GENIUS AND TALENT. 351 



ror " the very age and body of the time, liis form and feature," 

 exactly as the romance of our own day shows forth the stir and 

 ferment and turmoil of the present far greater period of national 

 development. A great deal of what most of us take for Shake- 

 speare is really the necessary spirit and background of the 

 Elizabethan stage, as much the common product of the nation 

 at large and of the dramatic tradition as the modern novel or the 

 modern burlesque is the common product of our own civilization. 



In science and philosophy, however, this general principle of 

 necessary development is even more demonstrably true than else- 

 where. There comes a crisis every now and then in the evolution 

 of thought, when new discoveries and new inventions are, as we 

 all say nowadays, '' in the air " ; when numberless workers, led up 

 to a certain point by previous thinkers and previous discoveries, 

 tremble all together on the very verge of the next great generali- 

 zation or the next important extension of thought or knowledge. 

 "He who says A must say B also," the wise French proverb 

 pithily puts it. Now it sometimes happens in such cases that a 

 number of workers co-operate so much in the new discovery, or 

 the new invention, or the new development, that no one man car- 

 ries off for himself the honors of the situation. That was the case 

 with the vast physical concept of the conservation of energy, by 

 far the vastest and most fundamental concept ever yet introduced 

 into our view of the material cosmos and its mode of working. 

 Yet that profound law was so slowly evolved by the separate 

 labors of many acute and suggestive thinkers, beginning with 

 Count Rumf ord and ending with Joule, Meyer, Helmholtz, Grove, 

 Clerk Maxwell, Balfour Stewart, and Tait, that no single name 

 will ever probably be associated with its promulgation, as the 

 name of Newton is associated with the law of gravitation, or as 

 the name of Darwin is associated with the principle of organic 

 evolution. More frequently, however, it happens that a particular 

 worker does either anticipate the others by a decided interval, or 

 succeeds at any rate in attracting to himself the attention of the 

 crowd, and in becoming, so to speak, the eponymous hero of the 

 new conquest. In such cases I do not say that the hero is not 

 really as a rule greater than the men he casts into the shade ; but 

 I do say that he is not as a rule as much greater as the world at 

 large, in its love for the sweet simplicity of hero-worship, sujj- 

 poses him to be. It is so hard to distribute your praise equitably 

 between a dozen or more of contributory geniuses ; it is so easy 

 to fix upon a single man and declare authoritatively in a very 

 loud voice, " Ipse fecit I " 



Mechanical inventions show us the working of this popular 

 tendency in a very clear and instructive manner. Who, for ex- 

 ample, invented the steam-engine ? James Watt, says everybody. 



