THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 527 



lie and society must agree in regard to the fitness of them, al- 

 though this agreement is not the emphatic thing. The essential 

 thing in this matter of intellectual variation is that the thoughts 

 thought must always be critically judged by the thinker himself. 

 This may be illustrated in some detail. 



Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and with them 

 no sense of fitness — none of the judgment about them which so- 

 ciety 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 chi- 

 merical schemes out and air them with the same assurance that 

 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 re- 

 specting himself and society in other relations, 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 persecution on the one hand, the exdltes on the 

 other. The images which throng into the consciousness of the 

 former of these are those which represent his own powerlessness 

 before an ever-present enemy. Neither the assurances of friends 

 nor the evidence of his own senses are sufficient to rectify the 

 judgment he makes that these imaginings are real. He has no true 

 sense of values, no way of selecting the fit combinations of his 

 fancy from the unfit ; and even though some transcendently true 

 and original thoughts were to flit through his diseased imagina- 

 tion, they would go as they came, and the world would still wait 

 for a genius to arise and rediscover them. The other class — the 

 exaltes — are somewhat the reverse. The illusion of personal great- 

 ness is so strong that their thoughts are infallible and their per- 

 sons 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 

 thoughts, who holds us sometimes by the extraordinary power of 

 his conceptions or the beauty of his creations. And yet we find 

 in it all some incongruity, some eminently unfit element, some 

 grotesque application, some elevation or depression from the level 

 of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in the sesthetic impres- 

 sion. The man himself does not know it, and that is the reason 

 that he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or paralyzed. 

 We in the community learn to regret that he is so " visionary," 

 with all his talent, and so we accommodate ourselves to his unf ruit- 

 fulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's entertain- 

 ment under the spell of his thinking. This certainly is not the 

 man to produce world movements. 



