romantic love and every boy and girl in Christendom has his life altered thereby. What we now are—as men—depends chiefly on social tradition; withhold it for a generation and we should revert to savagery and further. It is also true that social tradition sets the course of organic development. Individuals who are unfit for their social environment can not survive in it; those who possess variations, however slight, making adjustment to social conditions and social ideals more easy are more likely to survive and to transmit their traits. If we depended only on social tradition, progress would be limited by the extreme range of individual adaptations. But by the preservation of stable variations in the line of social evolution, we secure a new type from which new forward variations are more likely.
Whether great men really lay down the line of social evolution or only anticipate and hasten its necessary course is an unsolved question. Are great men, as Carlyle maintains, divinely inspired leaders, or are they, as Spencer tells us, necessary products of given physical and social conditions? If Dante had not set the ideal of romantic love, would it not have come from other sources? Did Darwin do more than express what was 'in the air' and hasten by a dozen years the necessary course of science? We can only answer such questions by an actual study of facts.
When we regard the noteworthy men that have appeared in the world, it is evident that they have but little in common. 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.' We have men of genius, great men and men merely eminent. Thus many a genius has been a 'mute inglorious Milton' lacking the character or the circumstance for the accomplishment of his task. Washington was scarcely a genius, but was a truly great man. Napoleon III. was neither a genius nor a great man, but was eminent to an unusual degree. But if we simply take those men who have most attracted the eyes and ears of the world, who have most set its tongues and printing presses in motion, we have a definite group. Beginning with this we can analyse and classify; we can study these individuals, their causes and their effects; we can regard them as types of a given age and race; we can use them to measure interests and tendencies.
For these purposes our first need is a definite list of the most eminent men, sufficiently large for statistical study.[1] The method I followed to discover the 1,000 men who are preeminent was this: I
- ↑ The statistics of this paper were presented to the American Psychological Association in December, 1894, and an abstract was published in The Psychological Review for March, 1895. It was read in its present form as a lecture before the Philosophical Club of Yale University in 1897.
