caused and unconditioned in vacant space. They have had a
definite origin and ordered antecedents. They are in direct relation
with the past. They present themselves to one person or little group of
persons rather than to another, because circumstances, or the accident
of a superior faculty of penetration, have placed the person or group in
the way of such ideas. In matters of social improvement the most common
reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that
the one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the
unimproved practice. Or he is one of those rare intelligences, active,
alert, inventive, which by constitution or training find their chief
happiness in thinking in a disciplined and serious manner how things can
be better done. In all cases the possession of a new idea, whether
practical or speculative, only raises into definite speech what others
have needed without being able to make their need articulate. This is
the principle on which experience shows us that fame and popularity are
distributed. A man does not become celebrated in proportion to his
general capacity, but because he does or says something which happened
to need doing or saying at the moment.

This brings us directly to our immediate subject. For such a man is the
holder of a trust It is upon him and those who are like him that the
advance of a community depends. If he is silent, then repair is checked,
and the hurtful elements of worn-out beliefs and waste institutions
remain to enfeeble the society, just as the retention of waste products
enfeebles or poisons the body. If in a spirit of modesty which is often
genuine, though it is often only a veil for love of ease, he asks why he
rather than another should speak, why he before others should refuse
compliance and abstain from conformity, the answer is that though the
many are ultimately moved, it is always one who is first to leave the
old encampment. If the maxim of the compromiser were sound, it ought to
be capable of universal application. Nobody has a right to make an
apology for himself in this matter, which he will not allow to be valid
for others. If one has a right to conceal his true opinions, and to
practice equivocal conformities, then all have a right. One plea for
exemption is in this case as good as another, and no better. That he has
married a wife, that he has bought a yoke of oxen and must prove them,
that he has bidden guests to a feast--one