Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s debt to his times.  “Given a Shakespeare,” he says, “and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him—­without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?” The answer to this question is to be found in the counter-question that is provoked by it.  Given the conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that of Shakespeare?  Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner’s contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own.  The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.

And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern production of wealth, the case is just the same.  No one has illustrated more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of “apprehending assembled propositions in their totality.”  It would be difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from ordinary men the monopolists of business ability.  It is precisely by apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their totality—­mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so forth—­by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes of to-day.  In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties, he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less rare—­namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight