He refers to the former when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged in the conditions of society generally.

"If you wish," he says, "to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor, he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war.

Of the insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation." For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?
Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more.

Of his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry--that is to say, the invention of the _Times_ printing-press.

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.