In order to understand how this is, let the reader reflect once more on one of the main truths that have been insisted on in the present volume—namely, that though all progress is the work of great or exceptional men, all great or exceptional men do not promote progress equally, and some of them indeed do not promote it at all. Progress results from the victory of the fittest of these over the less fit in the struggle to gain dominion over the thoughts and actions of others. Let the reader reflect also on the analysis that was given of the various qualities which go to make up greatness—that is to say, the qualities by which dominion over others is obtained. It was pointed out that greatness is a highly composite thing; that it need not necessarily imply any moral, nor indeed any intellectual superiority; and as an illustration of this it was mentioned that many most {337} important political movements have been produced by men whose greatness consisted merely in ordinary sense joined to, and made efficient by, an extraordinary strength of will. It is necessary now to follow this line of observation farther, and to point out that if extraordinary strength of will can produce beneficial effects when allied with ordinary sense, it is equally capable of producing effects that are mischievous when allied with stupidity, or with that kind of imperfect intellect which is as quick in defending and popularising, as it is in being duped by fallacies. And with these latter qualities it is allied as often as with the former. It is a great mistake to suppose that even the most false and foolish opinions which have influenced multitudes to their own detriment have been originated and promulgated by men who were altogether weak and inferior. On the contrary, most of the follies which have disturbed or retarded civilisation have been due to the influence of men who, though morally or intellectually contemptible, have possessed a vigour of character far beyond what is ordinary.
Now, if education has the effect attributed to it of liberating the will and developing the intellectual powers of men in whom the intellect is really acute and sound, there is an obvious danger of its having the same effect on men whose intellect is unbalanced and imperfect. To some of such intellects, no doubt, it may give clearness and equilibrium; but there are others for which it does nothing, except to increase their powers of reasoning wrongly; and when an {338} intellect of this kind is allied with a naturally strong will, the effect of education is to let loose a wild horse, merely in order that it may run away with a lunatic.
It must be remembered that the strength of a man’s will, though depending as a potentiality on the character with which he happens to be born, depends as an actual force on his desire for certain objects or results, coupled with the belief that he can attain these by action. Now, when a man’s powers of action are capable of realising his desires—as when a man who desires to be wealthy has the talents that produce wealth, or when the man who desires to be Prime Minister has the talents of a great statesman—his career satisfies himself, and is presumably serviceable to his country. In many cases, however, desire is exceptionally great, and generates also a strong impulse to act, but the capacity for that kind of action by which the desired object might be obtained is small. Thus many men desire exceptional wealth, but find themselves incapable of the peculiar kind of action that produces it. Their will, accordingly, if it makes them act at all, is like a steam-engine which merely puts useless machinery into motion; or if it fails to make them act, as it very often does, it shakes them to pieces with a kind of intellectual retching. These unhappy persons owe the condition in which they find themselves mainly to an over-estimate of their own powers; and this over-estimate is generally the direct result of education, which, by making them {339} falsely imagine themselves capable of attaining wealth, actualises a fruitless desire for it, which might otherwise have remained latent. When education has this effect on a man it is an unmitigated evil for himself, and very frequently for others.
Again, education, besides actualising exceptional desires which are wholly unaccompanied by any exceptional faculties that correspond to them, actualises desires accompanied by faculties which are really exceptional, and which produce results undoubtedly more than ordinary, but are nevertheless incapable of complete development. Many men, for instance, have gifts for music and poetry which, though genuine so far as they go, have yet some fatal defect in them, and will never produce, however devotedly they are exercised, any results possessing artistic value. Now the fact that progress is caused by a struggle between exceptional men, of course implies that some of them shall be less efficient than the others. It is by struggling with the less efficient that the superiority of the most efficient is realised; and in order that it may be found who the most efficient are, the inferior as well as the superior must put their capacities to the test. It is therefore unavoidably one object of education to stimulate the activity of some exceptional men whose own efforts are foredoomed to ultimate failure. Failures, however, differ in degree and kind. Some men fail because they can accomplish nothing of what they attempt, like the dreamers who have wasted their {340} lives in trying to make perpetual motions. Some fail because, though they accomplish something, others accomplish more; and the production of what is the best makes the second best valueless. Thus nine inventors might produce nine motor-cars, each of which worked well enough to command a considerable sale; but if a tenth inventor was to produce another which was faster, simpler, more durable, and cheaper than any of these, all the rest would drop out of use altogether, and be practically as valueless as the mad aggregation of wheels by which the seeker for the perpetual motion endeavoured to accomplish the impossible. Between the men who fail, however, because they succeed less than others, and the men who fail because they do not succeed at all, there is a great practical difference. The men who fail only because others succeed better than they do, contribute to the very success of the men by whom they are defeated; for they raise the standard of achievement which these men have to overpass. But the men who fail because they accomplish nothing waste their own lives without benefiting anybody. In the domain of economic production the truth of this is obvious. It is not less so in the domain of speculative thought. Scientific theories are constantly put forward which, though not true, are sufficiently near the truth to have some definite relation to it; and those who actually reach it find in errors of this kind an indispensable assistance. Nothing gives to truth so keen and clear an outline as the refuted errors of really powerful thinkers. But {341} there are errors, on the other hand, which, though it may be necessary to refute them because they have imposed themselves on a number of ignorant people, do nothing to advance the discovery of truth whatever, and the activity of those who originate them is altogether mischievous. Thus whilst the reasonings of heretical thinkers like Arius, by the controversy they provoked, were very largely instrumental in advancing orthodox theology to really logical completeness, the philosophy of religion owes absolutely nothing to Joanna Southcott or the American prophet Harris. Accordingly, whilst it is impossible to say with precision where the line is to be drawn between the exceptional talents which, if developed, would be of use in the progressive struggle and those which are so defective that their influences would be merely mischievous, it is obvious that talent of this latter kind is sufficiently plentiful to render its development dangerous.
History teems with examples of this fact, and so do the unwritten annals of the social life around us. Henri Murger in his studies of Bohemian Paris bears eloquent witness to the tragic absurdity of the results caused by the development of imperfect artistic talent, and the miserable endings of men who, if they had not tried to be artists, might have lived and thriven as honest and healthy ouvriers; whilst, according as we hold vaccination to be a blessing to the world or a curse, we must necessarily hold that it would have been far better for everybody if the talents of the men who invented it, or else {342} those of the men who now oppose it, had been killed by the frosts of ignorance, and never allowed to blossom.
But the commonest examples of talent that is wholly mischievous are afforded by certain classes of politicians and social agitators. There is a large number of men whose potential activity is considerable, and whose intellect has a natural nimbleness which will enable them, when stimulated by education, to seize on plausible fallacies and impose them both on themselves and others. Politicians of this class are familiar figures enough. The social agitator, whose mental equipment is similar, is more familiar still. Many attempts have been made to give a scientific explanation of those constant attacks on the existing organisation of society which are common to all civilised countries, and go by the name of socialism. Socialism is said by some to be the protest of increasing poverty against increasing wealth; by some to be the natural voice of highly organised labour, which has come at last to be capable of self-government; and by some to be an embodiment of the esoteric philosophy of Hegel. In reality it is the embodiment of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are exceptional, but at the same time inefficient. The avowed object of socialism is a redistribution of wealth; but the most striking characteristic of all the socialistic leaders has been an incapacity to produce the thing which they are so anxious to distribute. The wish to {343} redistribute it in some of them arises from sentiments of benevolence; in some from fallacious reasoning; and in some from personal envy; but in none has it been accompanied by those particular faculties on which the actual production of wealth in large quantities depends. Socialism, therefore, so far as it is a serious theory, is essentially an attempt on the part of men who are themselves economically impotent to prove that they, and others like them, have some reasonable right to possess and divide amongst themselves what they are constitutionally powerless to make for themselves. The result has been the elaboration of a theory of production which sometimes declares that wealth is produced by “aggregates of conditions,” or “social inheritances,” or “environments,” as Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bellamy, and Mr. Sidney Webb tell us; and sometimes that it is produced by “average labour measured by time,” as Karl Marx tells us,—the one doctrine being that wealth is produced by nobody, and that one man has thus as good a right to it as another; the other being that it is produced in equal quantities by everybody, and that everybody on that ground has a right to an equal quantity of it. Both doctrines agree in this, that they altogether miss and divert the attention of the mind from the forces and conditions on which wealth-production depends in reality.
Now if the elaboration of these fallacies had been confined to men who were capable of presenting them in a really arguable form, and if they had been promulgated only amongst classes who were capable {344} of passing a scientific judgment on them, they might have played—and within limits they have played—a valuable part in eliciting the truth opposed to them. But they have become wholly mischievous when, through the agency of indiscriminate education, they have influenced men who, whilst wanting in intellectual judgment, are nevertheless endowed with a potential activity of character, and who, when this is developed, at once become powerful agents in disseminating fallacies amongst others even less capable of criticising them than themselves. Thus many of the leaders of the “new unionism” in England are to be credited with energy of a really remarkable kind; but unfortunately the energy is united to such defective intellectual powers, that the more vigorously these are employed, the more mischievous and absurd is the result. The general resolutions that have been passed at Trade Union conferences declaring that no progress is possible till all the means of production shall have been nationalised, or the doctrine of the “new unionists” that wages control prices, are all results of the exercise of faculties which, though in some respects doubtless superior to those of the average man, had far better have never been developed at all.
It is men like these—the men with ill-balanced or abortive talents—the men with strong wills and defective intellects, the men whose ambition is developed by the smallest educational stimulus, but who have no talents proportionate to it which any {345} education could develop—it is men like these who invest with its principal dangers the equalisation of educational opportunity; and if education, as so many Conservatives say, really does nothing but promote popular discontent, it promotes discontent amongst the great masses of the population less from the manner in which it affects the average man directly, than from the manner in which it affects men who are inefficiently exceptional, and who, not having the gifts that would enable them to rise in any society, endeavour to persuade the masses that society, as at present constituted, is an organised conspiracy of the few to keep everybody else down.
The equalisation of educational opportunity has, therefore, two dangers—the danger of developing wants in the average man which could never be generally satisfied under any social arrangements; and the danger of developing the talents of a certain class of exceptional men which are naturally incomplete, and which the more fully they were developed, would only become more mischievous both to their possessors and to society.
And these dangers correspond with the two objects for the sake of which the equalisation of educational opportunity is advocated. One of these objects is the raising the condition of the average man; the other is the securing, alike for himself and for society, the full benefit of the potential gifts of the exceptional man. The average man, however, is not made better or happier by being filled in early life with importunate wants and propensities which he {346} will, when he comes to maturity, be unable to gratify; nor is any one made better or happier by the development of gifts which, however exceptional, can, by reason of their incompleteness, do nothing but give currency to error, or initiate abortive action.