at any rate that he is not yet explained away. So far all Spencer has told us is that before a Frankenstein monster can kill a man, he must be made by a man. But the man who creates the monster does not create the things the monster takes it into his head to do. We would hardly say that Frankenstein, if slain by the monster, had committed suicide.
Spencer’s biological interests did lead him to the perception that a great man might differ from other men in ways not reducible to differences in social opportunity. When he meets the heroic theory head on, he maintains that the resultant of “a long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.” On the basis of his theory of the hero as a resultant, Spencer proposes that, instead of attributing a decisive event to the great man who seems to have been its immediate occasion, we seek for the ultimate (Spencer’s “real”) explanation in “that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.”
Put in its simplest form, Spencer proposes that, instead or explaining the great man in terms of his immediate environment or the environment in terms of the activities of the great man, both the great man and his environment should be explained in terms of the total state of the world which preceded them. In one sense this is innocent enough; what the world is at any period is explained by what the world was at a period directly preceding it. But scientifically, it is not very fruitful. As William James showed in his trenchant comments on Spencer, this is comparable to explaining occurrences by God’s will. Whether the sparrow falls or flies we can always say it was caused by God’s will; and no matter what the historical scene is at any moment, with or without a great man, we can always say that it is a natural outgrowth of what the world was at an antecedent moment.
In so far as Spencer restricts himself to the field of history, his position begs the question at issue. To make this more apparent let us recast his view in the following way: Let C represent the cultural environment of any heroic figure, P his innate powers and capacities, C1 the historically preceding cultural environment, and P1 the ancestral line of the man in question. What Spencer is asserting is (1) that every question about the work or significance of an individual is a question about C+P; and (2) that C+P can always be explained by
