are said to belong to the Spencerian school, they can hardly be taken to express the ideas of Mr. Spencer himself.

Mr. Spencer reminds us, to begin with, that by no possibility could a Newton be born in a Hottentot family, a Milton among the Andamanese, a Howard or a Clarkson of Fiji parents, an Aristotle from a father or a mother with facial angles of fifty degrees. Here-though Professor James says nothing about the matter-he seems clearly enough to recognize that physiological cycle of causation of which his critic (and I think rightly) makes so much. And he shows us, in the second place, that the movement of geniuses is conditioned by the society into which the man of genius is born-that, however great his power of initiative, his power of achievement depends at last "on the 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." To all this we should add Mr. Spencer's very explicit declaration contained in his chapter on the Nature of the Social Science in "The Study of Sociology" This science, he says, "has in every case for its subject-matter the growth, development, structure and functions of the social aggregate, as brought about by the mutual actions of individuals, whose natures are partly like those of all men, partly like those of kindred races, partly distinctive." This triple specification, as Mr. Fiske remarks, "seems comprehensive enough to include the Grants and the Bismarcks, the Joneses and the Smiths."

I may now proceed to indicate in brief the main points of my agreement with Professor James in his own arguments and interpretations. I will touch briefly on two points. To begin with the less important of the two matters, I find myself in pretty complete acquiesence with Professor James in his criticism of what I should call the neo-Buckleism of Mr. Grant Allen, to which Mr. Allen's reply, though it convicts the critic of some oversight and hasty assertion, cannot be held by any means satisfactory. With Professor James I conceive Mr. Allen

to be quite unjustified in laying down the doctrine that "the individual characters themselves, in their totality, are wholly created by external circumstances."

This leads us naturally to the second and more important point. Professor James says: "The causes of production of great men lie in a sphere wholly inaccessible to the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem is: These data being given, how does the environment affect them, and how do they affect the environment?" With all this I cordially agree; indeed, I regard this part of Professor James' argument as his most useful contribution to the question under consideration.

From declaration of assent I shall now pass to some matters of criticism. First of all, Professor James appears to me to obscure the problem, while undertaking to simplify it, by assuming throughout his argument that there is a hard and fast line to be drawn between the genius on the one hand and the rank and file of men on the other. We are familiar enough with this sort of thing in Carlyle; but we are rather surprised when we find it coming from a writer like Professor James. Professor James, of course, simply falls into the common error of his school when he manifestly attempts to group all the facts of human history around a few towering personalities. How dramatic is the effect of this method, every reader of "Heroes and HeroWorship," of "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," and the "History of Frederick the Great," knows well enough. Hence its value when one comes to write Essays in Popular Philosophy. But it will hardly satisfy those who, studying more closely and in greater detail the slow movements and changes of human affairs, find themselves forced to the conclusion that after all history is not entirely summed up in the biographies of its great men. Professor James declares that a certain kind of talk about causation makes him impatient. I must confess that a certain kind

of talk about the genius, as a creature not of mortal race, but a cross, let us say, like the heroes of old, between men and gods, tends to produce the same unphilosophical effect in myself.

Again, in discoursing about the environment, Professor James throughout his essay seems to me to employ this often-used and much abused word in an altogether too restricted sense. He properly insists that with writers like Buckle, Draper, Taine, and Mr. Grant Allen, environment is too frequently synonymous with physical surroundings, geographical location, especially climate; yet I cannot help feeling that it is just these things which are generally uppermost in Professor James' mind. But I need scarcely say that this does not represent the evolutionary view of environment. The most important part of the environment of any man is the human part; not the rivers, islands, trees, lakes, mountains, weather; but the heterogeneous social world of a given time, with its knowledge, traditions, prejudices, political and domestic arrangements, making up its life; and all these things are not mere abstractions, the masses of men and women themselves, possessing, as I have insisted, in varying degrees powers of initiative and reaction. Nor is this all. We must recognize the power we each have of, to some extent, choosing our environment; and the environment we so select may not be that of the present at all, but of some epoch of the past.

One other point of detail remains to be touched upon. Even while we recognize the power of the environment in determining the effectiveness of a great man's initiative, we have, argues Professor James, still to go back to great men, that is, to other personal initiatives in the past. But to urge this consideration is to confuse the issue. The question, in any given case, is not how the environment came to be what it was, but simply the reciprocal relations between it and the geniuses thrown into its midst.

But my criticism is that Professor James appears to me to underestimate the importance of the environment, using

the word in the broad sense which, I have insisted, we should properly give to it. First, let me call your attention to the fact that Professor James, in laying down the lines of his discussion, promises more than he afterwards undertakes to perform. He roundly announces his purpose of showing that such causes are to be sought simply in the accumulated influences of individuals, their examples, initiatives, and decisions. Not a word here, you notice, about the environment; indeed, the whole intention of the introductory paragraph, from which this sentence is taken, is to lead us to suppose that the environment is to be dropped entirely from the forthcoming solution. Of course, it is not so dropped. It crops up again and again, gathering a trifle more force at each reappearance.

Professor James complains that a certain school of writers, of which Mr. Grant Allen is a representative, have no imagination of alternatives. "With them," he protests, "there is no tertium quid between the proposition that the environment creates the great man, and the proposition that it simply maintains him." But that the environment is powerless to generate the variations we call genius I fully, as I said, admit. That given such genius, it merely accepts or rejects him,-merely takes him all and all as he is, or all in all as he is throws him aside,-this on the other hand I strenuously deny. When the environment preserves a variation and thus makes it effective, it will be found, if I mistake not, in almost every case, that it not only picks out a man and gives him thereby free play for his initiative powers; it brings, to use Professor James' phrase, educative influence to bear upon him as well; or, in other words, it does something, and often a great deal, towards moulding him into the form and fashion of his society and time. I do not wish to emulate Southey's learned friend, who wrote whole volumes of hypothetical history in the subjunctive mood, but who can question that if Scott had been born in Shakespeare's time, he would have written romantic dramas; if Shakespeare had got himself born to-day he would write,

not plays, but novels? Properly to formulate the whole matter, therefore, we ought to say, not that the environment simply selects the great man whose genius is adapted to the receptivities of the moment, but that the environment selects the great man after his genius has been moulded by its conditions into a certain approximate adaptness to the receptivities of the moment.

Summarizing, then, I would say that I find Professor James' essay faulty at two chief points: in the first place, in the writer's habit of resolving all personal initiative into initiatives of a few great men, and thus reducing all other personal factors to practical nonentity; and, in the second place, in his tendency to underrate the importance of the environment in determining as well as directing the efforts of great men and small men alike.