Caxtoniana - 1875 Author:Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 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: ESSAY V. ON INTELLECTUAL CONDUCT AS DISTINCT FROM MORAL: THE "SUPERIOR MAN." Not unfrequently we find the world according high position to some man in whom... more » we recognise no merits commensurate with that superiority which wo are called upon to confess; no just claims to unwonted deference, whether in majestic genius or heroic virtue; no titles even to that conventional homage which civilised societies have agreed to render to patrician ancestry or to plebeian wealth. The moral character, the mental attributes, of this Superior Man, adorned by no pomp of heraldic blazonry, no profusion of costly gilding, seem to us passably mediocre; yet mediocrity, so wont to be envious, acknowledges his eminence, and sets him up as an authority. He is considered more safe than genius; more practical than virtue. Princes, orators, authors, yield to his mysterious ascendancy. Ho imposes himself on gods and men, quiet and inexorable as the Necessity of the Greek poets. Why or wherefore the Olympians should take for granted his right to the place he assumes, we know not, we humbler mortals; but wo yield, where they yield;—idle to contend against Necessity. Yet there is a cause for every effect; and a cause there must be for the superiority of this Superior Man, in whom there is nothing astonishing except his success. Examined closely, the cause may be found in this: True that his intellectual stature is no higher than ours, but, whether from art or from nature, it has got a portlier demeanour and a statelier gait. We do not measure its inches—we are so struck by the way it carries itself. In a word, there is an intellectual conduct as well as a moral conduct; and as a fellow-mortal, in whom the gross proportions of good or evil are much about the average, may so conduct himself morally, ...« less