The notion that something that moves and lives, as genius does, can at the same time be absolute has some interesting implications. Such a genius and all its works must be unstable. As it has no external sources and no external objects, as its own past can exercise no control over it (for that would be the most lifeless of tyrannies), it is a sort of shooting star, with no guarantees for the future. This, for the complete egotist, has no terrors. A tragic end and a multitude of enemies may seem good to the absolute hero and necessary to his perfect heroism. In the same way, to be without a subject-matter or an audience may seem good to the absolute poet, who sings to himself as he goes, exclusively for the benefit of that glorious and fleeting moment. Genius could not be purer than that: although perhaps it might be hard to prove that it was genius. A kindred implication, which perhaps might be less welcome to the egotist himself, is that an absolute genius is formless, and that the absolute freedom with which it thinks it takes on now this form and now that, is not really freedom at all, but subjection to unknown and perhaps ironical forces. Absolute Will, of which a perfectly free genius is an expression, [Pg 157] cannot say specifically what it craves, for essentially it should crave everything indiscriminately. In practice, however, it must seem to aim at this or that precise result. These specific aims are suggested to it by circumstances, foisted upon it in its replete innocence; for it is all expectation, all vague heartiness and zeal for it knows not what. The logic it proclaims at any time and calls eternal is but the fashionable rhetoric of that hour. Absolute Will is a great dupe on whom fortune forces card after card. Like Faust it is helpless before the most vulgar temptations. Why should it not fulfil itself now by the pursuit of magic, now by the seduction of a young girl, now by an archæological pose, now by a piratical or an engineering enterprise? True, there are limits to its gullibility; there are suggestions from which it recoils. The German ego, after swallowing Christianity whole, will in Luther stick at Indulgences. Faust sometimes turns on Mephistopheles, as the worm will turn: he says that he covets all experience, but in that he does himself a great injustice; there are experiences he scorns. After all this ego is not really absolute; it is specifically and pathetically human and directed upon a few natural ends. That is what saves it; for a mind can have no distinction and a soul no honour if its only maxim is to live on. It may take up with enthusiasm [Pg 158] whatever it takes up, but it will take up anything; and it may do mightily whatever it does, but it will not do it long.