And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus spake Zarathustra” was the greatest book in the world. There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are modest. They are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should never be confused although this is often done. A man has just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation, and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the great man must occasionally comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible persons. All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems. Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well what they mean by it. Others have suggested that the “soul” is only a beautiful empty word, which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about. Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.