hat was just now
quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the
inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to
the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the
astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our
interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching
them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are
nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to
the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an
infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to
Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer
are all the dykes of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch
between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of
the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they
are nothing. For the practical man they are everything.

It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical
truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the
nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new
support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they
themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they
have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points
which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which
the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of
his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact
that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much
commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to
those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced
price.

Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it
first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but
by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr.
Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative
commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of
the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously
made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked
in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not
used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fac