444 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ment to the ordinary activities of the life it is born into is not prompted 

 to find new adjustments to suit itself. The organic inhibition of 

 ordinary activities is, necessarily, a highly favorable condition for the 

 development of extraordinary abilities, when these are present in a 

 latent condition. Hence it is that so many men of the highest intellec- 

 tual aptitudes have so often shown the tendency to muscular incoordi- 

 nation and clumsiness which marks idiots, and that even within the 

 intellectual sphere, when straying outside their own province, they 

 have frequently shown a lack of perception wliich placed them on 

 scarcely so high a level as the man of average intelligence. It is not 

 surprising that by means of the idiots savants, the wonderful calcu- 

 lators, the mattoids and 'men of one idea,' and the men whose intel- 

 lectual originality is strictly confined to one field, we may bridge the 

 gulf that divides idiocy from genius. 



Since a basis of organic inaptitude — a condition which in a more 

 marked and unmitigated form we call imbecility — may thus often be 

 traced at the foundation of genius, we must regard it as a more funda- 

 mental fact in the constitution of genius than the undue prevalence 

 of insanity, which is merely a state of mental dissolution, in nearly 

 every case temporarily or permanently abolishing the aptitude for in- 

 tellectual achievement. But it must not, therefore, be hastily concluded 

 that the prevalence of insanity among men of genius is an accidental 

 fact, meaningless or unaccountable. In reality it is a very significant 

 fact. The intense cerebral energy of intellectual creation involves an 

 expenditure of tissue which is not the dissolution of insanity, for waste 

 and repair must here be balanced, but it reveals an instability which 

 may sink into the mere dissolution of insanity, if the balance of waste 

 and repair is lost and the high pressure tension falls out of gear. In- 

 sanity is rather a Nemesis of the peculiar intellectual energy of genius 

 exerted at a prolonged high tension than an essential element in the 

 foundation of genius. But a germinal nervous instability, such as to 

 the ordinary mind simulates some form of insanity, is certainly present 

 from the first in many cases of genius and is certainly of immense 

 value in creating the visions or stimulating the productiveness of men 

 of genius. We have seen how significant a gouty inheritance seems to 

 be. A typical example of this in recent years was presented by Wil- 

 liam Morris, a man of very original genius, of great physical vigor and 

 strength, of immense capacity for work, who was at the same time 

 abnormally restless, very irritable, and liable to random explosions of 

 nervous energy. Morris inherited from his mothers side a peculiarly 

 strong and solid constitution; on his father's side he inherited a 

 neurotic and gouty strain. It is evident that, given the robust consti- 

 tution, the germinal instability furnished by such a morbid element as 

 this — falling far short of insanity — acts as a precious fermentative ele- 



