ON MAN AND HIS DEVELOPMENT. 65 



nature from themselves, and history reserves for them 

 the title of great. Into a few the common elements of 

 our nature have entered in such pre-eminent degree and 

 large amount, and they have thence been enabled to 

 produce results so great and extraordinary for the rest 

 of men results so impossible of achievement or even of 

 conception by the others, that they, with a sort of noble 

 superstition, in former times credited these superior 

 spirits with a divine nature, and reverenced their memory 

 as of gods ; and even still, with a lingering trace of this 

 old hero-worship, with a survival of the old ennobling 

 reverence, great men are called men of genius a unique, 

 indefinable thing, which marks off its possessor from the 

 rest of mankind as of a different and higher nature. 

 These spirits, specially touched to finer issues, seem even 

 yet compact of finer clay and tempered with more ethe- 

 real fire than has gone to the composition of the gene- 

 rality ; and if we remember the services which these 

 select ones have rendered to humanity, in widening its 

 range, in lifting it higher, in multiplying its power, in 

 giving to it new and permanent realms of truth and 

 beauty, in giving to it in their lives examples of its 

 glorious possibilities of effort or achievement in virtue, 

 we shall, in spite of the levelling doctrine of science and 

 evolution, be inclined to deal tenderly with the still 

 lingering and generous superstition that credits great 

 men with being something peculiarly divine. In a sense 

 so they still are, so they were, and so they must ever be. 

 In reality, great men are but the highest summits of 

 that humanity which we all share ; nevertheless, they 

 have shown us what heights there are in humanity, from 

 whence a grander horizon opens. They have shown us 

 how we may climb nearer to those heights. In a certain 

 sense they have been the true creators. They have 



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