Annual Address of the President. 
13 
special creation theory of species, seems to hardly accord with the ob- 
served facts. If we examine the history of science, for example, we 
find that the great discoverers have blazed out when and only when their 
environment had reached a proper state of preparedness — a stadium of 
development that makes their appearance necessary for further progress. 
What makes them shine like stars in their less luminous surroundings 
is the fact that their environment was inarticulate, blind, and unco- 
ordinated. A Shakespeare but gives utterance to the mighty intellectual 
and moral forces of his race, tells it what it thinks and why it thinks 
thus, brings into the glare of conscious intellection the slowly wrought 
betterment of ages and interprets the national consciousness to itself. It 
is no wonder that such men are regarded as the visible incarnation of the 
tendencies that would otherwise have remained dumb and unseen. Racial 
ideals to become efficient must be made flesh and dwell with us. The 
history of the world’s religious and ethical development is epitomized 
largely in her Moseses, Gautamas, Christs; the genesis of the esthetic 
development in her Phidiases, Remb rants, and Beethovens; and so on 
through the categories of science and arts. 
If the life history of great men were completely representative of 
social progress, the theory of the social sciences would be vastly simpli- 
fied. Unfortunately this does not seem, to be the case : for not only are 
the activities of genius confined to certain limited fields of social progress, 
but there is always the personal equation of the individual to be disen- 
tangled from the universally significant elements, the evaluation of 
the abnormal or pathologic phase. That in the fullness of time criteria 
for making this distinction between the personal and the impersonal 
element in the activities of genius will be afforded by investigations of 
the kind we have been considering is not improbable. In any event 
we can be certain that the exact or predictive phase of the social sciences 
is conditioned on the formulation of laws governing the activities of so- 
ciety as a whole and not its individual elements. 
