3 i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are valuable assistants in support of the vortex theory which 

 he advances. I hope at an early date to supplement this arti- 

 cle with some still more interesting examples of the photog- 

 raphy of electrical discharges. 



THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 



By J. MARK BALDWIN, 



PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. 



PSYCHOLOGICAL science has reached a sort of understand- 

 ing in these recent years of the individual and of the social 

 setting in which he customarily disports himself ; and the duty 

 now devolves upon it of dealing with the exceptions to the rule. 

 No one will be disposed to deny certainly that the genius is in 

 some way exceptional ; and if any instance can, by showing what 

 society is not, cast light on what it is, the genius is the man to 

 question. So it is my purpose in this paper to endeavor to under- 

 stand him, as far as may be, without putting ourselves in his 

 shoes ; for apart from the inherent difficulty of assuming his 

 exceptional role, it may for another reason be more comfortable 

 not to do so, for under the exceptions to our social rule we are 

 forced to include also these other extremes found in the weak- 

 minded and the insane. 



The facts about the genius seem to indicate that he is a being 

 sui generis. Common mortals stand about him with expressions 

 of awe. The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves of our 

 libraries most accessible to the public, and even the wayfaring 

 man, to whom life is a weary round, and his conquests over 

 Nature and his fellows only the division of honors on a field that 

 usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimu- 

 late his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put Nature 

 and society so utterly to rout. He hears of men who swayed 

 the destinies of Europe, who taught Society by outraging her 

 conventions, whose morality even was reached by scorn of the 

 peccadilloes which condemn the ordinary man, to whom might 

 makes right, and homo mensura omnium. Every man has in 

 him to some degree the hero- worshiper, and gets inflamed some- 

 what by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great. 



Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong. The 

 genius does accomplish the world movements. Napoleon did set 

 the destiny of Europe, and Frederick did reveal, in a sense, a new 

 phase of moral conduct. And the truth of these things is just 

 what makes the enthusiasm of the common man so healthy and 

 stimulating. It is not the least that the genius accomplishes that 



