These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean. Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought, though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it. But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer.
This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may the social qualifications of men. There are men who find it their meat to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not need to learn the lessons of the social environment.