2. Talent and Genius. But one must be careful not
to confuse talent and genius. The qualities with which
the term “genius” has been invested ever since the
mid-eighteenth century, such as spontaneity, out-
standing originality, and exceptional creativity were
not implied in the Latin ingenium and the Italian
ingegno, meaning natural disposition, i.e., talent. The
Elizabethans still employed the term ingenium, or its
counterpart at that time, “wit.” In the course of the
seventeenth century the use of the term genius in-
creased and gradually supplanted “wit,” absorbing
ingenium in the process (Kaufman, 1926). But before
the end of the seventeenth century Sir William Temple
distingushed between “high flights of wit” and “the
pure native force or spirit of genius.” Nonetheless
talent and genius remained synonyms for a considerable
time. It was only after the men of the German “Storm
and Stress” had aggressively turned their attention to
the comparatively loose English ideas on genius “that
the distinction between genius and talent... was
sharpened into the strong antithesis which is now uni-
versally current...” (Murray, New English Diction-
ary, IV). Thus we see, about a hundred years after Sir
William Temple's time, genius and talent taking on
their present-day meanings. William Jackson in
Whether Genius be born or acquired (1798) declared
that “a man of genius must have talents, but talents
are possessed by many without it [i.e., genius]....
Genius is inventive, a creation of something not before
existing; to which talents make no pretence...”
(Kaufman, 1926). Again, about a hundred years later,
the poet James Russell Lowell laid down epigrammat-
ically: “Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius
is that in whose power a man is.”
Despite such semantic distinctions the term “talent”
has been used in the preceding paragraph to charac-
terize the pre-eighteenth-century concept of inborn
genius, because during the Renaissance the accretion
of distinct ideas defining the modern term genius were
still lacking. In the following sections these charac-
teristics will be briefly discussed, one by one.
