648 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



brain. If you will look at the faces of the children and the men 

 and women j^ublished in such a record as the Elmira yearbook, 

 first when they enter the institution, and then six months, twelve 

 months, or eighteen months later, after they have felt the force of 

 self-activity directed to some good end, you will be convinced, I am 

 sure, that Orniuzd has been at work. And this intellectual better- 

 ment of the feeble-minded, and this straightening up of the morally 

 oblique, are the result of definite reactions brought about in the brain 

 tissue, in the tool itself; are organic, and as such are permanent and 

 nonforfeitable. 



What is true at all is true in the extreme. We have taken 

 the extreme at the minus end of humanity; let us take now, some- 

 what more briefly, the extreme at the plus end. Never before, I 

 think, was there such a keen interest as now in the popular and 

 experimental study of the mind. Francis Galton opened the way 

 in such books as Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 

 and Hereditary Genius. There is wide interest in the experimental 

 work of psychologists. Even such morbid books as Lombroso's Man 

 of Genius and Max Nordau's Degeneration attract thousands of 

 readers, as well as the reply that Dr. Hirsch has made in Genius and 

 Degeneration. These studies have concerned themselves quite as 

 much with genius as with the normal and deficient. There is the 

 reservation that the material for study is not so abundant. At Elwyn 

 there are about one thousand deficient children. I think you could 

 not find the same number of geniuses brought together at any one 

 place, perhaps not even at Harvard. The results are, therefore, more 

 meager and more uncertain. There has always been thought to be 

 an intimate connection between genius and insanity, and, as you 

 know, one extreme view is that genius is only a beneficent form of 

 insanity. In most of our State institutions the insane and the de- 

 ficient are put into the same general class, but in reality they repre- 

 sent the organic extremes. But while insanity and genius stand at 

 the same end of mentality they are not, in spite of Lombroso and 

 I^Tordau, to be in any way confounded. Both represent an excess of 

 organization, a delicate bit of machinery capable of doing the finest 

 work or of getting the most seriously out of repair. The very fact 

 of genius seems to be made possible only by the disproportionate de- 

 velopment of some part of the brain. If this take place and leave 

 the other portions at least normally active, the result is beneficent, 

 and there is no affiliation with insanity. But if such an overdevelop- 

 ment take place at the expense of neighboring centers, sooner or later 

 there comes an occultation of some of the other powers, and insanity 

 results. In a rough way this explains, I think, the relation between 

 genius and insanity. Both are an overbalance. They have this in 



