elaborated at his writing-table in his library from all the books that have been written; it is something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in that of the philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man possesses, the conviction of his possession of an "I" or soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and comprehends it.
From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul.
And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that "Thus spake Zarathustra" was the greatest book in the world.
There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are modest. They are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should never be confused although this is often done. A man has just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation, and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the great man must occasionally
