52+ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ness of time must come; and the genius before his time can not 

 be, if judged by his works, a genius at all. His thought may be 

 great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it as its 

 richest outcome and its profoundest intuition, but before that 

 time it is as bizarre as the madman's fancies and as useless. 

 What would be thought, we might be asked, of a rat which devel- 

 oped upon its side the hand of a man, with all its exquisite 

 mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of 

 delicate manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true 

 to the pattern of a rat ? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be 

 justified in leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole 

 where his singular appendage held him fast ? Is such a rat any 

 the less a monster because man finds use for his hands ? 



To a certain extent this argument is true and forcible. If 

 social utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the prema- 

 ture genius is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put 

 in another way which renders it still more plausible. The varia- 

 tions which occur in intellectual endowment in a community 

 vary about a mean ; there is theoretically an average man. And 

 the differences among men which can be accounted for by any 

 philosophy of life must be in some way referable to this mean. 

 Variations which do not meet their counterpart at all in the social 

 environment, but which strike all the social fellows with dis- 

 approval, finding no sympathy whatever, are thereby exposed to 

 the charge of being " sports " of Nature and the fruit of chance. 

 The lack of hearing which such a man gets sets him in a form of 

 isolation which stamps him not only as the social crank but also 

 as the cosmic tramp. 



Put in its positive and usual form this view simply claims that 

 man is always the outcome of the social movement. The recep- 

 tion he gets is the measure of the degree in which he adequately 

 represents this movement. Certain variations are possible — men 

 who are forward in the legitimate progress of society — and these 

 men are the true and only geniuses. Other variations, which 

 attempt to discount the future, are sports ; for the only perma- 

 nent discounting of the future is that which is projected from the 

 elevation of the past. 



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 the school of Spencer can not answer these 

 questions, I think ; nor can it meet the appeal we all make to 

 history when wo cite the names of Aristotle, Pascal, and Nowtou, 



