Effects were here again mistaken for causes.

Could Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley, Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as having been such from _accident_, had not first received the indelible mint-stamp struck by the hand of Nature, and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to call the _predisposition_ of genius?
The _accidents_ so triumphantly held forth, which are imagined to have created the genius of these men, have occurred to a thousand who have run the same career; but how does it happen that the multitude remain a multitude, and the man of genius arrives alone at the goal?
This theory, which long dazzled its beholders, was in time found to stand in contradiction with itself, and perpetually with their own experience.
Reynolds pared down his decision in the progress of his lectures, often wavered, often altered, and grew more confused as he lived longer to look about him.[A] The infirm votaries of the new philosophy, with all their sources of genius open before them, went on multiplying mediocrity, while inherent genius, true to nature, still continued rare in its solitary independence.
[Footnote A: I transcribe the last opinions of Mr.Edgeworth.

"As to original genius, and the effect of education in forming taste or directing talent, the last revisal of his opinions was given by himself, in the introduction to the second edition of 'Professional Education.' He was strengthened in his belief, that many of the great differences of intellect which appear in men, depend more upon the early cultivating the habit of attention than upon any disparity between the powers of one individual and another.

Perhaps, he latterly allowed that there is more difference than he had formerly admitted between the _natural powers_ of different persons; but not so great as is generally supposed."-- _Edgeworth's Memoirs_, ii.

388.] Others have strenuously denied that we are born with any peculiar species of mind, and resolve the mysterious problem into _capacity_, of which men only differ in the degree.