difference of opinion as to what ‘health’ exactly means; at any rate, it is presumed that there is none. And judged according to that standard of health, genius, it is contended, is a disease.
Perhaps there are few who would not be diseased in this way and be a genius; but that does not alter the conclusions of science. “And although it may be a moot point whether the geniuses who have made this discovery are less diseased in brain than the geniuses they have studied, still the conclusion arrived at remains unaffected. In fact, it has been seriously maintained by eminent men—call them also diseased if you please, but all the same they are eminent in science—it has been maintained by such men, that, genius is a form of nervous instability.
Primarily, the theory is physiological. In the first place, genius is considered to be diseased in the body—especially, in the brain-centres and nervous system. Secondly, as a consequence of the first, he is considered to be diseased in mind, too. There is a correlation between mind and body; nervous instability, therefore, implies mental unsoundness.
Now, to refer to some leading opinions on the subject of insanity of genius, Dr. Moreau, quoted by William James, says: “Genius is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree.” “Genius,” says Dr. Lombroso, “is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety and is allied to moral insanity.” “Genius, like moral insanity,” says the same doctor again, “has its basis in epilepsy.” Mr. Nisbet, another author on the subject, has a whole book in which he discusses, from the medical standpoint, the biographies of more than two hundred men of genius and comes to the conclusion that genius is a form of insanity.
Everybody is aware that genius is not called insanity in the same sense in which certain men, shut up in specific asylums, are so called. But the point is that, if the brains of
