reproducing here.
I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But
unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are the
causes that make communities change from generation to
generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
that of thirty years ago?

I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
their decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. They
are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
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
fallacy as 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, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
point of view are available or attainable. 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 this discussion, and
assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes. Such
a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all 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 a cond