division of honours on a field that
usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimulate
his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put nature and
society so utterly to rout. He hears of men who swayed the destinies
of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose
morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which
condemn the ordinary man. Every man has in him in some degree the hero
worshipper, and gets inflamed somewhat by reading Carlyle's Frederick
the Great.

Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong. The genius does
accomplish the world movements. Napoleon did set the destiny of
Europe, and Frederick did reveal, in a sense, a new phase of moral
conduct. The truth of these things is just what makes the enthusiasm
of the common man so healthy and stimulating. It is not the least that
the genius accomplishes that he thus elevates the traditions of man
and inspires the literature that the people read. He sows the seeds of
effort in the fertile soil of the newborn of his own kind, while he
leads those who do not have the same gifts to rear and tend the
growing plant in their own social gardens. 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