The great-man theory as held by the conventional historian, and expressed by Carlyle and others in those vehement formulas which have so justly excited the ridicule of Mr. Herbert Spencer, errs not because it emphasises the fact that the great man is the sole cause of progress in the sense that no progress could have taken place without him, but because it ignores the fact that the ordinary men of his time, being the tools with which he works, or the instrument on which he plays, the result is conditioned not only by his capacities, but by theirs; just as the kind of music that can be produced by a pianist is determined not only by his own skill, but by the character of the piano also. Writers like Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, and with him the whole school of socialists, impressed by the obvious fact that the many do something, never pause to inquire what they do, or how much they do, or how little, but rush to the conclusion that {216} the many do everything. This conclusion is even more meaningless than the doctrine which it is intended to contradict. The many do something, and they do what is of extreme importance; but its importance is strictly limited, and is indeed only intelligible through its limitations, just as the character of a profile is intelligible only through its outlines. The object, therefore, of the sociological inquirer must be to discover precisely what these limitations are. The methods by which the discovery is to be made have been already indicated. Let us now go on to apply them. They are of two kinds. One consists of an examination of what, in any domain of activity, the many would produce, if the influence of the few were absent. The other consists in an examination of the kind of faculties which the production of such or such a result implies. If these faculties are common to all, we say the result is produced by the many; if the faculties are rare, we say it is produced by the few.