finds in the depth of his own soul, and
he has the skill to express them in forms of radiant beauty. But all
these secret feelings and desires are in the hearts of other men, who
have not the boldness to tell them nor the ability to embody them
exquisitely. In the life of man, as in nature generally, there is a
perpetual process of exfoliation, as Edward Carpenter calls it, whereby
a latent but striving desire is revealed, and the man of genius is the
stimulus and the incarnation of this exfoliating movement. That is why
every great poet and artist when once his message becomes intelligible,
is acclaimed and adored by the crowd for whom he would only have been an
object of idle wonderment if he had not expressed and glorified
themselves. When the man of genius is too far ahead of his time, he is
rejected, however great his genius may be, because he represents the
individual out of vital relation to his time. A Roger Bacon, for all his
stupendous intellect, is deprived of pen and paper and shut up in a
monastery, because he is undertaking to answer questions which will not
be asked until five centuries after his death. Perhaps the supreme man
of genius is he who, like Virgil, Leonardo, or Shakespeare, has a
message for his own time and a message for all times, a message which is
for ever renewed for every new generation.

The need for insisting on the intimate relations between Socialism and
Individualism has become the more urgent to-day because we are reaching
a stage of civilization in which each tendency is inevitably so pushed
to its full development that a clash is only prevented by the
realization that here we have truly a harmony. Sometimes a matter that
belongs to one sphere is so closely intertwined with a matter that
belongs to the other that it is a very difficult problem how to hold
them separate and allow each its due value.[256]

At times, indeed, it is really very difficult to determine to which
sphere a particular kind of human activity belongs. This is notably the
case as regards education. "Render unto Caesar the things that be
Caesar's, and unto God the things that be God's." But is education among
the things that belong to Caesar, to social organization, or among the
things that belong to God, to the province of the individual's soul?
There is much to be said on both sides. Of late the Socialist tendency
prevails here, and there is a disposition to standardize rigidly an
education so superficial, so