Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/708

692 We have an illustration of this progress in the fact of continual occurrence, that conceptions which prove inadmissible to the minds of one generation in consequence either of their want of intellectual power to apprehend them or of their preoccupation by other habits of thought, subsequently find a universal acceptance, and even come to be approved as "self-evident." Thus the first law of motion, divined by the genius of Newton, though opposed by many philosophers of his time as contrary to all experience, is now accepted by common consent, not merely as a legitimate inference from experiment, but as the expression of a necessary and universal truth; and the same axiomatic value is extended to the still more general doctrine that energy of any kind, whether manifested in the "molar" motion of masses, or consisting in the "molecular" motion of atoms, must continue under some form or other without abatement or decay; what all admit in regard to the indestructibility of matter being accepted as no less true of force—namely, that as ex nihilo nil fit, so nil fit ad nihilum. But, it may be urged, the very conception of these and similar great truths is in itself a typical example of intuition. The men who divined and enunciated them stand out above their fellows, as possessed of a genius which could not only combine but create, of an insight which could clearly discern what reason could but dimly shadow forth. Granting this freely, I think it may be shown that the intuitions of individual genius are but specially-exalted forms of endowments which are the general property of the race at the time, and which have come to be so in virtue of its whole previous culture. Who, for example, could refuse to the marvellous aptitude for perceiving the relations of numbers, which displayed itself in the untutored boyhood of George Bidder and Zerah Colburn, the title of an intuitive gift? But who, on the other hand, can believe that a Bidder or a Colburn could suddenly arise in a race of savages who cannot count beyond five? Or, again, in the history of the very earliest years of Mozart, who can fail to recognize the dawn of that glorious genius, whose brilliant but brief