The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
deflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[5] "it is the peculiarity
of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in
them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any
distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}
distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
the tree's nature.... Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
melt it, and let it cool.... No one can tell by examining a piece of
gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak can
tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A living
being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
own existence, but of all its ancestors."
Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
certain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
down. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The
new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundings
of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
be.[6]
{232}
Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community
stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away
without the sympathy of the community.
All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it
developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete
sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to
whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. "The
individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_. We all know, too,
how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at
the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
quoted:--
"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask
for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at
the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his
origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural?
Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,--or,
rather, not removed at all.... Is this an unacceptable solution? Then
the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the
whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
and appliances, he is a _resultant_.... You must admit that the
genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can
remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of
which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real
explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[7]
Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
believe in the power of initiative of the great man.
{234}
Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
largely due to J. S. Mill's example. I may possibly be wrong about the
facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
'resting in general notions.' And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
is great." _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.
To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the
labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
remake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} the social,
political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the
convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on
Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.
Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born
there,--as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he
mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have
engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
remains unchanged? Or might the substitute arise at
'Stratford-atte-Bowe'? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the
midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us
in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed,
suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of
articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that
individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not
upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other
unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
{236} physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a
fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably
from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from
the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences
between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various
races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they
would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who
inhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who went
to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been
white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and
indigestible port.... The differentiating agency must be sought in the
great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have
necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of
every nation upon the earth.... We cannot regard any nation as an
active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding
circumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two
sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose
that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even
tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding
causes."[9]
{237}
Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--
"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is
to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can
differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
without a cause."[10]
This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have
no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no _tertium quid_
between outward environment and miracle. _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!