Caesar could not have got very far with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly developed language.
But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken from an unlikely quarter.

"It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on Dryden_, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age....

The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of Buckle.

This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.
Thus Mr.Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social inheritance and environment"; and Mr.Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like results almost simultaneously.

Thus rival and independent claims," he proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum analysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it, "inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property," the mass of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents or other artificial restrictions.
The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious.