EVOLUTION THE RESULT OF INTENTION 105 



are themselves the children of intention once re- Booki 

 moved. Great men may not have meant to 

 produce them, but they have arisen from conditions 

 which great men did mean to produce ; and they 

 could not have arisen in any other way. And here 

 we are brought to a fact more obvious and more 

 important still. Before any further advance in social 

 civilisation can be made, other existing conditions, 

 whether intentionally produced or not, require to be 

 intentionally re-combined and acted on by men whose 

 enterprise, whose intellect, and whose constructive 

 imagination mark them out from their fellows as 

 the pioneers of the future. We are thus once 

 more confronted with the fact already insisted on 

 that the social conditions of a time are the same 

 for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can 

 make exceptional use of them, and turn them into a 

 stepping-stone on which their generation may rise 

 higher. 



Social evolution, therefore, in so far as it 

 is other than biological, may be denned as the 

 unintended result of the intentions of great men ; 

 and this definition at once brings us back to the 

 truth which was urged in the first chapter as the 

 starting-point of our argument, and which can now 

 be put before the reader with an added force and 

 clearness. 



It was said in the first chapter that sociologists The unm- 

 have succeeded in dealing with those wider social evoived r 

 phenomena which are exhibited by social aggregates 

 as wholes, and which are interesting and significant 



