"The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the astronomer neglects the other.

Now, this may be quite true if our interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet.

But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer.

The Alps for the astronomer may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel.

What to the astronomer are all the dykes of Holland?
But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one.