The next best thing to be done with our existing supply of genius might be to train it to check, by application of common sense and a little modesty, certain ailments inherent in its own constitution, namely: exaggeration, contrariness and, of course, megalomania. Such self-purification, on the part of persons of genius or what passes for such, would save the rest of us the disheartening task of throwing half of their sayings onto the scrap-heap, and of picking out of the scrap-heap some of the sayings of rival persons of genius consigned thereunto at their bidding. There is quite enough to be done in the way of selection, assimilation and elimination (since all understanding means that) without setting such Intelligence as we have to play scavenger to wasteful or slatternly genius.... And yet, and yet.... May not those trashinesses of genius, and the scavengering entailed thereby, be that which secures to Intelligence its highest activities, and in so far fulfils one of Genius’s chief missions? For, after all, Intelligence is the living, changing mass of unprofessional thought, the averaged, habitual thought of the majority of us. And is not the chief use of all such genius as is not set aside in science or in art, rather to make the rest of us think, than to furnish us with ready-made thoughts, however true or sublime? Nay, I would hazard the supposition that it was because the men of the Past were presented with such a mass of ready-made thoughts, creeds, philosophies, and moral formulæ (think of _Deuteronomy_!) all given for perfect and definitively valid, that there did not appear till so late in the day just what I have called _Intelligence_, which alone could give that without which the greatest genius is solitary and barren: an audience, a reader, a mind able to carry on the thinking and, in so far, able to eliminate the deciduous, the rubbishy elements of the thought already offered to it. The consideration of this loss which mankind may have suffered through the notion that thoughts must be accepted ready-made rather than transformed into one’s own, and that, consequently, men must be set apart to do the thinking (as the priests once did the praying and sacrificing) for others; this consideration is at the bottom of my present hatred of the idea (which I shared in my youth) that exceptionally gifted persons should consecrate themselves into a caste, ministers, maybe, of a new religion, chosen vessels for a new-fangled deity.