mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of delicate
manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true to the
pattern of a rat? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be justified in
leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole where his singular
appendage held him fast? Is such a rat any the less a monster because
man finds use for his hands.

To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social
utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the premature genius
is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way
which renders it still more plausible. The variations which occur in
intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is,
theoretically, an average man. The differences among men which can be
taken account of in any philosophy of life must be in some way
referable to this mean. The variation which does not find its niche at
all in the social environment, but which strikes all the social
fellows with disapproval, getting no sympathy whatever, is thereby
exposed to the charge of being the "sport" of Nature and the fruit of
chance. The lack of hearing which awaits such a man sets him in a form
of isolation, and stamps him not only as a social crank, but also as a
cosmic tramp.

Put in its positive and usual form, this view simply claims that man
is always the outcome of the social movement. The reception he gets is
a measure of the degree in which he adequately represents this
movement. Certain variations are possible--men who are forward in the
legitimate progress of society--and these men are the true and only
geniuses. Other variations, which seem to discount the future too
much, are "sports"; for the only permanent discounting of the future
is that which is projected from the elevation of the past.

The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim
at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made
social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the
vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see
over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which,
to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this
school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the
appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle,
Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone
have set guide-posts to history,