A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains
between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is a
common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a
sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
in the early history of Europe. That is to say, alter the milky way,
alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
what it now is. One fact involved in the difference might be that the
particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
the stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
way. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
at the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one
such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are no
accidents," I might say, "for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the
slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is
to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The
real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
months previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why he
died within the year."
It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But
unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are the
causes that make communities change from generation to
generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
that of thirty years ago?
I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
their decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. They
are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
the Joneses and the Smiths.
Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way. Like the
dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
point of view are available or attainable. Their fallacy is a
practical one. Let us see where it lies. Although I believe in
free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes. Such
a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
It has no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it
to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider
sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we as
men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
proposition. We must say, All things in the world are fatally
predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
of natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
concrete links are the only things of importance. The human mind is
essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
and it loses its way altogether. Man always wants his curiosity
gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow,
the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
and fall and break his head too.
It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the
'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering. He treats them
(under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they
exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
for the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealing
with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the
marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system. Just so
a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
thousandth of a second.
There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;
different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The
mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetates
in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in
manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
with one another only _if we take the whole universe into account_.
For all lesser points of view it is lawful--nay, more, it is for human
wisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
another.
And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an
animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
able to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ the
peculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it is
produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the
title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
a physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignore
altogether,[2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
clumping the two cycles of causation into one. What preserves an
animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. The
giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest. But these
philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
branches, but also produced him. They _made_ his neck long by the
constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them. The
environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
wax into harmony with itself. Numerous instances were given of the way
in which this goes on under our eyes. The exercise of the forge makes
the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
forth. Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
adduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of
_adaptive_ changes. Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
produces the adjustment. The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
of which we know nothing. His next achievement was to define the true
problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
visible environment on the animal. That problem is simply this; Is the
environment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account of
this or that peculiarity with which he may be born? In giving the name
of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
the fixed outcome of natural law. If the total system of the universe
be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
remote and roundabout way, hang together. What Darwin means is, that,
since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
produced. This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
born. It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in
which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
and towards divergence from the parent type. What are the causes there?
In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,--inaccessible,
therefore, to direct observation of any kind. Secondly, their
operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
conditions of environment. The same parents, living in the same
environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
an idiot or a monster. The visible external conditions are therefore
not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
severally flow.
The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
physiology. Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, which
operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up. They are
upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
the particular stimulus which joggles them down. Galvanic work, equal
to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
exactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritants
than galvanism are employed. The irritant has merely started or
provoked something which then went on of itself,--as a match may start
a fire which consumes a whole town. And qualitatively as well as
quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
cause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated in
what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
different ways. You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turn into a sour clot or
a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
the process. Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that
the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
image of it?
Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
entanglement with matters such as these? The success of his work is a
sufficiently affirmative reply.
And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The causes of
production of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible to
the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin,
the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
affect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirm
that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short _selects_
him.[3] And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He
acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
the region in which it appears. We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
statement of the influence of cats on the growth of 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 he kills most canker-worms, or
drives away most native birds. Just so the 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 large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
social relations.
{227}
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.
We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
history. It is only following the common-sense 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 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 better of the two; but with the years such
questions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once so
vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no
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
{228} 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 does a revolution, or any
great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an
accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
a 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 she ever had.
There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
But 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
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 be satisfied
with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
{229} _Allemands_. Bismarck's will showed 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--
"will never do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been"--
of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The
community _may_ evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this
or that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve. Why, the 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 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.
But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every {230} 'man' fits
every 'hour.' Some incompatibilities there are. A given genius may
come either too early or too late. Peter the 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?
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. After Voltaire, no
Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
makes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain
sides of the field altogether, and 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,[5] "it is the peculiarity
of living 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 {231}
distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
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 its ancestors."
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
powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
be.[6]
{232}
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, 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 community.
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 know, too,
how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
necessary 'laws' where human 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:--
"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
believed so long as, resting in general {233} 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 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 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."[7]
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.
{234}
Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
social, political, and 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 from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
is great." _Not_ to fall back on the 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.
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
remake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} 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 certain boat will cause a
stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he
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 restore the sociologic
equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
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 the
midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
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
individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
commerce, art, morals, 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
{236} 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 conspicuous differences
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;[8] and if the people who 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 geographical features of land 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
causes."[9]
{237}