The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim
at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made
social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the
vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see
over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which,
to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this
school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the
appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle,
Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone
have set guide-posts to history, and given to the world large portions
of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible
variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations--that
is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is
genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand,
he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put
in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he
would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat
Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow
processes of evolution!
It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have
led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite
out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius
brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to
harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of
expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a
brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him
and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is
no connection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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