Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that when we describe great men as being a minority, or a “_scattered few_,” we do not mean that out of every thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine “_ordinary_” men and one genius; or that there are (let us say) seven hundred who can be described for all purposes as “_ordinary_,” and two hundred and ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as “_stupid_”; and that there is one “_clever_” or “_great_” man who towers over them like an oak tree over bramble bushes. Nor, again, do we mean that “_greatness_” is some single definite quality, which marks its possessor out like a white man amongst negroes. Believers in extreme democracy, who very rightly discern in the great-man theory the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such as this to its exponents. But the great-man {117} theory, when properly analysed and explained, will be found to comprise no such absurdities as the foregoing. When we speak of “greatness” we mean a great variety of efficiencies, which, though grouped together because they are all exceptional in degree, are nevertheless indefinitely various in kind; and, moreover, the degrees to which they are exceptional are indefinitely various also, the degree being in many cases so low that it is difficult to say whether it should be classed as exceptional at all. In short, there are as many degrees of greatness as there are of temperature; and it is as difficult to draw a line between ordinary men and men whose greatness is of a very low degree, as it is to draw a line between coldness, coolness, and low degrees of heat. But though it may be questionable whether we should call a day cool when the thermometer is at fifty-nine, and whether we should call it hot when the thermometer is at sixty-one, everybody admits that it is hot when the thermometer is at eighty-five, and cold when the thermometer registers twenty degrees of frost. In the same way, though there will be a certain number of people who may be classed as great by one judge and classed as ordinary by another, there is a certain number whose capacities, however unequal amongst themselves, set their possessors apart as indubitably greater than the majority; and we are speaking with sufficient, though we cannot speak with absolute precision, when we say that progress depends on the action of this minority. {118}