. There are men who find it their meat
to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the
lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in
planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by
instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They
gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the
acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They
seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not
need to learn the lessons of the social environment.

Now, such persons undoubtedly represent a variation toward
suggestibility of the most delicate and singular kind. They surpass
the teachers from whom they learn. It is hard to say that they "learn
to judge by the judgments of society." They so judge without seeming
to learn, yet they differ from the man whose eccentricities forbid him
to learn through the discipline of society. The two are opposite
extremes of variation; that seems to me the only possible construction
of them. It is the difference between the ice boat which travels
faster than the wind and the skater who braves the wind and battles
up-current in it. The latter is soon beaten by the opposition; the
former outruns its ally. The crank, the eccentric, the enthusiast--all
these run counter to sane social judgment; but the genius leads
society to his own point of view, and interprets the social movement
so accurately, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that
his very singularity gives greater relief to his inspiration.

Now let a man combine with this insight--this extraordinary sanity of
social judgment--the power of great inventive and constructive
thought, and then, at last, we have our genius, our hero, and one that
we well may worship! To great thought he adds balance; to originality,
judgment. This is the man to start the world movements if we want a
single man to start them. For as he thinks profoundly, so he
discriminates his thoughts justly, and assigns them values. His
fellows judge with him, or learn to judge after him, and they lend to
him the motive forces of success--enthusiasm, reward. He may wait for
recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he may be muzzled for
thinking his thoughts, he may die and with him the truth to which he
gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to
traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his
thought