Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these
sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found
devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference,
and is conversant with facts and surfaces; cities and persons; and the
bringing certain things to pass;--the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and
philosophy, men of genius.
Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in
philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the
haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men
who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are
rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as
monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely
more kind.
It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by
the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design--he will presently
undervalue the actual object.
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