104 



ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book I 

 Chapter 4 



Evolution, in 

 fact, is the 

 unintended 

 result of the 

 intentions of 

 great men. 



printing press had the immediate inventors of such 

 an implement not coerced them into their service, 

 and forced them to contribute to a deliberately 

 planned result. 



The state of the case is this. Let us take any 

 civilised society at any period we will, and examine 

 it in the act of advancing to the next stage of its 

 development. We shall find that its existing con- 

 ditions consist partly of results intended by particular 

 great men whose past actions have produced them, 

 and partly of results neither foreseen nor intended 

 by anybody. Thus at the present day amongst 

 our social conditions we have the telegraph and the 

 railway system both of them results intentionally 

 produced by individuals ; and we have also a 

 variety of new wants and habits, new methods of 

 conducting trade and government, which have been 

 produced by these, but which were neither intended 

 nor even thought of by the inventors of the loco- 

 motive, or by Wheatstone and Cooke when their 

 wires at last realised the long-forgotten dream of 

 the Italian Jesuit Strada. 1 Thus, though social 

 conditions at any given time are a compound of 

 intended results and unintended, and even though 

 we may admit that at any given time these last are 

 more widely diffused than the former, these last 



1 Strada, an Italian Jesuit, in the seventeenth century invented, 

 or rather imagined, communication by electric telegraph ; and his 

 idea actually comprised the use of two needles moved by two magnets, 

 these magnets being connected in such a way that, by the move- 

 ment of either of them, the needle actuated by the other could be 

 made to point to such and such letters on a dial. 



