The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
remote and roundabout way, hang together. What Darwin means is, that,
since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
produced. This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
born. It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in
which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
and towards divergence from the parent type. What are the causes there?
In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,--inaccessible,
therefore, to direct observation of any kind. Secondly, their
operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
conditions of environment. The same parents, living in the same
environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
an idiot or a monster. The visible external conditions are therefore
not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
severally flow.
The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
physiology. Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, which
operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up. They are
upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
the particular stimulus which joggles them down. Galvanic work, equal
to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
exactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritants
than galvanism are employed. The irritant has merely started or
provoked something which then went on of itself,--as a match may start
a fire which consumes a whole town. And qualitatively as well as
quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
cause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated in
what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
different ways. You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turn into a sour clot or
a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
the process. Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that
the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
image of it?
Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
entanglement with matters such as these? The success of his work is a
sufficiently affirmative reply.
And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The causes of
production of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible to
the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin,
the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
affect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirm
that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short _selects_
him.[3] And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He
acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
the region in which it appears. We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
statement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in their
neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit
in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy
about the English sparrow here,--whether he kills most canker-worms, or
drives away most native birds. Just so the great man, whether he be an
importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or
whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about
a rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
social relations.
{227}
The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in
the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of
individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that
they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose
gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
direction.
We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
history. It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a
Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon
up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly
observe. Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at
any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development.
Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a
decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place
offered in the counting-house, and is _committed_. Little by little,
the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so
near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he
may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour
might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such
questions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once so
vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no
otherwise with nations. They may be committed by kings and ministers
to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
{228} religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
starting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or any
great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an
accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
it has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be crying
forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
commanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. She
would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
{229} _Allemands_. Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lesson
will not be forgotten. Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they--
"will never do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been"--
of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The
community _may_ evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this
or that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve. Why, the very
birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like
Columbus's egg. "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
seed." But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a
community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are
to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either
of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.
But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every {230} 'man' fits
every 'hour.' Some incompatibilities there are. A given genius may
come either too early or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sent
to a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
and died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?
Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
from the sphere of his possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, no
Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
makes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain