The conclusion, therefore, of the whole matter is as follows. In the first place, whatever may be the speculative significance of Mr. Spencer’s contention, which Mr. Bellamy expresses with the arithmetical precision of an accountant, that each living generation does only a minute fraction of what it seems to do, or of arguments like Mr. Sidney Webb’s, that {83} each living generation does nothing at all of what it seems to do, the mass of living men at all events do something, in the very real sense that if they did not do it they would die; and the doing of this something is for them the whole of life, and all practical problems depend on the manner in which they do it. Such being the case, it follows, in the second place, that however much the ordinary man does, the great man does a great deal more. Therefore, if the ordinary man does any of the things that he seems to do, and causes any of the events that he seems to cause—if he ploughs the farm that he seems to plough, and lays the bricks that he seems to lay—indeed we may add, if he eats the dinners that he seems to eat—the great man in a precisely similar sense is the cause of those changes and of that progress which he seems to cause. Hence of these changes he is, for the practical sociologist, not merely the proximate initiator, whose action and peculiarities may be neglected, but a true and primary cause, on which the attention of the sociologist must be concentrated; and just as in action it is impossible to do without him, so in practical reasoning it is impossible to go behind him. The reader has now been shown the absolute futility of that train of reasoning by which even so keen a thinker as Mr. Spencer has persuaded himself that he can get rid of the causality of the great man, and in which every socialistic reformer who has risen above the level of a demagogue has attempted to find a scientific foundation for his {84} impossible castle in the air. But the demolition and exposure of these mischievous and miserable fallacies shall not be entrusted only to the arguments that have been brought to bear on them. The validity of these arguments shall now be finally substantiated by direct appeal to a sociologist whose identity may surprise the reader. This is none other than Mr. Spencer himself, who, when he forgets to be the conscious expositor of his theory, and turns aside to illustrate some particular point by examples drawn from the experience of common life, is constantly contradicting, in a most remarkable but entirely unconscious way, the fundamental principle which he has deliberately set himself to establish.