was recorded, posterity revives it in regretful sentences on
his tomb.

The two things to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of
the phenomenally great man--I mean on the side of our means of
accounting for him in reasonable terms--are these: first, his
intellectual originality; and, second, the sanity of his judgment. And
it is the variations in this second sort of endowment which give the
ground which various writers have for the one-sided views now current
in popular literature.

We are told, on the one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on
another hand, that he is to be classed with those of "insane" temper;
and yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to
outrage society by performing criminal acts. All these so-called
theories rely upon facts--so far as they have any facts to rest
upon--which, if space permitted, we might readily estimate from our
present point of view. In so far as a really great man busies himself
mainly with things that are objective, which are socially and morally
neutral--such as electricity, natural history, mechanical theory, with
the applications of these--of course, the mental capacity which he
possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in these things may
lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined relationships
which are had in view by the writer in quest for degeneracy. It will
still be admitted, however, by those who are conversant with the
history of science, that the greatest scientific geniuses have been
men of profound quietness of life and normal social development. It is
to the literary and artistic genius that the seeker after abnormality
has to turn; and in this field, again, the facts serve to show their
own meaning.

As a general rule, these artistic prodigies do not represent the union
of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often
distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their
insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of
emotional experience which crystallize into single creations of art.
They depend upon "inspiration"--a word which is responsible for much
of the overrating of such men, and for a good many of their illusions.
Not that they do not perform great feats in the several spheres in
which their several "inspirations" come; but with it all they often
present the sort of unbalance and fragmentary intellectual endowment
which allies them, in particula