Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no
bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the
one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates
the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of
Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare,"
he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the
multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the
various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth
to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had
developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be
found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the
conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its
language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have
produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an
individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that
of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted
his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him
sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's
contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind,
and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his
own.
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