“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.