As to general tendency, it is false to set it over against individuals, as if it were a separate thing; it is only through individuals that general tendency begins or persists. “Impersonal tendency” in society is a mere abstraction; there is no such thing. Whether idiosyncrasy is such as we all have in some measure, or whether it takes the form of conspicuous originality or genius, it is a variant element in life having always some tendency to innovation. Of course, if we believe in the prevalence of continuity and law, we cannot regard it as a new creation out of nothing; it must be a reorganization of hereditary and social forces. But however this may be, the person as a whole is always more or less novel or innovating. Not one of us floats quite inert upon the general stream of tendency; we leave the world somewhat different from what it would have been if we had been carried off by the croup. Now in the case of a man of genius, this variant tendency may be so potent as to reorganize a large part of the general life in its image, and give it a form and direction which it could not have had otherwise. How anyone can look at the facts and doubt the truth of this it is hard to see. Would the life we receive from the last century have been the same if, say, Darwin, Lincoln, and Bismarck had not lived? Take the case of Darwin. No doubt his greatness depended upon his representing and fulfilling an existing tendency, and this tendency entered into him from his environment, that is from other individuals. But it came out of him no longer the vague drift toward evolutionary theory and experiment that it was before, but concrete, common-sense, matter-of-fact knowledge, thoroughly Darwinized, and so accredited by his character and labors that the world accepts it as it could not have done if he had not lived. We may apply the same idea to the author of Christianity. Whatever we may or may not believe regarding the nature of Christ’s spiritual leadership, there is, I take it, nothing necessarily at variance with a sound social science in the Christian theory that the course of history has been transformed by his life. The vague instincts which it is the function of the leader to define, stimulate and organize, might have remained latent and ineffectual, or might have developed in a totally different manner, if he had not lived. No one can guess what the period following the French Revolution, or any period of French history since then, might have been without Napoleon; but it is apparent that all would have been very different. It is true that the leader is always a symbol, and can work only by using existing elements of life; but in the peculiar way in which he uses those elements is causation, is creation, in the only sense, perhaps, in which creation is definitely conceivable. To deny its importance is as absurd as to say that the marble as it comes from the quarry and the marble after Michelangelo is through with it, are one and the same thing.