active could have served his cunning purposes even more effectively? Nazism without anti-Semitism is conceivable, though it would be just as abominable as the one we know.
From the fact that we can trace the rise of Nazi belief in social conditions, it does not at all follow that arose out of these or other social conditions and not out of the hysterical animosity of Hitler. Most of the adherents of Nazism in Germany began by deprecating its anti-Semitism as incident and transitory—threatening rhetorical bombast, so they said, to force a capimlation without a struggle. But having bet on Hitler and become his willing hostages after he received power, they ended up by accepting and defending anti-Semitism when Hitler showed himself fanatically intransigent on the question. A faithful Spencerian would have us believe that both Hitler and the persecution of the Jews could have been predicted from the state of German culture in the nineteenth century and from Hitler’s hereditary antecedents. This is not true and would be irrelevant even if it were true.
Were Spencer writing to-day, without doubt he would contemptuously add Hitler the Bestial to Napoleon the Greedy and Frederick the Treacherous as another illustration of a ruling figure whose biography explains nothing of the march of events. This follows readily enough from the First Principles of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy but not from a critical study of historical facts. And it is no more true, in the bald, unqualified way that Spencer holds it, of Napoleon and of Frederick than of Hitler. For example, suppose we want to understand why Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, an act that, as he later declared, was the greatest error in his life. Or why, when he had reached Vilna, he refused to accept Czar Alexander’s offer of peace which would have plugged the last leaks in the Continental blockade. It may be that the history of Europe would have been the same even if Napoleon had kept the peace and saved the army of a half million men he lost in Russia. (A prima facie case can easily be made out for an opposite conclusion.) But—and this is the crux of the matter—once it is granted that Napoleon could have done other than he did, it is the sheerest dogmatism to rule out in advance the possibility that the key to his decision might be found in the personality of “Napoleon the Wicked.” What Spencer and Hegel really believe is that neither Napoleon nor any other figure in history could have acted differently in any important respect. This tendency toward
