for excluding him from
society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts,
thoughts which will work, thoughts which will bring in a new area in
the discovery of principles, or of their application. This is just
what all development depends upon, this attainment of novelty, which
is consistent with older knowledge and supplementary to it. But
suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the
topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges,
or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that
man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist,
or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the
intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical
workability--in short, to sum it up, "fitness." Any thought, to live
and germinate, must be a fit thought. And the community's sense of the
fitness of the thought is their rule of judgment.

Now, the way the community got this sense--that is the great result we
have reached above. Their sense of fitness is just what I called above
their judgment. So far, at least, as it relates to matters of social
import, it is of social origin. It reflects the outcome of all social
heredity, tradition, education. The sense of social truth is their
criterion of social thoughts, and unless the social reformer's thought
be in some way fit to go into the setting thus made by earlier social
development, he is not a genius but a crank.

I may best show the meaning of the claim that society makes upon the
genius by asking in how far in actual life he manages to escape this
account of himself to society. The facts are very plain, and this is
the class of facts which some writers urge, as supplying an adequate
rule for the application of the principles of their social philosophy.
The simple fact is, say they, that without the consent of society the
thoughts of your hero, whether he be genius or fool, are practically
valueless. The fulness of time must come; and the genius before his
time, if judged by his works, can not be a genius at all. His thought
may be great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it
as its richest outcome and its profoundest intuition; but before, that
time, it is as bizarre as a madman's fancies and as useless. What
would be thought, we might be asked by writers of this school, of a
rat which developed upon its side the hand of a man, with all its