man 



THE EXTENT OF NATURAL INEQUALITIES 69 



us say the capacity for scientific and mathematical Book i 

 discovery the difference which separates one 

 ordinary man from another is insignificant when 

 compared with the difference by which Newton is 

 separated from both of them. And it is this latter 

 sort of difference which alone concerns the socio- 

 logist. The difference which separates men from 

 microbes is nothing to him. And what is true of 

 what men are, is equally true of what they do. The 

 addition made by any one great man to knowledge 

 may be small when compared with the knowledge, 

 regarded in its totality, which has been gathered it may be 

 together by all other great men preceding him ; but speculative 6 

 it may at the same time be incalculably great when j^f tothe er> 

 compared with the additions made by the ordinary f/J^if 

 men, his contemporaries. important. 



Let us make this matter yet clearer by reference 

 to one more authority, who, though endeavouring 

 to confirm the very argument which is here being 

 exposed, is, little as he perceives it, assassinated by 

 his own illustrations. In Macaulay's essay on 

 Dryden there occurs the following passage, a part 

 of which anticipates the exact phraseology of 

 Mr. Spencer. "// is the age that makes the man, 

 not the man that makes the age. . . . The inequali- 

 ties of the intellect, like the inequalities of the 

 surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to 

 the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions 

 they may safely be neglected" The passage is 

 quoted for the sake of this last simile. For those 

 who study the human destiny as a whole who 



