GREATNESS TO BE MEASURED BY RESULTS 121 



bad poetry, was a greater man than Voltaire. This Book n 

 is perfectly true ; but it is necessary to explain 

 clearly that it in no way contradicts what is being 

 here asserted. It is, on the contrary, part of it. 

 It cannot be too emphatically said that greatness, 

 in the only sense in which we are here considering 

 it that is to say, as an agent of social progress is 

 a quality which we attribute to a man not with 

 reference to his whole nature, but with reference 

 solely to the objective results produced by him, so 

 that in one domain of activity a man may be great, 

 in another ordinary, in another decidedly stupid. 

 What, then, we here mean by a great man is merely 

 .a man who is superior to the majority in his power but the 

 of producing some given class of result, whereas the ^^SstS 

 .average man and the stupid are not superior to the any- 

 majority in their powers of producing any. 



The reader must thus entirely disabuse himself The measure 



c , . , . r ... of a man's 



ot the idea that greatness, as an agent or social greatness as 



progress, has any necessary resemblance to great- s 



ness as conceived of by the moralist. A man may 



be a great saint or a noble "moral character" who P roduced b y 



him. 



passes his life in obscurity, stretched on a bed of 

 sickness, and incapable even of rendering the 

 humblest help to others. He is great in virtue 

 not of what he does, but of what he is. But great- 

 ness, as an agent of social progress, has nothing 

 whatever to do with what a man is, except in so 

 Jar as what he is enables him to do what he does. 

 If two doctors were confronted by some terrible 

 -epidemic, and the one met it by tending the poor 



