To realise the truth of this we need do no more than consider for a moment the ordinary process of education. The schoolmaster and the college tutor, by the State or some other authority, are compelled to give their pupils instruction in certain subjects. But there is another kind of compulsion involved in the matter also; and this has to do not with the selection of the subjects that are to be taught, but with what is to be taught about them. The general progress of a community depends {138} primarily upon this; and what is to be taught about them is determined not by the State, or by any other legally constituted body, but by the masters of speculative knowledge, by contemporary men of science, scholars, historians, and philosophers. Knowledge advances because these men are not only adding to it, but because they are perpetually assimilating the new discoveries with the old; and these men, by means of their comments on previous writers, or by new works of their own, often reproduced in the form of text-books, put the word into the teachers’ mouths; and the teachers, like the prophet Balaam, are compelled to speak it. In other words, great speculative thinkers are great as agents of mental civilisation and enlightenment only because, and only in so far as, they settle for others what these others shall believe and think. And now let us pass from mental progress to material—that is to say, from speculative knowledge to applied knowledge; and the truth that is being here insisted on will become clearer still. The master of knowledge, as applied to production, is the inventor. Now the most perfect and important machines ever devised by man—let us say the steam-engine and the printing press—had they been planned by their original inventors in all their present completeness, but kept by the inventors to themselves in the form of working models, made by their own hands and shut up in their own rooms, would have left the arts of life totally unaffected; our fastest means of travelling would still be the stage-coach; {139} our few books would be produced by the methods of the mediæval scriptorium. These machines are instruments of social progress only because, and in so far as, they are multiplied and brought into use; and they could not be multiplied—as efficient implements, they could not be even made—without the co-operation of an enormous number of workers. It is probable indeed that in constructing the very model itself an inventor will have to employ some labour besides his own. Thus this first and preliminary step towards rendering his apparatus a factor in social progress he can take only by influencing one or two other men, at all events—artisans whose technical action he directs in such a way that it produces something specifically different from anything which it had produced before; and as the apparatus is reproduced on a larger scale, put on the market, multiplied so as to meet a growing