68 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



covery, advance, and improvement depend on great men, 

 and find their limits and arrest with the non-appearance 

 of these. Civilizations became what they were by a 

 series of great men; without these, they either would 

 not have been at all, or their courses would have been 

 wholly different. But in the absence of the particular 

 great men, would not others have taken their places 

 other Columbuses, other Newtons ? Possibly, in some 

 cases; in others not; but even had others appeared in 

 all, then these would have been the initiating spirits. So 

 that the course of history and evolution would still have 

 moved under the initiative and guidance of individuals. 



4. Our civilization and culture is what great men, 

 as distinct from natural selection, have made it; what 

 inventors and discoverers, what philosophers, founders of 

 religions and lawgivers, what artists and poets, what 

 even statesmen and conquerors, have made it; much 

 more than what evolution, unaided by these, though 

 with the full benefit of natural selection, heredity, and 

 adaptation, has made it. The Homers and Dantes and 

 Shakespeares have enlarged our human nature by reveal- 

 ing to it what was before invisible in itself, by teaching 

 it to read and truly to know itself. They have brought 

 from non-existence into being, and have annexed for 

 ever to man's spiritual kingdom, a new and wonderful 

 world of beauty and of truth, ever the twin bequest of 

 the great poet. They have widened our consciousness of 

 Nature and of ourselves, have added inexhaustible fields 

 of spiritual delight for the soul to revel in in all her 

 changing moods. They have supplied to our spirit its 

 proper elements on which it lives, the nutriment on 

 which it may feed, the air which it can respire. And 

 have not the Beethovens and Mozarts, the Raphaels and 

 Titians, artists of different types from the poets the 



