A STATISTICAL STUDY OF EMINENT MEN. 361 



romantic love and every boy and girl in Christendom has his life altered 

 thereby. What we now are as men depends chiefly on social tradi- 

 tion ; withhold it for a generation and we should revert to savagery and 

 further. It is also true that social tradition sets the course of organic 

 development. Individuals who are unfit for their social environment 

 can not survive in it; those who possess variations, however slight, 

 making adjustment to social conditions and social ideals more easy are 

 more likely to survive and to transmit their traits. If we depended 

 only on social tradition, progress would be limited by the extreme range 

 of individual adaptations. But by the preservation of stable variations 

 in the line of social evolution, we secure a new type from which new 

 forward variations are more likely. 



Whether great men really lay down the line of social evolution or 

 only anticipate and hasten its necessary course is an unsolved question. 

 Are great men, as Carlyle maintains, divinely inspired leaders, or are 

 they, as Spencer tells us, necessary products of given physical and 

 social conditions? If Dante had not set the ideal of romantic love, 

 would it not have come from other sources? Did Darwin do more than 

 express what was ' in the air ' and hasten by a dozen years the necessary 

 course of science? We can only answer such questions by an actual 

 study of facts. 



When we regard the noteworthy men that have appeared in the 

 world, it is evident that they have but little in common. 'Some are 

 born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 

 them.' We have men of genius, great men and men merely eminent. 

 Thus many a genius has been a 'mute inglorious Milton' lacking the 

 character or the circumstance for the accomplishment of his task. 

 Washington was scarcely a genius, but was a truly great man. Napoleon 

 III. was neither a genius nor a great man, but was eminent to an 

 unusual degree. But if we simply take those men who have most 

 attracted the eyes and ears of the world, who have most set its tongues 

 and printing presses in motion, we have a definite group. Beginning 

 with this we can analyse and classify; we can study these individuals, 

 their causes and their effects; we can regard them as types of a given 

 age and race ; we can use them to measure interests and tendencies. 



For these purposes our first need is a definite list of the most 

 eminent men, sufficiently large for statistical study.* The method I 

 followed to discover the 1,000 men who are preeminent was this: I 



* The statistics of this paper were presented to the American Psychological 

 Association in December, 1894, and an abstract was published in The Psycholog- 

 ical Review for March, 1895. It was read in its present form as a lecture before 

 the Philosophical Club of Yale University in 1897. 



