[The Story of the Mind by James Mark Baldwin]@TWC D-Link bookThe Story of the Mind CHAPTER X 21/52
He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal praise.
Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar judgment of his fellows.
His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of their truth be full and unique.
Wagner led the musical world by his single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought, though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either in the one or in the other.
To be sure, this divine assurance of the man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it. But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer. This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last fruitful application of the doctrine of variations.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|