estimated values by which
society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the
pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to
speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of
poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad
strain of heredity, what the theologians call "original sin"; he then
is an "habitual criminal" in the current distinction of criminal
types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teachings of
society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the
fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not
society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his
fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed.
Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is carried
away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary
current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed
temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in
social judgment is forgotten: he is then the "occasional" criminal. It
is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal
he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified
private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the
lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents
the level of social rightness in his time and place. Then, as to the
idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no good judgment, for
the very adequate but pitiful reason that they have no judgment at
all.

This, then, is the doctrine of Social Heredity; it illustrates the
side of conformity, of personal acquiescence on the part of the
individual in the rules of social life. Another equally important
side, that of the personal initiative and influence of the individual
mind in society, remains to be spoken of in the next chapter. Social
Heredity emphasizes _Imitation_; the Genius, to whom we now turn,
illustrates _Invention_.

CHAPTER X.

THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT.

The facts concerning the genius seem to indicate that he is a being
somewhat exceptional and apart. Common mortals stand about him with
expressions of awe. The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves
of our libraries most accessible to the public, and even the
wayfaring man, to whom life is a weary round, and his conquests over
nature and his fellows only the