§ 65. There is, I think, a great tendency, whenever we come to estimate a great and exceptional genius, to regard him as manifesting merely a higher degree of that conscious ability called talent, or cleverness. It is much easier to understand this view of genius than to give any rational account of its spontaneity, its unconscious and unreflective inspirations, which seem to anticipate, and solve without effort, questions laboriously answered by the patient research or experiment of ordinary minds[159:1]. We talk of 'flashes of genius.' When these flashes come often enough, and affect large political questions, we have results which baffle ordinary mortals, and are easily mistaken either for random luck or acute calculation. [Sidenote: Alexander's military antecedents.] If I am right, Alexander started with few definite ideas beyond the desire of great military conquests. On this point his views were probably quite clear, and no doubt often reasoned out with his early companions. He had seen the later campaigns of Philip, and had discovered at Chæronea what the shock of heavy cavalry would do against the best infantry the Greek world could produce. In his very first operations to put down revolt and secure his crown, he had made trial of his field artillery, and of the marching powers of his army through the difficult Thracian country. He therefore required no Aristotle to tell him that with the combined arms of Greece and Macedonia he could conquer the Persian Empire. His reckless exposure of his life at the Granicus and at Issus may indeed be interpreted as the divine confidence of a genius in his star, but seems to me nothing more than a manifest defect in his generalship, counterbalanced to some extent by the enthusiasm it aroused in his household troops. [Sidenote: He learns to respect Persian valour and loyalty.] But it also taught him a very important lesson. He had probably quite underrated the high qualities of the Persian nobles. Their splendid bravery and unshaken loyalty to their king in all the battles of the campaign, their evident dignity and liberty under a legitimate sovran, must have shown him that these were indeed subjects worth having, and destined to be some day of great importance in checking Greek discontent or Macedonian insubordination. The fierce and stubborn resistance of the great Aryan barons of Sogdiana, which cost him more time and loss than all his previous conquests, must have confirmed this opinion, and led to that recognition of the Persians in his empire which was so deeply resented by his Western subjects. [Sidenote: He discovers how to fuse the nations in Alexandria.]