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 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY. VI. THE FACTORS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. Concluded.

IV. The innovating individual. If the growth of numbers or of wealth seems to move societies through the same series of stages, their dependence on inventions forbids us to postulate a single route of development traversed by all peoples. For, since inventions have no fixed order of appearance, the succession of social changes, so far as it is controlled by them, is not law- abiding, and cannot be predicted.

The innovating individual, as a factor of social change, needs to be clearly distinguished from the Great Man who in the pre- scientific days held the center of the stage. We are coming to recognize that most of the important achievements from the plow and the loom to the steam engine and the telegraph may be resolved into a long series of very short steps which were taken one after another, frequently by different individuals, separated perhaps by wide intervals of time and space. To make Tubal- Cain stand for the working of metals, Gutenberg for printing, and Watts for the steam engine is like attributing the Pentateuch to Moses, the Psalms to David, and the Iliad to Homer. The popular mind spares itself effort by crediting the house to the man who lays the last tile and allowing his co-workers to drop out of view. History, however, far from gratifying these hero- worshiping' propensities, shows that nearly every truth or mechanism is the fusion of a large number of original ideas pro- ceeding from numerous collaborators, most of whom have been forgotten. The resolution of human achievement into the con- tributions of tens of thousands of innovating individuals is, therefore, very far from the theory of progress that gives the glory to a few Great Men.

Nor can it be granted, as some insist, that every social varia- tion consists in the generalizing of some individual's invention. To be sure, the fire drill, the gun, or the press existed as a thought

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