But this definition of evolution does not apply only to development in that world of facts studied by Darwinian science. It is equally applicable to the process of social evolution also. Indeed social evolution is even more strikingly, though not more truly, than physiological evolution, the reasonable {98} sequence of the unintended. How this is can be easily made plain; and when once the idea is grasped, which the definition embodies, it will be seen that social evolution, although it is no doubt different from all or from any of those changes deliberately produced by the agency of the great man, instead of excluding these changes, or eliminating the great man as the cause of them, is a process which depends altogether upon him and them, and that, instead of obscuring the great man’s importance, it only exhibits it in a stronger and clearer light.
Let us take then our definition of evolution as the reasonable sequence of the unintended, and apply the idea embodied in it to that aggregate of conditions, either in our own or any similar period, amongst which the great man works. All these conditions, such as the knowledge which he finds accumulated, the inventions which he finds in use, the political and the economic conditions of his country, are, taken as a whole, the result of no one man’s genius. It is equally obvious that they do not, in their incalculably complex entirety, represent any one man’s intention, or even the joint intention of any number of men acting in concert. Printing, for example, and railway travelling have produced a number of social results never dreamed of by the men who perfected our locomotives and our steam printing presses. Accordingly, when any great man of to-day initiates some fresh social change, whether as an inventor, a director of industry, a politician, or {99} a religious teacher, a large part of his achievement consists in his manipulation and refashioning of results of past human action, which can be set down to the credit, or ascribed to the intentions of no individual, and no body of individuals. The society of the past intended these no more than the great men of the past. They are results, that is to say, which come all under the heading of the unintended. But when we consider the great man’s achievement thus, we shall not only witness the grouping of many of the factors essential to it into one heterogeneous but logically coherent class, as the unintended. When such a grouping has taken place, we shall see that there remains behind an equally coherent and equally striking residuum—namely, the social results and conditions that have been obviously and notoriously intended. These may not be found existing apart from the former; but though in conjunction or combination with them, they will be visible as a distinct and separate element, and their true importance as a factor in social progress will begin to be apparent to the mind the moment their specific peculiarity, as just described, is apprehended.
Let us take a few examples which, owing to their magnitude and familiarity, will be at once intelligible. Our first shall be taken from the histories of art and of speculative philosophy. In each of these domains of human activity and achievement we find those phenomena of development to which it is now customary to apply the name of evolution. Thus we hear of the evolution of philosophy from the {100} crude guesses of Thales to the elaborate system of Aristotle. We hear of the evolution of the Greek drama from the exhibitions of Thespis with his cart to the tragedies of Æschylus and of Sophocles; and similarly we hear of the evolution of the English drama from such exhibitions as miracle plays or Gammer Gurton’s Needle to tragedies such as Hamlet and comedies such as As You Like It. And to all such examples of development the word evolution is applied with perfect accuracy; for there is in each an obvious and orderly sequence of the unintended. Aristotle’s philosophy was in part derived from that of his predecessors. He employed existing materials so as to produce a result which was not intended, indeed was not even imagined, by those who originally got them together and fashioned them, and which would never have been reached by Aristotle himself, if his predecessors had not thus unintentionally assisted him. None the less, however, does the Aristotelian philosophy, as its author gave it to the world, embody the deliberate intention of his profound and unrivalled genius; and it is only because it embodies this intended element that it constitutes an advance on the philosophies that went before it. Similarly, though Sophocles and Shakespeare, in constructing their dramas, each profited by the achievements of the dramatists who had gone before them, and though the art of each would doubtless have been more crude and imperfect had he come into the world a generation or two before he did, yet the part played {101} by evolution in the production of Hamlet and Antigone is totally distinct from, and is altogether dwarfed by, the part played by the genius and the intentions of their great authors.
Let us now turn to invention and applied science; and the history of social progress, as connected with and derived from them, will show the same two elements—the unintended and the intended, similarly related and similarly coexistent. A brilliant illustration of this fact is provided for us, in one of his books, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, though he himself, with a curious blindness and perversity, uses it not to illustrate but to obscure the point on which we are now dwelling. The illustration referred to is the history of the press by which the Times is printed, which implement, according to Mr. Spencer, is the result altogether of evolution. “In the first place,” he says, “this automatic printing machine is lineally descended from other automatic printing machines . . . each pre-supposing others that went before. . . . And then, in tracing the more remote antecedents, we find an ancestry of hand printing presses.” He further points out that this press implies not only an ancestry of former presses, but also the existence of the machinery used in making it, and again how this machine-making machinery has a distinct ancestry of its own, which includes the fact of the abundance of iron in England. Geometry, physics, chemistry also, he says, played their part in the process; and he winds up by referring to purely social causes. {102} Why, he asks, was the Walter press produced? In order that “with great promptness” it might “meet an enormous demand.”
It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than this of the part played by evolution in the domain of mechanical invention. It is perfectly evident that the mass of discoveries and inventions which preceded and paved the way for the final invention in question were due to men who had no idea in their heads of such a machine as a steam-driven printing press at all. When printing was first invented, steam-power was undreamed of. When the steam-engine was being perfected as a means of driving machinery, the inventors had no specific intention of applying this force to the printing press. The men whose genius and energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid the foundation of the English iron trade, and with it, as Mr. Spencer says, the foundation of “machine-making generally,” in all probability never even saw a newspaper, and could not have conceived the possibility of collecting enough news daily to fill as much as one page of the Times. The mathematicians and chemists to whose work Mr. Spencer alludes most probably never gave a thought to the practical application of their discoveries, and knew as little of the process of printing as they did of Chinese grammar. But let us give to these facts all the weight we can. Let us accept the antecedents that made the Walter press possible as not only sequences but also concurrences of the unintended; and yet the part played {103} by the great man remains as essential, and remains as large as ever. The fact that the Walter press could never have existed unless Caxton’s press had existed, and that Caxton never foresaw the future development of his apparatus, does nothing to disprove the fact that in the development of printing generally, genius like Caxton’s was an indispensable agent, and one which stamped its character on the whole sequence of inventions which it inaugurated. Nor again does the fact that an invention like the Walter press implies not only a direct sequence of inventions and discoveries, but also a concurrence of many separate sequences, such as the invention and discoveries of chemists, of machine-makers, and producers of iron, do anything to disprove the importance and the necessity of the part played by the men to whose genius the press was directly due. For although the co-existence of the separate sequences referred to—the parallel march of progress in many separate arts and sciences—may have been altogether unintended by any of those concerned in them, what was emphatically not unintended was their final concurrence—the fact of their being brought together for one definite purpose. This was due to the deliberate intention of exceptional men with strong synthetic powers, who appropriated and connected the achievements of various other men. Chemistry, geometry, the production of iron, and the development of machinery for machine-making would never have worked together to produce an automatic {104} printing press had the immediate inventors of such an implement not coerced them into their service, and forced them to contribute to a deliberately planned result.
The state of the case is this. Let us take any civilised society at any period we will, and examine it in the act of advancing to the next stage of its development. We shall find that its existing conditions consist partly of results intended by particular great men whose past actions have produced them, and partly of results neither foreseen nor intended by anybody. Thus at the present day amongst our social conditions we have the telegraph and the railway system—both of them results intentionally produced by individuals; and we have also a variety of new wants and habits, new methods of conducting trade and government, which have been produced by these, but which were neither intended nor even thought of by the inventors of the locomotive, or by Wheatstone and Cooke when their wires at last realised the long-forgotten dream of the Italian Jesuit Strada.[†] Thus, though social conditions at any given time are a compound of intended results and unintended, and even though we may admit that at any given time these last are more widely diffused than the former, these last {105} are themselves the children of intention once removed. Great men may not have meant to produce them, but they have arisen from conditions which great men did mean to produce; and they could not have arisen in any other way. And here we are brought to a fact more obvious and more important still. Before any further advance in social civilisation can be made, other existing conditions, whether intentionally produced or not, require to be intentionally re-combined and acted on by men whose enterprise, whose intellect, and whose constructive imagination mark them out from their fellows as the pioneers of the future. We are thus once more confronted with the fact already insisted on—that the social conditions of a time are the same for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can make exceptional use of them, and turn them into a stepping-stone on which their generation may rise higher.
[†] Strada, an Italian Jesuit, in the seventeenth century invented, or rather imagined, communication by electric telegraph; and his idea actually comprised the use of two needles moved by two magnets, these magnets being connected in such a way that, by the movement of either of them, the needle actuated by the other could be made to point to such and such letters on a dial.
Social evolution, therefore, in so far as it is other than biological, may be defined as the unintended result of the intentions of great men; and this definition at once brings us back to the truth which was urged in the first chapter as the starting-point of our argument, and which can now be put before the reader with an added force and clearness.
It was said in the first chapter that sociologists have succeeded in dealing with those wider social phenomena which are exhibited by social aggregates as wholes, and which are interesting and significant {106} to the speculative or religious philosopher. The truth of this statement is illustrated by what has just been said about evolution. If evolved phenomena are phenomena which exhibit a reasonable sequence, and have yet been intended by no animal or human mind, it is open to the thinker to argue that they must have been intended by the mind of some higher power; and a new gate is opened into the Eden of theological speculation, from which man was driven when he first ate of the tree of scientific knowledge.
But whilst the business of the speculative philosopher is solely with the phenomena that have been unintended, the business of the practical sociologist is solely with the phenomena that have been intended. A moment’s reflection will convince the reader that this must be so. The meaning of the words “practical science” is a science from which we can draw practical advice; but all advice implies an intended end; and every attempt to solve social problems scientifically must be concerned with results which we may deliberately set ourselves to produce, and not with by-products which, ex hypothesi, are beyond our calculation. We may study these by-products of intention as they have shown themselves in the past; but if we do this, it will be with the object of becoming able to foresee them in the future. So soon as we can foresee them, we shall be able to intend their production; and when this happens they will cease to belong to the unintended. The great man will then consciously aim at them, and {107} not leave them to the incalculable chances of evolution. It may safely be said, no doubt, that, let us study human conduct as we may, unintended, or evolved phenomena will always continue to form a large part of what we mean by social progress; but, as practical inquirers, we must put them on one side, and confine our attention to those factors in the problem which either embody some definite human intention themselves, or on which we can found, by studying them, some definite intention of our own. And of such factors the chief is the great man, whose importance is enhanced rather than dwarfed by the fact that his intellect and his energy are the causes not only of great results which he intends, but also of those others—wider, if not more important—which, though neither intended nor foreseen by himself or by anybody else, would, if it were not for him, never take place at all.