_The tendency toward spontaneous variation (invention) is always in inverse ratio to the simplicity of the environment._ The savage environment is in its nature very simple, consequently homogeneous. The lower races show a much smaller degree of differentiation than the higher; in them, as Jastrow says, physical and psychic maturity is more precocious, and as the period just before the adult age is the plastic period _per se_, this diminishes the chances of a departure from the common type. Thus comparison between whites and blacks, between primitive and civilized peoples, shows that, for equal populations, there is an enormous disproportion as to the number of innovators. The barbarian environment is much more complex and heterogeneous: it contains all the rudiments of civilized life. Consequently, it favors more individual variations and is richer in superior men. But these variations are rarely produced outside of a very restricted field--political, military, religious. So it seems impossible to agree with Joly[70] that neither primitive nor barbarian peoples produce superior minds, "unless," as he says, "by this name we mean those that simply surpass their congeners." But is there a criterion other than that? I see none. Greatness is altogether a relative idea; and would not our great creators seem, to beings better endowed than we, very small? The civilized environment, requiring division of labor and consequently a constantly growing complexity of heterogeneous elements, is an open door for all vocations. Doubtless, the social spirit always retains something of that tendency toward stagnation that is the rule in lower social orders; it is more favorable to tradition than to innovation. But the inevitable necessity of a warm competition between individuals and peoples is a natural antidote for that natural inertia; it favors useful variations. Moreover, civilization means evolution; consequently the conditions under which the imagination is active change with the times. Let us suppose, Weismann justly says, that in the Samoan Islands there were born a child having the singular and extraordinary genius of Mozart. What could he accomplish? At the most, extend the gamut of three or four tones to seven, and create a few more complex melodies; but he would be as unable to compose symphonies as Archimedes would have been to invent an electric dynamo. How many creators have been wrecked because the conditions necessary for their inventions were lacking? Roger Bacon foresaw several of our great discoveries; Cardan, the differential calculus; Van Helmont, chemistry; and it has been possible to write a book on the forerunners of Darwin.[71] We talk so much of the free flight of imagination, of the all-comprehensive power of the creator, that we forget the sociological conditions--not to mention others--on which they are every moment dependent. In this respect, no invention is personal in the strict sense; there always remains in it a