Means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to
act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or
privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care. Nor does human
nature alter as between classes: by and large the poor have the same
impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the
methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than
biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but
mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation
transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or
education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and
heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they are ready
adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations,
however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses; hence
development, in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment
and innovation–the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social
evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.
Here the initiative individual–the “great man,” the “hero,” the “genius”–
regains his place as a formative force in history. He is not quite the god that
Carlyle [Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)] described; he grows out of his time
and land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent and
voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new ideas
would be untimely and impracticable. When he is a hero of action, the
demands of his position and the exaltation of crisis develop and inflate him
to such magnitude and powers as would in normal times have remained
potential and untapped. But he is not merely an effect. Events take place
through him as well as around him; his ideas and decisions enter vitally
into the course of history. At times his eloquence, like Churchill’s
[Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)], may be worth a thousand regiments; his
foresight in strategy and tactics, like Napoleon’s [Napoleon I, Emperor of
