who sit in judgment on him. He
must judge his own thoughts therefore as they do. And his own proper
estimate of things and thoughts, his relative sense of fitness, gets
application, by a direct law of his own mental processes, to himself
and to his own creations. The limitations which, in the judgment of
society, his variations must not overstep, are set by his own
judgment also. If the man in question have thoughts which are
socially true, _he must himself know that they are true_. So we reach
a conclusion regarding the selection of the particular thoughts which
the genius may have: _he and society must agree in regard to the
fitness of them_, although in particular cases this agreement ceases
to be the emphatic thing. The essential thing comes to be the
reflection of the social standard in the thinker's own judgment; _the
thoughts thought must always be critically judged by the thinker
himself; and for the most part his judgment is at once also the social
judgment_. This may be illustrated further.

Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and withal no sense of
fitness--none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go
through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity
of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater
admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them
with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But
such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and
that are harmless, we smile and let him talk; but if his lack of
judgment extend to things of grave import, or be accompanied by equal
illusions regarding himself and society in other relationships, then
we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane.
Two of the commonest forms of such impairment of judgment are seen in
the victims of "fixed ideas" on the one hand, and the _exaltes_ on the
other. These men have no true sense of values, no way of selecting the
fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some
transcendently true and original thought were to flit through the
diseased mind of such a one, it would go as it came, and the world
would wait for a man with a sense of fitness to arise and rediscover
it. The other class, the _exaltes_, are somewhat the reverse; the
illusion of personal greatness is so strong that their thoughts seem
to them infallible and their persons divine.

Men of such perversions o