for its accomplishment that some individual or class of individuals shall have made a sacrifice of his or their personal interest to the interest of the whole.  When it is on the part of a body of men or a multitude of individuals taken at random that any such sacrifice is reckoned upon, then it is that in speaking of the plan the term Utopian may without impropriety be applied.’  And this is the very kind of sacrifice which must be anticipated by those who so misunderstand the doctrine of evolution as to believe that the world is improved by some mystic and self-acting social discipline, which dispenses with the necessity of pertinacious attack upon institutions that have outlived their time, and interests that have lost their justification.

We are thus brought to the position—­to which, indeed, bare observation of actual occurrences might well bring us, if it were not for the clouding disturbances of selfishness, or of a true philosophy of society wrongly applied—­that a society can only pursue its normal course by means of a certain progression of changes, and that these changes can only be initiated by individuals or very small groups of individuals.  The progressive tendency can only be a tendency, it can only work its way through the inevitable obstructions around it, by means of persons who are possessed by the special progressive idea.  Such ideas do not spring up uncaused and unconditioned in vacant space.  They have had a definite origin and ordered antecedents.  They are in direct relation with the past.  They present themselves to one person or little group of persons rather than to another, because circumstances, or the accident of a superior faculty of penetration, have placed the person or group in the way of such ideas.  In matters of social improvement the most common reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that the one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved practice.  Or he is one of those rare intelligences, active, alert, inventive, which by constitution or training find their chief happiness in thinking in a disciplined and serious manner how things can be better done.  In all cases the possession of a new idea, whether practical or speculative, only raises into definite speech what others have needed without being able to make their need articulate.  This is the principle on which experience shows us that fame and popularity are distributed.  A man does not become celebrated in proportion to his general capacity, but because he does or says something which happened to need doing or saying at the moment.