GREATNESS IS RELATIVE 127 



to the narrowness rather than to the width of the Book n 

 imagination. Chapter T 



Greatness, in short, as an agent of social progress, Greatness is 



1 ,. , ,. not one quality, 



is in most cases not a single quality, but a peculiar but various 



combination of many ; its composition varies 

 according to the character of the results in the 

 production of which the great men are severally 

 more efficient than the majority ; and it often 

 depends less on the extent to which any special 

 faculty is developed, in comparison with the same 

 faculty as possessed by ordinary men, than it does 

 on the degree to which each faculty is developed as 

 compared with the others possessed by the great 

 man himself. 



When we speak of greatness, then, in the sense Greatness, 

 here attributed to the word when we speak of those qualities 7 

 great men as agents of social progress we do not L^am'of^o- 

 mean that the world is divided into ordinary men gress, make the 



few more 



and heroes. The members of that minority whom efficient than 



the many. 



we group together as great men, though some of 

 them are, no doubt, of noble and heroic proportions, 

 are for the most part great in relation to special 

 results only ; even in relation to these special results 

 they are great in very various degrees, and many 

 of them in other relations may be ordinary, 

 or even less than ordinary. It must therefore be 

 clearly understood that greatness, as an agent of 

 social progress, is not an absolute thing, and that to 

 say of any one man that he possesses more great- 

 ness than another is a statement which, taken 

 by itself, has no definite meaning. When we 



