into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates, promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated.  As for “the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen,” or the aggregate of conditions which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his fellow-countrymen.  They are a landscape which surrounds them all.  But aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of it painted in the absence of a great artist.

Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself.  That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.  That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each other in Spencer’s Study of Sociology.  One is a reference to the last Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first.  He refers to the former when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged in the conditions of society generally.  “If you wish,” he says, “to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the treacherous.”  When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon’s ancestor, he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war.  Of the insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hardly a country was free from “slaughter, suffering, and devastation.”  For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?  Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, “in whom the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we call moral sentiments”; and “all this slaughter, suffering, and devastation” were, he says, “gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men.”  Here we see how Spencer, as a matter of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is himself regarding them—­that of the speculative thinker and that of the practical politician,