Birikme ve sıçrama düşüncesi Hegel'i akla getiriyor ama burada sıçrama, yeni olanın başlangıcını değil, eski olanın meyvesini meydana getiriyor. Büyük insanı içinde bulunduğu çağ değil, geçmiş olan çağ ortaya çıkarıyor.
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My Idea of Genius.—Great men, like periods of greatness, are explosives storing up immense energy; historically and physiologically speaking, their precondition is always that they be collected, accumulated, saved, and preserved for over a long period—that there be a long period without explosions.* Once the tension in the mass becomes too great, then the most accidental stimulus is enough to bring ‘genius’, ‘action’, a great destiny into the world. What, then, do the environment, the age, the ‘spirit of the age’, ‘public opinion’ have to do with it!—Take the case of Napoleon. Revolutionary France, and pre-Revolutionary France even more so, would have produced the opposite type to Napoleon: indeed it did produce it. And because Napoleon was different, the heir to a stronger, longer-lasting, older civilization than the one which was going to pieces and up in smoke in France, he became master there—he was the sole master there. Great people are necessary, the age in which they appear is incidental; if they almost always become master of it, then this is simply because they are stronger and older, and result from a longer period of accumulation. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or old and young: the age is always comparatively much younger, thinner, more immature, more insecure, more childish.—The fact that people think very differently about this in France today (in Germany, too: but that means nothing), the fact that the theory of milieu,* a real neurotics’ theory, has become sacrosanct and almost