f judgment are common among us. We all know
the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us
sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his
creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some
eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or
depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in
the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is
the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or
paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so
"visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his
unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's
entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not
the man to produce a world movement.

Most of the men we call "cranks" are of this type. They are
essentially lacking in judgment, and the popular estimate of them is
exactly right.

It is evident, therefore, from this last explanation, that there is a
second direction of variation among men: _variation in their sense of
the truth and value of their own thoughts_, and with them of the
thoughts of others. This is the great limitation which the man of
genius shares with men generally--a limitation in the amount of
variation which he may show in his social judgments, especially as
these variations affect the claim which he makes upon society for
recognition. It is evident that this must be an important factor in
our estimate of the claims of the hero to our worship, especially
since it is the more obscure side of his temperament, and the side
generally overlooked altogether. This let us call, in our further
illustrations, the "social sanity" of the man of genius.

The first indication of the kind of social variation which oversteps
even the degree of indulgence society is willing to accord to the
great thinker is to be found in the effect which education has upon
character. The discipline of social development is, as we have seen,
mainly conducive to the reduction of eccentricities, the levelling off
of personal peculiarities. All who come into the social heritage learn
the same great series of lessons derived from the past, and all get
the sort of judgment required in social life from the common exercises
of the home and school in the formative years of their education. So
we should expect that the greater singularities of disposition which
represent in