, as applied to them, when historically these men will hardly be
discernible.
But all the figures large enough to fill history's perspective always
have been and always will be geniuses--men in whom the energy, the
thought, the imagination, the power of hundreds of men are
concentrated. Let us not deceive ourselves, and reap misery and
disappointment by thinking that we can, by any effort, equal them.
Alexander, Caesar, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Washington, Darwin,
Goethe, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Pasteur, Edison, Plato, Rhodes, Ito,
Diaz, Peter the Great--we cannot explain these phenomena of human
intellect and character except by the word genius.
All our toil and patience and everything cannot seat us in the high
places of these princes of Nature. "Who, by taking thought, can add a
cubit to his stature?" (The Bible again, you see; we cannot get away
from the Bible.)
But these men never knew that they were geniuses. They would have
known it undoubtedly if they had stopped to think about it. But they
were too busy with their task. A genius never thinks about his powers,
any more than an eagle is concerned about the method of his royal
flight from the mountain crag.
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