530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CT-irately, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that 

 his very singularity is its inspiration. 



Now, let a man combine with this insight — this extraordinary 

 sanity of social judgment — the power of great inventive and con- 

 structive thought, and then, at last, we have our hero, and one 

 that we well may worship. To great thought he adds balance ; to 

 originality, judgment. This is the man to start the world move- 

 ments, if we want a single man to start them. For, as he thinks 

 profoundly, so he discriminates his thoughts and assigns them 

 values. His fellows judge with him or learn to judge after him, 

 and lend to him the motive force of success — enthusiasm, reward. 

 He may wait for recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he 

 may be muzzled for thinking his thoughts, he may die, and with 

 him the truth to which he gave but silent birth. But the world 

 comes, by its slower progress, to traverse the path in which he 

 wished to lead it ; and if so be that his thought was recorded, the 

 world revives it in regretful sentences on his tomb. 



The thing to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of 

 the phenomenally great man — I mean on the side of our means of 

 accounting for him in reasonable terms — is the sanity of his judg- 

 ment ; the fact that he has great thoughts being the acknowl- 

 edged and familiar fact. And the variations from this social 

 sanity give all the ground that various writers have for the one- 

 sided views which are now current in popular literature. We are 

 told, on one hand, that the genius is a " degenerate " ; on the other 

 hand, that he is to be classed with those of " insane " temper ; and 

 yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to outrage 

 society. All these so-called theories rely upon facts — as far as 

 they have any facts to rely upon — which we may readily estimate 

 from our present point of view. As far as a really great man 

 busies himself mainly with things which are objective, unsocial, 

 and morally neutral — such as electricity, natural history, and me- 

 chanical theory with its applications — of course, the mental ca- 

 pacity which he possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in 

 this may lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined rela- 

 tionships which are had in view by the writer in quest for degen- 

 eracy. It will still be admitted, however, by those who are con- 

 versant with the history of science, that the greatest scientific 

 geniuses have been men of profound quietness of life and normal 

 social development. It is to the literary and artistic genius that 

 the seeker after abnormities has to turn ; and in this field, again, 

 the facts serve to show their own meaning. As a general rule, 

 these artistic phenomena do not represent the union of variations 

 which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often dis- 

 tinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their 

 insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of 



