[Footnote B:  This very Scotch metaphysician, at the instant he lays down this postulate, acknowledges that “Dr. Beattie had talents for a poet, but apparently not for a philosopher.”  It is amusing to learn another result of his ungenial metaphysics.  This sage demonstrates and concludes in these words, “It will therefore be found, with little exception, that a great poet is but an ordinary genius.”  Let this sturdy Scotch metaphysician never approach Pegasus—­he has to fear, not his wings, but his heels.  If some have written on genius with a great deal too much, others have written without any.]

Not that we are bound to demonstrate what our adversaries have failed in proving; we may still remain ignorant of the nature of genius, and yet be convinced that they have not revealed it.  The phenomena of predisposition in the mind are not more obscure and ambiguous than those which have been assigned as the sources of genius in certain individuals.  For is it more difficult to conceive that a person bears in his constitutional disposition a germ of native aptitude which is developing itself to a predominant character of genius, which breaks forth in the temperament and moulds the habits, than to conjecture that these men of genius could not have been such but from accident, or that they differ only in their capacity?

Every class of men of genius has distinct habits; all poets resemble one another, as all painters and all mathematicians.  There is a conformity in the cast of their minds, and the quality of each is distinct from the other, and the very faculty which fits them for one particular pursuit, is just the reverse required for another.  If these are truisms, as they may appear, we need not demonstrate that from which we only wish to draw our conclusion.  Why does this remarkable similarity prevail through the classes of genius?  Because each, in their favourite production, is working with the same appropriate organ.  The poetical eye is early busied with imagery; as early will the reveries of the poetical mind be busied with the passions; as early will the painter’s hand be copying forms and colours; as early will the young musician’s ear wander in the creation of sounds, and the philosopher’s head mature its meditations.  It is then the aptitude of the appropriate organ, however it varies in its character, in which genius seems most concerned, and which is connatural and connate with the individual, and, as it was expressed in old days, is born with him.  There seems no other source of genius; for whenever this has been refused by nature, as it is so often, no theory of genius, neither habit nor education, have ever supplied its want.  To discriminate between the habit and the predisposition is quite impossible; because whenever great genius discovers itself, as it can only do by continuity, it has become a habit with the individual; it is the fatal notion of habit having the power of generating genius, which has so long served to delude the numerous votaries of mediocrity.  Natural or native power is enlarged by art; but the most perfect art has but narrow limits, deprived of natural disposition.