tomed to do.

The lower animals perform many intelligent functions much better than
man; for instance, the finding of their way back to the place from
which they came, the recognition of individuals, and so on. In the
same way, there are many occasions in real life to which the genius is
incomparably less equal and fitted than the ordinary man. Nay more:
just as animals never commit a folly in the strict sense of the word,
so the average man is not exposed to folly in the same degree as the
genius.

The average man is wholly relegated to the sphere of _being_; the
genius, on the other hand, lives and moves chiefly in the sphere of
_knowledge_. This gives rise to a twofold distinction. In the first
place, a man can be one thing only, but he may _know_ countless
things, and thereby, to some extent, identify himself with them, by
participating in what Spinoza calls their _esse objectivum_. In the
second place, the world, as I have elsewhere observed, is fine enough
in appearance, but in reality dreadful; for torment is the condition
of all life.

It follows from the first of these distinctions that the life of the
average man is essentially one of the greatest boredom; and thus we
see the rich warring against boredom with as much effort and as little
respite as fall to the poor in their struggle with need and adversity.
And from the second of them it follows that the life of the average
man is overspread with a dull, turbid, uniform gravity; whilst the
brow of genius glows with mirth of a unique character, which, although
he has sorrows of his own more poignant than those of the average man,
nevertheless breaks out afresh, like the sun through clouds. It is
when the genius is overtaken by an affliction which affects others as
well as himself, that this quality in him is most in evidence; for
then he is seen to be like man, who alone can laugh, in comparison
with the beast of the field, which lives out its life grave and dull.

It is the curse of the genius that in the same measure in which others
think him great and worthy of admiration, he thinks them small and
miserable creatures. His whole life long he has to suppress this
opinion; and, as a rule, they suppress theirs as well. Meanwhile, he
is condemned to live in a bleak world, where he meets no equal, as it
were an island where there are no inhabitants but monkeys and parrots.
Moreover, he is always troubled by the illusion that from a distance a
monkey looks lik