WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 81 
The regularity and constancy of results which spring 
from the varying conditions of race, climate, and occu- 
pations, as well as from the social, political, and moral 
influences around us, clearly indicate, what statistics 
prove, that madness is but one of many causes of sui- 
cide.. Now, since genius is itself exceedingly rare, and 
its union with insanity still less frequently found, it is 
evident that suicide, although occasionally committed 
by those of exalted minds, is altogether too infrequent 
among them to justify us in claiming it as evidence in 
behalf of the insanity of genius. Certainly, when we 
find that Kleist, Beneke, and Chatterton stand almost 
alone in this list, the support for the assumption is not 
strong, nor is it enhanced if the quality of genius thus 
represented is duly estimated. 
Those who would make genius dependent upon or as- 
sociated with a morbid mental state, seek to strengthen 
their position by citing the names of Burke, Chatham, 
Linnzeus, Moore, Southey, Scott, Swift, and Shelley, as 
among those whose faculties were impaired by mental 
disease. I interpret the facts differently. 
It is true that Linnzeus at the age of sixty failed in 
memory, and that, when nearly seventy, an attack of 
apoplexy ruined his mind; that Moore, Southey, and 
Scott, when the years of their life were nearly num- 
bered, were enfeebled in mind, because in old age the 
work of repair had failed ; while Swift, at three-score 
years and ten, lost his mental powers as a result of a 
disease which began long years before, not in the brain, 
but in the organ of hearing. 
Shelley, indeed, was eccentric and given to sleep- 
walking and hallucinations, and at times he may have 
confounded the mythical with the real, seeing ‘‘ forms 
more real than living man,’’ but I know of no rule of 
psychology or of medical jurisprudence which will au- 
thorize us to say he was insane. His fervor, his reason, 
