here is to be anything like a real
explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[7]

Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
believe in the power of initiative of the great man.

{234}

Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
largely due to J. S. Mill's example. I may possibly be wrong about the
facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
'resting in general notions.' And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'

The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
is great." _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.

To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the
labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
remake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} the social,
political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer ho