BOOK II
CHAPTER I THE NATURE AND DEGREES OF THE SUPERIORITIES OF GREAT MEN
That great men are true causes of progress is admitted by Mr. Spencer himself to be the natural opinion of mankind. What has been done, then, in the preceding book is not much more than this:—a sound popular judgment, which is of the highest sociological importance, has been rescued from the discredit cast on it by the sophisms of modern theorists. These very theorists themselves, when they reason as practical men, have been shown to the reader blowing all their disproofs of it to the winds, and holding and appealing to it as tenaciously and as passionately as anybody; and it is consequently given back to us, with its old authority unimpaired. Sound popular judgments, however, are not science. They lack what is the essence of science—that is to say, analytical precision. We must now, therefore, take this judgment with regard to the great man, and endeavour to invest it with a meaning exact and full enough to enable us to apply it to the detailed phenomena of society.
And here Mr. Herbert Spencer shall once more {112} help us; for this remarkable writer, though he fails to recognise what he is doing, not only appeals on many critical occasions to the great-man theory as an explanation of the most important social phenomena, but he is repeatedly calling attention throughout his sociological writings to those facts of human nature of which the great-man theory is the expression. It will be sufficient to quote a few passages only.
Let us turn, then, to the opening pages of Mr. Spencer’s Study of Sociology and consider what is contained in them. We shall find that they are entirely devoted to describing the abject mental condition of by far the largest portion of all classes of English society, from the labourer, the farmer, and the Nonconformist minister with his Bible, up to “men called educated” and the most illustrious of our historians and philosophers. All of them, says Mr. Spencer, “are slaves to unwarranted opinions”; “proximate causes” are all that the majority of them are able to understand. Nor does he represent this as some accidental result, due to prejudices or deficiencies in education peculiar to our own country. He represents it as an inevitable result of the character of the human race. In his “Postscript” to the same volume he takes care to make his meaning plain. “Most people,” he says, “conclude quickly from small evidence,” and are incapable “of comprehending in their totality assembled propositions.” Indeed, those whose mental constitution is such that they can take a {113} rational view of “human affairs” are, he proceeds to say, merely “a scattered few.” He elsewhere divides society into “the capable and the incapable,” the “worthy and the unworthy”; and in the “Postscript” just alluded to he mentions as an admitted fact that in every social aggregate “the inferior form the majority.” But a yet more caustic passage remains to be mentioned. In this same work, The Study of Sociology, he is ridiculing—and very justly—the socialistic idea that the State can be endowed with any talent or wisdom beyond what happens to be possessed by the individual functionaries who compose the State. These functionaries, he says, are merely “a cluster of men,” which, like any other cluster taken at hap-hazard, will comprise “a few clever individuals, many ordinary, some decidedly stupid”; and he devotes pages to showing by means of multiplied examples, how incapable the ordinary statesman, to say nothing of the decidedly stupid, has been of promoting progress in even the simplest ways.
Mankind at large, then, according to Mr. Spencer, may, roughly speaking, be divided into three classes—the “clever” who are few, the “ordinary” who are the bulk of the population, and the “decidedly stupid” who form a considerable residuum; and it will appear from what he says of that representative “cluster,” the State, that whilst all real progress is the work of the clever few, the “ordinary men” do nothing to promote it, and “the decidedly stupid men” impede it. {114}
Now it must be perfectly obvious to the reader that in this description of mankind we have the fundamental facts before us which the great-man theory formulates. For let us begin by supposing that the entire human race contained no individuals superior to the “decidedly stupid,” who, whenever they are placed in official positions, do nothing, Mr. Spencer declares, but commit the most pernicious blunders, either by their irrational conservatism, or their still more irrational innovations. It is obvious that in this case the world would never have progressed at all. Let us next suppose that in addition to the “decidedly stupid” men, the human race comprises also a large proportion of “ordinary” men, but not a single man who deserves to be called more than “ordinary.” Could social progress, as we know it, have taken place even then? Could thought, for example, ever have made any advances, had everybody been as incapable as Mr. Spencer’s “ordinary” man is of taking a rational view of human affairs—had everybody been enslaved, like him, “to unwarranted opinions,” and been, like him, entirely lacking in the faculty which enables a man to comprehend “assembled propositions in their totality”? Or to put the whole matter in terms of a single instance, could Mr. Spencer’s own system of philosophy have been written if he himself had not been immensely superior not only to “ordinary” men, but even to those rival thinkers whom, in every one of his volumes, he treats with such supreme disdain? {115}
The answer of course is No. Under such conditions progress would have been quite impossible. Our simple argument will accordingly run thus. It is evident that those triumphs of thought, enterprise, and invention, to which social progress is due, could never have been made had the whole of each generation been as stupid and void of character as its lowest and weakest members. Therefore progress must be due to men who are superior to the “decidedly stupid.” Here we have the great-man theory in embryo. But it is equally evident that we can go a step farther, and say that progress could never have taken place had there been no individuals who in will, originality, and intellect were superior to “ordinary men.” Social progress, therefore, must be due to this third class—the class which alone is capable of taking “a rational” view of things; but this class, as Mr. Spencer tells us, consists of a “scattered few,” and here we have, in Mr. Spencer’s own language, neither more nor less than the great-man theory developed. We have it developed in the form of a distinct general proposition that progress is due not to mankind at large, but to a minority of exceptional individuals, and in this form, which Mr. Spencer has assisted us in giving it, it is brought into actual accordance with the facts of social life, and, unlike the wild exaggerations of Carlyle, it will be found to accord the more closely with them the more fully it is analysed.
The error of writers like Carlyle was that they took a part for the whole. They recognised no {116} great men at all except great men of the greatest kind—heroic figures which appeared once or twice in a century; and as for the rest of mankind, they treated them, in accordance with Mr. Spencer’s formula, as a mass of units, approximately equal in capacity. The truth of the case is, on the contrary, this:—that whatever is done by great men of the heroic type, something similar, if not so striking, is done by a number of lesser great men also; that whilst the action of the heroic great men is intermittent, the action of the lesser great men is constant; and that the latter, as a body, although not individually, do incalculably more to promote progress than the former.
Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that when we describe great men as being a minority, or a “scattered few,” we do not mean that out of every thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine “ordinary” men and one genius; or that there are (let us say) seven hundred who can be described for all purposes as “ordinary,” and two hundred and ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as “stupid”; and that there is one “clever” or “great” man who towers over them like an oak tree over bramble bushes. Nor, again, do we mean that “greatness” is some single definite quality, which marks its possessor out like a white man amongst negroes. Believers in extreme democracy, who very rightly discern in the great-man theory the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such as this to its exponents. But the great-man {117} theory, when properly analysed and explained, will be found to comprise no such absurdities as the foregoing. When we speak of “greatness” we mean a great variety of efficiencies, which, though grouped together because they are all exceptional in degree, are nevertheless indefinitely various in kind; and, moreover, the degrees to which they are exceptional are indefinitely various also, the degree being in many cases so low that it is difficult to say whether it should be classed as exceptional at all. In short, there are as many degrees of greatness as there are of temperature; and it is as difficult to draw a line between ordinary men and men whose greatness is of a very low degree, as it is to draw a line between coldness, coolness, and low degrees of heat. But though it may be questionable whether we should call a day cool when the thermometer is at fifty-nine, and whether we should call it hot when the thermometer is at sixty-one, everybody admits that it is hot when the thermometer is at eighty-five, and cold when the thermometer registers twenty degrees of frost. In the same way, though there will be a certain number of people who may be classed as great by one judge and classed as ordinary by another, there is a certain number whose capacities, however unequal amongst themselves, set their possessors apart as indubitably greater than the majority; and we are speaking with sufficient, though we cannot speak with absolute precision, when we say that progress depends on the action of this minority. {118}