260 



ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book HI 

 Chapter 3 



Therefore in 

 denying to 

 average men 

 the powers 

 that produce 

 progress, 



we are not 

 degrading the 

 average man. 

 We are merely 

 asserting that 

 these powers 

 form but a 

 small part of 

 life. 



have the very abstract and essence of all practicable 

 democratic government. 



It is true that even here we are brought sharply 

 back again to those limitations by which the powers 

 of the normal man are surrounded. The jury, who 

 represent the normal man's intelligence, require, 

 as Sir Henry Maine points out, to have the facts on 

 which they are to base their judgment, in exact 

 proportion as these are obscure or complicated, 

 reduced to order for them by advocates whose 

 powers are more than normal. It is also true 

 that, though it is the identity of ordinary men's per- 

 ceptions which shows the reality and the qualities of 

 external objects, ordinary men's perceptions would 

 never have sufficed to show us that the earth was 

 not the centre of the universe, and that the sun did 

 not move round it. But the true moral of all that 

 has been just insisted on is, that in denying to the 

 masses of mankind those special powers which 

 actively initiate and actively promote progress, and 

 actively sustain the fabric of advanced civilisation, 

 we are not denying to the masses of mankind great 

 moral and great intellectual qualities generally. We 

 are not asserting that the normal, the average, the 

 ordinary man is incapable of being developed into 

 a creature endowed with beliefs, thoughts, and feel- 

 ings which are not only noble and correct, but 

 which expand and improve as civilisation advances. 

 We are merely asserting that the ordinary man, or 

 the masses of mankind, which are simply the 

 ordinary man multiplied, cannot provide themselves 



