Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/550

530, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that his very singularity is its inspiration.

Now, let a man combine with this insight—this extraordinary sanity of social judgment—the power of great inventive and constructive thought, and then, at last, we have our hero, and one that we well may worship. To great thought he adds balance; to originality, judgment. This is the man to start the world movements, if we want a single man to start them. For, as he thinks profoundly, so he discriminates his thoughts and assigns them values. His fellows judge with him or learn to judge after him, and lend to him the motive force of success—enthusiasm, reward. He may wait for recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he may be muzzled for thinking his thoughts, he may die, and with him the truth to which he gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his thought was recorded, the world revives it in regretful sentences on his tomb.

The thing to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of the phenomenally great man—I mean on the side of our means of accounting for him in reasonable terms—is the sanity of his judgment; the fact that he has great thoughts being the acknowledged and familiar fact. And the variations from this social sanity give all the ground that various writers have for the one-sided views which are now current in popular literature. We are told, on one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on the other hand, that he is to be classed with those of "insane" temper; and yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to outrage society. All these so-called theories rely upon facts—as far as they have any facts to rely upon—which we may readily estimate from our present point of view. As far as a really great man busies himself mainly with things which are objective, unsocial, and morally neutral—such as electricity, natural history, and mechanical theory with its applications—of course, the mental capacity which he possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in this may lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined relationships which are had in view by the writer in quest for degeneracy. It will still be admitted, however, by those who are conversant with the history of science, that the greatest scientific geniuses have been men of profound quietness of life and normal social development. It is to the literary and artistic genius that the seeker after abnormities has to turn; and in this field, again, the facts serve to show their own meaning. As a general rule, these artistic phenomena do not represent the union of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of