Let us therefore refer to the terms in which he has done so. “_Given a Shakespeare_,” he says, “_and what dramas could he have written, without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life—without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?_” Mr. Spencer could not have put his own case more clearly; and the more clearly it is put, the more easy it is to answer it, and to show that for practical men it has no meaning whatsoever. The answer to the question he asks is not only obvious, but contains at the same time the solution of the whole problem we are discussing. It will inevitably take the form of another question. Given the {80} conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced dramas like _King Lear_ and _Hamlet_, unless England had happened to possess that unique phenomenon—a Shakespeare? Could a Bottom have written these dramas, or a Dogberry, or a Sir Toby Belch? Or could Sir Thomas Lucy, or any of the “poetasters” satirised by Ben Jonson? Or could the actors, Kemp, Jones, and Bryan, who assisted in the representation of these dramas upon the stage? The answer is, of course, No. And yet these men inherited the same language that Shakespeare did; the three last had the advantage of knowing his finest passages by heart. The weaver, the bellows-mender, the constable, the Justice of Peace, had behind them the same traditions that Shakespeare had, and were surrounded by the same “_multitudinous conditions_” of civilisation. But out of these conditions one man alone was capable of eliciting the results elicited by Shakespeare. The real explanation of the whole difficulty—the difficulty involved in the fact that whilst the argument of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bellamy is, in a speculative sense, not merely true but a truism, it is utterly untrue in any practical sense—is as follows: Every human being living at any given time is, as Mr. Spencer says, an inheritor of the past; but men inherit the past in very different degrees. They inherit the knowledge of the past only according to the degree to which they acquire it; the language of the past only according {81} to their skill in manipulating it; the inventions of the past only according to their skill in reproducing and using them.