"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is
to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can
differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
without a cause."[10]
This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
moment we refuse to 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 quid_
between outward environment and miracle. _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!
If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
outward cycle of visible 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 and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
scientific character.
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 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 Greeks in intelligence? No
geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It 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 founding a line of descent
to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} 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.
Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
fauna and its 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.
Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--
"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
Philippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
their luxuriant forests, and their 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 differences or similarities in
the various 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
those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
with widely differing geographical environments. A singularly
accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[11]
uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
with great effect He says:--
"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 Greek, and the
Saracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
with 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 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 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 sounding-board of history."
This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
detail. All the material 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. 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 {242} 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
torches seem to have been wanting.[12]
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get
vibrating through and through {243} 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.
{244}
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 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, 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 movement would make more
progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as 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 {245}
move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]
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 lesson of the 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 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.
I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
environment in _mental_ evolution. After what I have already said, I
may be quite concise. Here, if 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 {246} 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. The
entire field of those abstract 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'
experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
by his mind.[14] The pleasures and benefits, 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 fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
been repeated in experience."[15]
{247}
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 of the mind,
so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
region of 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, which are most characteristically human,
Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
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.
It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
simple order are very literal. 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 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
{248} 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 ways must receive a
deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of
thoughts of concrete 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 most rarefied abstractions
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 another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
be flashes of 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 {249} differences may be, they will
all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
spontaneous. That 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.
To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
investigator's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
requisite, and to be 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 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 the strictest sense of the term. It flashes
out of one brain, and no other, because the instability 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. {250} 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 any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.
Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
determinate directions. The humorous bent is quite characteristic; 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
{251} 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 larger environment's selective power. Civilized
Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, 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 Humboldts and its Steins,
proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
1872.
Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[17]
tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
conceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract conception can be
developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
forth.
"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is a
belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations.... The
daily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
imperfectly, and in but few 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 make
discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it
rarely happens that, 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 experiences of perfectly straight
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 experience which cultivates the consciousness
of what we call _truth_. How closely allied this 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
agreement between the results of calculations."
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 {253} relations.' In this chapter the yard-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 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 alter their
idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
show? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
from our special 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 ever give it its
_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
ultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates should
turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions 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, 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 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 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.
[1] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
[2] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
(among other things) for variation. But it occupies its own separate
place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
of the relations of the whole animal to the environment. _Divide et
impera!_
[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect
this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
[4] The reader will remember when this was written.
[5] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
[6] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
[7] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
[8] No! not even though they were bodily brothers! The geographical
factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor. The difference
between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this 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 divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
[9] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quote
from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
[10] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in
Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
[11] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
[12] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
the greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
make--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)--to be
radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
the great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and to
the way in which the physiological averages 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 assertion that
_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
types are irrepressible. Voltaire, 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 in them,' known
only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
judgment. What has started them on their career of effective greatness
is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
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 fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
That is, two or three might appear 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.
[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
extent met the need. But who can doubt that if he had certain other
qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
still more decisive? (1896.)
[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
monotonous.
[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On
page 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of the
connection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ of
the outer connection. 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.
[16] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
[17] Part viii. chap. iii.
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