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 a division of labour between genius and tradition; nowhere are the types of the young rebel and the tireless pedant so common and so extreme.

The notion that something that moves and lives, as genius does, can at the same time be absolute has some interesting implications. Such a genius and all its works must be unstable. As it has no external sources and no external objects, as its own past can exercise no control over it (for that would be the most lifeless of tyrannies), it is a sort of shooting star, with no guarantees for the future. This, for the complete egotist, has no terrors. A tragic end and a multitude of enemies may seem good to the absolute hero and necessary to his perfect heroism. In the same way, to be without a subject-matter or an audience may seem good to the absolute poet, who sings to himself as he goes, exclusively for the benefit of that glorious and fleeting moment. Genius could not be purer than that: although perhaps it might be hard to prove that it was genius.

A kindred implication, which perhaps might be less welcome to the egotist himself, is that an absolute genius is formless, and that the absolute freedom with which it thinks it takes on now this form and now that, is not really freedom at all, but subjection to unknown and perhaps ironical forces. Absolute Will, of which a perfectly free genius is an expression,