ays, "and what dramas could he have written without the
multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the
various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth
to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had
developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be
found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the
conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its
language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have
produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an
individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that
of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted
his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him
sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's
contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind,
and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his
own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with
singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary
sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue
of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the
men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional
genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to
the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.

And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern
production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has illustrated
more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character
of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has
insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to
be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of
"apprehending assembled propositions in their totality." It would be
difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual
aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from
ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by
apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their
totality--mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so
forth--by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them
into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the
in