Alexander Gerard (1728-95) was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and became the first professor of moral philosophy and logic there in 1753. ‘The success of [his earlier work] An Essay on Taste may have been instrumental in leading Gerard to explore another of the eighteenth century’s seminal abstract nouns, ‘genius’. In 1774, he published An Essay on Genius, a work that is in many ways more important and philosophically innovative than the book on taste by which he is best known. … For Gerard, genius is “the leading faculty of the mind, the grand instrument of all investigation”; it is the mind’s capacity for invention that makes genius the mind’s pre-eminent quality. (Homer is, not surprisingly, cited as the perfect model of genius.) Genius derives from imagination, but the two are not identical: “Genius implies regularity, as well as comprehensiveness of imagination. Regularity arises in a great measure from such a turn of imagination as enables the associating principles, not only to introduce proper ideas, but also to connect the design of the whole with every idea that is introduced”. Gerard’s introduction of the idea of ‘regularity’ into his argument may seem to impose restrictions upon genius, but the discipline of organization and arrangement is necessary to bring to fruition the buds of genius’ (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, Thoemmes Press, 1999).
