Precocity and Genius

Genius is often precocious. Precocious originality is one of the characteristics of genius, many philosophers affirm that genius consists in an exaggerated development of one faculty at the expense of others.

Dante, when nine years old, wrote a sonnet to Beatrice, Tasso wrote verses at Ten. Pascal and Comte were great thinkers at the age of 13,Fornier at 15,Niebubr at seven. Goethe wrote a story in seven languages when was only at ten.

Victor Hugo composed at 15.Moore translated Anacreon at 13.Mayerbeer,at 5,played on the piano.

Delay in the development of genius may be explained by the absence of circumstances favourable to its bloosming, and by the ignorance of teachers and parents who see mental obtuisity, even idiocy, where there is only the distraction of genius.

Many children who became great men have been regarded at school as bad, but their intelligence soon manifested itself. Gustav Flaubert was the very opposite of a phenomenal child. It was with extreme difficulty that he succeeded in learning to read.

Many eminent men who were acclaimed in later life for their genius were backward in their scholastic career. Einstein himself was considered a poor student in school and failed in the entrance examination for the polytechnicum in Zurich. 

Maharshi  Aurobindo,the spiritual giant could not speak fluent English at the age of 12.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. Where education ends, genius often begins. Gray was asked if he recollected when he first felt that the strong predilection to poetry. He replied that “he believed it was when he began to read Virgil for his own amusement and not in school hours as a task”.

Nevertheless, going through the life span of many eminent persons, who influenced the world, it was rightly said that that the child is the father of man, nothing could be truer than in the case of the genius.