2 8 ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book i like a real explanation of such changes, it must be 



sought (not in the great man himself \ but in the 



aggregate of social conditions, out of which he and 



they have arisen" Except, perhaps, in the military 



struggles of primitive savage tribes, "new institu- 



tions, new activities, new ideas, all," he says, 



These effects. " unobtrusively make their appearance, without the 



tolae explained aid of any king or legislator; and if you wish to 



understand the phenomena of social evolution, you 

 man, but to w ^f n0 fa fa should you read yourself blind over 



the causes that < -^ J 



are behind the th e biographies of all the great rulers on record, 



great man. . c 



down to Frederick the Greedy, and Napoleon the 

 Treacherous." And he points his moral by observ- 

 ing, with a certain philosophic tartness, that there is 

 no surer index of a man's " mental sanity " than the 

 degree of contempt which, as a scientific thinker, 

 he feels for the class of facts which the biography 

 of individuals offers him. 



Such, then, being Mr. Spencer's theory of the 

 way in which social phenomena must be re- 

 garded, if we mean to make them the subject 

 of anything like scientific study, let us turn to his 

 magnum opus, The Principles of Sociology, and see 

 how, and with what results, he puts his theory of 

 study into practice. This immense work, full of 

 encyclopaedic detail as it is, contains certain general 

 and comparatively simple conclusions, which can 

 with sufficient clearness be expressed in a short 

 summary, and which are typical of the character 

 and the contents of Mr. Spencer's sociology as a 

 whole. These general conclusions constitute in 



