GENIUS AND INSANITY. 453 



fits, if authentic, might be said perhaps to illustrate the border-line 

 between a normal and an abnormal condition of mind. A more dis- 

 tinctly pathological case is that of Beethoven, who could not be made 

 to understand why his standing in his night attire at an open window 

 should attract the irreverent notice of the street boys. For in this 

 case we have a temporary incapacity to perceive exterior objects and 

 their relations ; and a deeper incapacity of a like nature clearly shows 

 itself in poor Johnson's standing before the town clock vainly trying 

 to make out the hour. 



This same aloofness of mind from the external world betrays itself 

 in many of the eccentric habits attributed to men and women of 

 genius. Here, again, Johnson serves as a good instance. His incon- 

 venient habit of suddenly breaking out with scraps of the Lord's 

 Prayer in a fashionable assembly marks a distinctly dangerous drift- 

 ing away of the inner life from the firm anchorage of external 

 fact. 



In the cases just considered we have to do with a kind of mental 

 blindness to outer circumstances. A further advance along the line 

 of intellectual degeneration is seen in the persistence of vivid ideas, 

 commonly anticipations of evil of some kind, which have no basis in 

 external reality. Johnson's dislike to particular alleys in his London 

 walks, and Madame de Stael's bizarre idea that she would suffer from 

 cold when buried, may be taken as examples of these painful delusions 

 or idees fixes. A more serious stage of such delusions is seen in the 

 case of Pascal, who is said to have been haunted by the fear of a gulf 

 yawning just in front of him, which sometimes became so overmaster- 

 ing that he had to be fastened by a chain to keep him from leaping 

 forward. 



It is plain that in this last case we touch on the confines of sense- 

 illusion. It is probable that hallucinations may occur as very rare 

 experiences in the case of normal and healthy minds. Yet, though not 

 confined to states of insanity, illusions of the senses are commonly, if 

 not always, indicative of at least a temporary disturbance of the 

 psycho-physical organism. And we have on record a considerable 

 number of instances of eminent men who were subject to these decep- 

 tions. It is not only the religious recluse, with his ill-nourished body, 

 and his persistent withdrawal from the corrective touch of outer things, 

 who experiences them. Luther was their victim as well as Loyola. 

 Auditory hallucinations that is, the hearing of imaginary voices 

 appear to have occurred to Malebranche and Descartes, as they cer- 

 tainly did to Johnson. The instances of visual hallucinations are per- 

 haps more numerous still. Pope, Johnson, Byron, Shelley, are said to 

 have had their visions. Even so strong and well-balanced a mind as 

 Goethe was not exempted. Nor has the active life of the soldier 

 always proved a safeguard. The stories of the prognostic visions of 

 Brutus and other generals of the old world are well known. Among 



