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    peculiar degree * what implies no mental power at all , requires to be sure no genius . But can this be said of the conviction which comes by the comparison and appreciation of numerous and scattered proofs ? Can it , above all , be said of the knowledge of supersensual things , of man ' s mental and moral nature , where the appeal is to internal

    consciousness and self-observation , or to the experience of our common life interpreted by means of the key which self-knowledge alone can supply ? The most important phenomena of human nature cannot even be conceived , except by a mind which has actively studied itself . Believed they may be , but as a blind

    man believes the existence and properties of colour . To know these truths is always to discover them . Everyone , I suppose , of adult years , who has any capacity of knowledge , can remember the impression which he experienced when he discovered some truths which he thought he had known for years before . He had only

    believed them ; they were not the fruits of his own consciousness , or of his own observation ; he had taken them upon trust , or he had taken upon trust the premises from which they were inferred . If he had happened to forget them , they had been lost altogether ; whereas the truths which we know we can discover again and again ad libitum .

    It is with truths of this order as with the ascent of a mountain . Every person who climbs Mont Blanc exerts the same identical muscles as the first man who reached the summit ; all that the first climber can do is to encourage the others and lend them a helping hand . What he has partly saved them the necessity of , is courage : it requires less hardihood to attempt to do what somebody has done before . It is an advantage also to have some one to point out the way and stop us when we are going wrong .

    Though one man cannot teach another , one man may suggest to another . I may be indebted to my predecessor for setting my own faculties to work ; for hinting to me what questions to ask myself , and in what order ; but it is not given to one man to answer those questions for another . Each person ' s own reason must work upon the materials afforded by that same person ' s own experience . Knowledge comes only from within ; all that comes from without is but questioning , or else it is mere authority .

    Now , the capacity of extracting the knowledge of general truth from our own consciousness , whether it be by simple observation , "b y that kind of self-observation which is called imagination , or by a more complicated process of analysis and induction , is originality ; and where truth is the result , whoever says Originality

    says Genius . The man of the greatest philosophic genius does no more than this , evinces no higher faculty ; whoever thinks at all , thinks to that extent , originally . Whoever knows anything of his own knowledge , not immediately obvious to the senses , manifests more or less of the same faculty which made a Newton or a Locke ,

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    652 On Genius .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 652, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/4/