7 o ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book i survey it as speculative and remote observers the 

 inequalities of intellect may, it is quite true, be 

 neglected as safely as the inequalities of the surface 

 of a planet are neglected by the astronomer who is 

 engaged in calculating its revolutions. But because 

 these latter inequalities are nothing to the astronomer, 

 it does not follow that they are nothing to the 

 engineer and the geographer. To the astronomer 

 the Alps may be an infinitesimal and negligeable 

 excrescence, but they were not this to Hannibal or 

 the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to 

 the astronomer are all the dykes in Holland ? But 

 they are all the difference to the Dutch between a 

 dead nation and a living one. 



And the same difference, even in its most minute 

 details, holds good between speculative, or as we 

 may call it star-gazing, sociology and sociology as 

 a practical science ; for is it not one of Mr. Spencer's 

 most important and interesting contentions that 

 these very irregularities of the earth's surface 

 these lands, seas, plains, valleys, and mountains 

 which, when compared with the mass of the earth, 

 are so absolutely inappreciable, constitute some of 

 the most important of the " external factors" of 

 human history and civilisation ? And the same 

 holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. 

 They may be nothing to the social star-gazer, but to 

 the social politician they are everything. 



So much, then, for two of the most shallow 

 sophisms that ever imposed themselves on pre- 

 sumably serious reasoners. We will now turn to 



