i 7 | THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the natural blessings of our own reason, than buy the uncertain knowl- 

 edge of this life with sweat and vexation, which death gives every 

 fool gratis" (Sir Thomas Browne). "No way has been found for 

 making heroism easy even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for 

 him. . . . There is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly 

 to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto 

 a certain emblematic air, like the annual plowing and sowing of the 

 Emperor of China. Let us make it an honest sweat " (Emerson). Who 

 shall decide when doctors disagree ? Once more, look at what Her- 

 bert Spencer calls the " great-man theory " in history. He and Ma- 

 caulay and Buckle, on one side, are as wide apart as the poles of the 

 earth from Carlyle and Emerson, on the other, concerning this theory. 

 Hear Carlyle first : " We can not look, however imperfectly, upon a 

 great man without gaining something by him. He is the living light- 

 fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near the light which 

 enlightens, which has enlightened, the darkness of the world ; and 

 this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary, shin- 

 ing by the gift of Heaven." To the same effect, Emerson: "Literary 

 history, and all history, is a record of the power of minorities, and of 

 minorities of one. . . . The importance of the one person who has 

 truth over nations who have it not is because power obeys reality and 

 not appearance, according to quality and not quantity. How much 

 more are men than nations ! ... So that, wherever a true man appears, 

 everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself. He is the only great 

 event ; and it is easy to lift him into a mythological person." 



On the other side, hear Macaulay : " Those who have read history 

 with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invec- 

 tives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intel- 

 lectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and impressing a 

 new character on the age. The difference between one man and an- 

 other is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. . . . 

 The sun illuminates the hills while it is still below the horizon ; and 

 truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes 

 manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. 

 They are the first to catch and reflect a light which, without their 

 assistance, must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath 

 them." And here is what Herbert Spencer offers on the same side : 

 " The origin of the great man is natural ; and, immediately he is thus 

 recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society 

 that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the 

 whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its 

 institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts 

 and appliances, he is a resultant of an enormous aggregate of causes 

 that have been operating for ages. . . . If it be 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 



