It has already been explained that the great man, as here understood, does not in any way correspond with the fittest man in the Darwinian struggle for existence. The fittest man in the Darwinian sense merely promotes progress by the physiological process of reproducing his slight superiorities in his children, and thus raising in the slow course of ages the general level of capacity throughout subsequent generations of his race. The great man, on the contrary, promotes progress, not because he raises the capacity of the generations that come after him, but because he rises individually above the general level of his own. This, however, is only one of the differences by which the great man is distinguished from the fittest. There are two others, of which the first that we must consider is as follows.
The fittest man, or the survivor in the Darwinian struggle for existence, is, so far as his own contemporaries are concerned, greater than his inferiors only in respect of what he accomplishes for {131} himself, or for those immediately dependent on him. He is the man who lives and thrives whilst others die or languish, because whilst they can secure for themselves but little of what is requisite for life and health, he, by his superior gifts, is able to secure much. “Families,” says Mr. Spencer, “whom the increasing difficulty of obtaining a living does not stimulate to improvement in production are on the high road to extinction, and must ultimately be supplanted by those whom the difficulty does so stimulate.” That is to say, Mr. Spencer, and all our modern sociologists with him, conceive of the fittest as a man, or a man and his family, who fight for their food in isolation, like a lion and lioness with their cubs, and who affect their contemporaries only by being better fed than they, or as a race-horse affects its competitors only by being first at the winning post.
But the great man, as an agent of progress, shows his greatness in a way precisely opposite to that in which the fittest man shows his fitness. This it is that our contemporary sociologists all fail to perceive, and endless error is the consequence. The great man, unlike the strongest lion, promotes progress by increasing the food-supply not of himself, but of others; or if he increase his own, as he no doubt generally does, he does so only by showing others how to increase theirs. He is like a lion who should be better fed than the rest of the lions in his region, not because he took a carcase from them for which they all were fighting, {132} but because he showed them how to find others which they never would have found unaided, and took for himself in payment a small portion of each. The great man, in fact, as an agent of social progress, is great not in virtue of any completed results which he produces directly, by the action of his own hands or brains, or which he exhibits in his own person, but in virtue of the completed results which, by some simultaneous influence which he exercises over the brains or hands of others, he enables others to exhibit in themselves, or produce or do in the form of products or social services.
In order to realise this great truth, let us begin with considering that form of greatness which promotes social progress by supplying it with its first materials, and from which all other kinds of greatness draw some portion of their nourishment. It so happens that one of the most remarkable thinkers of this century, who, though he preceded Mr. Spencer, belongs to the same school, is able to assist us here by a very apt and remarkable passage.
John Stuart Mill, in that section of his System of Logic to which he gives the title of “The Logic of the Moral Sciences,” writes thus. “In the difficult process of observation and comparison which is required (for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of the laws of empirical sociology, and especially of social progress) it would evidently be a great assistance if it should happen to be the fact that one element in the complex existence of social man is pre-eminent over all the others, as the prime agent {133} of the social movement. For we could then take the progress of that one element as the central chain, to each successive link of which, the corresponding links of all the other progressions being appended, the succession of facts would by this alone be presented in a kind of spontaneous order, far more approaching to the real order of their filiation than could be obtained by any other merely empirical process. Now the evidence of history and that of human nature combine, by a striking instance of consilience, to show that there really is one social element which is predominant and almost paramount amongst the agents of social progression. This is the state of the speculative faculties, including the nature of the beliefs which by any means they have arrived at, concerning themselves and the world by which they are surrounded. Thus,” Mill continues, “to take the most obvious case, the impelling force to most of the improvements effected in the arts of life is the desire for increased material comfort; but as we can only act on external objects in proportion to our knowledge of them, the state of knowledge at any given time is the limit of the industrial improvement possible at that time, and therefore the progress of industry must follow and depend upon the progress of that knowledge.”
Any one who was inclined to be hypercritical might object, and object with justice, that the practical application of knowledge often lags behind the speculative attainment, and that material progress therefore, at certain times, depends on {134} some new state of the practical rather than of the speculative faculties; but apart from this not very important inaccuracy of expression, Mill’s way of putting the case is admirable for its lucidity and for its truth; and we may, for our present purpose, be content to take it as it stands. All civilisation depends on the accumulation of speculative knowledge, and all progress in civilisation depends on an increase in speculative knowledge.
Speculative knowledge, however, does not increase of itself. It is not acquired without considerable effort; and people acquire it only because they strongly desire to do so. Such being the case, let us turn to another passage, taken likewise from the writings of Mill, and occurring in the very same chapter as that which has just been quoted. “It would be a great error,” says Mill, “and one very little likely to be committed, to assert that speculation, intellectual activity, the pursuit of truth, is amongst the more powerful propensities of human nature, or holds a predominating place in the lives of any save decidedly exceptional individuals. But notwithstanding the relative weakness of this principle among other sociological agents, its influence is the main determining cause of social progress, all the other dispositions of our nature which contribute to that progress being dependent on it for accomplishing their share of the work.”
Now what does this passage mean? About its meaning, and the truth of its meaning, there can be no possible doubt; but it will be well to observe {135} the extraordinary confusion in which Mill involves what he means by his perverse manner of expressing it. In the first sentence of this last passage he tells us as clearly as possible that with regard to the pursuit of truth, and the power of discovering and understanding it, mankind are divided broadly into two classes—the great majority with whom the “pursuit of truth” and “intellectual activity” are “slight propensities,” and “the decidedly exceptional individuals” with whom these propensities are overmastering. But he has no sooner drawn this clear and all-important distinction between the two classes than he proceeds to undo his own work and mixes them together again in one unmeaning blur. He converts his statement that only “the decidedly exceptional individuals” desire truth with any great intensity, and have the faculties requisite for discovering it, into the statement that if we take “the decidedly exceptional individuals” and the majority together, and regard them as one body, which he calls “mankind,” we shall find that the average desire for truth is lukewarm, and the faculties for discovering it insufficient. He might just as well group Shakespeare with a hundred ordinary men; tell us that Shakespeare could write the greatest poetry the world has ever known, and that the hundred other men could write no poetry at all, and then convert these statements into the following—that the one hundred and one men, Shakespeare included, could only write poetry of a very moderate quality. {136}
This confusion of statement, however, on the part of Mill, is merely mentioned here in passing, as one more example of the nature of that inveterate error—namely the ignoring of the differences between one class of men and another—which has made modern sociology so useless for practical purposes. The sole point which really now concerns us is this. In spite of the verbal, and indeed the mental confusion into which Mill lapses, the truth which he was struggling to express, and which no one, he says, would be likely to contradict, is not that, as he nonsensically puts it, the speculative faculties are weak in mankind generally, but that amongst the larger part of mankind they have hardly any efficiency at all, whilst “in decidedly exceptional individuals” they are intense, active, and conquering; and that consequently it is these “decidedly exceptional individuals” who practically constitute “the one social element which is predominant, and almost paramount, amongst the agents of social progression.”
Now such being the case, let us resume our present inquiry, and ask how do these individuals who alone strongly desire truth, and have the faculties for discovering it, perform the practical part which Mill so rightly assigns to them? By what kind of conduct do they become “agents of social progression” so as to raise communities from the level of helpless savagery and gradually endow them with all the resources of civilisation? One thing is perfectly clear. They do not so by the mere act {137} of acquiring knowledge, by laying up this treasure in a napkin, or by showing it secretly to one another. They do so only by diffusing it, in such measure as is practicable, amongst a circle of men much wider than themselves. They do so, that is to say, by influencing the minds of others, by guiding their attention to this and to that fact, by providing, as it were, a go-cart for their weaker intellectual faculties, and compelling them to confront and assent to such and such propositions. All that mass of developing knowledge and expanding ideas which forms not only the basis but a part of all progressive civilisation, and is commonly called by the general name of enlightenment, is produced solely by the influence on average minds of the minds that are “decidedly exceptional.” It is not produced by the fact that the “decidedly exceptional” minds are stocked with such ideas and with such knowledge themselves, but by the fact that they communicate such a measure of these to average minds as average minds are severally able to receive.