Reynolds evidently had little faith in original genius. Addressing Royal Academy students, he said[a]:
You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply the deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labour; nothing is to be obtained without it.... I will venture to assert that assiduity unabated by difficulty, and a disposition eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit, will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers.
On another occasion Reynolds observed of Michelangelo[]:
He appears not to have had the least conception that his art was to be acquired by any other means than great labour; and yet he of all men that ever lived, might make the greatest pretensions to the efficacy of native genius and inspiration.
Gibbon said that Reynolds agreed with Dr. Johnson in denying all original genius, any natural propensity of the mind to one art or science rather than another.[c] Hogarth also agreed with Reynolds, for he describes genius as "nothing but labour and diligence."
Croce says that genius has a quantitative and not a qualitative signification, but he offers no demonstration.[d] Evidently he is mistaken, for the signification is both quantitative and qualitative. It is true that what a Phidias, or a Raphael, or a Beethoven puts together is a sum of small beauties, any one of which may be equalled by another man, but he does more than represent a number of beauties, for he combines these into a beautiful whole which is superior in quality and cannot be estimated quantitatively. We may possibly call Darwin a genius because of the large number of facts he ascertained, and the correct inferences he drew from them, but we particularly apply the term to him by reason of the general result of all these facts and inferences, this result being qualitative and not quantitative. Croce probably took his dictum from Schopenhauer, who, however, represented degrees of quality as quantitative,[e] which is of course confusing the issue.
[a] Reynolds's Second Discourse.
[] His Fifth Discourse.
[c] Gibbon's Memoirs of my Life and Writings.
[d] Æsthetic.