The state of the case is this. Let us take any civilised society at any period we will, and examine it in the act of advancing to the next stage of its development. We shall find that its existing conditions consist partly of results intended by particular great men whose past actions have produced them, and partly of results neither foreseen nor intended by anybody. Thus at the present day amongst our social conditions we have the telegraph and the railway system—both of them results intentionally produced by individuals; and we have also a variety of new wants and habits, new methods of conducting trade and government, which have been produced by these, but which were neither intended nor even thought of by the inventors of the locomotive, or by Wheatstone and Cooke when their wires at last realised the long-forgotten dream of the Italian Jesuit Strada.† Thus, though social conditions at any given time are a compound of intended results and unintended, and even though we may admit that at any given time these last are more widely diffused than the former, these last {105} are themselves the children of intention once removed. Great men may not have meant to produce them, but they have arisen from conditions which great men did mean to produce; and they could not have arisen in any other way. And here we are brought to a fact more obvious and more important still. Before any further advance in social civilisation can be made, other existing conditions, whether intentionally produced or not, require to be intentionally re-combined and acted on by men whose enterprise, whose intellect, and whose constructive imagination mark them out from their fellows as the pioneers of the future. We are thus once more confronted with the fact already insisted on—that the social conditions of a time are the same for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can make exceptional use of them, and turn them into a stepping-stone on which their generation may rise higher. † Strada, an Italian Jesuit, in the seventeenth century invented, or rather imagined, communication by electric telegraph; and his idea actually comprised the use of two needles moved by two magnets, these magnets being connected in such a way that, by the movement of either of them, the needle actuated by the other could be made to point to such and such letters on a dial. Social evolution, therefore, in so far as it is other than biological, may be defined as the unintended result of the intentions of great men; and this definition at once brings us back to the truth which was urged in the first chapter as the starting-point of our argument, and which can now be put before the reader with an added force and clearness.