The quality of mind known as genius involves, in connection with the reasoning faculties, the special exercise of imagination in its higher creative or constructive forms; and in understanding this faculty we have an insight into the marvelous nature of genius.
It may be said that imagination is that faculty which, in its lower or constructive form, works within the limits of recollection, and transforms the materials of sense-experience into pictures of thought, and recombines them into forms of greater beauty and usefulness, while in its higher or creative form it distills therefrom truths which reason has not yet discerned, and idealizes beauties and excellences which excite our admiration and exalt our emotions.
When thought symbolizes to the mind "the forms of things unknown," it is because the imagination—leaping beyond the bounds of sensory perception—gathers from the infinitudes of unrevealed realities new truths, and thereby "gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name." It is thus that the intellect is able to extend the horizon of knowledge, and obtain material for the workshops of the brain.
Imagination, however bold may be its flight, is, nevertheless, under the restraining influence of reason, and performs its wondrous work along true parallels of thought. Its ideals are not mere symbols of myths and fleeting shadows, but ideals which are the embodiments of eternal truths. Thus, by its sovereignty in realms where Ariadne's thread is lost from view, the imagination constructs its empire, and gives by its own methods new revelations of truth, thereby "converting all nature into the rhetoric of thought."
This, then, is the special mind-quality—the "vision and the faculty divine"—which constitutes the power of genius.
In the attempt, not to define genius, but to explain the order of its succession, Mr. Galton was led to "conclude that each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow," and that native endowments of mind are of themselves quite sufficient to enable an individual to become "eminent" or even "illustrious."
That there is a profound principle of truth involved in the question of heredity can not be denied, and that the factor of inheritance is the most essential of any which enters into the complex equation of mind as well as of body, is a well-established fact; but it is not the only factor which determines mental expression, nor can a complete classification of known facts be made from it alone. Heredity explains the existence of a general nervous constitution, a brain-fiber, having definite aptitudes or "organic dispositions," which are transmitted from parent to offspring, securing thereby not only a continuity, but a conservation of psychical as well as of physical properties; but the special way in which this mental aptitude shall show itself is largely dependent upon external influences or an unexplained spontaneity.
Organization limits the influence exerted by environment, while
