[The Story of the Mind by James Mark Baldwin]@TWC D-Link book
The Story of the Mind

CHAPTER X
3/52

This is true; and a philosophy of society should not overlook either of the facts--the actual deeds of the great man with his peculiar influence upon his own time, and his lasting place in the more inspiring social tradition which is embodied in literature and art.
Yet the psychologist has to present just the opposite aspect of these apparent exceptions to the Canons of our ordinary social life.

He has to oppose the extreme claim made by the writers who attempt to lift the genius quite out of the normal social movement.

For it only needs a moment's consideration to see that if the genius has no reasonable place in the movement of social progress in the world, then there can be no possible doctrine or philosophy of such progress.

To the hero worshipper his hero comes in simply to "knock out," so to speak, all the regular movement of the society which is so fortunate, or so unfortunate, as to have given him birth; and by his initiative the aspirations, beliefs, struggles of the community or state get a push in a new direction--a tangent to the former movement or a reversal of it.

If this be true, and it be farther true that no genius who is likely to appear can be discounted by any human device before his abrupt appearance upon the stage of action, then the history of facts must take the place of the science or philosophy of them, and the chronicler become the only historian with a right to be.
For of what value can we hold the contribution which the genius makes to thought if this contribution runs so across the acquisitions of the earlier time and the contributions of earlier genius that no line of common truth can be discovered between him and them?
Then each society would have its own explanation of itself, and that only so long as it produced no new genius.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books