CHAPTER I 



THE DEPENDENCE OF EXCEPTIONAL ACTION ON THE 

 ATTAINABILITY OF EXCEPTIONAL REWARD, OR 

 THE NECESSARY CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE 

 MOTIVES TO ACTION AND ITS RESULTS. 



IN entering on the inquiry which now lies before us Great men 



i i i differ from 



it is necessary to recall to the reader, and to insist ordinary men 

 with renewed emphasis on a fact which has been ex- n n ot iifkmdT > 

 plained with the utmost fulness already. This is the 

 fact that those exceptional efficiencies of the few on 

 which the initiation, the progress, and the maintenance 

 of civilisation depend, and which in a technical sense 

 we have here described -as greatness, do not consist of 

 qualities which are unique in kind, or which are not 

 possessed in some measure by the masses of ordinary 

 men ; but that they are made up of ordinary faculties 

 magnified or mixed together in unusual proportions. 

 For although, as George Eliot observes in a striking 

 passage, the faculties of all men are the same in 

 kind, they manifest themselves in different men in 

 such very different degrees that a faculty or feeling 

 which in one man has the power and dimensions of 

 a tiger, may never in another man outgrow those of 



