The best that society can do to assist
them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.
For the rest it is the particular business of the exceptional individual
to impose himself on the public; and the necessity he is under of
creating his own following may prove to be helpful to him as his own
exceptional achievements are to his followers. The fact that he is
obliged to make a public instead of finding one ready-made, or instead
of being able by the subsidy of a prince to dispense with one--this
necessity will in the long run tend to keep his work vital and human.
The danger which every peculiarly able individual specialist runs is
that of overestimating the value of his own purpose and achievements,
and so of establishing a false and delusive relation between his own
world and the larger world of human affairs and interests. Such a danger
cannot be properly checked by the conscious moral and intellectual
education of the individual, because when he is filled too full of
amiable intentions and ideas, he is by way of attenuating his individual
impulse and power.
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