g the study of these in favor
of the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
communing with their {261} kindred spirits,--in imagining as strongly
as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,--each one of us may
best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
soul.[1]

This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
indifference to their general laws and averages. The difference
between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
friend, 'important.' Some organizing genius must in the nature of
things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal,
domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
Jesus of Nazareth?

The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importance
of topics. They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here. And I
for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
individual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
it to be,--that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question
of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.

[1] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
l'Imitation, Etude Sociologique (2me Edition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
the best possible commentary on this text,--'invention' on the one
hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
factors of social change.

{263}

ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]

We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
American philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
among th