THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 317 



pear about us. First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from 

 a social point of view, because lie varies too much on the side of 

 defect. He shows from infancy that he is unable to enter into 

 the social heritage because ho is unable to learn to do social 

 things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society 

 pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away 

 in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced lunatic ; he 

 varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social 

 relationships which society requires of each individual. Either 

 he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of 

 some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing who wan- 

 ders among us like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. 

 He is not a factor in social life ; he has not come into the inher- 

 itance. 



Then there is the extraordinary class of people whom we may 

 describe by a stronger term than those already employed. We 

 find not only the unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom so- 

 ciety selects with pity in its heart; but there are also the anti- 

 social, the class whom we usually designate as criminals. These 

 persons, like the others, are variations; but they seem to be 

 variations in quite another way. They do not represent lack on 

 the intellectual side always or alone, but on the moral side, on 

 the social side, as such — for morality is in its origin and practical 

 bearings a social thing. The least we can say of the criminals is 

 that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to violate the 

 rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the general secu- 

 rity of men taken together in the enjoyment of the social her- 

 itage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of de- 

 struction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from 

 generation to generation by 3 ust this process of social inheritance. 

 So society says to the criminal also, "You must perish." We 

 kill off the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform 

 the rest. They too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the 

 past. 



So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. 

 The instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some in- 

 sight into the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, 

 and the way he comes to live it. 



n. 



Passing on to take up the second of the informal topics sug- 

 gested, we have to find the best description that we can of the 

 social man — the one who is fitted for the social life. This ques- 

 tion concerns the process by which any one of us comes into the 

 wealth of relationships which the social life represents. For to 

 say that a man does this is in itself to say that he is the man so- 



