450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the more scientific mind of Aristotle it appeared certain (according to 

 Seneca) that there was no great intellect {magnum ingenium) without 

 some mixture of madness {dementias). 



It must be remembered, however, that in the eyes of the ancients 

 genius was hardly degraded by this companionship with madness. 

 Men had not yet begun to look on insanity as one of the most pitiable 

 of maladies. So far from this, it was a common idea that the insane 

 were themselves inspired by the action of deity. We have a striking 

 illustration of the absence even among the educated Greeks of the mod- 

 ern feeling toward madness in the fact that Plato was able to argue, 

 with no discoverable trace of his playful irony, that certain sorts of 

 madness are to be esteemed a good rather than an evil.* 



The influence of Christianity and of the Church served at first to 

 brand mental derangement with the mark of degradation. The doc- 

 trine of possession now assumed a distinctly repellent form by the in- 

 troduction of the Oriental idea of an evil spirit taking captive the 

 human frame and using it as an instrument of its foul purposes. The 

 full development of this idea of demoniacal possession in the middle 

 ages led, as we know, to many cruelties. And, though Christianity 

 showed its humane side in making provision for the insane by asylums, 

 the treatment of mental disease during this period was, on the whole, 

 marked by much harshness. f 



This debasement of the idea of madness had, however, no appre- 

 ciable effect in dissolving the companionship of the two ideas in popu- 

 lar thought. For the attitude of the Church was, for the most part, 

 hostile to new ideas, and so to men of original power. In sooth, we 

 know that they were again and again branded as heretics, and as 

 wicked men possessed by the devil. And thus genius was attached to 

 insanity by a new bond of kinship. 



The transition to the modern period introduces us to a new concep- 

 tion both of genius and of insanity. The impulse of inquisitiveness, 

 the delight in new ideas, aided by the historical spirit with its deep 

 sense of indebtedness to the past, have led the later world to extol 

 intellectual greatness. We have learned to see in it the highest 

 product of Nature's organic energy, the last and greatest miracle 

 of evolution. On the other hand, the modern mind has ceased 

 to see in insanity a supernatural agency, and in assimilating it to 

 other forms of disease has taken up a humane and helpful attitude 

 toward it. 



Such a change of view might seem at first to necessitate a sharp 

 severance of the new ideas. For, while it places genius at the apex of 



* " Phaedrus," he. cit. Mr. Lecky points out that the Greeks had no asylums for the 

 insane (" History of European Morals," vol. ii, p. 90). On the other hand, Dr. Maudsley 

 tells us that Greek scientific opinion on the subject was an anticipation of modern ideas 

 (" Responsibility in Mental Disease," p. 6). 



\ See Lecky, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 92, etc. ; cf. Maudsley, op. cit., p. 10. 



