166 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



arising ; then you must admit that the genesis of the great man de- 

 pends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the 

 race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has 

 slowly grown. If it he a fact that the great man may modify his 

 nation in its structure and actions, it is also a fact that there must 

 have been those antecedent modifications constituting national prog- 

 ress before he could be evolved. Before he can remake his society, 

 his society must make him. So that all those changes of which he is 

 the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations 

 which gave him birth. If there is to be any thing like a real explana- 

 tion of these chancres, it must be sought in that as-oregate of condi- 

 tions out of which both he and they have arisen. 



Even were we to grant the absurd supposition that the genesis of 

 the great man does not depend on the antecedents furnished by the 

 society he is born in, there would still be the quite-sufficient facts that 

 he is powerless in the absence of the material and mental accumula- 

 tions which his society inherits from the past, and that he is powerless 

 in the absence of the coexisting population, character, intelligence, 

 and social arrangements. Given a Shakespeare, and what dramas 

 could he have written without the multitudinous traditions of civilized 

 life without the various experiences 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? Suppose 

 a Watt, with all his inventive power, living in a tribe ignorant of iron, 

 or in a tribe that could get only as much iron as a fire blown by hand- 

 bellows will smelt ; or suppose him born among ourselves before lathes 

 existed; what chance would there have been of the steam-engine? 

 Imagine a Laplace unaided by that slowly-developed system of Mathe- 

 matics which we trace back to its beginnings among the Egyptians ; 

 how far would he have got with the " Mecanique Celeste? " Nay, the 

 like questions may be put and have like answers, even if we limit our- 

 selves to those classes of great men on whose doings hero-worshippers 

 more particularly dwell the conquering rulers and generals. Xeno- 

 phon could not have achieved his celebrated feat had his Ten Thousand 

 been feeble, or cowardly, or insubordinate. Csesar would never have 

 made his conquests without disciplined troops inheriting their prestige 

 and tactics and organization from the Romans who lived before them. 

 And, to take a recent instance, the strategical genius of Moltke would 

 have gained no great campaigns had there not been a nation of some 

 forty millions to supply soldiers, and had not those soldiers been men 

 of strong bodies, sturdy characters, obedient natures, and capable of 

 carrying out orders intelligently. 



Were any one to marvel over the potency of a grain of detonating 

 powder, which explodes a cannon, propels the shell, and sinks a vessel 

 hit were he to enlarge on the transcendent virtues of this detonating 

 powder, not mentioning the ignited charge, the shell, the cannon, and 



