superable difficulty in the process of social assimilation
would show themselves early. Here it is that the actual conflict
comes--the struggle between impulse and social restraint. Many a
genius owes the redemption of his intellectual gifts to legitimate
social uses to the victory gained by a teacher and the discipline
learned through obedience. And thus it is also that many who give
promise of great distinction in early life fail to achieve it. They
run off after a phantom, and society pronounces them mad. In their
case the personal factor has overcome the social factor; they have
failed in the lessons they should have learned, their own
self-criticism is undisciplined, and they miss the mark.

These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One
of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and
the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes
the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean.
Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest
influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It
is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius
should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The
fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct
society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men
up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal
praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of
fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar
judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as
his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of
their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his
single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be
true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought,
though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either
in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the
man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it.
But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer.

This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last
fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the
intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may
the social qualifications of men