It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered: but then she is to be conquered. It has been too much the fashion of late to travestie that great dictum of Bacon’s into a very different one, and say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered; thus proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save her own impotence—a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon’s own hopes of what science would do for the welfare of the human race. For what is all human invention, but the transcending and conquering one natural law by another? What is the practical answer which all mankind has been making to nature and her pretensions, whenever it has progressed one step since the foundation of the world: by which all discoverers have discovered, all teachers taught: by which all polities, kingdoms, civilizations, arts, manufactures, have established themselves; all who have raised themselves above the mob have faced the mob, and conquered the mob, crucified by them first and worshipped by them afterwards: by which the first savage conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the forest, by killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds grow at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead; and won his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature, proving thereby that he was a man, and not an ape? What but this?—‘Nature is strong, but I am stronger. I know her worth, but I know my own. I trust her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall be, and not my tyrant; and if she interfere with my ideal, even with my personal comfort, then Nature and I will fight it out to the last gasp, and Heaven defend the right!’

In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early, or laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much inclined to say to men: ‘You are the puppets of certain natural laws. Your own freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist merely as a dangerous disease. All you can do is to submit to the laws, and drift whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.’ But not less certainly was the same blame to be attached to the French Socialist School. It, though based on a revolt from the Philosophie du neant, philosophie de la misère, as it used to term the laissez faire School, yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe, namely, that man was the creature of circumstances; and denied him just as much as its antagonist the possession of freewill, or at least the right to use freewill on any large scale.

The laissez faire School was certainly the more logical of the two. With them, if man was the creature of circumstances, those circumstances were at least defined for him by external laws which he had not created: while the Socialists, with Fourier at their head (as it has always seemed to me), fell into the extraordinary paradox of supposing that though man was the creature of circumstances, he was to become happy by creating the very circumstances which were afterwards to create him. But both of them erred, surely, in ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which he can, for good or for evil, rebel against and conquer circumstance.

I am not, surely, overstepping my province as Professor of History, in alluding to this subject. Just notions of Political Economy are absolutely necessary to just notions of History; and I should wish those young gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go first, were it possible, to my more learned brother, the Professor of Political Economy, and get from him not merely exact habits of thought, but a knowledge which I cannot give, and yet which they ought to possess. For to take the very lowest ground, the first fact of history is, Bouche va toujours; whatever men have or have not done, they have always eaten, or tried to eat; and the laws which regulate the supply of the first necessaries of life are, after all, the first which should be learnt, and the last which should be ignored.

The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving due weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the force which ought to determine all human life; and our greatest living political economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a plea unequalled since the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-determining power of the individual, and for his right to use that power.

But my business is not with rights, so much as with facts; and as a fact, surely, one may say, that this inventive reason of man has been, in all ages, interfering with any thing like an inevitable sequence or orderly progress of humanity. Some of those writers, indeed, who are most anxious to discover an exact order, are most loud in their complaints that it has been interfered with by over-legislation; and rejoice that mankind is returning to a healthier frame of mind, and leaving nature alone to her own work in her own way. I do not altogether agree with their complaints; but of that I hope to speak in subsequent lectures. Meanwhile, I must ask, if (as is said) most good legislation now-a-days consists in repealing old laws which ought never to have been passed; if (as is said) the great fault of our forefathers was that they were continually setting things wrong, by intermeddling in matters political, economic, religious, which should have been let alone, to develop themselves in their own way, what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the continuous progress, of the human mind?

Look again at the disturbing power, not merely of the general reason of the many, but of the genius of the few. I am not sure, but that the one fact, that genius is occasionally present in the world, is not enough to prevent our ever discovering any regular sequence in human progress, past or future.

Let me explain myself. In addition to the infinite variety of individual characters continually born (in itself a cause of perpetual disturbance), man alone of all species has the faculty of producing, from time to time, individuals immeasurably superior to the average in some point or other, whom we call men of genius. Like Mr. Babbage’s calculating machine, human nature gives millions of orderly respectable common-place results, which any statistician can classify, and enables hasty philosophers to say—It always has gone on thus; it must go on thus always; when behold, after many millions of orderly results, there turns up a seemingly disorderly, a certainly unexpected, result, and the law seems broken (being really superseded by some deeper law) for that once, and perhaps never again for centuries. Even so it is with man, and the physiological laws which determine the earthly appearance of men. Laws there are, doubt it not; but they are beyond us: and let our induction be as wide as it may, they will baffle it; and great nature, just as we fancy we have found out her secret, will smile in our faces as she brings into the world a man, the like of whom we have never seen, and cannot explain, define, classify—in one word, a genius. Such do, as a fact, become leaders of men into quite new and unexpected paths, and, for good or evil, leave their stamp upon whole generations and races. Notorious as this may be, it is just, I think, what most modern theories of human progress ignore. They take the actions and the tendencies of the average many, and from them construct their scheme: a method not perhaps quite safe were they dealing with plants or animals; but what if it be the very peculiarity of this fantastic and altogether unique creature called man, not only that he develops, from time to time, these exceptional individuals, but that they are the most important individuals of all? that his course is decided for him not by the average many, but by the extraordinary few; that one Mahommed, one Luther, one Bacon, one Napoleon, shall change the thoughts and habits of millions?—So that instead of saying that the history of mankind is the history of the masses, it would be much more true to say, that the history of mankind is the history of its great men; and that a true philosophy of history ought to declare the laws—call them physical, spiritual, biological, or what we choose—by which great minds have been produced into the world, as necessary results, each in his place and time.

That would be a science indeed; how far we are as yet from any such, you know as well as I. As yet, the appearance of great minds is as inexplicable to us as if they had dropped among us from another planet. Who will tell us why they have arisen when they did, and why they did what they did, and nothing else? I do not deny that such a science is conceivable; because each mind, however great or strange, may be the result of fixed and unerring laws of life: and it is conceivable, too, that such a science may so perfectly explain the past, as to be able to predict the future; and tell men when a fresh genius is likely to arise and of what form his intellect will be. Conceivable: but I fear only conceivable; if for no other reason, at least for this one. We may grant safely that the mind of Luther was the necessary result of a combination of natural laws. We may go further, and grant, but by no means safely, that Luther, was the creature of circumstances, that there was no self-moving originality in him, but that his age made him what he was. To some modern minds these concessions remove all difficulty and mystery: but not, I trust, to our minds. For does not the very puzzle de quo agitur remain equally real; namely, why the average of Augustine monks, the average of German men, did not, by being exposed to the same average circumstances as Luther, become what Luther was? But whether we allow Luther to have been a person with an originally different character from all others, or whether we hold him to have been the mere puppet of outside influences, the first step towards discovering how he became what he was, will be to find out what he was. It will be more easy, and, I am sorry to say, more common to settle beforehand our theory, and explain by it such parts of Luther as will fit it; and call those which will not fit it hard names. History is often so taught, and the method is popular and lucrative. But we here shall be of opinion, I am sure, that we only can learn causes through their effects; we can only learn the laws which produced Luther, by learning Luther himself; by analyzing his whole character; by gauging all his powers; and that—unless the less can comprehend the greater—we cannot do till we are more than Luther himself. I repeat it. None can comprehend a man, unless he be greater than that man. He must be not merely equal to him, because none can see in another elements of character which he has not already seen in himself: he must be greater; because to comprehend him thoroughly, he must be able to judge the man’s failings as well as his excellencies; to see not only why he did what he did, but why he did not do more: in a word, he must be nearer than his object is to the ideal man.

And if it be assumed that I am quibbling on the words ‘comprehend’ and ‘greater,’ that the observer need be greater only potentially, and not in act; that all the comprehension required of him, is to have in himself the germs of other men’s faculties, without having developed those germs in life; I must still stand to my assertion. For such a rejoinder ignores the most mysterious element of all character, which we call strength: by virtue of which, of two seemingly similar characters, while one does nothing, the other shall do great things; while in one the germs of intellect and virtue remain comparatively embryonic, passive, and weak, in the other these same germs shall develop into manhood, action, success. And in what that same strength consists, not even the dramatic imagination of a Shakespeare could discover. What are those heart-rending sonnets of his, but the confession that over and above all his powers he lacked one thing, and knew not what it was, or where to find it—and that was—to be strong?