stands to mere
learning as the words to the music in a song. A man of learning is a
man who has learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we
learn something which the genius has learned from nobody. Great minds,
of which there is scarcely one in a hundred millions, are thus the
lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in
the boundless sea of monstrous error and bewilderment.

And so the simple man of learning, in the strict sense of the
word--the ordinary professor, for instance--looks upon the genius much
as we look upon a hare, which is good to eat after it has been killed
and dressed up. So long as it is alive, it is only good to shoot at.

He who wishes to experience gratitude from his contemporaries, must
adjust his pace to theirs. But great things are never produced in
this way. And he who wants to do great things must direct his gaze
to posterity, and in firm confidence elaborate his work for coming
generations. No doubt, the result may be that he will remain quite
unknown to his contemporaries, and comparable to a man who, compelled
to spend his life upon a lonely island, with great effort sets up a
monument there, to transmit to future sea-farers the knowledge of his
existence. If he thinks it a hard fate, let him console himself with
the reflection that the ordinary man who lives for practical aims
only, often suffers a like fate, without having any compensation to
hope for; inasmuch as he may, under favorable conditions, spend a life
of material production, earning, buying, building, fertilizing,
laying out, founding, establishing, beautifying with daily effort
and unflagging zeal, and all the time think that he is working for
himself; and yet in the end it is his descendants who reap the benefit
of it all, and sometimes not even his descendants. It is the same with
the man of genius; he, too, hopes for his reward and for honor at
least; and at last finds that he has worked for posterity alone. Both,
to be sure, have inherited a great deal from their ancestors.

The compensation I have mentioned as the privilege of genius lies, not
in what it is to others, but in what it is to itself. What man has in
any real sense lived more than he whose moments of thought make their
echoes heard through the tumult of centuries? Perhaps, after all, it
would be the best thing for a genius to attain undisturbed possession
of himself, by spending his life in enjoying the pleasure of his