tellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes
of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties,
he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less
rare--namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an
imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight
into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates,
promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of
promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his
moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of
conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions
which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his
fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But
aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as
Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the
able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape
could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of
it painted in the absence of a great artist.

Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is
to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the
great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection
with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of
general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater
than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.
That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two
references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each
other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_. One is a reference to the last
Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former
when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the
ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged
in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to
understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should
you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on
record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the
treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor,
he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument
in order to indulge in a pare