the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual chasm which I could not myself, at least hypothetically, cross." "It is rather an 'acquired character,' a mere fruit of special opportunity--which in a few cases it doubtless may be--but it is something external; at bottom we are all equal." Many facts may be advanced to corroborate the results of our analysis here. The crowd always resents the Carlyle, William James, Nietzsche, Goethe theory of genius. Genius is not congenital superiority. It is the result of hard work. The genius is not a unique personal fact, he is a "representative man." He says just what his age is thinking. The inarticulate message of his contemporaries simply becomes articulate in some one, and behold a genius. In other words, I suppose, all Vienna, messenger boys and bootblacks especially, were suddenly fascinated by Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling improvised musical renderings of the theme of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard and wrote these whistlings down in the form of the Ninth Symphony. According to the crowd, Luther did not create the Reformation, or Petrarch the Renaissance; these movements themselves created their leaders and founders; all that the genius did was to interpret and faithfully obey the People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need only study hard enough to be able to tell the people what they already think. The superiority of genius is therefore no different from that of any educated person; except in degree of application. Anyone of us might possess this superiority. In other words, the "intellectual snobbishness" which the crowd resents is nothing else than the crowd-man's own fiction of self-importance, projected upon those whose imagined superiority he envies. It is recognized, even exaggerated by the unlearned, because it is precisely the sort of superiority which the ignorant man himself, in his ignorance, imagines that he himself would display if he "only had the chance," and even now possesses unrecognized.