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. It may be, of course, that society is so
constituted--or, rather, so lacking in constitution--that simple
variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its
cataclysms; but a great many efforts will be made to prove the
contrary before this highest of all spheres of human activity is
declared to have no meaning--no thread which runs from age to age and
links mankind, the genius and the man who plods, in a common and
significant development.

In undertaking this task we must try to judge the genius with
reference to the sane social man, the normal Socius. What he is we
have seen. He is a person _who learns to judge by the judgments of
society_. What, then, shall we say of the genius from this point of
view? Can the hero worshipper be right in saying that the genius
teaches society to judge; or shall we say that the genius, like other
men, must learn to judge by the judgments of society?

The most fruitful point of view is, no doubt, that which considers the
genius a variation. And unless we do this it is evidently impossible
to get any theory which will bring him into a general scheme. But how
great a variation? And in what direction?--these are the questions.
The great variations found in the criminal by heredity, the insane,
the idiotic, etc., we have found excluded from society; so we may well
ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our determination of the
limits within which society decides who is to be excluded is correct,
then the genius must come within these limits. He can not escape them
and live socially.

_The Intelligence of the Genius._--The directions in which the genius
actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact.
He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great
"constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us
believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater
thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason