THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 313 



be thus elevates the traditions of man, inspires the literature that 

 the people read. He sows the seeds of effort in the fertile soil of 

 the newborn of his own kind, while he leads those who do not 

 have the same gifts to rear and tend the growing plant in their 

 own social gardens. This is true: and a philosophy of society 

 should not overlook either of the facts — the actual deeds and the 

 peculiar influence of the great man upon their own time — or his 

 lasting p]ace in the more inspiring social tradition which is em- 

 bodied in literature and art. 



But it is not my aim to add to the literature of hero-worship. 

 The considerations on that side are so patent that he who runs 

 may read. My aim is to present just the opposite aspect of these 

 apparent exceptions to the canons of our ordinary social life, and 

 so to oppose the extreme claim made by the writers v/ho attempt, 

 in the name of social philosophy and science, to blur the lines of 

 sane thought on these topics. For it only needs a moment's 

 consideration to see that if the genius has no reasonable place in 

 the movement of social progress in the world, then there can be 

 no possible doctrine or philosophy of such progress. To the 

 hero- worshiper his hero comes in simply to " knock out," so to 

 speak, all the regular movement of th.e society which is so fortu- 

 nate, or so unfortunate, as to have given him birth : and by his 

 initiative the aspirations, beliefs, struggles of the community or 

 state get a push, in a new direction — a tangent to the former 

 movement or a reversal of it. If this be true, and it be further 

 true that no genius who is likely to appear can be discounted by 

 any human device before his abrupt appearance upon the stage of 

 history, then the history of facts takes the place of the science or 

 philosophy of them, and the chronicler is the only historian with 

 a right to be. 



Our genius, then, is a very critical factor in human thought. 

 Not only is he the man from whom we expect the thought; he 

 is also the man who, if the hero-worshiper is right, traduces 

 thought. For of what value can we hold the contribution 

 which he makes to thought if this contribution runs so across 

 the acquisitions of the earlier time, and the contributions of 

 earlier genius, that no line of common truth can be discovered 

 between him and them ? Then each, society would have its 

 own explanation of itself, and that only so long as it pro- 

 duced no new genius. It may be, of course, that society is so 

 constituted — or, rather, so lacking in constitution — that simple 

 variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its 

 cataclysms ; but a great many efforts will be made by the 

 geniuses themselves to prove the contrary before this highest of 

 all spheres of human activity is declared to have no meaning — 

 no thread which runs from age to age and links mankind, the 



TOL. XLIX. — 26 



