and of this fact we will take one example more.  Of his doctrine that the great man is merely a “proximate initiator,” and in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry—­that is to say, the invention of the Times printing-press.  This wonderful piece of mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the so-called inventor, but “the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen.”  But when elsewhere, in his treatise on Social Statics, Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail, he says, to recognise as absolute a man’s “property in his own ideas,” or, in other words, “his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind.”  Thus Spencer himself, at times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a definite place in his general sociological system.[12]

The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now quoted from him.  “The inequalities of the intellect,” he says, “like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass” that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the astronomer neglects the other.  Now, this may be quite true if our interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet.  But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer.  The Alps for the astronomer may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel.  What to the astronomer are all the dykes of Holland?  But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one.  And the same thing holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect.  For the social astronomer they are nothing.  For the practical man they are everything.