C1+P1. The second assertion is a non sequitur. C+P may be the consequence of C1+P1+X, where X designates any event which has historical effects but neither cultural nor biological causes, like fire, earthquake, plague, or accident. If the causes of the latter be included in what Spencer means by “the aggregate of conditions,” then his idea runs foul of James’s criticism. All he is saying is that to-day has grown out of yesterday and that to-morrow will develop out of to-day. At this juncture Spencer must embrace either a tautology or an absurdity.
It is on the first point that Spencer begs the whole question by ruling out the possibility of genuine interaction between personality and culture (C and P or C1 and P1.), In his earlier formulations he had asserted that great men were made by their cultures and admitted that great men could remake culture. But his insistence upon taking the great man and his environment together, not as a problem for analysis, but as a situation to be explained by an earlier situation, likewise unanalysed, simply by-passes the issue. The issue will not be by-passed. It crops up at every turn in our historical experience.
That strategically placed men are subjected to certain pressures, that they sometimes falter and break under them or ride them out and master them, is undeniable. Whether the leading men or the conjecture of circumstances are more decisive in explaining some specific event of momentous consequence, is an inescapable question. Was Hitler responsible for the anti-Semitic obsession of German Nazidom, an obsession that hindered not helped the Nazi international programme of fraud and conquest, or did the cultural environment and history of Germany make it obligatory upon Hitler to presecute the Jews?[1] Granted, although there is no reason to believe it, that Hitler could not have raised his consuming mania to the level of state policy unless the early apostles of anti-Semitism, Chamberlain, Stocker, and the Austrian Lueger, had preceded him. Still, why were the Jews as a group made the scapegoats, when other groups, actually just as guiltless but politically more
- ↑ According to Mr. James G. Macdonald of the New York Times (November 29, 1942), Hitler told him in an interview in the spring of 1933 that he intended “to use anti-Semitism as a means toward world domination.” Nonetheless, although Hitler’s anti-Semitism was an important factor in arousing world public opinion against him, especially in countries he hoped to neutralize temporarily, he intensified his persecutions of the Jews. Only countries he has subdued by force of arms, excepting his original allies, have “adopted” his anti-Semitic decrees.
