book	99	null
book	operations widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an accidental	null
book	success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.	null
book	Would England have to-day the ‘ imperial’ ideal which she now has, if a certain boy named	null
book	Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European affairs	null
book	35 if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of a	null
book	Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that sh e ever had. There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe. But	null
book	in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany it has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be crying forward and backward at once, as she does now, ‘letting I will not wait upon I would, ’ wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in	null
book	all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely commanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. She would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another. Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still	null
book	be satisfied with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled Gelehrten and political	null
book	herbivora, and to the French as ces bons , or ces naifs , Allemands . Bismarck ’s will showed	null
book	them, to their own great astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lesson will not be forgotten. Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they—	null
book	“will never do away, I ween,	null
book	The marks of that which once hath been”—	null
book	of Bismarck ’s initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.	null
book	The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any rate, one factor in the	null
book	changes that constitute social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways. The	null
book	accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve. Why, the	null
book	very birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like Columbus’s egg. “ All can	null
book	raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed.” But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.	null
book	But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every ’ man’ fits every ‘hour.’ Some	null
book	incompatibilities there are. A given genius may come either too early or too late. Peter the	null
book	Hermit would now be sent to a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have lived and died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses, what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?	null
book	Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away from the sphere of his possible effectiveness. A fter Voltaire, no Peter	null
book	the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general protestantization of France; after a	null
book	35 The reader will remember when this was written.	null
book	100	null
book	Manchester school, a Beaconsfield ’s success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar makes	null
book	little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain sides of the field altogether, and	null
book	limits the future possible angles of deflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do no better than quote from Professor Clifford,	null
book	36 “it is the peculiarity of living	null
book	things not merely that they change under the influence of surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of	null
book	the tree’s nature.... Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold, melt it, and let it cool.... No one can tell by examining a piece of gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak can tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A living being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its own existence, but of all i ts ancestors. ”	null
book	Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a certain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid down. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however, is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundings of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are powerl ess to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall be.	null
book	37	null
book	Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors,—the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra- social forces,	null
book	but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the co mmunity.	null
book	All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work, Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. “The individual withers, and the world is more and more,” to these writers; and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the ‘ world ’ has come to be almost synonymous with the climate . We all	null
book	know, too, how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a ‘ science of	null
book	history’ and those who deny the existence of anything like necessary ‘ laws’ where human	null
book	societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the ‘ great -man theory’ of history, from which a few passages may be quoted:—	null
book	36 Lectures and Essays, i. 82.	null
book	37 Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently quote, admits that a set of people who, if	null
book	they had been exposed ages ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed into negroes	null
book	might now, after a protracted exposur e to the conditions of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to	null
book	Timbuctoo.	null
book	101	null
book	“The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably believed so long as,	null
book	resting in general notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural? Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed, —or, rather, not removed at all.... Is this an	null
book	unacceptable solution? Then the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant .... You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on	null
book	the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.”	null
book	38	null
book	Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who believe in the power of initiative of the great man.	null
book	Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes social, political, and	null
book	religious discussion in England, and contrasts so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is largely due to J. S. Mill’s example. I may possibly be wrong about the facts; but I am, at any rate, ‘asking for particulars,’ and not ‘resting in general notions.’ And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it started from no personal influence whatever, but from the ‘aggregate of conditions,’ the ‘ generations, ’ Mill and all his contemporaries ‘ descended	null
book	from, ’ the whole past order of nature in short, surely he, not I, would be the person ‘ satisfied	null
book	with vagueness.’	null
book	The fact is that Mr. Spencer ’s sociological method is identical with that of one who would	null
book	invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the	null
book	gentleman ’s death. It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of replying to	null
book	whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, “God is great.” Not to fall back on the	null
book	gods, where a proximate principle may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.	null
book	To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great man ’s society, properly so called, does not make him before he can	null
book	remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there, —as the pressure of water outside a	null
book	38 Study of Sociology, pages 33 -35.	null
book	102	null
book	certain boat will cause a stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he	null
book	mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother at Stratford -upon-Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of him, to	null
book	restore the sociologic equilibrium, —just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter	null
book	how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level remains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at ‘ Stratford -atte-Bowe’ ? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in	null
book	the midst of Mr. Spencer’ s vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.	null
book	We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed, suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of articles in the Gentleman ’s Magazine, in which he maintained that	null
book	individuals have no initiative in determining social change.	null
book	“The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals,	null
book	or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspic uous differences	null
book	between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they would now be indistinguishable from the semi -barbarian negroes who inhabit that central African metropolis;	null
book	39 and if the people who	null
book	went to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and indigestible port.... The differentiating agency must be sought in the great permanent geographic al features of land	null
book	and sea; ... these have necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of every nation upon the earth.... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation. There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even tastes and inclinations must themselves be the result of surrounding	null
book	causes. ”	null
book	40	null
book	Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:—	null
book	“It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical Hellas, acting upon the	null
book	given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditions in which they are set,—including, of course, under the term physical conditions the relations of place and time in which they stand with regard to other bodies of	null
book	men. To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated without a cause. ”	null
book	41	null

book

clover in their neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy about the English sparrow here, —whether h e kills most canker -worms, or drives away most native birds. Just so the

null

book

great man, whether he be an importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about a rearrangement, on a

null

book

large or a small scale, of the pre- existing social relations.

null

book

The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction.

null

book

We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale all about us, and on a

null

book

large scale in the case of the leaders of history. It is only following the common- sense

null

book

method of a Lyell, a Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly observe. Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house, and is committed . Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other

null

book

career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been the bett er of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the old

null

book

alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no

null

book

otherwise with nations. They may be committed by kings and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science, or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the starting -point of new policies. Just so

null

book

does a revolution, or any great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose

null

book

34 It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its educative influence, and that this constitutes a

null

book

considerable difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect this aspect of the relation here,

null

book

for the other is the more im portant. At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.

null

book

99

null

book

operations widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an accidental

null

book

success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.

null

book

Would England have to-day the ‘ imperial’ ideal which she now has, if a certain boy named

null

book

Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European affairs

null

book

35 if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of a

null

book

Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that sh e ever had. There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe. But

null

book

in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany it has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be crying forward and backward at once, as she does now, ‘letting I will not wait upon I would, ’ wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in

null

book

all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely commanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. She would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another. Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still

null

book

be satisfied with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled Gelehrten and political

null

book

herbivora, and to the French as ces bons , or ces naifs , Allemands . Bismarck ’s will showed

null

book

them, to their own great astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lesson will not be forgotten. Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they—

null

book

“will never do away, I ween,

null

book

The marks of that which once hath been”—

null

book

of Bismarck ’s initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.

null

book

The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any rate, one factor in the

null

book

changes that constitute social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways. The

null

book

accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve. Why, the

null

book

very birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like Columbus’s egg. “ All can

null

book

raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed.” But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.

null

book

But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every ’ man’ fits every ‘hour.’ Some

null

book

incompatibilities there are. A given genius may come either too early or too late. Peter the

null

book

Hermit would now be sent to a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have lived and died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses, what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?

null

book

Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away from the sphere of his possible effectiveness. A fter Voltaire, no Peter

null

book

the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general protestantization of France; after a

null

book

35 The reader will remember when this was written.

null

book

100

null

book

Manchester school, a Beaconsfield ’s success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar makes

null

book

little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain sides of the field altogether, and

null

book

limits the future possible angles of deflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do no better than quote from Professor Clifford,

null

book

36 “it is the peculiarity of living

null

book

things not merely that they change under the influence of surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of

null

book

the tree’s nature.... Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold, melt it, and let it cool.... No one can tell by examining a piece of gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak can tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A living being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its own existence, but of all i ts ancestors. ”

null

book

Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a certain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid down. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however, is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundings of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are powerl ess to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall be.

null

book

37

null

book

Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors,—the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra- social forces,

null

book

but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the co mmunity.

null

book

All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work, Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. “The individual withers, and the world is more and more,” to these writers; and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the ‘ world ’ has come to be almost synonymous with the climate . We all

null

book

know, too, how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a ‘ science of

null

book

history’ and those who deny the existence of anything like necessary ‘ laws’ where human

null

book

societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the ‘ great -man theory’ of history, from which a few passages may be quoted:—

null

book

36 Lectures and Essays, i. 82.

null

book

37 Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently quote, admits that a set of people who, if

null

book

they had been exposed ages ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed into negroes

null

book

might now, after a protracted exposur e to the conditions of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to

null

book

Timbuctoo.

null

book

101

null

book

“The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably believed so long as,

null

book

resting in general notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural? Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed, —or, rather, not removed at all.... Is this an

null

book

unacceptable solution? Then the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant .... You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on

null

book

the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.”

null

book

38

null

book

Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who believe in the power of initiative of the great man.

null

book

Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes social, political, and

null

book

religious discussion in England, and contrasts so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is largely due to J. S. Mill’s example. I may possibly be wrong about the facts; but I am, at any rate, ‘asking for particulars,’ and not ‘resting in general notions.’ And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it started from no personal influence whatever, but from the ‘aggregate of conditions,’ the ‘ generations, ’ Mill and all his contemporaries ‘ descended

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from, ’ the whole past order of nature in short, surely he, not I, would be the person ‘ satisfied

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with vagueness.’

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The fact is that Mr. Spencer ’s sociological method is identical with that of one who would

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invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the

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gentleman ’s death. It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of replying to

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whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, “God is great.” Not to fall back on the

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gods, where a proximate principle may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.

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To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great man ’s society, properly so called, does not make him before he can

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remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there, —as the pressure of water outside a

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38 Study of Sociology, pages 33 -35.

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102

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certain boat will cause a stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he

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mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother at Stratford -upon-Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of him, to

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restore the sociologic equilibrium, —just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter

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how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level remains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at ‘ Stratford -atte-Bowe’ ? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in

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the midst of Mr. Spencer’ s vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.

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We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed, suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of articles in the Gentleman ’s Magazine, in which he maintained that

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individuals have no initiative in determining social change.

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“The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals,

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or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspic uous differences

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between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they would now be indistinguishable from the semi -barbarian negroes who inhabit that central African metropolis;

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39 and if the people who

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went to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and indigestible port.... The differentiating agency must be sought in the great permanent geographic al features of land

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and sea; ... these have necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of every nation upon the earth.... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation. There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even tastes and inclinations must themselves be the result of surrounding

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causes. ”

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40

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Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:—

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“It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical Hellas, acting upon the

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given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditions in which they are set,—including, of course, under the term physical conditions the relations of place and time in which they stand with regard to other bodies of

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men. To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated without a cause. ”

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41

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