nthetical denunciation of war. Of the
insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that
provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation."
For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?
Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom
the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we
call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and
devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless
desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter
of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely
contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is
himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the
practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of
his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and
in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives
us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry--that is to say,
the invention of the _Times_ printing-press. This wonderful piece of
mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been
for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and
having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his
moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the
so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has
arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_,
Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently
attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail,
he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas,"
or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were,
out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at
times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when
considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they
must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though
he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a
definite place in his general sociological system.[12]

The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is
shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage t