GREAT MEN, AS THE TRUE CAUSE OF PROGRESS
It is evident that an error of the kind now in question does not
represent the carelessness of the untrained thinker. It is nothing if
not deliberate; and indeed Mr. Spencer admits that it is altogether
in opposition to the opinions which men naturally hold. Accordingly,
the arguments by which he and his followers justify it, and have
actually imposed it on all the sociological thinkers of their
generation, require, before we reject them, to be examined with the
utmost care.
Let us then turn our attention once again to the grounds on which
Mr. Spencer refuses to admit the great or exceptional man as a
true factor in the production of social change. If the reader
will reflect upon the account that has been already given of Mr.
Spencer’s arguments in connection with this point, he will find
that Mr. Spencer rejects the great man for two reasons, which are
not only distinct, but are, when interpreted closely, not entirely
consistent with each other. One of these reasons is that the great,
or exceptional man does {56} not really produce those great changes
of which he is nevertheless “_the proximate initiator_”; the other
is that, outside the sphere of primitive warfare, he does not even
proximately initiate any great changes at all. The first of these
two contentions is expressed with sufficient clearness in his
statement “_if there is to be anything like a real explanation_”
of those changes of which the great man is the “_proximate
initiator_”—changes, to quote an example which he himself gives, such
as those produced by the conquests of Julius Cæsar—this explanation
must be sought not in the great man himself, but “_in the aggregate
of social conditions out of which he and they_ (i.e. _the changes
commonly supposed to have been produced by him_) _have arisen_.”
Mr. Spencer’s second contention is expressed in the following
passage, the concluding words of which have been quoted already,
but on which it will be presently necessary for us to insist again.
“_Recognising_,” he says, “_what truth there is in the great-man
theory, we may say that, if limited to the history of primitive
societies, the histories of which are histories of little else than
endeavours to destroy one another, it approximately expresses fact in
representing the great leader as all-important. But its immense error
lies in the assumption that what was once true was true for ever, and
that a relation of ruler and ruled which was good at one time is good
for all time. Just as fast as the predatory activity of early tribes
diminishes, just as fast as large aggregates are formed, so fast do
societies {57} begin to give origin to new activities, new ideas, all
of which unobtrusively make their appearance without the aid of any
king or legislator_.”
It will be necessary to deal with these two contentions separately;
and we will begin with the second, as set forth in the words just
quoted. We shall find it valuable as an example of that singular
confusion of thought by which all the reasoning of our sociologists
with regard to this question is vitiated. Mr. Spencer speaks of
an “_immense error_” which he is pointing out and correcting. The
“_immense error_” in reality is to be found in his own conception.
It is hard to imagine anything more arbitrary and more gratuitously
false than the contrast which he here draws between the actions
of men in primitive war, for the success of which he admits a
great leader to have been essential, and their various actions and
activities as manifested in peaceful progress, which, he contends,
neither require leadership nor exhibit traces of its influence.
We are at this moment altogether waiving the question of how far
the great leader, when he is the proximate cause of the military
successes of his tribe, is their cause in any deeper sense. It is
enough for us now to take Mr. Spencer’s admission that the leader
is really the cause, in some sense or other, of the social changes
connected with early warfare; and, keeping to this sense, let us
consider in what possible way less causality can be attributed to the
actions of great men and leaders in the sphere of peaceful progress.
{58}
“_A primitive society_,” if it is to become powerful in war—this
Mr. Spencer admits—must have a great leader to direct it. But what
precisely is it that such a leader is and does? Such a leader leads,
because he is one mind or personality impressing for the moment its
superior qualities on many minds or personalities. He supplies the
fighting men of his society with an intelligence not their own—often
with a courage, a presence of mind, and a resolution. He dictates
to them the directions in which their feet are to carry them; the
manner in which they are to group themselves; the movements of their
hands and arms. He gives the word, and a thousand men dig trenches.
He gives the word again, and a thousand men wield swords; now he
makes them advance; now he makes them halt; and the measure of his
greatness as a leader is to be found in those results which, by
directing the action of all these men, he elicits from it.
And now from the triumphs of war let us turn to those of
peace. “_These_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_unlike the former, make
their appearance unobtrusively, without the aid of any king or
legislator_.” It may, no doubt, be true that they do appear
unobtrusively in the sense that they are not accompanied by trumpets
and drums and tom-toms. A factory for the production of toffee, or
of trimmings for ladies’ petticoats does not require an Ivan the
Terrible to direct it, nor are Mr. Spencer’s sentences as he writes
them punctuated by discharges of artillery. But if the essence of
kingship and {59} leadership is to command the actions of others,
the larger part of the progressive activities of peace, and the arts
and products of civilisation, result from and imply the influence of
kings and leaders, in essentially the same sense as do the successes
of primitive war, the only difference being that the kings are here
more numerous, and though they do not wear any arms or uniforms, are
incomparably more autocratic than the kings and czars who do.
As a particularly clear illustration of this important truth, let
us take Mr. Spencer himself, and place him before his own eyes as
an autocratic king or ruler. In certain respects he is so; and it
is only because he is so that he has been able to give, through his
books, his thoughts and theories to the world. For let us examine any
one of his volumes and consider what it is, in so far as it differs
from any other volume—let us say from a treatise on the cutting of
trousers, or an attack on the Spencerian philosophy—which is printed
in similar type on pages of the same size. It differs solely in the
order in which the letters have been arranged by the hands of the
compositors; and its value as a work of philosophy consequently
depends altogether on a certain complicated series of movements which
the hands of the compositors have made. And how has this prolonged
series of minute movements been secured? It has been secured by the
fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer, through his manuscript, has given
the compositors a prolonged series of orders, which their hands,
day after day, have been obliged to obey {60} passively. He has
been as absolute a master of all their professional actions as ever
was the most arbitrary general of the professional actions of his
soldiery; and there is absolutely no difference in point of command
and obedience between the compositors who, at Mr. Spencer’s bidding,
put into type the words “_homogeneity_” and “_the Unknowable_” and
the Guards who charged the French at the bidding of the Duke of
Wellington.
Precisely the same thing is true of all scientific inventions—not
indeed of inventions as mere ideas and discoveries, but of inventions
and discoveries applied practically to the service of civilisation.
The mere discovery of certain properties belonging to material
substances, or the thinking out of some new machine or process, may
be the work of one man, who has command over nobody except himself.
But the moment he proceeds to make his machine or process useful—to
apply it to the purpose of actual business or manufacture—he is
obliged to secure for himself an entire army of mercenaries, who act
under his orders in precisely the same way as soldiers act under the
orders of the military leader, or as the compositors act under the
orders of Mr. Spencer. When the electric telegraph was supplemented
by the invention of the telephone, telephones were produced, and
could have been produced, only by a multitude of men performing a
series of manual actions which were different in detail from anything
they had performed before, and which, if it had not been for the
inventor, would never {61} have been performed at all. They filed or
they cast pieces of metal into new shapes; with these pieces of metal
they connected in new order pieces of other materials, such as wood
and vulcanite, the shape of these last being new and special also;
and every piece of material shaped or connected with another piece
was the exact resultant of so many manual movements made in passive
obedience to the inventor’s autocratic orders. It was only because
his orders were obeyed with such humble fidelity and completeness
that these movements resulted in telephones, enriching the world with
a new convenience, and not in the old-fashioned telegraphic machines,
or in penholders, or vulcanite inkstands, or even in useless heaps
of shavings and brass filings. And the same is the case with every
invention or contrivance which has helped to build up the fabric of
modern material civilisation.
Civilisation, however, even in its most material sense, does not
consist of contrivances and inventions only. “_The one operation_,”
says Mill, “_of putting things into fit places . . . is all that man
does, or can do, with matter. He has no other means of acting on
it than by moving it._” But valuable as this formula is, it is not
sufficiently comprehensive; for there is another economic process
which, to the ordinary mind at all events, is hardly suggested by
such a phrase as “_to move matter_.”
The process referred to consists in the moving of men. What is meant
by the distinction here drawn is this—that the industrial efficiency
of a community {62} does not depend solely on the muscles of the
manual workers being given a right direction, so that they shall
shape material objects in such and such a way; but it depends also on
the movements which are prescribed to the men, being prescribed to
the men best fitted to perform them, and being prescribed to them in
such order that when each movement has to be made, the men told off
to make it shall be ready to make it at the moment. Here we see part
of the secret of the success of the great contractor.
The importance of these considerations becomes all the clearer to us
when we reflect on the fact that the mere production of commodities,
and the production of the means of production, form but a part
of the processes which advance, maintain, and indeed constitute
civilisation. A part almost equally large consists in the rendering
of various personal services, which often, no doubt, involve the
utilisation of improved appliances, but which almost as often are
neither more nor less than the performance of actions of a simple
and ordinary kind, the merit and demerit, the wastefulness or the
economy of which depend on their being performed with absolute
punctuality and despatch. A good example of this is the case of a
large hotel. Whether a large hotel is carried on at a profit or at a
loss depends almost entirely on this question of personal management.
The success of a successful manager does not depend on his capacity
for inventing new methods of waiting, of cooking, or of making beds.
It depends on his {63} capacity for organising his staff of cooks,
waiters, and chamber-maids. This is well expressed by that most
significant American saying, “He’s a smart man, but he couldn’t keep
a hotel”; the meaning being that one of the most important, and at
the same time one of the rarest faculties required for maintaining a
complicated civilisation like our own is the faculty by which, given
a number of tasks, one man governs a number of men in the act of
cooperatively performing them.
Examples of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied, but those
just adduced are quite sufficient to prove the sole point insisted
on at the present moment—namely, that whatever be the part (and Mr.
Spencer admits it to be “_all-important_”) which the great man plays
as a leader in primitive warfare, a part precisely similar in kind is
played by other great men in the peaceful processes, and, above all,
in the progress of civilisation.
And now, having dealt with this point, let us turn to Mr. Spencer’s
other contention—his contention namely that, whatever the part may
be, and however seemingly important, which the great man plays in
producing social changes, he is, in any case, nothing but their
“_proximate initiator_”;—that “_they have their chief cause in the
generations he descended from_”;—and that if there is to be anything
like a real and scientific explanation of them, it must be sought
in the aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have
arisen, and not in the great man’s personality as revealed to us by
any {64} records of his life, or by any analysis of his peculiar
faculties.
We have already seen in a general way how this feat of merging the
great man in “_the aggregate of conditions out of which he has
arisen_” is performed by Mr. Spencer himself. Let us now turn for a
moment to three other writers who, though differing from him as to
certain of his conclusions, have with regard to this particular point
done little else than popularise and apply his teaching.
“_It needs only a little reflection_,” writes Mr. Kidd, “_to
enable us to perceive that the marvellous accomplishments of modern
civilisation are primarily the measure of the social stability and
social efficiency, and not of the intellectual pre-eminence of the
peoples who have produced them. . . . For it must be remembered
that even the ablest men amongst us, whose names go down to history
connected with great discoveries and inventions, have each in reality
advanced the sum of knowledge by only a small addition. In the
fulness of time, and when the ground has been slowly and laboriously
prepared for it, the great idea fructifies and the discovery is
made. It is, in fact, the work not of one, but of a great number
of persons. How true it is that all the great ideas have been the
products of the time rather than of individuals may be the more
readily realised when it is remembered that, as regards a large
number of them, there have been rival claims put forward for the
honour of authorship by persons who, working quite independently,
have arrived at like results almost {65} simultaneously. Thus rival
and independent claims have been made for the discovery of the
differential calculus . . . the invention of the steam engine, . . .
the methods of spectrum analysis, the telegraph, the telephone, as
well as many other discoveries._” And then Mr. Kidd proceeds to quote
with approval the following sentence from an essay which was written
by an American socialist, Mr. Bellamy; and the sentence has been
repeated with solemn and triumphant unction in half the socialistic
books which have been given to the world since. “_Nine hundred and
ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of every man’s produce are the
result of his social inheritance and environment.” “This is so,_”
remarks Mr. Kidd, “_and it is, if possible, even more true of the
work of our brain than of the work of our hands._” To these passages
we must add one from Mr. Sidney Webb, who is, intellectually, a
favourable example of a modern English socialist. Referring to the
socialistic proposal that all kinds of workers, no matter what their
work, should be paid an equal wage, “_this equality_,” he says,
“_has an abstract justification, as the special ability or energy
with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to
the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and
consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to
society as the unearned increment of rent._”
Here we have then, in the words of these four writers, Mr. Spencer,
Mr. Kidd, Mr. Bellamy, and {66} Mr. Sidney Webb, the case against
the great man set fully before us; and we may accordingly proceed to
analyse it. We shall find that it divides itself into four separate
arguments, which are constantly recurring in some form or other in
all the works of our modern sociological writers, and especially
in the works of those who are democratic or socialistic in their
sympathies. Firstly, there is the argument that in any advanced
civilisation not one of the improvements made during any given epoch
would have been possible if a variety of other improvements and the
accumulation of various knowledge had not gone before it; and that
thus the man who is called the inventor or author of the improvement
is merely the vehicle or delegate of forces outside himself.
Secondly, there is the argument that the inventor or author of the
improvement, even if we attribute to him some special ability of his
own, is in respect of his own congenital energies merely the product
and expression of preceding generations and circumstances. Of the
four arguments in question, these are the most important; but they
are constantly reinforced by two others. One is drawn from the fact
that several independent workers often arrive simultaneously at the
same discovery. The other is drawn from the fact—or what is alleged
to be the fact—that the interval which divides even the greatest
man from his fellows, alike in respect of what he is and of what he
accomplishes, is really extremely slight, and not worth considering.
{67}
For convenience’ sake, we will deal with these two latter arguments
first, and put them out of the way before we approach the others.
We will begin with the argument drawn from the fact that the same
discovery is often made simultaneously by independent workers. This
would perhaps hardly be worth discussing if it were not used so
constantly by such a variety of serious writers. The fact is true
enough, but what is the utmost that it proves? If two or three
men make the same discovery at once, this does not prove, as it
is supposed to do, that all men are approximately equal, but that
two or three men, instead of one man, are greater than the rest
of their fellow-workers. If three horses at a race out-distance
all competitors, and pass the winning-post within the same three
seconds, this does not prove that a cart-horse is as swift as the
Derby favourite. As a matter of fact, that more men than one should
reach at the same time the same discovery independently is precisely
what we should be led to expect, when we consider what discovery is.
The facts of nature which form the subject-matter of the discoverer
are in themselves as independent of the men who discover them as an
Alpine peak is of the men who attempt to scale it. They are indeed
precisely analogous to a peak which all discoverers are attempting to
scale at once; and the fact that three men make the same discovery
simultaneously does no more to show that any of their neighbours
could have made it, and that it is made in reality, not by them,
but by {68} their generation, than the fact that the three most
intrepid cragsmen in Europe meet at last on the same virgin summit,
which other adventurers had sought to scale in vain, would prove
the feat to have been really accomplished by the mass of tourists
at Interlaken, who had never climbed anywhere except by the Rigi
railway, and whose stomachs would be turned by a precipice of twenty
feet.
Let us now turn to the argument that the inequalities between men’s
abilities are small, that the work accomplished by even the ablest
is small also, and that the exceptional man as a separate subject of
study may, in the words of a writer who will be quoted presently,
be in consequence “_safely neglected_.” The answer to this is that
whether an inequality be great or small depends altogether on the
point from which the total altitude is measured. If a child who is
three feet high, and a giant who is nine feet high, are both of
them standing on the summit of Mont Blanc, the difference between
the elevation of their respective heads above the sea-level will
be infinitesimal; but no one who was discussing the question of
human stature would say that little children and giants were of
approximately the same height. Similarly, if our object is to
compare men in general with all other living creatures, no doubt the
difference between the ordinary man and a microbe is incomparably
greater than the difference between an ordinary man and Newton; but
if our object is to compare men with men, in relation to this or that
mental capacity—let {69} us say the capacity for scientific and
mathematical discovery—the difference which separates one ordinary
man from another is insignificant when compared with the difference
by which Newton is separated from both of them. And it is this
latter sort of difference which alone concerns the sociologist. The
difference which separates men from microbes is nothing to him. And
what is true of what men are, is equally true of what they do. The
addition made by any one great man to knowledge may be small when
compared with the knowledge, regarded in its totality, which has been
gathered together by all other great men preceding him; but it may at
the same time be incalculably great when compared with the additions
made by the ordinary men, his contemporaries.
Let us make this matter yet clearer by reference to one more
authority, who, though endeavouring to confirm the very argument
which is here being exposed, is, little as he perceives it,
assassinated by his own illustrations. In Macaulay’s essay on Dryden
there occurs the following passage, a part of which anticipates the
exact phraseology of Mr. Spencer. “_It is the age that makes the
man, not the man that makes the age. . . . The inequalities of the
intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear
so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great
revolutions they may safely be neglected._” The passage is quoted
for the sake of this last simile. For those who study the human
destiny as a whole—who {70} survey it as speculative and remote
observers—the inequalities of intellect may, it is quite true, be
neglected as safely as the inequalities of the surface of a planet
are neglected by the astronomer who is engaged in calculating its
revolutions. But because these latter inequalities are nothing to
the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the
engineer and the geographer. To the astronomer the Alps may be
an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence, but they were not
this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to
the astronomer are all the dykes in Holland? But they are all the
difference to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one.
And the same difference, even in its most minute details, holds good
between speculative, or as we may call it star-gazing, sociology
and sociology as a practical science; for is it not one of Mr.
Spencer’s most important and interesting contentions that these very
irregularities of the earth’s surface—these lands, seas, plains,
valleys, and mountains—which, when compared with the mass of the
earth, are so absolutely inappreciable, constitute some of the
most important of the “_external factors_” of human history and
civilisation? And the same holds good of the inequalities of the
human intellect. They may be nothing to the social star-gazer, but to
the social politician they are everything.
So much, then, for two of the most shallow sophisms that ever imposed
themselves on presumably serious reasoners. We will now turn to {71}
those two other arguments in which the case against the great man
finds its main support, and which, however misleading they may be,
must be examined at greater length. In both of these the distinctly
exceptional character of the great man is assumed, or at all events
is not denied, but it is represented as being, if it exists, not
properly the great man’s own. The first argument refers it to
aggregates of external conditions—the knowledge accumulated for the
great man’s use, the character of his fellow-citizens, who are ready
to carry out his orders, and generally to what Mr. Bellamy calls his
“_social inheritance and environment_.” The second argument refers it
to the great man’s line of ancestors, insisting that he inherits from
them his own exceptional capacities, which capacities his ancestors
acquired by being members of society, and of which it is accordingly
contended that society is ultimately the source.
Now on both these arguments, before we consider them in detail, there
is one broad criticism to be made, which applies to both equally.
There is a certain sense—a remote and speculative sense—in which they
are both of them quite true, and indeed are almost truisms; but for
practical purposes they are either not true at all, or if true, are
altogether irrelevant; and it is necessary to show the reader, by a
few simple examples, that in the doctrine that statements can be at
once true and not true there is no philosophical hair-splitting, and
no Hegelian paradox, but merely the assertion of a {72} fact which,
when once attention has been called to it, common sense will perceive
to be as obvious as it is important.
It was just now observed that the same thing can be great and not
great, according to the things with which we compare it. In the
same way the same statement may be true or not true, according to
the nature of the discussion on which it is brought to bear. Let us
take as an example those familiar statements of fact which are given
in terms of averages. If the vast majority of any given population
vary in height between the limits of five feet six and six feet, the
statement that a man’s average height is from five feet seven to
five feet eight would be a truth most important to the producers of
ready-made overcoats. But if half the population were two feet high,
and half rather more than nine feet, to give the average stature as
something like five feet seven would be for the coatmakers the most
absurd misstatement imaginable, and would lead them to make, if they
acted on it, garments that would fit nobody.
Let us turn from the question of the truth of a statement to the
question of its mere relevance; and we can illustrate what has been
said by an example equally homely. In the transference of goods by
rail, these have to be sorted according to bulk, weight, shape,
fragility, perishability, and so forth. In deciding which are to
be sent by fast trains, and which by slow, the primary question
will be that of perishability. When the perishable and {73} the
non-perishable shall have been separated, and they are being placed
on the trains allotted to them, the primary questions will be those
of shape, weight, and fragility. But so long as the preparatory
separation is in progress, to assert that the goods possess any of
these latter characteristics will be wholly irrelevant, no matter how
true. Boxes of fish will not be put with book parcels because neither
of them are fragile, or because they are both oblong; and each
characteristic, and every classification based on it, will be either
relevant or irrelevant, full of meaning or meaningless, according to
what question, out of a considerable series, has to be answered at
the moment by the officials who superintend the business.
And now let us go back to the two arguments that are before us; and
we shall be prepared to see how, though true for the speculative
philosopher, they have no meaning, or only a false meaning, for any
practical man.
We will first take that which is expressed with sufficient plainness
in the passage quoted from Mr. Sidney Webb, and which insists on
the great man’s debt to society generally, not for his external
circumstances, but for his personal character and capacities. The
idea involved in it is very easy to grasp. The great man’s congenital
superiority is an inheritance from his superior ancestors; but his
ancestors would not have had it to hand on to him if they had not
been forced to develop such superiorities as they possessed by
exerting them in a competitive struggle {74} with the great mass
of their contemporaries. Thus the mass of their contemporaries
formed a strop or hone on which the superior faculties of these men
were sharpened; and the great man of to-day, to whom the superior
faculties have descended, owes them accordingly, not to his own
ancestors only, but to the mass of inferior men who struggled with
them, and were worsted in the struggle. In other words, the greatness
of the exceptional man has really been produced by the whole body
of society in the past; and the results of it ought to be divided
amongst the whole body of society in the present.
Now that the above line of argument has a certain kind of truth
in it, it is hardly necessary to observe; and for biologists,
psychologists, and speculative philosophers generally, such truth
as it possesses may no doubt be of value; but that this truth has
no relation whatever to practical life, and no applicability to any
one of its problems, can be seen by considering the kind of results
we shall arrive at, if, adopting the reasoning of Mr. Webb and his
friends, we merely carry it out to the more immediate of its logical
consequences.
Let us begin with their reasoning, so far as it concerns the past. If
the inferior competitors who were beaten by the great man’s ancestors
are to be credited with having helped to produce the talents by which
they were themselves defeated, and must therefore be held to have
had a claim on the wealth which these talents produced, which claim
has descended to the inferior majority of {75} to-day, the same
claim might be advanced by any weaker nation which, after a series
of battles, succumbs finally to the stronger. In the Franco-German
War the French might have said to the Germans, “You acquired by
fighting with us, the faculties which have enabled you to conquer
us. Your strength therefore, in reality, belongs to us, not you; and
hence justice requires that you should give us back Alsace.” In the
same way it might be urged that all the idle apprentices of the past
have, by the warning they afforded, stimulated the industry of the
industrious, and therefore in abstract justice had a claim on their
earnings.
Let us now take Mr. Webb’s reasoning so far as it concerns the
present, and we shall find that it results in similar fantastic
puerilities. If the great man of to-day owes his greatness to society
as a whole, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes
his idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, the dishonest man his
dishonesty; and if the great man who produces an exceptional amount
of wealth can, with justice, claim no more than the average man who
produces little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing
anything may with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His
constitutional fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend
it, are both due to society, and society, not he, must suffer. And
the same thing holds good of every form of economic incompetence.
The absurdity of Mr. Webb’s position will be seen yet more clearly
when we see how it looks {76} when stated in the language of Mr.
Bellamy. “_Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand
of every man’s produce are the result of his inheritance and his
environment._” Now if this proposition has any practical application,
it must mean that the whole living population—great men and ordinary
men, labourers and directors of labour—who are commonly held to be
the producers of the income of Great Britain to-day, really produce
of it only one farthing in the pound; and hence, if we still persist
in considering the proposition a practical one, we shall be forced to
conclude that the whole of the living population might at any given
moment stop work altogether, or fall into a trance like the Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus, and the production would continue with hardly an
appreciable diminution.
Again, if the proposition has any practical bearing on economics,
it must necessarily have a bearing precisely similar on morals. If
a man of to-day produces only a thousandth part of what he seems
to produce, it is equally evident that he does only a thousandth
part of what he seems to do. Let us see, if we accept this theory,
to what sort of conclusions it will lead us. One conclusion to
which it will lead us at once is the following—that each of us is
responsible only for a thousandth part of his actions; and from this
will follow others more remarkable still. Since the holiest man has
elements of evil in him, and the worst man elements of good, the
good deeds for which we honour the saint may {77} really be the
result of his antecedents, and his few faulty deeds may be all that
we are to attribute to himself; whilst, conversely, the criminal’s
antecedents may have been the cause of all his crimes and vices, and
he may himself have done nothing but some acts of unnoticed kindness.
It will be thus impossible to form any true judgment of anybody;
for the real St. Peter may have been merely a false and truculent
ruffian, and the real Judas Iscariot may have been fit for Abraham’s
bosom. And yet even these conclusions deducible from the premises
of Mr. Bellamy are sane when compared with those deducible from the
premises of Mr. Sidney Webb; for Mr. Bellamy would allow a man to
be responsible for a thousandth part of his actions at all events,
whilst Mr. Sidney Webb would not allow that anybody either did or was
responsible for anything.
And now, finally, let us turn to that other argument which seeks to
eliminate the causality of the great man, not by proving that he owes
his superior brain-power to society, but by proving that superior
brain-power has little to do with his achievements, their principal
cause being the appliances, the opportunities, and the accumulated
knowledge at his command; and that these, at all events, are due not
to himself, but others—to the efforts of past generations, and the
legacy they have left to the present. This is the argument which
is mainly relied upon by Mr. Spencer. He insists on the fact that
none of the great inventors or discoverers could have made their
discoveries or {78} inventions if centuries of past progress had
not prepared the way for them. “_A Laplace, for instance_,” he says,
“_could not have got very far with the_ Mécanique Céleste _unless he
had been aided by the slowly developed system of mathematics, which
we trace back to its beginnings amongst the ancient Egyptians_”; and
his many other illustrations are all of the same kind.
If we consider the meaning of this argument carefully we shall
see that its logical outcome is not to deny to the great man all
superiority whatsoever, but to exhibit his superiority as being
less than it is usually supposed to be. Laplace, Mr. Spencer would
say, may have been personally a little above the level of his
contemporaries, but he owed most of his elevation to sitting on
the shoulders of his predecessors. Now if this reduction of the
great man’s reputed greatness to such very small proportions has
any practical meaning, it must mean that greatness is not only
less than it is supposed to be, but is also a great deal commoner,
and more easily procurable. Whatever any particular great man has
done, could have been done, if he had not done it, by an indefinite
number of others. Let us then take as an illustration some definite
task, and see how far such reasoning has any practical application.
Our illustration shall be taken from the domain of art; for the
great artist, according to Mr. Spencer’s special statement, owes
his greatness to the achievements of past generations, just as the
great mathematician does, or the great thinker, or the great {79}
inventor. Let us suppose, then, that it is desired to decorate some
public hall with pictures worthy of Titian or Michael Angelo, or to
open some national theatre with a new play worthy of Shakespeare. The
great question will be where to find the artist or poet whose works
shall even approximate to these ideals of excellence; and any one
who knows anything about either pictures or poetry will know that to
find him is a well-nigh hopeless task. Now what conceivable help,
what conceivable meaning, would there be in Mr. Spencer’s coming
forward and telling the public that the greatest poet or artist is
the product of the same conditions that have produced any one of
themselves? Mr. Spencer has actually made this precise statement.
Let us therefore refer to the terms in which he has done so. “_Given
a Shakespeare_,” he says, “_and what dramas could he have written,
without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life—without the
various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave
wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred
generations had developed and enriched by use?_”
Mr. Spencer could not have put his own case more clearly; and the
more clearly it is put, the more easy it is to answer it, and to
show that for practical men it has no meaning whatsoever. The answer
to the question he asks is not only obvious, but contains at the
same time the solution of the whole problem we are discussing. It
will inevitably take the form of another question. Given the {80}
conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its
language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have
produced dramas like _King Lear_ and _Hamlet_, unless England had
happened to possess that unique phenomenon—a Shakespeare? Could a
Bottom have written these dramas, or a Dogberry, or a Sir Toby Belch?
Or could Sir Thomas Lucy, or any of the “poetasters” satirised by Ben
Jonson? Or could the actors, Kemp, Jones, and Bryan, who assisted
in the representation of these dramas upon the stage? The answer
is, of course, No. And yet these men inherited the same language
that Shakespeare did; the three last had the advantage of knowing
his finest passages by heart. The weaver, the bellows-mender, the
constable, the Justice of Peace, had behind them the same traditions
that Shakespeare had, and were surrounded by the same “_multitudinous
conditions_” of civilisation. But out of these conditions one man
alone was capable of eliciting the results elicited by Shakespeare.
The real explanation of the whole difficulty—the difficulty involved
in the fact that whilst the argument of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bellamy
is, in a speculative sense, not merely true but a truism, it is
utterly untrue in any practical sense—is as follows: Every human
being living at any given time is, as Mr. Spencer says, an inheritor
of the past; but men inherit the past in very different degrees. They
inherit the knowledge of the past only according to the degree to
which they acquire it; the language of the past only according {81}
to their skill in manipulating it; the inventions of the past only
according to their skill in reproducing and using them.
The extraordinary confusion of thought involved in Mr. Spencer’s
position is focalised in an argument constantly employed by
socialists—that “_inventions once made, become common property_.”
Except the earliest and simplest of them, they no more become common
property than the countless facts and figures buried in Parliamentary
Blue-Books become the property of every new member of Parliament, or
than encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who
happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; or
than the power of deciphering the hieroglyphics which are preserved
in the British Museum becomes the property of every cabman who
drives his vehicle along Great Russell Street. It is perfectly true
that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge enables men to
acquire it who never might have discovered it for themselves; but
as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated,
the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and
the increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased
difficulty in acquiring all, or even in assimilating those which are
practically connected with one another. A mechanic, for instance,
could with ten minutes’ attention comprehend the principle involved
in a cantilever bridge, but to design and construct a bridge such as
that which now spans the {82} Forth, with its spans of six hundred
yards and its altitudes of aerial steel, implies an assimilation
of our multitudinous existing knowledge, such as is hardly to be
found in a score of engineers in Europe. Or to turn once more to
Mr. Spencer’s example of Shakespeare, whilst all Shakespeare’s
contemporaries had the same antecedents that he had, the same
line of thinkers behind them, and the same developed vocabulary,
Shakespeare’s mind was capable of absorbing much of the national
inheritance, whilst the great mass of his contemporaries could
comparatively absorb very little.
We are thus brought back to the point from which we set out—namely,
the differences in capacity by which men are distinguished from
one another; and we see that all the reasonings of our modern
sociologists have, for practical purposes, left these differences
undiminished. The difference between the great man and the ordinary
man is not made less by the fact that they both of them owe much to a
common past, any more than the difference between a hogshead of water
and a wine-glass is made less by the fact that both have been filled
from the same stream.
The conclusion, therefore, of the whole matter is as follows. In
the first place, whatever may be the speculative significance of
Mr. Spencer’s contention, which Mr. Bellamy expresses with the
arithmetical precision of an accountant, that each living generation
does only a minute fraction of what it seems to do, or of arguments
like Mr. Sidney Webb’s, that {83} each living generation does
nothing at all of what it seems to do, the mass of living men at all
events do something, in the very real sense that if they did not do
it they would die; and the doing of this something is for them the
whole of life, and all practical problems depend on the manner in
which they do it. Such being the case, it follows, in the second
place, that however much the ordinary man does, the great man does
a great deal more. Therefore, if the ordinary man does any of the
things that he seems to do, and causes any of the events that he
seems to cause—if he ploughs the farm that he seems to plough, and
lays the bricks that he seems to lay—indeed we may add, if he eats
the dinners that he seems to eat—the great man in a precisely similar
sense is the cause of those changes and of that progress which he
seems to cause. Hence of these changes he is, for the practical
sociologist, not merely the proximate initiator, whose action and
peculiarities may be neglected, but a true and primary cause, on
which the attention of the sociologist must be concentrated; and just
as in action it is impossible to do without him, so in practical
reasoning it is impossible to go behind him.
The reader has now been shown the absolute futility of that train
of reasoning by which even so keen a thinker as Mr. Spencer has
persuaded himself that he can get rid of the causality of the great
man, and in which every socialistic reformer who has risen above the
level of a demagogue has attempted to find a scientific foundation
for his {84} impossible castle in the air. But the demolition
and exposure of these mischievous and miserable fallacies shall
not be entrusted only to the arguments that have been brought to
bear on them. The validity of these arguments shall now be finally
substantiated by direct appeal to a sociologist whose identity may
surprise the reader. This is none other than Mr. Spencer himself,
who, when he forgets to be the conscious expositor of his theory, and
turns aside to illustrate some particular point by examples drawn
from the experience of common life, is constantly contradicting,
in a most remarkable but entirely unconscious way, the fundamental
principle which he has deliberately set himself to establish.
In the seventh chapter of his _Study of Sociology_, being
incidentally concerned to insist on the iniquity and the
mischievousness of war, he describes how Europe, during the earlier
years of this century, was visited by certain disasters, far-reaching
and horrible, from the consequence of which the world has hardly
yet recovered. These disasters consisted of slaughter, plunder,
pestilence, agony, rape, and ruin; and to say nothing of their
results on those whom they left alive, they resulted in some two
million violent and unnecessary deaths. And how does Mr. Spencer
explain these appalling phenomena? He who declares that we should
learn nothing about social causation “_should we read ourselves
blind over the biographies_” of all the great rulers of the world,
explains them by tracing them to one sole and single cause; and this,
he says, was the genius {85} and personality of Napoleon. “_Out of
the sanguinary chaos of the Revolution_,” he writes, “_rose a soldier
whose immense ability, joined with his absolute unscrupulousness,
made him now general, now consul, now autocrat. The instincts of
the savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call
moral sentiments. . . . And all this slaughter, all this suffering,
all this devastation was gone through—_” Let us pause and ask why
it was gone through, according to Mr. Spencer. Does he say it was
gone through because of “_aggregates of past conditions_” and the
influence of antecedent generations? Far from it. He says, “_All this
was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot
over all men._”
But perhaps Mr. Spencer may have a defence ready. He may tell us
that the influence of Napoleon was merely that of a military leader,
which influence he has excepted from his theory of general causes.
To this it must be answered in the first place that Napoleon was
at all events not a leader in “_early_” or “_primitive_” warfare,
to which Mr. Spencer’s exception is specifically and emphatically
limited. Mr. Spencer consequently shows us, by his own practical
reasoning, that this theoretical limitation of which he made so much
cannot be maintained for a moment, and that whatever is true of great
leaders in a primitive war, he himself recognises—all his theories
notwithstanding—as equally true of them in the most advanced stages
of civilisation. But a far more important {86} answer, and one taken
from himself, is still in reserve—an answer which clenches the whole
matter, and shows us that Mr. Spencer, in his dealings with practical
life, really recognises great men as exercising in the arts of peace
precisely the same kind of causality which Napoleon exercised in war.
Let us turn to Mr. Spencer’s treatise on _Social Statics_, and to
the section of it in which he treats of patents—or as he himself
describes them, “_the rights of property in ideas_.” He begins by
complaining that the right of patenting “_inventions, patterns, or
designs_” is not recognised as being based on any moral right at all,
but is generally regarded as a kind of “_privilege_” or “_reward_.”
“_The prevalence of such a belief_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_is by no
means creditable to the national conscience. . . . To think_,” he
exclaims, “_that a sinecurist should be held to have a ‘vested
interest’ in his office, and a just title to compensation if it is
abolished; and yet that an invention over which no end of mental toil
has been spent, and on which the poor mechanic has laid out perhaps
his last sixpence—an invention which he has completed entirely by his
own labour and with his own materials—has wrought, as it were, out of
the very substance of his own mind—should not be acknowledged as his
property_!”
_Social Statics_ is one of Mr. Spencer’s earlier works. Let us now
consult his latest, the third and final volume of his _Principles
of Sociology_; and here we shall find this same admission that the
{87} great man’s achievements are wrought not out of aggregates
of conditions, but “_out of the very substance of his own mind_,”
emphasised by him as a practical truth, with all the vigour of
a practical man. In his chapter on the “_Interdependence and
Integration of Industrial Institutions_” he dwells with much
eloquence on the almost incalculable benefits that have resulted,
and extended themselves through the whole industrial world, from
certain improvements introduced into the manufacture of steel. And to
what were these improvements due? Mr. Spencer answers this question
not merely by admitting, but by insisting with the fervour of a
hero-worshipper, that they were due to the genius of one single man,
namely Bessemer; and so obvious does this truth appear to him, that
he devotes an indignant footnote to denouncing the governing classes
for not being sufficiently alive to it, and for conferring on a man
who, “_out of the very substance of his own mind_,” had wrought such
gigantic and universally beneficial changes, no higher reward than
the title of Sir Henry Bessemer—“_an honour_” he says, “_like that
accorded to a third-rate public official on his retirement, or to a
provincial mayor on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee_.”
After this, what more need be said? Here we have Mr. Spencer himself,
the moment he touches the practical side of life, contemptuously
brushing aside the whole of his speculative theory and admitting,
or rather insisting, with the most unhesitating and uncompromising
vigour, that “_the phenomena of {88} social evolution_,” even
if they do not result entirely, as Carlyle would have it, from
the actions of great men, yet cannot, at all events, be possibly
explained without them; and that great men, their natures, and the
details of their active lives, are primary factors to be studied by
every practical sociologist, and are not to be merged in “_society_,”
in “_antecedents_,” and in “_aggregates of conditions_.”
The practically independent character of the great man’s causality
will be yet more apparent at another stage of our argument, and we
shall see that the whole structure of all civilised societies depends
on it. But we may, for the present, regard it as being sufficiently
established, and the absurd and unreal character of the attempts to
get rid of it demonstrated. So much, then, being assumed, we will, in
the following chapter, consider two objections of a character very
different from any of those of which we have now disposed. They are
objections which will very possibly have suggested themselves to the
reader’s mind, but which, instead of conflicting with the truth which
has been just elucidated, will be found, when examined carefully, to
emphasise and to enlarge its significance.
{89}