The greatest largess to the mind which higher thought brings is the
conviction of a transcendent existence. Though we do not know the
nature of this existence, except obscurely, we are assured of its
reality and of its immanence, through a growing sense that all that
happens to us is simply our relation to it.
In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of this
transcendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the help
afforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by the
flesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit not
to attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of the
world-order now and then vouchsafed. For the genius stands midway
between man and Beyond-man: in Nietzsche's phrase, "Man is a bridge
and not a goal."
Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the
most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. According
to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of
its _perceptions_. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talent
thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius
beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a
more profound perception of the world which lies before them also,
in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, and
consequently in greater purity and distinctness." This profounder
perception arises from his detachment: his intellect has to a
certain extent freed itself from the service of his will, and leads
an independent life. So long as the intellect is in the service of
the will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist for
the intellect; but along with this partial severance of the two
there comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, a
complex of relationships not reproducible in _linear_ thought, for
the mind is oriented simultaneously in _many_ different directions.
Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is a
classic example. He is reported to have said of his manner of
composing, "I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance ...
in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as
succession--the way it comes later--but all at once, as it were. It
is a rare feast! all the inventing and making goes on in me as in a
beautiful strong dream."