Man Theory," according to which the explanation
of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of
exceptional or great men--the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of
as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no
explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated
phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change,
they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have
descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly
attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" of the
generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have
got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of
mathematicians who went before him. Caesar could not have got very far
with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready
to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not
lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly
developed language.

But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with
their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the
theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among
his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken
from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on
Dryden_, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that
makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of
the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear
so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great
revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely
expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take
one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of
Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the
organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in
society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the
theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by
Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.

Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a
socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most
popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of
the thousand of the produce of every man are the