460 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



presence of the creative faculty to be regarded as itself an abnormal 

 excrescence in the human mind ? Or is it that the possession and 

 fruition of the faculty are apt to be attended with circumstances which 

 are injurious to perfect mental well-being? 



In order to understand the precise relation between two things, 

 we ought to know all about the nature and causes of each. But this 

 we are very far from knowing in the present case. Science has, no 

 doubt, done much to clear up the ancient mystery of madness. We 

 now know that it has a perfectly natural origin, and we understand 

 a good deal respecting the more conspicuous agencies, psychical and 

 physical, predisposing and exciting, which bring about the malady. 

 Yet so intricate is the subject, so complex and subtile the influences 

 which may conspire to just disturb the mental balance, that in many 

 cases, even with a full knowledge of an individual and his antecedents, 

 the most skillful expert finds himself unable to give a complete and 

 exhaustive explanation of the phenomenon. 



With respect to genius the case is much worse. We may have a 

 clearer intuition of its organic composition than the ancients ; we may 

 be able better than they to describe in psychological terms the essen- 

 tial qualities of the original and creative mind. But we have hardly 

 advanced a stej) with respect to a knowledge of its genesis and ante- 

 cedents. We do, no doubt, know some little about its family history. 

 Mr. Galton, with his characteristic skill in striking out new paths of 

 experimental research, has brought to light a number of interesting 

 facts with respect to the hereditary transmission of high intellectual 

 endowments. But these researches supply no answer to the supremely 

 interesting question, How does the light of genius happen to flash out 

 in this particular family at this precise moment ? A preparation there 

 may be, as Goethe somewhere hints, in the patient building up by the 

 family of sterling intellectual and moral virtues. But this is hardly 

 the beginning of an explanation. How much the better are we able 

 to comprehend Carlyle's wondrous gift of spiritual clairvoyance for 

 knowing that he came of a thoroughly sound stock, having more than 

 the average, it may be, of Northern shrewdness ? To trace the family 

 characteristics in a great man is one thing, to explain the genius which 

 ennobles and immortalizes these is another.* 



In the present state of our knowledge, then, genius must be looked 

 upon as the most signal and impressive manifestation of that tendency 

 of Nature to variation and individuation in her organic formations 

 which modern science is compelled to retain among its unexplained 

 facts. Why we have a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, a Goethe here 



* Much the same applies to what M. Taine and others hare said about the larger prepa- 

 ration of the original teacher and the artist by the traditions of the community and the 

 spirit of the age. See, for a careful treatment of the whole question of the antecedents 

 of genius, an article by M. H. Joly, " Psychologie des Grands Ilommes" (III) in the " Re- 

 vue Philosophique," August, 1882. 



