t seems to me) the complete
sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to
whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. "The
individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_. We all know, too,
how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at
the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
quoted:--

"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask
for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at
the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his
origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural?
Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,--or,
rather, not removed at all.... Is this an unacceptable solution? Then
the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the
whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
and appliances, he is a _resultant_.... You must admit that the
genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can
remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of
which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
generations he descended from. If t