All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems. Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well what they mean by it.
Others have suggested that the “soul” is only a beautiful empty word, which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about. Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.
The scientific man ranks, as I have already said, and as I shall presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the scientific man. Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in this preference? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of science, as such, can say nothing? Can he peer into depths where the man of science is blind?
The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute genius (a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could not have a vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its perfect memory would be independent of time. To comprehend anything one must have within one something similar. A man notices, understands, and comprehends only those things with which he has some kinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious, most continuous, and most individual ego. The ego is the central point, the unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness.
The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the centre of infinite space; the great man contains the whole universe within himself; genius is the living microcosm. He is not an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of elements; the argument in chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and things must not be taken in that sense; he is everything. In him and through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of science. For the genius the ego is the all, lives as the all; the genius sees nature and all existences as whole; the relations of things flash on him intuitively; he has not to build bridges of stones between them. And so the genius cannot be an empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms and molecules.
It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his genius. That is why his views are more valuable than those of all others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full consciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have significance, all things are symbolical.
For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases through the walls of the capillaries; the blue of the sky is more than the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light; snakes are not merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made, if everything that has been done by the following: Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Müller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucydides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. The greatest poly-historian, on the contrary, does nothing but add branch to branch and yet creates no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher.
The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself. Although these remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of genius, although the occurrence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition of genius:
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine spark in mankind.
The great idea of the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance—although traces of the idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle—appears to be quite disregarded by modern thinkers since the death of Leibnitz. It has hitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative of those masters of men.
But the incongruity is only apparent. All mankind have some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to everything: his idea of the “whole” is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants or animals. They are limited, they do not know the whole but only one element; they do not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the “starry vault” and “the moral law.” For the latter originates in the soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself: the starry heavens and the moral law are fundamentally one and the same. The universalism of
