t on which it
bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it
proves? That more men than one should reach at the same time the same
discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect,
when we consider what the character of scientific discovery is. The
facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as
independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men
who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely analogous to such a
peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact
that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that
it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and
that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation,
than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at
last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been
accomplished less by these men themselves than by the mass of tourists
who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to
an ascent by the Rigi Railway.

Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a
somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more
common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests
in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become
common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not
for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as
discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers
accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that
of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these
only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no
more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than
encyclopaedic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or
happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. It is
perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge
enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise;
but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated,
the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the
increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased
difficulty in assimilating even those which are connected most closely
with each other. We may safely