_ evolve. Why, the very
birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like
Columbus's egg. "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
seed." But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a
community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are
to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either
of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.

But the indeterminism is not absolute. Not every {230} 'man' fits
every 'hour.' Some incompatibilities there are. A given genius may
come either too early or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sent
to a lunatic asylum. John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
and died unknown. Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?

Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
from the sphere of his possible effectiveness. After Voltaire, no
Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
makes little headway; and so on. Each bifurcation cuts off certain
sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
deflection. A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[5] "it is the peculiarity
of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
surrounding circumstances, but that any change