The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with
the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to
mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men
at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can
advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word
guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound,
and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The
solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a
common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience
intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius
constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it
lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it
expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its
signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in
its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall
finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are
consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the
ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and
expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within
them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but
what we shall at last understand.
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