But this definition of evolution does not apply only to development in that world of facts studied by Darwinian science. It is equally applicable to the process of social evolution also. Indeed social evolution is even more strikingly, though not more truly, than physiological evolution, the reasonable {98} sequence of the unintended. How this is can be easily made plain; and when once the idea is grasped, which the definition embodies, it will be seen that social evolution, although it is no doubt different from all or from any of those changes deliberately produced by the agency of the great man, instead of excluding these changes, or eliminating the great man as the cause of them, is a process which depends altogether upon him and them, and that, instead of obscuring the great man’s importance, it only exhibits it in a stronger and clearer light. Let us take then our definition of evolution as the reasonable sequence of the unintended, and apply the idea embodied in it to that aggregate of conditions, either in our own or any similar period, amongst which the great man works. All these conditions, such as the knowledge which he finds accumulated, the inventions which he finds in use, the political and the economic conditions of his country, are, taken as a whole, the result of no one man’s genius. It is equally obvious that they do not, in their incalculably complex entirety, represent any one man’s intention, or even the joint intention of any number of men acting in concert. Printing, for example, and railway travelling have produced a number of social results never dreamed of by the men who perfected our locomotives and our steam printing presses. Accordingly, when any great man of to-day initiates some fresh social change, whether as an inventor, a director of industry, a politician, or {99} a religious teacher, a large part of his achievement consists in his manipulation and refashioning of results of past human action, which can be set down to the credit, or ascribed to the intentions of no individual, and no body of individuals. The society of the past intended these no more than the great men of the past. They are results, that is to say, which come all under the heading of the unintended. But when we consider the great man’s achievement thus, we shall not only witness the grouping of many of the factors essential to it into one heterogeneous but logically coherent class, as the unintended. When such a grouping has taken place, we shall see that there remains behind an equally coherent and equally striking residuum—namely, the social results and conditions that have been obviously and notoriously intended. These may not be found existing apart from the former; but though in conjunction or combination with them, they will be visible as a distinct and separate element, and their true importance as a factor in social progress will begin to be apparent to the mind the moment their specific peculiarity, as just described,