presence of the creative faculty to be regarded as itself an abnormal excrescence in the human mind? Or is it that the possession and fruition of the faculty are apt to be attended with circumstances which are injurious to perfect mental well-being?
In order to understand the precise relation between two things, we ought to know all about the nature and causes of each. But this we are very far from knowing in the present case. Science has, no doubt, done much to clear up the ancient mystery of madness. We now know that it has a perfectly natural origin, and we understand a good deal respecting the more conspicuous agencies, psychical and physical, predisposing and exciting, which bring about the malady. Yet so intricate is the subject, so complex and subtile the influences which may conspire to just disturb the mental balance, that in many cases, even with a full knowledge of an individual and his antecedents, the most skillful expert finds himself unable to give a complete and exhaustive explanation of the phenomenon.
With respect to genius the case is much worse. We may have a clearer intuition of its organic composition than the ancients; we may be able better than they to describe in psychological terms the essential qualities of the original and creative mind. But we have hardly advanced a sate) with respect to a knowledge of its genesis and antecedents. We do, no doubt, know some little about its family history. Mr. Galton, with his characteristic skill in striking out new paths of experimental research, has brought to light a number of interesting facts with respect to the hereditary transmission of high intellectual endowments. But these researches supply no answer to the supremely interesting question, How does the light of genius happen to flash out in this particular family at this precise moment? A preparation there may be, as Goethe somewhere hints, in the patient building up by the family of sterling intellectual and moral virtues. But this is hardly the beginning of an explanation. How much the better are we able to comprehend Carlyle's wondrous gift of spiritual clairvoyance for knowing that he came of a thoroughly sound stock, having more than the average, it may be, of Northern shrewdness? To trace the family characteristics in a great man is one thing, to explain the genius which ennobles and immortalizes these is another.[1]
In the present state of our knowledge, then, genius must be looked upon as the most signal and impressive manifestation of that tendency of Nature to variation and individuation in her organic formations which modern science is compelled to retain among its unexplained facts. Why we have a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, a Goethe here
- ↑ Much the same applies to what M. Taine and others have said about the larger preparation of the original teacher and the artist by the traditions of the community and the spirit of the age. See, for a careful treatment of the whole question of the antecedents of genius, an article by M. H. Joly, "Psychologie des Grands Hommes" (III) in the "Revue Philosophique," August, 1882.
