Great Men and their EnvironmentGreat Men and their EnvironmentWilliam JamesA lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in theAtlantic Monthly, vol. 46, no. 276 (October 1880), pp. 441 ---459.A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains betweenthe facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolutionas expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very generalremarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is a common platitudethat a complete acquaintance with any one thing, however small, would require aknowledge of the entire universe. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but someof the remote conditions of his fall are to be found in the milky way, in ourfederal constitution, or in the early history of Europe. That is to say, alterthe milky way, alter our federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarianancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from what itnow is. One fact involved in the difference might be that the particularlittle street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the sparrow might notfind himself opposite the sparrow at that particular moment; or, findinghimself there, he might not be in that particular serene and disengaged mood ofmind which expressed itself in throwing the stone. But, true as all this is,it would be very foolish for any one who was inquiring the cause of thesparrow's fall to overlook the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speakanthropomorphic an agent, and to say that the true cause is the federalconstitution, the westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure ofthe milky way. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfectlegitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his door-stepand cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen at the table,died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one such instance; and Imight, if I chose, contend with perfect logical propriety that the slip on theice was no real accident. "There are no accidents," I might say, "forscience. The whole history of the world converged to produce that slip. Ifanything had been left out, the slip would not have occurred just there andthen. To say it would is to deny the relations of cause and effect throughoutthe universe. The real cause of the death was not the slip, but theconditions which engendered the slip, --- and among them his having sat ata table, six months previous, one among thirteen. That is truly thereason why he died within the year."It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here. Iwould fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. Butunfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement until wehave a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be. The erroris needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required forexhibiting the brightness of a picture. And the error which I am going to useas a foil to set off what seems to me the truth of my own statements iscontained in the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer and his disciples. Ourproblem is, What are the causes that make communities change from generation togeneration, --- that make the England of Queen Anne so different from theEngland of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from that ofthirty years ago?I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulatedinfluences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and theirdecisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are irrespective ofpersons, and independent of individual control. They are due to theenvironment, to the circumstances, the physical geography, the ancestralconditions, the increasing experience of out relations; to everything, in fact,except the Grants and the Bismarcks, the Joneses and the Smiths.Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same fallacyas he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner with thirteen,or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way. Like the dog in the fable, whodrops his real bone to snatch at its image, they drop the real causes to snatchat others, which from no possible human point of view are available orattainable. Their fallacy is a practical one. Let us see where it lies.Although I believe in free-will myself, I will waive that belief in thisdiscussion, and assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all humanactions. On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligenceinvestigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and omnipresent, ableto take in the whole of time and space at a single glance, there would not bethe slightest objection to the milky way or the fatal feast being invoked amongthe sought-for causes. Such a divine intelligence would see instantaneouslyall the infinite lines of convergence towards a given result, and it would,moreover, see impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much acondition of the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with thestone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan. Ithas no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it to see buttwo or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider sweeps it has to use`general ideas,' as they are called, and in so doing to drop all concretetruths. Thus, in the present case, if we as men wish to feel the connectionbetween the milky way and the boy and the dinner and the sparrow and the man'sdeath, we can do so only by falling back on the enormous emptiness of what iscalled an abstract proposition. We must say, All things in the world arefatally predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a systemof natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have lost allthe concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the concrete linksare the only things of importance. The human mind is essentially partial. Itcan be efficient at all only by picking out what to attend to, andignoring everything else, --- by narrowing its point of view. Otherwise, whatlittle strength it has is dispersed, and it loses its way altogether. Manalways wants his curiosity gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the caseof the sparrow, the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander offfrom the cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, tosurvey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile escape. Andif, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves in contemplation ofthe thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice the ice on the step and coverit with ashes, some other poor fellow, who never dined out in his life, manyslip on it in coming to the door, and fall and break his head too.It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our view. In mathematics we know howthis method of ignoring and neglecting quantities lying outside a certain rangehas been adopted in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out allthe "infinitesimals" of the quantities he is considering. He treats them(under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they existperfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist for the purposesof his calculation. Just so an astronomer, dealing with the tidal movementsof the ocean, takes no account of the waves made by the wind, or by thepressure of all the steamers which day upon night are moving their thousands oftons upon its surface. Just so the marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows forthe motion of the wind, but not for the equally real motion of the earth andsolar system. Just so a business man's punctuality may overlook an error offive minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must counteach thousandth of a second.There are, in short, different cycles of operation in nature;different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one another, sothat what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible with almost anycondition of things at the same moment in the next. The mould on the biscuitin the store-room of a man-of-war vegetates in absolute indifference to thenationality of the flag, the direction of the voyage, the weather, and thehuman dramas that may go on on board; and a mycologist may study it in completeabstraction from all these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, isthere any chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope tolearn something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who inmaneuvering the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary to bringthe mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely lose the battle byreason of the excessive "thoroughness" of his mind.The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected withone another only if we take the whole universe into account. For alllesser points of view it is lawful --- nay, more, it is for human wisdomnecessary --- to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one another.And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an animal ora human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the possession ofsome extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be able to discriminatebetween the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in himand the causes that maintained it after it is produced; and we shallsee, if the peculiarity be one that he was born with, that these two sets ofcauses belong to two such irrelevant cycles. It was the triumphant originalityof Darwin to see this, and to act accordingly. Separating the causes ofproduction under the title of `tendencies to spontaneous variation,' andrelegating them to a physiological cycles which he forthwith agreed to ignorealtogether {1}, he confined hisattention to the causes of preservation, and under the names of naturalselection and sexual selection studied them exclusively as functions of thecycle of the environment.Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine ofdescent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of clumping thetwo cycles of causation into one. What preserves an animal with hispeculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the nature of theenvironment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. The giraffe with hispeculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are in his environment talltrees whose leaves he can digest. But these philosophers went further, andsaid that the presence of the trees not only maintained an animal with a longneck to browse upon their branches, but also produced him. They madehis neck long by the constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them.The environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the animal bya kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the wax into harmonywith itself. Numerous instances were given of the way in which this goes onunder our eyes. The exercise of the forge makes the right arm strong, the palmgrows callous to the oar, the mountain air distends the chest, the chased foxgrows cunning and the chased bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animalcombustion, and so forth. Now these changes, of which many more examples mightbe adduced, are at present distinguished by the special name ofadaptive changes. Their peculiarity is that that very feature in theenvironment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself produces theadjustment. The `inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's phrase, `corresponds'with its own efficient cause.Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in amount ofthese changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely greater mass ofchanges being produced by internal molecular accidents, of which we knownothing. His next achievement was to define the true problem with which wehave to deal when we study the effects of the visible environment on theanimal. That problem is simply this: Is the environment more likely topreserve or to destroy him, on account of this or that peculiaritywith which he may be born? In giving the name of "accidental variations" tothose peculiarities with which an animal is born, Darwin does not for a momentmean to suggest that they are not the fixed outcome of natural law. If thetotal system of the universe be taken into account, the causes of thesevariations and the visible environment which preserves or destroys them,undoubtedly do, in some remote and round-about way, hang together. What Darwinmeans is, that, since the environment is a perfectly known thing, and itsrelations to the organism in the way of destruction or preservation aretangible and distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings andfrustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a disparateand incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are produced. Thislast cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is born. It is the cycleof influences upon ova and embryos; in which lie the causes that tip them andtilt them towards masculinity or femininity, towards strength or weakness,towards health or disease, and towards divergence from the parent type. Whatare the causes there?In the first place, they are molecular and invisible, --- inaccessible,therefore, to direct observation of any kind. Secondly, their operations arecompatible with any social, political and physical conditions of theenvironment. The same parents, living in the same environing conditions, mayat one birth produce a genius, at the next an idiot or a monster. The visibleexternal conditions are therefore not direct determinants of this cycle; andthe more we consider the matter, the more we are forced to believe that twochildren of the same parents ar made to differ from each other by causes asdisproportionate to their ultimate effects as is that famous pebble on theRocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf ofSt. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean towards which it makes them severally flow.The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and dischargingforces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in physiology. Almost allcauses there are forces of detent, which operate by simply unlockingenergy already stored up. They are upsetters of unstable equilibria, and theresultant effect depends infinitely more on the nature of the materials upsetthan on that of the particular stimulus which joggles them down. Galvanicwork, equal to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle towhich the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and exactlythe same muscular effect will emerge if other irritants than galvanism areemployed. The irritant has merely started or provoked something which thenwent 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 absolutelyincommensurable with the cause. We find this condition of things in allorganic matter. Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which theinstability of albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens,treated in what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave inquite 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 amass of koumiss --- depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the alcoholicis 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 bringforth a genius or a dunce, even as the rain-drop passes east or west of thepebble, --- is it not obvious that the deflecting cause must lie in a region sorecondite and minute, must be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal ofso high an order, that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting toframe an image of it?Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that regionaltogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all entanglementwith matters such as these? The success of his work is a sufficientaffirmative reply.And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject. The causes ofproduction of great men lie in a sphere wholly inaccessible to the socialphilosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin acceptshis spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem is, thesedate being given, How does the environment affect them, and how do they affectthe environment? Now, I affirm that the relation of the visible environment tothe great man is in the main exactly what it is to the "variation" in theDarwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, inshort selects him {2}. Andwhenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes modified by hisinfluence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He acts as a ferment, andchanges its constitution, just as the advent of a new zoölogical specieschanges 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 thegrowth of clover in their neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of theEuropean rabbit in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in thecontroversy about the English sparrow here, --- whether he kills more cankerworms, or drives away most native birds. Just so the great man, whether he bean important from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether hespring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about a rearrangement, ona large or a small scale, of the pre-existing social relations.The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in themain due directly or indirectly to the acts or the examples of individualswhose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whoseaccidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments,initiators of movements, setters of precedent or fashion, centers ofcorruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had freeplay, would have led society in another direction.We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale allabout us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of history. It isonly following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a Darwin and a Whitney tointerpret the unknown by the known, and reckon up cumulatively the only causesof social change we can directly observe. Societies of men are just likeindividuals, in that both at any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities ofdevelopment. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend ona decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the placeoffered in the counting-house, and is committed. Little by little, thehabits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease tobe reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubtwhether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been thebetter of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and theold alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something lesssubstantial than a dream. It is no otherwise with nations. They may becommitted by kings and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory ordefeat, by prophets to this religion or that, by various geniuses to fame inart, science or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of futurepossibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be thestarting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or any great civicprecedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations widen with thecourse of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an accidental success fixesan ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.Would England have to-day the "imperial" ideal which she now has, if acertain 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 {3} if a Frederic the Great had inheritedher throne instead of a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, andBright had all been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day preciselythe 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 inEngland 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 conquerbut not to fight, if her ideal had in all these years been fixed by asuccession of statesmen of supremely commanding personality, working in onedirection? Certainly not. She would have espoused, for better or worse,either one course or another. Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germanswould still be satisfied with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacledGelehrten and political herbivora, and to the French as cesbons, or ces naifs, Allemands. Bismarck's will showed them, totheir own great astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. Thelesson 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, onefactor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The communitymay evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this or thatferment decides in which way it shall evolve. Why, the very birds ofthe forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but neverdevelop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with usindividuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light withdarkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist toour sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new morallight within us. But it is like Columbus's egg. "All can raise the flowersnow, for all have got the seed." But if this be true of individuals in thecommunity, how can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certainway, a community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways areto a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either of manyalternative impulses given by different men of genius, and still live and beprosperous, just as a man may enter either of many businesses. Only, theprosperities may differ in their type.But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every "man" fits every"hour." Some incompatabilites there are. A given genius may come either tooearly or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sent to an insane asylum.John Mill in the tenth century would have lived and died unknown. Cromwell andNapoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame inthe day of telescopic-sighted rifles; and, to express differently an instancewhich Spencer uses, what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which noprecursive genius had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius nowincompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some previousgenius of a different strain has warped the community away from the sphere ofhis possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, now Peter the hermit; afterCharles IX and Louis XIV, no general protestantization of France; after aManchester school, a Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II,a Castelar makes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certainsides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles ofdeflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do nobetter than quote from Professor Clifford {4}, "it is the peculiarity of living things not merely that theychange under the influence of surrounding circumstances, but that any changewhich takes place in them is not lost but retained, and as it were built intothe organism to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause anydistortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you may doafterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your distortion is there; itis 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 cantell by examining a piece of gold how often it has melted and cooled ingeologic ages, or even in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cutsdown an oak can tell by the rings of its trunk how many times winter has frozenit into widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A livingbeing must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its ownexistence, but of all its ancestors."Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in acertain 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 itbecomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The new beginning hasalready excluded the possibility of those earlier phrases and transitions,while it has at the same time created the possibility of an indefinite set ofnew ones, no one of which, however, is completely determined in advance. Justso the social surroundings of the past and present hour exclude the possibilityof accepting certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positivelydefine what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they arepowerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall be. {5}Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two whollydistinct factors, --- the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the playof physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the power ofinitiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment,with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factorsare essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of theindividual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see itdeveloped by a man of genius should read that golden little work, Bagehot'sPhysics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete senseof the way in which concrete things grow and change is as livingly present asthe straining after a pseudo-philosophy of evolution is livingly absent. Butthere are never wanting minds to whom such views seem personal and contracted,and allied to an anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields ofknowledge. "The individual withers, and the world is more and more," to thesewriters; 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 allknow, too, how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a"science of history" and those who deny the existence of anything likenecessary "laws" where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at theopening 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 man may becomfortably believed so long as, resting in general notions, you do not ask forparticulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that ourideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover thehypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation ofsocial progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask, Whencecomes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. Thequestion has two conceivable answers: his origin is supernatural, or it isnatural. Is his origin supernatural? Then he is a deputy god, and we havetheocracy once removed, --- or, rather, not removed at all. ... Is this anunacceptable solution? Then the origin of the great man is natural; andimmediately this is recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena inthe society that gave him birth as a product of hits antecedents. Along withthe whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with itsinstitutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts andappliances, he is a resultant. ... You must admit that the genesis ofthe great man depends on the long series of complex influences which hasproduced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which thatrace has slowly grown. ... Before he can remake his society, his society mustremake him. all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator havetheir chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to beanything like a real explanation of those changes, it must be sought in thataggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen." {6}Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost callimpudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the fist sentence of thisextract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who believe in the powerof initiative of the great man.Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes social,political and religious discussion in England, and contrasts so strongly withthe bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is largely due to J. S. Mill'sexample. I may possibly be wrong about the facts; but I am, at any rate,"asking for particulars," and not "resting in general notions." And ifMr. Spencer should tell me it started from no personal influence whatever, butfrom the "aggregate of conditions," the "generations," Mill and all hiscontemporaries "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 ofone who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the sparrow, and thethirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death. It is of little morescientific value than the Oriental method of replying to whatever questionarises by the unimpeachable truism, "God is great." Not to fall backon the gods, where a proximate principle may be found, has with us Westernerslong since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished from an inefficientintellect.To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its antecedents isthe starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal and consummation, ofscience. If she is simply to lead us out of the labyrinth by the same whole wewent in by three or four thousand years ago, it seems hardly worth while tohave followed her through the darkness at all. If anything is humanly certainit is that the great man's society, properly so called, does not makehim before he can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social,political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions havejust as much and just as little do as conditions of the crater of Vesuvius hasto do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him. Canit be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to haveso impinged on Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that aW. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there, --- asthe pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a stream of a certainform to ooze into a particular leak? And does he mean to say that if theaforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother atStratford-upon-Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of him, torestore the sociologic equilibrium? Or might the substitute arise at"Stratford-atte-Bowe"? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the midst ofMr. 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 nodoubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed, suggestive, andbrilliant writer published last year a couple of articles in theGentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that individuals haveno initiative in determining social change. "The differences between one nation and another, whether inintellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend,not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknownand unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physicalcircumstances 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 ofHamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notoriousand conspicuous differences between them are wholly due to the geographicalposition of the various races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone toTimbuctoo, they would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroeswho inhabit that central African metropolis {7}; and if the people who went to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg,they would now have been white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade inimitation sherry and indigestible port. ... The differentiating agency must besought in the great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... thesehave necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of everynation upon the earth. ... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent indifferentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effectin such a direction. [These two sentences dogmatically deny the existence ofthe relatively independent physiological cycle of causation. WJ] To supposeotherwise is to suppose that the mind of man is exempt from the universal lawof causation. There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors.Even tastes and inclinations must themselves be the result ofsurrounding causes." {8}Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says: "It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of thegeographical Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryanbrain. ... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoevercan differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditionsin which they are set, --- including, of course, under the term physicalconditions the relations of place and time in which they stand with regardto other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law ofcausation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself is to imaginethat it can be differentiated without a cause. {9}This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the moment werefuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled round by aparticular school, makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination ofalternatives. With them there is no tertium quid between outwardenvironment and miracle. Aut Cæsar, aut nullus! Aut Spencerism,aut catechism!If by "physical conditions" Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the outwardcycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply physiologically false.For a national m,ind differentiates "itself" whenever a genius is born in itsmidst by causes acting in the invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allenmeans by "physical conditions" the whole of nature, his assertion, thoughtrue, forms but the vague Asiatic profession of belief in an all-envelopingfate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced orscientific character. . And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allenfail to have distinguished in these matters between necessaryconditions and sufficient conditions of a given result? The Frenchsay that to have an omelet we must break our eggs; that is, the breaking ofeggs is a necessary condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition?Does an omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind.To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial dealings withthe world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a necessary condition. Butif they are a sufficient condition, why did not the Phoenicians outstrip theGreeks in intelligence? No geographical environment can produce a given typeof mind. It can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced,and thwart and frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective,and determines what shall actually be only be destroying what is positivelyincompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident habits inits denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite withtheir thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the pugnacity of the Norsemanis, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should notforget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do justas well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fisheshappened to have that number. He owed his prodigious success infounding a line of descent to some entirely other quality, --- we know notwhich, --- but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved tothe present day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall betaken in tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is amatter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of China,India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation in predictingthat he will do no more with these examples than he has done with Hellas. Hewill appear upon the scene after the fact, and show that the quality developedby each race was, naturally enough, not incompatible with its habitat. But hewill utterly fail to show that the particular form of compatibility fallen intoin each case was the one necessary and only possible form.Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a faunaand its environment are. An animal may better his chances of existence ineither of many ways, --- growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean; small andswift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny, slimy, or venomous; more timid ormore pugnacious; more cunning or more fertile of offspring; more gregarious ormore solitary; or in other ways besides, --- and any one of these ways may suithim to many widely different environments.Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace willwell remember the striking illustration of this in his MalayArchipelago: "Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vastsize and its freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geologicalstructure, its uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forestvegetation that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of thePhilippines in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, theirluxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with the east endof Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as arid as that ofTimor. Yet between these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as itwere, after the same pattern, subjected to the same climate, and bathed by thesame oceans, there exists the greatest possible contrast when we compare theiranimal productions. Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences orsimilarities in the various forms of life that inhabit different countries aredue to corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countriesthemselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and NewGuinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, arezoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its drywinds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate climate, yetproduces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to those inhabiting thehot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere clothe the plains and mountainsof New Guinea." Here we have similar physical-geographical environments harmonizing withwidely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing with widelydiffering geographical environments. A singularly accomplished writer,E. Gryzanowski, in the North AmericaReview, uses the instance of Sardinia and Corsica in support of thisthesis with great effect. He says: "These sister islands, lying in the very center of theMediterranean, at almost equal distances from the centers of Latin andNeo-Latin civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and theSaracen, with a coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed with obviousand tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of agricultural and mineralwealth, have nevertheless remained unknown, unheeded, and certainly uncared forduring the thirty centuries of European history. ... These islands havedialects, but no language; records of battles, but no history. They havecustoms, but no laws; the vendetta, but no justice. They have wantsand wealth, but no commerce; timber and ports, but no shipping. They havelegends, but no poetry; beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could stillbe said that they had universities, but no students. ... That Sardinia, withall her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a singleartists is almost as strange as her barbarism itself. ... Near the focus ofEuropean civilization, in the very spot which an à priorigeographer would point out as the most favorable place for material andintellectual, commercial and political development, these strange sisterislands have slept their secular sleep, like nodes on thesounding-board of history."This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some detail.All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the Sardinianpopulation, being of an ancestry more mixed than [even] that of the Englishrace, would justify far higher expectations than that of Sicily." YetSicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme, and her commerceto-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowiski [sic] has his own theory of the historictorpor of these favored isles. He thinks they stagnated because they nevergained political autonomy, being always owned by some Continental power. Iwill not dispute the theory; but I will ask, Why did they not gain it? andanswer immediately: Simply because no individuals were born there withpatriotism and ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians areprobably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best wood-pile willnot blaze till a torch is applied, and appropriate torches seem to have beenwanting. {11}Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibratingthrough and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming togetherand in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, -why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, is such amystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in theintervals. Then the mass of the nation glows incandescent, and may continue toglow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement havepassed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides ofhuman affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but thatindividual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery isjust about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow bygreat towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt manygeniuses, who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But overand above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time,to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse isfar greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity ofthese periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.It is folly, then, to speak of the "laws of history" as of somethinginevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences any onecan then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, the very laws ofphysics are conditional, and deal with ifs. The physicist does notsay, "The water will boil anyhow"; he only says it will boil if a fire iskindled beneath it. And so the utmost the student of sociology can everpredict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, societywill be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with greatconfidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if some onecould but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted,however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordinationto a paramount state rather than federation, because no historian could havecalculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment suchpositions of authority to three such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III,Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It is certain now that themovement of the independents, reformers, or whatever one pleases to call them,will triumph. But whether ti do so by converting the Republican party to itsends, or by rearing a new party on the ruins of both our present factions, thehistorian cannot say. There can be no doubt that the reform movement wouldmake more progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now inten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic gift,to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to victory? But, atpresent, we, his environment, who sigh for him and would so gladly preserve andadopt him if he came, can neither move without him, nor yet do anything tobring him forth. {12} |
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