GENIUS AND INSANITY. 447 



Co. all the same. Mr. Spencer had, in reality, very little to do with 

 the edition. For the Introduction, the had taste with which the 

 notes were embellished, and the newspaper quotation describing the 

 doings in a branch of the positivist church in London which Mr. Har- 

 rison does not like, he is not to be held to account. 



For his offense in correcting some injurious misrepresentations in a 

 controversial volume published for the use of a people three thousand 

 miles away, the London " Times " declares that Mr. Spencer has made 

 the amende honorable by destroying the book ; and this is the general 

 English view. The equally general American view is, that this ex- 

 treme proceeding was ridiculous, that it benefited nobody, and gratui- 

 tously deprived many readers in this country of a valuable work on 

 an important subject. It is, at any rate, desirable that the responsi- 

 bility for this result should be fixed where it justly belongs. Mr. 

 Spencer made two proposals to Harrison looking to the preservation 

 of the work, both of which were absolutely fair, but neither of which 

 was accepted. Mr. Spencer would have been justified in making a 

 stand upon either of these propositions, and refusing further conces- 

 sions ; but Mr. Harrison's rejection of his overtures left the matter in 

 so unsatisfactory a shape that nothing remained for Mr. Spencer but 

 to cut the knot by ordering the book suppressed. 



GENIUS AND INSANITY. 



By JAMES SULLY. 



THE problems which have so long perplexed the thoughtful mind 

 in presence of that dark yet fascinating mystery, the nature and 

 origin of genius, have recently propounded themselves with new stress 

 and insistence. Whatever may be said against Mr. Froude's neglect 

 of the pruning-knife in publishing Carlyle's " Journals and Letters," 

 the psychologist at least will be grateful to him for what is certainly 

 an unusually full and direct presentment of the temperament and life 

 of genius. Here we may study the strange lineaments which stamp a 

 family likeness on the selected few in whose souls has burned the genu- 

 ine fire of inspiration. These memoirs disclose with a startling distinct- 

 ness the pathetic as well as the heroic side of the great man. In Car- 

 lyle we see the human spirit in its supreme strength jarred and put 

 out of tune by the suffering incident to preternaturally keen sensi- 

 bilities and an unalterably gloomy temperament. 



In this strange record, too, we find ourselves once more face to 

 face with what is perhaps the most fascinating of the fascinating prob- 

 lems surrounding the subject of intellectual greatness, that of its rela- 

 tion to mental health. Carlyle compels the attentive reader to pro- 

 pound to himself anew the long-standing puzzle, " Is genius something 



