GENIUS AND TALENT. 353 



one man has borne off all the praise, while many men bore the 

 brunt of the labor ; in other cases the work done has been so even- 

 ly distributed among several laborers that even that unjust judge, 

 the general public, could set none as greater or less than another, 

 none as before or after another. 



Observe, once more, a case where, at first sight, the part played 

 by the individual genius seems exceptionally great — I mean New- 

 ton's discovery of universal gravitation. Here, surely, if ever 

 anywhere, the genius was fully entitled to say, " Alone I did it." 

 Yet even here it was quite as much the crisis that made Newton 

 as Newton that made the crisis. Galileo's observations on the 

 pendulum, Torricelli's invention of the mercurial barometer, the 

 true theory of the common pump. Von Guericke's air-pump, Co- 

 pernicus's view of the solar system, Kepler's laws of motion — all 

 these led up, slowly but surely, by various routes, to the ultimate 

 and inevitable discovery of the law of gravitation. The world 

 had its problem then and there neatly presented to it. The Car- 

 tesian theory of vortices, indeed, was a premature attempt at a 

 metaphysical, or at least an a priori solution of the self-same diffi- 

 culty. All the early work of the seventeenth century led up 

 directly to Newton as a foregone conclusion. Newton himself 

 merely came, in the fullness of time, as the great, fully-equipped 

 mathematical and physical thinker who could not fail to advance 

 science by that one step, already foreshadowed and predestined 

 for him by the joint work of his many ^predecessors. 



So it was, too, with organic evolution and with evolution in 

 general. In the last century De Maillet and Monboddo, from dif- 

 ferent sides, had caught faint glimpses (as in a glass, darkly) of 

 the descent of animals from common progenitors. With Buffon 

 the glimpse became a distinct idea; with Erasmus Darwin the 

 idea grew into a fully evolved and tenable hyiDothesis. Lamarck 

 gave it form and body ; Goethe breathed into it a wider cosmical 

 spirit. Even the particular notion of natural selection was hit 

 upon simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin ; while Spencer had 

 traced out the development of mind seven years before the publi- 

 cation of the " Origin of Species." Kant and Laplace and Lyell led 

 on, by many lines, to the " System of Synthetic Philosophy." Evo- 

 lutionism has been a growth of numberless minds, yet in the fut- 

 ure it will appear to the multitude at large as the work of two men, 

 and of two men only — Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. I 

 need hardly say, I hope, that no man feels more profound rever- 

 ence for those two mighty thinkers than I do — indeed, I dare 

 never trust myself to say in public how profound that reverence 

 really is ; we stand so near them still that those who estimate 

 them at their true worth only get laughed at ; but I do not think 

 we ought ever to forget the important part played also in their 



VOL. XXXIV. — 23 



