Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their produce is really the result of their social inheritance and environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included, is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate. No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment? Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment, could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it, the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.