comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible persons.
All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems. Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well what they mean by it.
Others have suggested that the "soul" is only a beautiful empty word, which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about. Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.
The scientific man ranks, as I have already said, and as I shall presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the scientific man. Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in this preference? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of science, as such, can say nothing? Can he peer into depths where the man of science is blind?
The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute genius (a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could not have a vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its
