66 GENIUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 
fretted gold the Lemnian statue of the Parthenon and 
the Zeus of Olympia ; whence came the power of Michael . 
Angelo, Salvator Rosa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rubens, 
to paint in matchless beauty, on canvas and in fresco, 
the wondrous imagery of their minds ; or of Beethoven, 
to record in his symphonies the raptures of his soul ; 
or of Scott, to clothe with the habiliments of life the 
ideals of his brain; or of Spenser, Burns, and Byron, 
to write with such rhythmic beauty ; or of Goethe, to 
garnish with poetic dress the deep philosophy of his 
thought? In what cloudland of the past were hidden 
the possibilities of Dante and Milton—who made their 
visions of the eternal realms the subject of impassioned 
verse—at once gorgeous in its rich tracery of thought, 
and sublime in its pageantry of bliss and woe? In what 
ancestral brain did sleep the transcendent genius of 
Shakespeare that read every page ‘‘in nature’s infinite 
book of secrecy’’; or did smolder the giant intellect of 
Newton, which weighed the planets and bound with 
the force of gravity atoms and worlds in a bond of 
unity ? 
Such examples seem indicative of conditions powerful 
to modify, transform, or deflect the action of the laws of 
heredity, and to cause ‘‘indefinite variability ’’ in psy- 
chological phenomena, as is done in material forms. 
This variability, this new psychic manifestation, is 
robed with the insignia of a new creation ; a new species 
has been born into the realm of mind, displaying new 
and more exalted powers, but nevertheless restrained 
in its action by the organization which, under law, pre- 
sides with such tyranny over every mental expression, 
and makes us, to a greater extent than we commonly 
think, creatures of an inexorable destiny. ‘The contrast 
between the exalted ideals and grand achievements of 
genius, and the feeble, discordant expressions of mad- 
ness, is as pathetic as it is striking. The citadel of 
