536 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



his own life, we should call him a Fatalist ; and should remind 

 him that the efforts of shipwrecked persons to save their lives 

 are so far from being immaterial, that the average amount of 

 those efforts is one of the causes on which the ascertained annual 

 number of deaths by shipwreck depend. However universal 

 the laws of social development may be, they cannot be more 

 universal or more rigorous than those of the physical agencies 

 of nature ; yet human will can convert these into instruments 

 of its designs, and the extent to which it does so makes the 

 chief difference between savages and the most highly civilized 

 people. Human and social facts, from their more complicated 

 nature, are not less, but more, modifiable, than mechanical 

 and chemical facts ; human agency, therefore, has still 

 greater power over them. And accordingly, those who main- 

 tain that the evolution of society depends exclusively, or 

 almost exclusively, on general causes, always include among 

 these the collective knowledge and intellectual development of 

 the race. But if of the race, why not also of some powerful 

 monarch or thinker, or of the ruling portion of some political 

 society, acting through its government ? Though the varieties 

 of character among ordinary individuals neutralize one another 

 on any large scale, exceptional individuals in important posi- 

 tions do not in any given age neutralize one another ; there 

 was not another Themistocles, or Luther, or Julius Ceesar, of 

 equal powers and contrary dispositions, who exactly balanced 

 the given Themistocles, Luther, and Csesar, and prevented 

 them from having any permanent effect. Moreover, for 

 aught that appears, the volitions of exceptional persons, or the 

 opinions and purposes of the individuals who at some particular 

 time, compose a government, may be indispensable links in the 

 chain of causation by which even the general causes produce 

 their effects ; and I believe this to be the only tenable form of 

 the theory. 



Lord Macaulay, in a celebrated passage of one of his early 

 essays (let me add that it was one which he did not himself 

 choose to reprint), gives expression to the doctrine of the ab- 

 solute inoperativeness of great men, more unqualified, I should 

 think, than has been given to it by any writer of equal abilities. 



