The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
uniformity become clear.... Those conditions furnished by advancing
civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity
simultaneously make possible the notion of _exactness_.... Hence the
primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
of what we call _truth_. How closely allied this is to the
consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even
in language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement.
Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect
agreement between the results of calculations."
The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in
which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of
'outer {253} relations.' In this chapter the yard-stick, the balance,
the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure
among the 'relations' external to the mind. Surely they are so, after
they have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative power
of the social environment. Originally all these things and all other
institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the
outer environment showed no sign. Adopted by the race and become its
heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they
environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of
progress rolls. But take out the geniuses, or alter their
idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
show? We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
from our special information about particular cases of change) is a
metaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation,
an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,--a mood which
is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of
it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of
fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was,
and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing
proceeds. Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and
mighty a style of looking on the world as this. What we at present
call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to
birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
ultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates should
turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which
science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region
which--whether above or below--is at least altogether different from
that in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove
the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in
protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think
that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree
that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is
an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought,
just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous
distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work,
force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved,
carries us back to a pre-galilean age.
[1] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
[2] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
(among other things) for variation. But it occupies its own separate
place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
of the relations of the whole animal to the environment. _Divide et
impera!_
[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect
this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
[4] The reader will remember when this was written.
[5] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
[6] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
[7] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
[8] No! not even though they were bodily brothers! The geographical
factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor. The difference
between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this difference
might be invisible to the naked eye. No two couples of the most
homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in
identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages. The
minute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
[9] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. I quote
from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
[10] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878. Reprint in
Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
[11] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
[12] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
the greatest respect. Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
geniuses, etc. He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
make--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)--to be
radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
the great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and to
the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked
entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of
geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born
happened not to find tasks. I doubt the truth of his assertion that
_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
types are irrepressible. Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be
conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch. But take
Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:
nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them,' known
only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
judgment. What has started them on their career of effective greatness
is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions
and powers. I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in
with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they
need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
equally great. Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions. But apart
from these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively. Take
longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
would on the whole be more spread out.
[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
extent met the need. But who can doubt that if he had certain other
qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
still more decisive? (1896.)
[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
monotonous.
[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460. See also pp. 463, 464, 500. On
page 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of the
connection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ of
the outer connection. Mr. Spencer works most with the law of
frequency. Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr.
Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.
[16] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
[17] Part viii. chap. iii.
{255}
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,--one
by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic
Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero
Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, _ibidem_, p. 75. The article which
follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article. It was refused at the
time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for
August, 1890. It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing
article, on which it casts some explanatory light.
Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple
considerations. A nation's great men, he says, are but slight
deviations from the general level. The hero is merely a special
complex of the ordinary qualities of his race. The petty differences
impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are
nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek
mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in a
philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a
locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of
better coal. What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fraction
compared with what he derives from his parents, or {256} indirectly
from his earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero is
so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what
really calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for the
sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary
men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted,
as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.
Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen's unrivalled polemic amiability
and be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts or
try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleon
and the average level of their respective tribes. Let it be as small
as Mr. Allen thinks. All that I object to is that he should think the
mere _size_ of a difference is capable of deciding whether that
difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study. Truly
enough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the
bird's-eye view vanish in the details. Which is the right point of
view for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points of
view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural
reality _per se_ is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation,