the natural blessings of our own reason, than buy the uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation, which death gives every fool gratis" (Sir Thomas Browne). "No way has been found for making heroism easy even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. . . . There is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the annual plowing and sowing of the Emperor of China. Let us make it an honest sweat" (Emerson). Who shall decide when doctors disagree? Once more, look at what Herbert Spencer calls the "great-man theory" in history. He and Macaulay and Buckle, on one side, are as wide apart as the poles of the earth from Carlyle and Emerson, on the other, concerning this theory. Hear Carlyle first: "We can not look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him. He is the living light fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near—the light which enlightens, which has enlightened, the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary, shining by the gift of Heaven." To the same effect, Emerson: "Literary history, and all history, is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. . . . The importance of the one person who has truth over nations who have it not is because power obeys reality and not appearance, according to quality and not quantity. How much more are men than nations!. . . So that, wherever a true man appears, everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself. He is the only great event; and it is easy to lift him into a mythological person."
On the other side, hear Macaulay: "Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and impressing a new character on the age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. . . . The sun illuminates the hills while it is still below the horizon; and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light which, without their assistance, must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them." And here is what Herbert Spencer offers on the same side: "The origin of the great man is natural; and, immediately he is thus recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant of an enormous aggregate of causes that have been operating for ages. . . . If it be a fact that the great man may modify his nation in its structure and actions, it is also a fact that there must have been those antecedent modifications constituting
