[Footnote A:  It is more dangerous to define than to describe:  a dry definition excludes so much, an ardent description at once appeals to our sympathies.  How much more comprehensible our great critic becomes when he nobly describes genius, “as the power of mind that collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert!” And it is this POWER OF MIND, this primary faculty and native aptitude, which we deem may exist separately from education and habit, since these are often found unaccompanied by genius.]

Such theorists deduce the faculty called genius from a variety of exterior or secondary causes:  zealously rejecting the notion that genius may originate in constitutional dispositions, and be only a mode of the individual’s existence, they deny that minds are differently constituted.  Habit and education, being more palpable and visible in their operations, and progressive in the development of the intellectual faculties, have been imagined fully sufficient to make the creative faculty a subject of acquirement.

But when these theorists had discovered the curious fact, that we have owed to accident several men of genius, and when they laid open some sources which influenced genius in its progress, they did not go one step further, they did not inquire whether such sources and such accidents had ever supplied the want of genius in the individual.  Effects were here again mistaken for causes.  Could Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley, Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as having been such from accident, had not first received the indelible mint-stamp struck by the hand of Nature, and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to call the predisposition of genius?  The accidents so triumphantly held forth, which are imagined to have created the genius of these men, have occurred to a thousand who have run the same career; but how does it happen that the multitude remain a multitude, and the man of genius arrives alone at the goal?

This theory, which long dazzled its beholders, was in time found to stand in contradiction with itself, and perpetually with their own experience.  Reynolds pared down his decision in the progress of his lectures, often wavered, often altered, and grew more confused as he lived longer to look about him.[A] The infirm votaries of the new philosophy, with all their sources of genius open before them, went on multiplying mediocrity, while inherent genius, true to nature, still continued rare in its solitary independence.