Page:The Hero in History.djvu/77

Rh parts are interdependent. Yet the loss of a finger will not necessarily affect vision, though a disease of the optic nerve will. Many of the body’s parts and functions may undergo change without noticeably altering the capacity to think. So in the pattern of historical events. We are confident that some of the events antecedent to the present war, like the romantic marriage of Edward VIII., were not causally relevant to its outbreak. No one could plausibly argue that his marriage brought on the Second World War, or that if he had “renounced the woman he loved” and continued as king, it would have been prevented. Endow him with any trait or quality of your favourite hero, and still there would be little ground to believe that he could have forestalled the approaching show-down between Fascist Germany and Democratic England. The latter event, although not literally inevitable, was in the making or “in the cards,” to use a colloquialism. There were certain important conflicts of interest between the two sides which seemed to be pressing these countries into war. These conflicts have been observed in the past to lead to wars between nations in Western society independently of the character of their sovereigns, and no large-scale war has been observed to occur when such conflicts have been altogether absent. It is historical situations of this type which the social determinists validly stress in discounting the influence of outstanding individuals.

There are other historical situations in which we ran legitimately say that, although an individual’s act has been part of the pattern of events culminating in a great happening, the event would have occurred without him although not at the same time. For example, as far as its influence on the development of Europe is concerned, Columbus was the first to discover America. We are all cognizant of the intrepidity he displayed and the hardships he underwent during the voyage. Nonetheless most historians would be ready to admit that, even if his ships had foundered, the New World would have been discovered, anyhow. And they would maintain this even if it had not intact been rediscovered by Amerigo Vespucci. The expanding technological facilities of nascent capitalism, the desire to exploit more intensively the markets of the East, the quest for a short passage to India—Columbus himself died in the belief that he had discovered eastern Asia—made it only a matter of time before the Western Hemisphere would have been reached by enterprising sailors. The record shows that the whole period