These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One
of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and
the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes
the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean.
Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest
influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It
is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius
should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The
fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct
society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men
up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal
praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of
fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar
judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as
his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of
their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his
single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be
true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought,
though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either
in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the
man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it.
But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer.
This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last
fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the
intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may
the social qualifications of men. There are men who find it their meat
to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the
lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in
planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by
instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They
gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the
acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They
seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not
need to learn the lessons of the social environment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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