8 2 ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book i Forth, with its spans of six hundred yards and its 



altitudes of aerial steel, implies an assimilation of our 



multitudinous existing knowledge, such as is hardly 



The discoveries to be found in a score of engineers in Europe. Or 



and inventions AT C ' If 



of the past are to turn once more to Mr. bpencers example of 

 onhosTonfy Shakespeare, whilst all Shakespeare's contemporaries 

 whocanab- nac j t h e same antecedents that he had, the same line 



sorb and use 



them. of thinkers behind them, and the same developed 



vocabulary, Shakespeare's mind was capable of 

 absorbing much of the national inheritance, whilst 

 the great mass of his contemporaries could compara- 

 tively absorb very little. 



Thus the intro- We are thus brought back to the point from 

 pastTnto'the 6 which we set out namely, the differences in capa- 

 ieaves the C ^Y ^7 which men are distinguished from one 

 differences be- another ; and we see that all the reasonings of our 



tween the great 



man and modern sociologists have, for practical purposes, 

 diminished, left these differences undiminished. The difference 

 between the great man and the ordinary man is not 

 made less by the fact that they both of them owe 

 much to a common past, any more than the difference 

 between a hogshead of water and a wine-glass is 

 made less by the fact that both have been filled from 

 the same stream. 



The conclusion, therefore, of the whole matter is 

 as follows. In the first place, whatever may be the 

 speculative significance of Mr. Spencer's contention, 

 which Mr. Bellamy expresses with the arithmetical 

 precision of an accountant, that each living genera- 

 tion does only a minute fraction of what it seems to 

 do, or of arguments like Mr. Sidney Webb's, that 



