1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. 19 



An exceptional sort of sand grain — a sand grain that is exceptionally 

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

 upon any 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. But an exceptional man comes into the 

 world — a Caesar, or a Napoleon, or a Peter the Hermit — and he appears 

 to persuade and convince and compel and take entire possession of 

 the sand heap — I mean the community — 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 limits. To hope to foretell the birth and coming of 

 men of exceptional force and genius is to hope incredibly, and if in- 

 deed such exceptional men do as much as they seem to do in warping 

 the path of humanity, our utmost prophetic limit in human affairs is 

 a conditional sort of prophecy. If people do so and so, we can say, 

 then such and such results will follow, and we must admit that that 

 is our boundary. 



But everybody does not believe in the importance of the leading 

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

 by 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 never been born. There are those who believe entirely in the 

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

 the individual man ; and, for my own part, I must confess myself a 

 rather extreme case of the latter kind. I must confess I believe that 

 if, by some juggling with space and time, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, 

 Edward IV., William the Conqueror, Lord Kosebery, and Eobert 

 Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have produced any 

 serious dislocation in the course of destiny. I believe that these 

 great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and instru- 

 ments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent 

 forces behind them ; they are the pen-nibs Fate has used for her 

 writing, the diamonds upon the drill that pierces through the rock. 

 And the more one inclines to this trust in forces, the more one will 

 believe in the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future, 

 that will serve us in politics, in morals, in social contrivances, and in 

 a thousand spacious ways. And even those who take the most ex- 

 treme and personal and melodramatic view of the ways of human 

 destiny, who see life as a tissue of fairy godmother births and acci- 

 dental meetings and promises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit 

 there comes a limit to these things — that at last personality dies 

 away and the greater forces come to their own. The great man, 

 however great he be, cannot set back the whole scheme of things ; 

 what he does in right and reason will remain, and what he does 

 against the greater creative forces will perish. We cannot foresee 

 him ; let us grant this. His personal difference, the splendour of his 

 effect, his dramatic arrangement of events, will be his own ; in other 

 words, we cannot estimate for accidents and accelerations and delays 



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