Between individuals, even the greatest, and society there is perpetual action and reaction. While the individual powerfully acts on society, he can only so act in so far as he is himself the instrument and organ of society. The individual leads society, but only in that direction whither society wishes to go. Every man of science merely carries knowledge or invention one further step, a needed and desired step, beyond the stage reached by his immediate predecessors. Every poet and artist is only giving expression to the secret feelings and impulses of his fellows. He has the courage to utter for the first time the intimate emotion and aspiration which he finds in the depth of his own soul, and he has the skill to express them in forms of radiant beauty. But all these secret feelings and desires are in the hearts of other men, who have not the boldness to tell them nor the ability to embody them exquisitely. In the life of man, as in nature generally, there is a perpetual process of exfoliation, as Edward Carpenter calls it, whereby a latent but striving desire is revealed, and the man of genius is the stimulus and the incarnation of this exfoliating movement. That is why every great poet and artist when once his message becomes intelligible, is acclaimed and adored by the crowd for whom he would only have been an object of idle wonderment if he had not expressed and glorified themselves. When the man of genius is too far ahead of his time, he is rejected, however great his genius may be, because he represents the individual out of vital relation to his time. A Roger Bacon, for all his stupendous intellect, is deprived of pen and paper and shut up in a monastery, because he is undertaking to answer questions which will not be asked until five centuries after his death. Perhaps the supreme man of genius is he who, like Virgil, Leonardo, or Shakespeare, has a message for his own time and a message for all times, a message which is for ever renewed for every new generation. The need for insisting on the intimate relations between Socialism and Individualism has become the more urgent to-day because we are reaching a stage of civilization in which each tendency is inevitably so pushed to its full development that a clash is only prevented by the realization that here we have truly a harmony. Sometimes a matter that belongs to one sphere is so closely intertwined with a matter that belongs to the other that it is a very difficult problem how to hold them separate and allow each its due value.[256]