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.