Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and withal no sense of
fitness--none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go
through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity
of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater
admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them
with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But
such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and
that are harmless, we smile and let him talk; but if his lack of
judgment extend to things of grave import, or be accompanied by equal
illusions regarding himself and society in other relationships, then
we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane.
Two of the commonest forms of such impairment of judgment are seen in
the victims of "fixed ideas" on the one hand, and the _exaltes_ on the
other. These men have no true sense of values, no way of selecting the
fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some
transcendently true and original thought were to flit through the
diseased mind of such a one, it would go as it came, and the world
would wait for a man with a sense of fitness to arise and rediscover
it. The other class, the _exaltes_, are somewhat the reverse; the
illusion of personal greatness is so strong that their thoughts seem
to them infallible and their persons divine.
Men of such perversions of judgment are common among us. We all know
the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us
sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his
creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some
eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or
depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in
the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is
the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or
paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so
"visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his
unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's
entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not
the man to produce a world movement.
Most of the men we call "cranks" are of this type. They are
essentially lacking in judgment, and the popular estimate of them is
exactly right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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