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    knew something ? The question is , how he is to know it . There is one way ; and nobody has ever hit upon more than one—by

    discovery . There is a language very generally current in the world s which implies that knowledge can be vicarious ; that when a truth has become known to any one , all who follow have nothing to do but passively to receive it ; as if one man , by reading or listening , could transport another man ' s knowledge ready manufactured into his own skull . As well might he try the experiment upon

    another man ' s eyesight . Those who have no eyesight of their own , or who are so placed that they cannot conveniently use it , must "believe upon trust ; they cannot know , A man who knows may tell me what he knows , as far as words go , and I may learn to parrot it after him ; but if I would knota it , I must place my mind in the same state in which he has placed his ; I must make the thought my own thought ; I must verify the fact by my own observation , or by interrogating my own consciousness .

    The exceptions and qualifications with which this doctrine must be taken , and which are more apparent than real , will readily present themselves . For example , it will suggest itself at once that the truth of which I am now speaking is general truth . To know an individual fact may be no exercise of mind at all ;

    merely an exercise of the senses . The sole exercise of mind may have been in' bringing the fact sufficiently close for the senses to judge of it ; and that merit may be peculiar to the first discoverer : there may be talent in finding where the thief is hid , but none at all in being able to see him when found . The same observation applies in a less degree to some general truths . To know a general truth is , indeed , always an operation of the mind : but some physical truths may be brought to the test of sensation

    by an experiment so simple , and the conclusiveness of which is so immediately apparent , that the trifling degree of mental power implied in drawing the proper inference from it , is altogether eclipsed by the ingenuity which contrived the experiment , and the sagacious forecast of an undiscovered truth which set that ingenuity to work : qualities , the place of which may now be supplied by mere imitation .

    So , again , in a case of mere reasoning- from assumed premises , as , for instance , in mathematics , the process bears so strong an analogy to a merely mechanical operation , that the first discoverer alone has any real difficulty to contend against ; the second may follow the first with very little besides patience

    and continued attention . But these seeming exceptions do not trench in the least upon the principle which I have ventured to lay dcfwti . If the first discovery alone requires genius , it is because the first discovery alone requires any but the simplest and most commonplace exercise of thought . Though genius be no peculiar mental power , but only mental power possessed in a

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    On Genius . # & 1

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• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 651, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/3/