In this conception of the History of Mental and Physical culture, we
much overrate the influence, though we cannot overrate the power, of
the men by whom the change seems to have been effected. We cannot
overrate their power,--for the greatest men of any age, those who
become its leaders when there is a great march to be begun, are indeed
separated from the average intellects of their day by a distance which
is immeasurable in any ordinary terms of wonder.

But we far overrate their influence; because the apparently sudden
result of their labour or invention is only the manifested fruit of the
toil and thought of many who preceded them, and of whose names we have
never heard. The skill of Cimabue cannot be extolled too highly; but no
Madonna by his hand could ever have rejoiced the soul of Italy, unless
for a thousand years before, many a nameless Greek and nameless Goth
had adorned the traditions, and lived in the love, of the Virgin.

In like manner, it is impossible to overrate the sagacity, patience, or
precision, of the masters in modern mechanical and scientific
discovery. But their sudden triumph, and the unbalancing of all the
world by their words, may not in any wise be attributed to their own
power, or even to that of the facts they have ascertained. They owe
their habits and methods of industry to the paternal example, no less
than the inherited energy, of men who long ago prosecuted the truths of
nature, through the rage of war, and the adversity of superstition; and
the universal and overwhelming consequences of the facts which their
followers have now proclaimed, indicate only the crisis of a rapture
produced by the offering of new objects of curiosity to nations who had
nothing to look at; and of the amusement of novel motion and action to
nations who had nothing to do.