For as he thinks profoundly, so he discriminates his thoughts justly, and assigns them values.

His fellows judge with him, or learn to judge after him, and they lend to him the motive forces 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, posterity revives it in regretful sentences on his tomb.
The two things 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--are these: first, his intellectual originality; and, second, the sanity of his judgment.

And it is the variations in this second sort of endowment which give the ground which various writers have for the one-sided views now current in popular literature.
We are told, on the one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on another 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 by performing criminal acts.