Page:The Hero in History.djvu/76

76 not always permissive to genius; they may be crushing. And when they are permissive, there are limits to the range of possibilities of heroic action. These limits can be inferred from the whole complex of social traditions, habits, tools, and techniques, and the clash of group interests. It is this complex of culture traits which, without explaining the existence of genius, throws some light on its historical development and responsiveness to the “ripe” conditions. Carlyle would have held that Newton born into a community of Australian primitives would necessarily have made some major scientific discovery and that a Napoleon would have been a great savage military chieftain. Plechanov and other social determinists, on the other hand, realize that man is an “acculturated organism,” to employ a favourite expression of John Dewey. He is dependent for his intellectual power not only upon his biological capacities but upon the society that sets the framework of interest and attention within which doubt and inquiry arise, and that supplies the very words which both inspire and limit the ideas that germinate within him. There is no good reason to believe that if a man with the biological endowment of Newton or Raphael or Napoleon had been born in early prehistory he would have rediscovered fire or created magnificent ornaments and paintings or achieved renown as a warrior.

The social determinists left a richer bequest to modern thought than an insight into the multiple ways in which genius is tied to culture. They made us sensitive to the interrelatedness of the different expressions of culture although they absurdly overstated the extent of the interrelation. But of greatest importance was their insistence on the notion of determining trends in history which, despite the mystical metaphysics that accompanied it, expressed a certain truth.

Instead of peeling off the metaphysical husks from the doctrine of social determinism in order to discover its kernel of truth, let us restate the truth independently.

All of us are aware that both in nature and history certain events seem more relevantly connected than others. As soon as they got down to concrete cases, the social determinists, too, acknowledged this. Even if we were to grant that in some sense all events are connected with each other, we would still have to recognize that some are more intimately bound up with one another than others. The living organism is often pointed to as an illustration of an organic system of which all