Let us turn from the question of the truth of a statement to the question of its mere relevance; and we can illustrate what has been said by an example equally homely. In the transference of goods by rail, these have to be sorted according to bulk, weight, shape, fragility, perishability, and so forth. In deciding which are to be sent by fast trains, and which by slow, the primary question will be that of perishability. When the perishable and {73} the non-perishable shall have been separated, and they are being placed on the trains allotted to them, the primary questions will be those of shape, weight, and fragility. But so long as the preparatory separation is in progress, to assert that the goods possess any of these latter characteristics will be wholly irrelevant, no matter how true. Boxes of fish will not be put with book parcels because neither of them are fragile, or because they are both oblong; and each characteristic, and every classification based on it, will be either relevant or irrelevant, full of meaning or meaningless, according to what question, out of a considerable series, has to be answered at the moment by the officials who superintend the business. And now let us go back to the two arguments that are before us; and we shall be prepared to see how, though true for the speculative philosopher, they have no meaning, or only a false meaning, for any practical man. We will first take that which is expressed with sufficient plainness in the passage quoted from Mr. Sidney Webb, and which insists on the great man’s debt to society generally, not for his external circumstances, but for his personal character and capacities. The idea involved in it is very easy to grasp. The great man’s congenital superiority is an inheritance from his superior ancestors; but his ancestors would not have had it to hand on to him if they had not been forced to develop such superiorities as they possessed by exerting them in a competitive struggle {74} with the great mass of their contemporaries. Thus the mass of their contemporaries formed a strop or hone on which the superior faculties of these men were sharpened; and the great man of to-day, to whom the superior faculties have descended, owes them accordingly, not to his own ancestors only, but to the mass of inferior men who struggled with them, and were worsted in the struggle. In other words, the greatness of the exceptional man has really been produced by the whole body of society in the past; and the results of it ought to be divided amongst the whole body of society in the present.