A Critical Examination of Socialism

by W. H. Mallock

And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their inspiration.

The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and the various arts of life—that, beginning as an animal only a little higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass, or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any problem of practical life—such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes—the central point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother, whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically. Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.

Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare," he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him—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?" The answer to this question is to be found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.

And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has illustrated more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of "apprehending assembled propositions in their totality." It would be difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their totality—mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so forth—by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties, he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less rare—namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates, promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of it painted in the absence of a great artist.

Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact. That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each other in Spencer's Study of Sociology. One is a reference to the last Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor, he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war. Of the insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation." For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors? Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is himself regarding them—that of the speculative thinker and that of the practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry—that is to say, the invention of the Times printing-press. This wonderful piece of mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on Social Statics, Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail, he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas," or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a definite place in his general sociological system.[12]

The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer 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 of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they are nothing. For the practical man they are everything.

It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced price.

Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr. Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fact on which it bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it proves? 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 the character of scientific discovery is. The facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely analogous to such a peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation, than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been accomplished less by these men themselves than by the mass of tourists who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to an ascent by the Rigi Railway.

Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or happens to inherit an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It is perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise; 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 assimilating even those which are connected most closely with each other. We may safely say that a knowledge of the simple rules of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the property of individuals only in proportion to the quantity of it which their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both vessels have been filled from the same stream.

Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their own—or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their produce is really the result of their social inheritance and environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included, is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate. No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment? Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment, could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it, the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.