As for "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his fellow-countrymen.

They are a landscape which surrounds them all.

But aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of it painted in the absence of a great artist.
Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself.

That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.
That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_.

One is a reference to the last Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first.