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.