flair and great insight. By way of contrast, there is the conventional form of genius who really abides by the rules—the formal, stated standards— and makes them work. Louis Pasteur is an example of a person who creatively applied the rigors of experimental investigation to unconventional assumptions. His results conclusively demonstrated basic principles of life and disease so convincingly that these replaced age-old myths with knowledge and understanding.

There are also different types of genius in another sense: those who work independently of people and those who get people to work for them. The first type is the artist/inventor. The second is the leader/messiah. The one frames a schema which accurately reflects reality or expresses an aesthetic state. The other offers his followers a schema which answers their needs and motivates them to live for the realization of their beliefs. Both Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler were gifted in being able to articulate what many around them just felt. For whatever purpose it is used, this ability must be recognized as a kind of genius.

It is hardly surprising that the decision to label a particular creative person a crackpot or genius is one of the more arbitrary judgments people presume to make. Of course, since people usually use their own schema as the standard for evaluation, they tend to regard any deviation from expectation with a certain amount of humor or trepidation and interpret it irreverently. The general rule is that a crackpot is someone who makes a concerted effort to find a new way to be stupid, whereas a genius is a crackpot who just happened to be right.

All such arbitrary judgments would be easier to make and there would be much more concurrence in them were we not so amazing in our ability to learn. This is one of those general animal capacities which humans have taken to a dubious extreme. We can learn just about anything. The problem is that we are not limited by reality to learning just what exists or occurs. Our schemas may keep us from learning what is while helping us, by illogical extensions, learn things that are not.

The creative mind which invents new possible relationships among objects or combinations of them may be committing an act of genius or stupidity, depending on whether reality can be brought into conformity with the new ideas. However, that mind will be labeled "Genius" or "Stupid" according to its conformity to the demands and desires of the reference group. The act of reorganizing cognitions in itself is of no particular value, except that it expands our potential for understanding and controlling the environment. Just how efficiently we do this and whether for good or evil depends on our cognitive abilities and the morality of our own conventional standards for evaluation.

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