say that a knowledge of the simple rules
of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of
Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great
mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge
in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes
of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a
river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the
property of individuals only in proportion to the quantity of it which
their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the
small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a
tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both
vessels have been filled from the same stream.

Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the
preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are
commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists
that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their
own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already
quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their
produce is really the result of their social inheritance and
environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of
view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more
general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included,
is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate.
No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the
country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more
than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for
the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and
that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and
experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment?
Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his
friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in
their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if
they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment,
could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The
admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to
do something at all events, is an admission wrung from