1 1 6 ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book ii great men at all except great men of the greatest 



kind heroic figures which appeared once or twice 



in a century ; and as for the rest of mankind, they 



For great men treated them, in accordance with Mr. Spencer's 



are not r , r i i 



necessarily formula, as a mass of units, approximately equal in 

 Carlyie 33 capacity. The truth of the case is, on the contrary, 

 this : that whatever is done by great men of the 

 heroic type, something similar, if not so striking, is 

 done by a number of lesser great men also ; that whilst 

 the action of the heroic great men is intermittent, the 

 action of the lesser great men is constant ; and that 

 the latter, as a body, although not individually, do in- 

 calculably more to promote progress than the former. 

 Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that 

 when we describe great men as being a minority, or 

 nor divided a " scattered few" we do not mean that out of every 

 from aii other thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine 

 " ordinary " men and one genius ; or that there are 

 (let us say) seven hundred who can be described for 

 all purposes as "ordinary" and two hundred and 

 ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as 

 "stupid"; and that there is one "clever'" or "great" 

 man who towers over them like an oak tree over 

 bramble bushes. Nor, again, do we mean that 

 "greatness" is some single definite quality, which 

 marks its possessor out like a white man amongst 

 negroes. Believers in extreme democracy, who 

 very rightly discern in the great - man theory 

 the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will 

 instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such 

 as this to its exponents. But the great -man 



