His French pupils, the amusing Helvetius, or Diderot, for they were equally concerned in the paradoxical "L'Esprit," inferred that this blank paper served also as an evidence that men had _an equal aptitude for genius_, just as the blank paper reflects to us whatever characters we trace on it.

This _equality of minds_ gave rise to the same monstrous doctrine in the science of metaphysics which that of another verbal misconception, _the equality of men_, did in that of politics.

The Scottish metaphysicians powerfully combined to illustrate the mechanism of the mind,--an important and a curious truth; for as rules and principles exist in the nature of things, and when discovered are only thence drawn out, genius unconsciously conducts itself by a uniform process; and when this process had been traced, they inferred that what was done by some men, under the influence of fundamental laws which regulate the march of the intellect, must also be in the reach of others, who, in the same circumstances, apply themselves to the same study.

But these metaphysicians resemble anatomists, under whose knife all men are alike.
They know the structure of the bones, the movement of the muscles, and where the connecting ligaments lie! but the invisible principle of life flies from their touch.

It is the practitioner on the living body who studies in every individual that peculiarity of constitution which forms the idiosyncrasy.
Under the influence of such novel theories of genius, JOHNSON defined it as "A Mind of large general powers ACCIDENTALLY determined by some _particular direction_." On this principle we must infer that the reasoning LOCKE, or the arithmetical DE MOIVRE, could have been the musical and fairy SPENSER.[A] This conception of the nature of genius became prevalent.