540 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



duction, can be, to a certain extent, reduced to regularity and 

 law. And the belief that they can be so, is equally consistent 

 with assigning very great, or very little efficacy, to the 

 influence of exceptional men, or of the acts of governments. 

 And 'the same may be said of all other accidents and disturbing 

 causes. 



4. It would nevertheless be a great error to assign 

 only a trifling importance to the agency of eminent indi- 

 viduals, or of governments. It must not be concluded that 

 the influence of either is small, because they cannot bestow 

 what the general circumstances of society, and the course of 

 its previous history, have not prepared it to receive. Neither 

 thinkers nor governments effect all that they intend, but in 

 compensation they often produce important results which they 

 did not in the least foresee. Great men, and great actions, 

 are seldom wasted : they send forth a thousand unseen influ- 

 ences, more effective than those which are seen ; and though 

 nine out of every ten things done, with a good purpose, by 

 those who are in advance of their age, produce no material 

 effect, the tenth thing produces effects twenty times as great 

 as any one would have dreamed of predicting from it. Even 

 the men who for want of sufficiently favourable circumstances 

 left no impress at all upon their own age, have often been of 

 the greatest value to posterity. Who could appear to have 

 lived more entirely in vain, than some of the early heretics ? 

 They were burnt or massacred, their writings extirpated, their 

 memory anathematized, and their very names and existence 

 left for seven or eight centuries in the obscurity of musty 

 manuscripts their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from 

 the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the memory 

 of these men men who resisted certain pretensions or certain 

 dogmas of the Church in the very age in which the unanimous 

 assent of Christendom was afterwards claimed as having been 

 given to them, and asserted as the ground of their authority 

 broke the chain of tradition, established a series of precedents 

 for ' resistance, inspired later Eeformers with the courage, and 

 armed them with the weapons, which they needed when man- 



