386 THE DISCOVEKY OF THE FUTUKE. 



g-rain wnat its outline will l)c. And if you shoot ii load of such sand 

 from a cart you can not foretell with any certainty where any partic- 

 ular o-rain will be in th(^ heap that you make; l)ut you can tell — you 

 can tell prett}' definitely — the form of the heap as a whole. And fur- 

 ther, if you pass that sand through a series of shoots and linall}" drop 

 it some distance to the ground, you will be a]>le to foretell that grains 

 of a certain sort of form and izt^ will for the most part be found in 

 one part of the heap and grains of another sort of form and size will 

 l)e found in another part of the heap. In such a case, you see, the 

 thing as a whole may be simpler than its component parts, and this I 

 submit is also the case in many human affairs. So that because the 

 individual future eludes us completeh^ that is no reason why we 

 should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and serviceable gen- 

 eralizations upon countless important issues in the human destiny. 



But there is a very grave and impoi'tant-looking difference between 

 a load of sand and a multitude of human beings, and this I nuist face 

 and examine. Our thoughts and wills and emotions are contagious. 

 An exceptional sort of sand grain, a sand grain that was exceptionally 

 big and heavy, for example, exerts no influence worth considering 

 upon an}" other of the sand, grains in the load. They will fall and roll 

 and heap themselves just the same whether that exceptional grain is 

 with them or not; l)ut an exceptional man comes into the world, a 

 Caesar or a Napoleon or a Peter the Hermit, and he appears to j)er- 

 suade and convince and compel and take entire possession of the sand 

 heap — I mean the comnmnity — and to twist and alter its destinies to 

 an almost unlimited extent. And if this is indeed the case, it reduces 

 our project of an inductive knowledge of the future to very small lim- 

 its. To hope to foretell the birth and coming of men of exceptional 

 force and genius is to hope incredi])ly, and if, indeed, such excep- 

 tional men do as nuich as they seem to do in warping the path of 

 humanity, our utmost prophetic limit in human ati'airs is a conditional 

 sort of })rophecy. If people do so and so, we can sa3% then such and 

 such results will follow, and mc nuist admit that that is our limit. 



But everybody does not l)elieve in the importance of the leading 

 man. There are those who will say that the whole world is diHerent 

 b}' reason of Napoleon. But there are also those who will say the 

 whole world of to-day would be very much as it is now if Napoleon 

 had ne\(>r been born. There are those who believe entirely in the 

 individual man and those who believe entirely in the forces behind the 

 indiA'idual man, and for my own part I must confess myself a rather 

 extreme case of the latter kind. I umst confess I l)elieve that if \)y 

 some juggling with space and time Julius Ca\sar, Napoleon, Edward 

 IV, William the C'Oncjueror, Lord Rosebcn-y, and Robert Burns had 

 all been changed at biith it would not ha\e produced any serious dis- 

 location of the course of destiny. I ))elie\e that these great men of 



