theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	characteristically human, Spencer ’s law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact	null
book	the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys,—selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.	null
book	It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a simple order are very literal.	null
book	They are slaves of habit, doing what they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and matter -of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse physical kind	null
book	which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring, and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget his frequent allusions to the trockener ernst of dogs and horses, nor to their ehrlichkeit . And every noticer of their	null
book	ways must receive a deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple, and treadmill-like operations of their minds.	null
book	But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of thoughts of concrete	null
book	things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the mos t rarefied abstractions	null
book	and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one character or ano ther. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will be flashes of	null
book	poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of moral harmony. But, whatever their differences may be, they will all agree in this, —that their genesis is sudden and, as it were, spontaneous. That	null
book	is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although, when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom it first occurred.	null
book	To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically pointed out	null
book	47 how the	null
book	genius of discovery depends altogether on the number of these random notions and guesses	null
book	which visit the investigator ’s mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first requisite, and to be	null
book	willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as well expect a chemist ’s note-book to write down the name of the body analyzed, or	null
book	a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient to make any brain conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is a spontaneous variation in	null
book	47 In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.	null
book	108	null
book	the strictest sense of the term. It flashes out of one brain, and no other, because the instability	null
book	of that brain is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction. But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle’s absurd Physics and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce the one produce the other. When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir,—the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has long ceased to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it is once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations may come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature’s ways. The environment preserves the conception which it was unable to produce in	null
book	any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.	null
book	Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at particular moments into	null
book	particular ideas and combinations are matched by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards determinate directions. The humorous bent is quite char acteristic;	null
book	the sentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each mind, which makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a certain way. Here again the selection goes on. The products of the mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the community. We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene. We are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of woe. The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters its tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is ( pace Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the gauntlet of the	null
book	larger environment ’s selective power. Civilized Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars,	null
book	poets, princes, and theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the Albigensian crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations. Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its	null
book	Humboldts and its Steins, proved itself in the most signal way ‘ adjusted ’ to its environment in	null
book	1872.	null
book	Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,	null
book	48 tries to show the necessary	null
book	order in which the development of conceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract	null
book	conception can be developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so forth.	null
book	“Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in law , is a belief of which the primitive	null
book	man is absolutely incapable.... Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the	null
book	conception of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations.... The daily impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very imperfectly, and in but few	null
book	cases. Of all the objects around,—trees, stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,—most differ widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to ma ke	null
book	48 Part viii. chap. iii.	null
book	109	null
book	discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it rarely happens that,	null
book	whether alive or dead, they are presented in just the same attitudes.... It is only along with a gradual development of the arts ... that there come frequent experie nces of perfectly straight	null
book	lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of equality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of succession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait among them.... So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is the notion which it tends to generate.... Only as fast as the practice of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of uniformity become clear.... Those conditions furnished by advancing civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity simultaneously make possible the notion of exactness .... Hence the primitive man has little	null
book	experience which cultivates the consciousness of what we call truth . How closely allied this	null
book	is to the consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even in language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement. Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect agreemen t between the results of calculations.”	null
book	The whole burden of Mr. Spencer’s book is to show the fatal way in which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of ‘outer relations. ’ In this chapter the yard -	null
book	stick, the balance, the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure among the ‘ relations ’ external to the mind. Surely they are so, after they have been	null
book	manufactured; but only because of the preservative power of the social environment. Originally all these things and all other institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the outer environment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become its heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of progress rolls. But take out the geniuses, or al ter	null
book	their idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment show? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.	null
book	The plain truth is that the ‘philosophy’ of evolution (as distinguished from our special	null
book	information about particular cases of change) is a metaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,—a mood which is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was, and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing proceeds. Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and mighty a style of looking on the world as this. What we at present call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should eve r give it its quietus , no	null
book	matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the ultimate phenomenal distinctions which science accumulates should turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions	null
book	on which science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region which—whether above or below—is at least altogether different from that in which science dwells. A critic,	null
book	however, who cannot disprove the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in ‘ scientific ’ plumes. I think that all who have had the	null
book	patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian ‘philosophy’ of social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of ‘ Force, ’ effacing all the previous distinctions between	null
book	actual and potential energy, momentum, work, force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved, carries us back to a pre- galilean age.	null
book	110	null
book	The Importance Of Individuals	null
book		null
book	The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,—one by Mr. Grant Allen,	null
book	entitled the ‘Genesis of Genius,’ in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled ‘Sociology and Hero Worship,’ by Mr. John Fiske, ibidem , p. 75. The article which follows is	null
book	a rejoinder to Mr. Allen’ s article. It was refused at the time by the Atlantic, but saw the day	null
book	later in the Open Court for August, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing article, on which it casts some explanatory light.	null
book	Mr. Allen ’s contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple considerations. A nation’ s	null
book	great men, he says, are but slight deviations from the general level. The hero is merely a	null
book	special complex of the ordinary qualities of his race. The petty differences impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in a philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of bette r coal. What each man adds is but an	null
book	infinitesimal fraction compared with what he derives from his parents, or indirectly from his earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero is so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what really calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for the sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted, as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.	null
book	Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen’ s unrivalled polemic amiability and be as conciliatory as	null
book	possible, I will not cavil at his facts or try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a	null
book	Goethe, or a Napoleon and the average level of their respective tribes. Let it be as small as Mr. Allen th inks. All that I object to is that he should think the mere size of a difference is	null
book	capable of deciding whether that difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study. Truly enough, the details vanish in the bird’s-eye view; but so does the bird’s- eye view	null
book	vanish in the details. Which is the right point of view for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points of view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural reality per se is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation, foreground, and	null
book	background are created solely by the interested attention of the looker- on; and if the small	null
book	difference between the genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy cannot be ended until a	null
book	complete philosophy, accounting for all differences impartially, shall justify us both.	null
book	An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: “ There is very little	null
book	difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important .” This	null
book	distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the difference	null
book	which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its kind. An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch on a man’s nose. Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.	null
book	Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have pondered. It is this: That	null
book	among all the differences which exist, the only ones that interest us strongly are those we do not take for granted. We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on all fours and fails to understand our conversation.	null
book	111	null
book	Expecting no more from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we	null
book	expect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog by discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the throwing of crusts to be snapped at. But if either dog or friend fall above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively emotion. On our brother’s vices or genius we never weary of descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a thought. What he says may transport us;	null
book	that he is able to speak at all leaves us stone cold. The reason of all this is that his virtues and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race’s average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year ’s growth is going on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which	null
book	stands inert and belongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of human perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley with cries of “meat, meat! ” This	null
book	vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen’s principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself. Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen in the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher the intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed, I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allen seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and tweedledee?	null
book	To a Veddah ’s eyes the differences between two white literary men seem slight indeed, —	null
book	same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper	null
book	and poring over books, etc. “ Just two white fellows, ” the Veddah will say, “with no	null
book	perceptible difference. ” But what a difference to the literary men themselves! Think, Mr.	null
book	Allen, of confounding our philosophies together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at the thought.	null
book	But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place himself at the Veddah’s point	null
book	of view, and to see things en gros and out of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that	null
book	there are things and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are the humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,—the large distinctions or the small? In the an swer to this question lies the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the	null
book	sociologists. As I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I prefer.	null
book	The zone of the individual differences, and of the social ‘ twists ’ which by common	null
book	confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions. The sphere of the race’ s average, on the	null
book	contrary, no matter how large it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones. Th e moving present in which we live with	null
book	its problems and passions, its individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make room for fresh actors and a newer play. And though it may be true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone	null
book	shall fatally be narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady- like tea -table	null

book

characteristically human, Spencer ’s law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact

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the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys,—selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.

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It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a simple order are very literal.

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They are slaves of habit, doing what they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and matter -of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse physical kind

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which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring, and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget his frequent allusions to the trockener ernst of dogs and horses, nor to their ehrlichkeit . And every noticer of their

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ways must receive a deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple, and treadmill-like operations of their minds.

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But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of thoughts of concrete

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things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the mos t rarefied abstractions

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book

and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one character or ano ther. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will be flashes of

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poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of moral harmony. But, whatever their differences may be, they will all agree in this, —that their genesis is sudden and, as it were, spontaneous. That

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is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although, when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom it first occurred.

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To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically pointed out

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47 how the

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genius of discovery depends altogether on the number of these random notions and guesses

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which visit the investigator ’s mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first requisite, and to be

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willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as well expect a chemist ’s note-book to write down the name of the body analyzed, or

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a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient to make any brain conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is a spontaneous variation in

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47 In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.

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108

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the strictest sense of the term. It flashes out of one brain, and no other, because the instability

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of that brain is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction. But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle’s absurd Physics and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce the one produce the other. When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir,—the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has long ceased to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it is once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations may come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature’s ways. The environment preserves the conception which it was unable to produce in

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any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.

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Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at particular moments into

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particular ideas and combinations are matched by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards determinate directions. The humorous bent is quite char acteristic;

null

book

the sentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each mind, which makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a certain way. Here again the selection goes on. The products of the mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the community. We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene. We are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of woe. The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters its tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is ( pace Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the gauntlet of the

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larger environment ’s selective power. Civilized Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars,

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poets, princes, and theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the Albigensian crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations. Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its

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Humboldts and its Steins, proved itself in the most signal way ‘ adjusted ’ to its environment in

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book

1872.

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book

Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,

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48 tries to show the necessary

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book

order in which the development of conceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract

null

book

conception can be developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so forth.

null

book

“Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in law , is a belief of which the primitive

null

book

man is absolutely incapable.... Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the

null

book

conception of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations.... The daily impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very imperfectly, and in but few

null

book

cases. Of all the objects around,—trees, stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,—most differ widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to ma ke

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48 Part viii. chap. iii.

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109

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discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it rarely happens that,

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whether alive or dead, they are presented in just the same attitudes.... It is only along with a gradual development of the arts ... that there come frequent experie nces of perfectly straight

null

book

lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of equality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of succession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait among them.... So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is the notion which it tends to generate.... Only as fast as the practice of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of uniformity become clear.... Those conditions furnished by advancing civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity simultaneously make possible the notion of exactness .... Hence the primitive man has little

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experience which cultivates the consciousness of what we call truth . How closely allied this

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book

is to the consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even in language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement. Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect agreemen t between the results of calculations.”

null

book

The whole burden of Mr. Spencer’s book is to show the fatal way in which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of ‘outer relations. ’ In this chapter the yard -

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book

stick, the balance, the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure among the ‘ relations ’ external to the mind. Surely they are so, after they have been

null

book

manufactured; but only because of the preservative power of the social environment. Originally all these things and all other institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the outer environment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become its heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of progress rolls. But take out the geniuses, or al ter

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their idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment show? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.

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book

The plain truth is that the ‘philosophy’ of evolution (as distinguished from our special

null

book

information about particular cases of change) is a metaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,—a mood which is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was, and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing proceeds. Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and mighty a style of looking on the world as this. What we at present call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should eve r give it its quietus , no

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book

matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the ultimate phenomenal distinctions which science accumulates should turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions

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book

on which science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region which—whether above or below—is at least altogether different from that in which science dwells. A critic,

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book

however, who cannot disprove the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in ‘ scientific ’ plumes. I think that all who have had the

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patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian ‘philosophy’ of social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of ‘ Force, ’ effacing all the previous distinctions between

null

book

actual and potential energy, momentum, work, force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved, carries us back to a pre- galilean age.

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110

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The Importance Of Individuals

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The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,—one by Mr. Grant Allen,

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entitled the ‘Genesis of Genius,’ in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled ‘Sociology and Hero Worship,’ by Mr. John Fiske, ibidem , p. 75. The article which follows is

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a rejoinder to Mr. Allen’ s article. It was refused at the time by the Atlantic, but saw the day

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later in the Open Court for August, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing article, on which it casts some explanatory light.

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Mr. Allen ’s contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple considerations. A nation’ s

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great men, he says, are but slight deviations from the general level. The hero is merely a

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special complex of the ordinary qualities of his race. The petty differences impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in a philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of bette r coal. What each man adds is but an

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infinitesimal fraction compared with what he derives from his parents, or indirectly from his earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero is so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what really calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for the sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted, as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.

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Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen’ s unrivalled polemic amiability and be as conciliatory as

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possible, I will not cavil at his facts or try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a

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Goethe, or a Napoleon and the average level of their respective tribes. Let it be as small as Mr. Allen th inks. All that I object to is that he should think the mere size of a difference is

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capable of deciding whether that difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study. Truly enough, the details vanish in the bird’s-eye view; but so does the bird’s- eye view

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vanish in the details. Which is the right point of view for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points of view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural reality per se is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation, foreground, and

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background are created solely by the interested attention of the looker- on; and if the small

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difference between the genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy cannot be ended until a

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complete philosophy, accounting for all differences impartially, shall justify us both.

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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: “ There is very little

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difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important .” This

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distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the difference

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which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its kind. An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch on a man’s nose. Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.

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Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have pondered. It is this: That

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among all the differences which exist, the only ones that interest us strongly are those we do not take for granted. We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on all fours and fails to understand our conversation.

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Expecting no more from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we

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expect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog by discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the throwing of crusts to be snapped at. But if either dog or friend fall above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively emotion. On our brother’s vices or genius we never weary of descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a thought. What he says may transport us;

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that he is able to speak at all leaves us stone cold. The reason of all this is that his virtues and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race’s average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year ’s growth is going on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which

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stands inert and belongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of human perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley with cries of “meat, meat! ” This

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vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen’s principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself. Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen in the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher the intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed, I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allen seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and tweedledee?

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To a Veddah ’s eyes the differences between two white literary men seem slight indeed, —

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same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper

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and poring over books, etc. “ Just two white fellows, ” the Veddah will say, “with no

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perceptible difference. ” But what a difference to the literary men themselves! Think, Mr.

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Allen, of confounding our philosophies together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at the thought.

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But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place himself at the Veddah’s point

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of view, and to see things en gros and out of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that

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there are things and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are the humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,—the large distinctions or the small? In the an swer to this question lies the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the

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sociologists. As I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I prefer.

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The zone of the individual differences, and of the social ‘ twists ’ which by common

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confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions. The sphere of the race’ s average, on the

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contrary, no matter how large it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones. Th e moving present in which we live with

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its problems and passions, its individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make room for fresh actors and a newer play. And though it may be true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone

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shall fatally be narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady- like tea -table

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