Let us make this matter yet clearer by reference to one more authority, who, though endeavouring to confirm the very argument which is here being exposed, is, little as he perceives it, assassinated by his own illustrations. In Macaulay’s essay on Dryden there occurs the following passage, a part of which anticipates the exact phraseology of Mr. Spencer. “_It is the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age. . . . The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected._” The passage is quoted for the sake of this last simile. For those who study the human destiny as a whole—who {70} survey it as speculative and remote observers—the inequalities of intellect may, it is quite true, be neglected as safely as the inequalities of the surface of a planet are neglected by the astronomer who is engaged in calculating its revolutions. But because these latter inequalities are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. To the astronomer the Alps may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence, but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are all the dykes in Holland? But they are all the difference to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one. And the same difference, even in its most minute details, holds good between speculative, or as we may call it star-gazing, sociology and sociology as a practical science; for is it not one of Mr. Spencer’s most important and interesting contentions that these very irregularities of the earth’s surface—these lands, seas, plains, valleys, and mountains—which, when compared with the mass of the earth, are so absolutely inappreciable, constitute some of the most important of the “_external factors_” of human history and civilisation? And the same holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. They may be nothing to the social star-gazer, but to the social politician they are everything.