66 THE CKEED OF SCIENCE, EELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



increased and deepened human nature. They have shown 

 us the truth and beauty we could not have seen save 

 through their eyes. They have created the truth and 

 beauty. They have given us the power we could not 

 have had without their help ; and if they have not created 

 this power, they have given us the control over it. Great 

 men have been the means of developing mankind far 

 more directly and essentially than natural selection, 

 assisted by heredity and adaptation, as even Darwin 

 admits.* It was by means of the superior and original 

 minds that the adaptation of the rest to their environ- 

 ment was brought about. The evolution of human 

 societies and civilizations, the evolution of the arts, insti- 

 tutions, religions, philosophies, literatures, laws, has been 

 accomplished by a series of loftier minds, the individuals 

 of which took up successively and improved upon the 

 thoughts and ideas of their predecessors, beginning with 

 the first creative mind ; and without such minds no fresh 

 initiative or improvement, no originality or advance, no 

 new creation or fresh suggestion appears. There is sub- 

 stantial truth in the view of a great writer that "the 

 history of what man has accomplished in this world is at 

 bottom the history of the great men who have worked 

 there." f Herbert Spencer, it is true, lightly esteems the 

 theory, and asks in reply Whence comes the great man ? 

 What makes him possible ? The great man, he tells us, 

 must be made by his society before he can unmake or 

 improve it. And this view is also, to a certain extent, 

 true ; but not in the most important or essential sense. 

 For society makes only so much of the great man as goes 

 to the composition of the average man, leaving an over- 

 plus which is not to be put to the credit of society or 

 previous human acquisition, but which is a gift from 

 * The Descent of Mam,. f Carlyle, Lectures on Heroes. 



