048 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



subjection of social progress to invariable laws, is often held in conjunc- 

 tion with the doctrine, that social progress can not be materially influenced 

 by the exertions of individual persons, or by the acts of governments. 

 But though these opinions are often held by the same persons, they are 

 two very different opinions, and the confusion between them is the eter- 

 nally recurring error of confounding Causation with Fatalism. Because 

 whatever happens will be the effect of causes, human volitions among the 

 rest, it does not follow that volitions, even those of peculiar individuals, 

 are not of great efficacy as causes. If any one in a storm at sea, because 

 about the same number of persons in every year perish by shipwreck, 

 should conclude that it was useless for him to attempt to save 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 uni- 

 versal the laws of social development may be, they can not be more univer- 

 sal or more rigorous than those of the physical agencies of nature; yet 

 human will can convert these into instruments of its designs, and the ex- 

 tent 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 maintain 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 govern- 

 ment? Though the varieties of character among ordinary individuals neu- 

 tralize one another on any large scale, exceptional individuals in important 

 positions do not in any given age neutralize one another; there was not 

 another Themistocles, or Luther, or Julius Caesar, of equal powers and 

 contrary dispositions, who exactly balanced the given Themistocles, Luther, 

 and CaBsar, and prevented them from having any permanent effect. More- 

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

 opinions and purposes of the individuals who at some particular time com- 

 pose 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 absolute inoperativeness of great men, 

 more unqualified, I should think, than has been given to it by any writer 

 of equal abilities. Ho compares them to persons who merely stand on a 

 loftier height, and thence receive the sun's rays a little earlier, than the 

 rest of the human race. " The sun illuminates the hills while it is still be- 

 low the horizon, and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little be- 

 fore it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their su- 

 periority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light which, without 

 their assistance, must in a short time be visible to those who lie far be- 

 neath them."* If this metaphor is to be carried out, it follows that if 

 there had been no Newton, the world would not only have had the New- 



* Essay on Diyden, in Miscellaneous Writings, i., 186. 



