THE BUILDING OF REFLEX ARCS 233 



of William of Orange with its liberal and enlightened " character " 

 the Seven Provinces that resisted Philip owed their freedom ; the 

 results in the two cases being the decay of Spain from that time 

 forward, and the final success in the struggle for religious liberty. 

 In such a view of historical facts it is not necessary either to follow 

 Carlyle in his extreme claims for the influence of great men and 

 heroes, nor to look upon the hero as an epiphenomenon. It is 

 certain that eventually some other great man would have arisen 

 to do what the great Genoese did, if he had not done it, and as it 

 is claimed that Amerigo di Vespucci did, and it is certain that 

 Philip was only the last of the Hapsburg sovereigns who determined 

 the fall of Spain, and that Huss, Jerome, Wycliffe and Luther 

 in their days initiated the struggle for religious liberty which 

 Holland brought to success. But the facts referred to can hardly 

 be disputed, and the men and their " characters " did certainly 

 determine permanent changes in the world. 



Napoleon. 

 Among individual men of modern times none strikes the 

 imagination as does Napoleon. Without ignoring the tremendous 

 outburst of the soul of down-trodden France at the Revolution, 

 it cannot be denied that the " character " or grey matter of brain 

 of the man of whom it is said " nothing where he had passed was 

 as it had been before," was the dominant and natural fact that 

 changed the face of Europe. What physical quality had Napoleon, 

 except those of his grey cells, which could have led him to such 

 results on the environment into which he was cast ? 



Migrations. 

 Similar results in nations and tribes can easily be supplied 

 from the great migrations of the past. The wider movements 

 are but due to comparatively small aggregates of adventurous men, 

 in other words to the aggregation of many similar central nervous 

 systems. The great Western and Southern adventures of the 

 Scythian Tribes had many contributing causes on which the 

 historian has much to say, and they were physically highly efficient 

 for their new career, but, reduced to the simplest elements, it was 

 neither their great stature, strong muscles, flaxen hair, nor blue 

 eyes, but the cerebral constitution of a comparatively small group 

 of them which brought part of the ration to the promised land, 

 and left another and large part in their homes beyond and along 

 the Danube. The subsequent story of the latter may well be 

 compared with the invaders of Gaul and Italy in connection with 

 initiative in evolution. 



