theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	39 No! not even though they were bodily brothers! The geographical factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral	null
book	factor. The difference between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two races is as	null
book	nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this	null
book	difference might be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of the most homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages. The minute	null
book	divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.	null
book	40 Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quote from the reprint in the Popular Science	null
book	Monthly Supplement December, 1878, pages 121, 123, 126.	null
book	41 Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September,	null
book	1878.	null
book	103	null
book	This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the moment we refuse to	null
book	invest in the kind of causation which is peddled round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no tertium	null
book	quid between outward environment and miracle. Aut Caesar, aut nullus ! Aut Spencerism, aut catechism!	null
book	If by ‘ physical conditions ’ Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the outward cycle of visible	null
book	nature and man, his assertion is simply physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates ‘ itself ’ whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the invisible	null
book	and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by ‘physical conditions’ the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but the vague Asiatic profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or scientific character.	null
book	And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished in these matters between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions of a given result? The French say that	null
book	to have an omelet we must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does an omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind. To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a necessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why did not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greek s in intelligence? No geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It	null
book	can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fishes happened to have that number. He owed his prodigious success in	null
book	founding a line of descent to some entirely other quality,—we know not which,—but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals. Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has done with Hellas. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show that the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the one necessary and only possible form.	null
book	Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a fauna and its	null
book	environment are. An animal may better his chances of existence in either of many ways,—growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny, slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other ways besides,—and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely different environments.	null
book	Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking illustrations of this in his	null
book	Malay Archipelago: —	null
book	“Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the	null
book	104	null
book	Philippines in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their luxuriant forests, and their	null
book	frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as arid as that of Timor. Yet between these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions. Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that diffe rences or similarities in the various	null
book	forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to th ose inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere clothe the plains	null
book	and mountains of New Guinea.”	null
book	Here we have similar physical -geography environments harmonizing with widely differing	null
book	animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing with widely differing geographical	null
book	environments. A singularly accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North Americ an	null
book	Review,	null
book	42 uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis with great effect	null
book	He says: —	null
book	“These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean, at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo -Latin civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the	null
book	Greek, and the Saracen, with a coast -line of more than a thousand miles, endowed with	null
book	obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown, unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of European history.... These islands have dialects, but no language; records of battles, but no history. They have customs, but no laws; the vendetta , but no justice. They	null
book	have wants and wealth, but no commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but no poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said that they had universities, but no students.... That Sardinia, with all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself.... Near the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an à priori geographer would	null
book	point out as the most favorable place for material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like nodes on the	null
book	sounding-board of history.”	null
book	This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some detail. All the material	null
book	advantages are in favor of Sardinia, “and the Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of Sicily.” Yet Sicily ’s past history has been brilliant in the extreme, and her commerce to-day is great.	null
book	Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply because no individuals were born there with patriotism and ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride, ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best wood- pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate	null
book	torches seem to have been wanting.	null
book	43	null
book	42 Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).	null
book	43 I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily	null
book	shotted bows of Mr. Galton, for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have the greatest	null
book	105	null
book	Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and	null
book	through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare,—why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.	null
book	It is folly, then, to speak of the ‘laws of history’ as of something inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, the very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with ifs . The physicist does not	null
book	say, “The water will boil anyhow;” he only says it will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost the student of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordination to a paramount state rather than federation,	null
book	because no historian could have calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It is certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or whatever one please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do so by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot say. There can be no doubt that the reform	null
book	respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the	null
book	outward opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses of each grade must needs be	null
book	born in every equal period of time; a subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high- class	null
book	geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to make —of great men fortuitously assembling	null
book	around a given epoch and making it great, and of their being fortui tously absent from certain places and times	null
book	(from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.) —to be radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to	null
book	the great complexity of the conditions of effective greatness, and to the way in which the physiological averages	null
book	of production may be masked entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born happened not to find tasks. I doubt the truth of his	null
book	assertion that intellectual genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain types are irrepressible. Voltaire,	null
book	Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch. But take Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer: nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music	null
book	in them,' known only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and judgment. What has started	null
book	them on their career of effective greatness is simply the accident of each stumbli ng upon a task vast, brilliant,	null
book	and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions and powers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves equally great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons, Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apart from these causes of	null
book	fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that whe re transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are	null
book	so small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages. That is, two or three might appear	null
book	together, just as the two or three balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Take longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls would on the whole be more spread out.	null
book	106	null
book	movement would make more progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as	null
book	now in ten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to victory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.	null
book	44	null
book	To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The les son of the	null
book	analysis that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries ’ speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to be sure, never	null
book	heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he allowed it to drift alone.	null
book	I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the environment	null
book	in mental evolution. After what I have already said, I may be quite concise. Here, if	null
book	anywhere, it would seem at first sight as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic, and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must result from a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entire field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. T he entire field of those abstract	null
book	conceptions which were taught us with the language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more than this, there is reason to think that the order of ‘ outer relations ’	null
book	experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted by his mind.	null
book	45 The pleasures and benefits,	null
book	moreover, which certain parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental experiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there were no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have found so useful between ‘spontaneous variation,’ as the producer of changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer, did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be quite right with his fundament al law of intelligence, which says, “ The cohesion between psychical	null
book	states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experience. ”	null
book	46	null
book	But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain that the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata	null
book	44 Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain extent met the need. But who can doubt that	null
book	if he had certain other qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been still more decisive?	null
book	(1896.)	null
book	45 That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our outer experience with a number of strongly	null
book	contrasted concomitants, it will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or monotonous.	null
book	46 Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On page 408 the law is formulated thus:	null
book	The persistence of the connection in consciousness is proportionate to the persistence of the outer connection.	null
book	Mr. Spencer works most with the law of frequency. Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr. Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.	null
book	107	null
book	of the mind, so to speak,—from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the region of	null
book	intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes. And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental departments which are highest, w hich are most	null

book

39 No! not even though they were bodily brothers! The geographical factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral

null

book

factor. The difference between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two races is as

null

book

nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this

null

book

difference might be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of the most homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages. The minute

null

book

divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.

null

book

40 Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quote from the reprint in the Popular Science

null

book

Monthly Supplement December, 1878, pages 121, 123, 126.

null

book

41 Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September,

null

book

1878.

null

book

103

null

book

This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the moment we refuse to

null

book

invest in the kind of causation which is peddled round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no tertium

null

book

quid between outward environment and miracle. Aut Caesar, aut nullus ! Aut Spencerism, aut catechism!

null

book

If by ‘ physical conditions ’ Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the outward cycle of visible

null

book

nature and man, his assertion is simply physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates ‘ itself ’ whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the invisible

null

book

and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by ‘physical conditions’ the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but the vague Asiatic profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or scientific character.

null

book

And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished in these matters between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions of a given result? The French say that

null

book

to have an omelet we must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does an omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind. To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a necessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why did not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greek s in intelligence? No geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It

null

book

can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fishes happened to have that number. He owed his prodigious success in

null

book

founding a line of descent to some entirely other quality,—we know not which,—but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals. Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has done with Hellas. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show that the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the one necessary and only possible form.

null

book

Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a fauna and its

null

book

environment are. An animal may better his chances of existence in either of many ways,—growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny, slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other ways besides,—and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely different environments.

null

book

Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking illustrations of this in his

null

book

Malay Archipelago: —

null

book

“Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the

null

book

104

null

book

Philippines in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their luxuriant forests, and their

null

book

frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as arid as that of Timor. Yet between these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions. Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that diffe rences or similarities in the various

null

book

forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to th ose inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere clothe the plains

null

book

and mountains of New Guinea.”

null

book

Here we have similar physical -geography environments harmonizing with widely differing

null

book

animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing with widely differing geographical

null

book

environments. A singularly accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North Americ an

null

book

Review,

null

book

42 uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis with great effect

null

book

He says: —

null

book

“These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean, at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo -Latin civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the

null

book

Greek, and the Saracen, with a coast -line of more than a thousand miles, endowed with

null

book

obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown, unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of European history.... These islands have dialects, but no language; records of battles, but no history. They have customs, but no laws; the vendetta , but no justice. They

null

book

have wants and wealth, but no commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but no poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said that they had universities, but no students.... That Sardinia, with all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself.... Near the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an à priori geographer would

null

book

point out as the most favorable place for material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like nodes on the

null

book

sounding-board of history.”

null

book

This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some detail. All the material

null

book

advantages are in favor of Sardinia, “and the Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of Sicily.” Yet Sicily ’s past history has been brilliant in the extreme, and her commerce to-day is great.

null

book

Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply because no individuals were born there with patriotism and ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride, ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best wood- pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate

null

book

torches seem to have been wanting.

null

book

43

null

book

42 Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).

null

book

43 I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily

null

book

shotted bows of Mr. Galton, for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have the greatest

null

book

105

null

book

Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and

null

book

through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare,—why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.

null

book

It is folly, then, to speak of the ‘laws of history’ as of something inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, the very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with ifs . The physicist does not

null

book

say, “The water will boil anyhow;” he only says it will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost the student of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordination to a paramount state rather than federation,

null

book

because no historian could have calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It is certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or whatever one please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do so by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot say. There can be no doubt that the reform

null

book

respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the

null

book

outward opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses of each grade must needs be

null

book

born in every equal period of time; a subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high- class

null

book

geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to make —of great men fortuitously assembling

null

book

around a given epoch and making it great, and of their being fortui tously absent from certain places and times

null

book

(from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.) —to be radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to

null

book

the great complexity of the conditions of effective greatness, and to the way in which the physiological averages

null

book

of production may be masked entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born happened not to find tasks. I doubt the truth of his

null

book

assertion that intellectual genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain types are irrepressible. Voltaire,

null

book

Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch. But take Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer: nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music

null

book

in them,' known only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and judgment. What has started

null

book

them on their career of effective greatness is simply the accident of each stumbli ng upon a task vast, brilliant,

null

book

and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions and powers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves equally great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons, Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apart from these causes of

null

book

fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that whe re transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are

null

book

so small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages. That is, two or three might appear

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together, just as the two or three balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Take longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls would on the whole be more spread out.

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106

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movement would make more progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as

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now in ten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to victory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.

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44

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To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The les son of the

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analysis that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries ’ speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to be sure, never

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heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he allowed it to drift alone.

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I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the environment

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in mental evolution. After what I have already said, I may be quite concise. Here, if

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anywhere, it would seem at first sight as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic, and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must result from a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entire field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. T he entire field of those abstract

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conceptions which were taught us with the language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more than this, there is reason to think that the order of ‘ outer relations ’

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experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted by his mind.

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45 The pleasures and benefits,

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moreover, which certain parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental experiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there were no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have found so useful between ‘spontaneous variation,’ as the producer of changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer, did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be quite right with his fundament al law of intelligence, which says, “ The cohesion between psychical

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states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experience. ”

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46

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But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain that the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata

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44 Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain extent met the need. But who can doubt that

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if he had certain other qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been still more decisive?

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(1896.)

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45 That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our outer experience with a number of strongly

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contrasted concomitants, it will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or monotonous.

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46 Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On page 408 the law is formulated thus:

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The persistence of the connection in consciousness is proportionate to the persistence of the outer connection.

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Mr. Spencer works most with the law of frequency. Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr. Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.

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107

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of the mind, so to speak,—from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the region of

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intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes. And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental departments which are highest, w hich are most

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