This wonderful piece of
mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been
for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and
having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his
moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the
so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has
arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_,
Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently
attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail,
he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas,"
or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were,
out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at
times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when
considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they
must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though
he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a
definite place in his general sociological system.[12]
The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is
shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now
quoted from him.
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