74 



ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



leads to 



Book i with the great mass of their contemporaries. Thus 

 the mass of their contemporaries formed a strop or 

 hone on which the superior faculties of these men 

 were sharpened ; and the great man of to-day, to 

 whom the superior faculties have descended, owes 

 them accordingly, not to his own ancestors only, but 

 to the mass of inferior men who struggled with 

 them, and were worsted in the struggle. In other 

 words, the greatness of the exceptional man has 

 really been produced by the whole body of society in 

 the past ; and the results of it ought to be divided 

 amongst the whole body of society in the present. 



Now that the above line of argument has a 

 certain kind of truth in it, it is hardly necessary to 

 observe ; and for biologists, psychologists, and 

 W racdcantfe speculative philosophers generally, such truth as it 

 possesses may no doubt be of value ; but that this 

 truth has no relation whatever to practical life, and 

 no applicability to any one of its problems, can be 

 seen by considering the kind of results we shall 

 arrive at, if, adopting the reasoning of Mr. Webb 

 and his friends, we merely carry it out to the more 

 immediate of its logical consequences. 



Let us begin with their reasoning, so far as 

 it concerns the past. If the inferior competitors 

 who were beaten by the great man's ancestors are 

 to be credited with having helped to produce the 

 talents by which they were themselves defeated, 

 and must therefore be held to have had a claim on 

 the wealth which these talents produced, which 

 claim has descended to the inferior majority of 



