Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/187

Rh are so native to those who display them, so deep seated and endowed with a life of their own, that education and training, instead of calling them forth, serve rather to check their development. In a man of genius we should discern self-reliant precocity, a passion for enterprise, a strong belief in his mission, a pride lifting him above sect-prejudice or party ambitions, and attaching him exclusively to the object of his meditations, for which alone he values life. Even when temporal necessities compel him to take part in the transactions of men, the world is for him only a peopled wilderness, where his soul lives in solitude.

The materials for such a study exist in part; they are to be found in biographies written during the last two hundred years, by the secretaries of the great academies, and in the autobiographic memoirs left by several illustrious men. An ingenious and learned Russian writer, Wechniakof, has lately published sundry works, in which he considers, from this point of view, the anthropological and sociological peculiarities which have had an influence in the individual development of original genuisesgeniuses [sic]. Unfortunately, these opusclesopuscules [sic] do not form a complete treatise, and yet a treatise on spontaneity would be a very curious and very useful work.

The aggregate of all the causes of diversity, heterogeneity, and innovation, which in man act in opposition to the principles of simplicity, homogeneity, and conservation, we may designate by one name, viz., evolution or progress. Regarded within the limits of positive observation, blind Nature has been ever the same. It is today, on the whole, what it was in Homer's time: the same sky, oceans, mountains, forests, flowers. Man, on the other hand, is ever undergoing transformation. Generations succeed one another, but are unlike. They are in a state of constant and rapid metamorphosis in their faiths, their knowledge, their arts, their wants. Nations, like individuals, grow up and decay. But the face of Nature is unchanged: as Byron says of Greece:

We might multiply ad infinitum these historic contrasts between the immutability of the universal fatalism which reigns in Nature, and the incessant movement of liberty and invention in man, together with the ceaseless striving of the soul to free itself from the grip of Fate. History is but the record of what has resulted during ages