All knowledge is cumulative through the upward ages. 
The element of originality in man’s achievements ‘is like unto 
leaven, which a man took, and hid in three measures of meal, 
till the whole was leavened,’—the meal representing the propor¬ 
tion of the world-knowledge upon which genius improves. 
The thoughts that humanity has never thought before, come 
rarely to our ken. But, in these days of ease and apathy, that 
man is nature-marked for fame and dubbed a ‘genius,’ whose 
energy ‘endureth to the end,’—who confidently carries out his 
bright idea—with verve and elan or with calm persistency—up to 
the portals of acceptancy and wrests from the guardian pedants 
there, a grudging, churlish, forced acknowledgment. But dignity 
may demand a worthier way; and I, for one, with Emerson, 
would rather say, ‘let me come into port grandly—or sail with 
God the seas.’ These men I reckon heroes, who for humanity’s 
sake withstand, for truth, the sneers and buffets of a hostile 
world of ignorance, remaining steadfast, fighting to the death. 
That is true patriotism,—that the highest rendering of the heroic 
phrase ‘pro patria mori’ (to die for one’s country). 
“No great man in history’s varied page but has at sometime 
had good reason to conclude that genius is the unforgiven sin 
humanity most abhors—the thing most trying to the schools’ 
weak equipose,—and that the most desired thing on earth is 
mediocrity. Books might be quoted by the score which prove the 
same ad nauseam; thus, we must conclude the world prefers 
to have it so. 
“But now, surrounded as we are by critics, hypercritical, I 
would here disclaim all egotistic thought that may, perhaps, be 
charged to me, in thus discussing my career. 
“Self-conscious of a higher light within, which men call 
genius, a man must be,—or he could not surprise the hoary old- 
school fallacies. But this self-consciousness, again, is never 
‘reckoned unto him for righteousness.’ The case has been 
thrashed out by many an abler pen than mine without appreciable 
effect upon the ‘world of wisdom.’ I merely quote, therefor, the 
words of Reibmayr which impress me most:— 
31 
