Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS Most people labour under the delusion that genius only makes its appearance twice or thrice during a generation. It is certainly the fact that a Napoleon, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven, is only born once in a century; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded as unnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more common than is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although it surrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. And nearly everybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversity that is as unconscious as it is criminal. Those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental development of an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinary processes of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of its mind. If children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at an astonishing rate. Give an imaginative child of five or six some simple object, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round it a web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame. Naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to the very motes that float in a sunbeam ; they will spin an Odyssey out of the most trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. Every commonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious and fantastic attributes. When left to observe facts for themselves, they will develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of cramming and caning would ever succeed in driving into them. There are probably few parents who have not been startled, at some period or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an original reflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental developmen...