Learning how to pay homage. – Men have to learn to pay homage just as they have to learn to feel contempt. Anyone who breaks new paths and has led many people onto new paths discovers with amazement how clumsy and poor those many are at expressing their gratitude; indeed, how seldom gratitude is able to express itself at all. It is as though whenever gratitude wants to speak, something gets caught in her throat so that she just clears her throat and falls silent clearing her throat. The way in which a thinker comes to sense the effects of his thoughts and their reorganizing and unsettling power is almost a comedy; it seems at times as if those who have been affected basically feel insulted and can only express what they take to be their threatened independence through a welter of incivilities. Entire generations are needed to invent merely a polite convention for thanks; and only very late comes that time when even gratitude has acquired a kind of spirit and genius; by then, someone is usually also around to be the great recipient of the gratitude, not only for what good he himself has done, but mostly for what his predecessors have slowly heaped up as a treasure of the highest and best.