GREAT MAN A TRUE CAUSE OF PROGRESS 83 



each living generation does nothing at all of what Book i 



it seems to do, the mass of living men at all events 



do something, in the very real sense that if they 



did not do it they would die ; and the doing of this if the ordinary 



something is for them the whole of life, and all [hTng, trS great 



practical problems depend on the manner in which 



they do it. Such being the case, it follows, in the 



second place, that however much the ordinary man 



does, the great man does a great deal more. There- 



fore, if the ordinary man does any of the things that 



he seems to do, and causes any of the events that 



he seems to cause if he ploughs the farm that he 



seems to plough, and lays the bricks that he seems 



to lay indeed we may add, if he eats the dinners 



that he seems to eat the great man in a precisely 



similar sense is the cause of those changes and of 



that progress which he seems to cause. Hence of 



these changes he is, for the practical sociologist, not 



merely the proximate initiator, whose action and and m 



.... . 111 i ca -l reasoning 



peculiarities may be neglected, but a true and he is a true 



i i ,1 . r . V cause for the 



primary cause, on which the attention ot the socio- sociologist. 

 logist must be concentrated ; and just as in action 

 it is impossible to do without him, so in practical 

 reasoning it is impossible to go behind him. 



The reader has now been shown the absolute 

 futility of that train of reasoning by which even so 

 keen a thinker as Mr. Spencer has persuaded him- 

 self that he can get rid of the causality of the great 

 man, and in which every socialistic reformer who 

 has risen above the level of a demagogue has 

 attempted to find a scientific foundation for his im- 



