That great men are true causes of progress is admitted by Mr. Spencer himself to be the natural opinion of mankind. What has been done, then, in the preceding book is not much more than this:—a sound popular judgment, which is of the highest sociological importance, has been rescued from the discredit cast on it by the sophisms of modern theorists. These very theorists themselves, when they reason as practical men, have been shown to the reader blowing all their disproofs of it to the winds, and holding and appealing to it as tenaciously and as passionately as anybody; and it is consequently given back to us, with its old authority unimpaired. Sound popular judgments, however, are not science. They lack what is the essence of science—that is to say, analytical precision. We must now, therefore, take this judgment with regard to the great man, and endeavour to invest it with a meaning exact and full enough to enable us to apply it to the detailed phenomena of society. And here Mr. Herbert Spencer shall once more {112} help us; for this remarkable writer, though he fails to recognise what he is doing, not only appeals on many critical occasions to the great-man theory as an explanation of the most important social phenomena, but he is repeatedly calling attention throughout his sociological writings to those facts of human nature of which the great-man theory is the expression. It will be sufficient to quote a few passages only. Let us turn, then, to the opening pages of Mr. Spencer’s _Study of Sociology_ and consider what is contained in them. We shall find that they are entirely devoted to describing the abject mental condition of by far the largest portion of all classes of English society, from the labourer, the farmer, and the Nonconformist minister with his Bible, up to “men called educated” and the most illustrious of our historians and philosophers. All of them, says Mr. Spencer, “_are slaves to unwarranted opinions_”; “_proximate causes_” are all that the majority of them are able to understand. Nor does he represent this as some accidental result, due to prejudices or deficiencies in education peculiar to our own country. He represents it as an inevitable result of the character of the human race. In his “_Postscript_” to the same volume he takes care to make his meaning plain. “_Most people_,” he says, “_conclude quickly from small evidence_,” and are incapable “_of comprehending in their totality assembled propositions._” Indeed, those whose mental constitution is such that they can take a {113} rational view of “_human affairs_” are, he proceeds to say, merely “_a scattered few_.” He elsewhere divides society into “_the capable and the incapable_,” the “_worthy and the unworthy_”; and in the “_Postscript_” just alluded to he mentions as an admitted fact that in every social aggregate “_the inferior form the majority_.” But a yet more caustic passage remains to be mentioned. In this same work, _The Study of Sociology_, he is