GENIUS AND INSANITY.

Having come to the conclusion that the designation “genius” does not express any one psychological concept, that nobody has succeeded in giving a pregnant definition of genius, nor is likely to do so, and also that insanity is equally indefinable, that it is impossible to draw a sharp line between mental sanity and mental derangement, it may seem useless to attempt to compare two such indefinite quantities. Still, the comparison—so long as it is a comparison—if we draw our conclusions with circumspection, can hardly do any harm; and it may possibly enrich our knowledge and lead us toward a recognition of truth.

It is no new-fangled notion that genius and insanity are somehow connected. Plato is known to have spoken of a θεῖα μανία, a divine insanity of poets. Seneca⁠[44] attributes to Aristotle the saying, “Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ fuit.” Aristotle⁠[45] says: “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” Cicero says:⁠[46] “Negat enim sine furore Democritus quemquam poetam magnum esse posse, quod idem dicit Plato.” Horace⁠[47] speaks of an amabilis insania, and Wieland of an amiable insanity of the Muses. Dryden⁠[48] has the lines—

One undeniable resemblance of the two phenomena is the relative infrequency of their occurrence and their divergence from the majority of mankind. Of old there was a tendency to ascribe everything that was uncommon and unaccountable to the influence of a supernatural force. Accordingly, it was believed that famous minds, as well as those that were darkened with madness, stood under a direct divine influence, or even formed, themselves, a part of the Godhead. In the Middle Ages the crazy were held to be bewitched, or possessed of the devil, while the greatest minds were honoured as graced by the Holy Spirit. Not infrequently the crazy, too, if their delusions or hallucinations were of a religious cast, were considered as saints in direct communion with the Deity. At the same time, eminent men of science, persecuted by ignorance and superstition, were abhorred as tools of the devil or burnt as heretics. At all events, genius and insanity—two inexplicable phenomena and vaguely defined—have been confounded together in various ages of the world, according to the ideas of those times.

After modern science had got rid of the dross of superstition and had taken its stand upon sceptical and objective observation, a revolution of opinion took place. Anciently an unbounded freedom had been attributed to the play of Nature. This far surpassed those limits within which rigid laws of Nature allow any such play. That was supernatural. But in modern times the tendency has been to confine the action of Nature within much too restricted bounds. All phenomena must now be brought under a schema artificially erected. Everything must have just such a measure and just such a weight, and every action of Nature is regarded as subject to a numerical rule. This method of investigation may have had beneficial results in physics, chemistry, and the other sciences that have flourished under it, but such a method of violent formularization must prove out of place for a science like psychology, in which we must always be limited to purely empirical facts, so that our investigations can only be analytical, and can never proceed synthetically.

As I have repeatedly remarked, psychology must strictly individualize; and I can imagine nothing more preposterous or unscientific than to assume a so-called normal man, and to conclude that anything which widely departs from that norm is diseased. We have seen that all phenomena of pronounced mental disease arise from the same psychical elements as the healthy action of the mind. We have further seen that the mental life of those great men whom we call geniuses presents no other psychical conditions than those of ordinary men, except for differences of quantity. “Health and disease,” says Claude Bernard, “are not two essentially different forms, as the old physicians could believe, and as many practitioners still believe. They are not to be regarded as distinct principles, as entities disputing for the living organism, and making it the theatre of their war. That sort of ideas belong in the medical lumber room. But, in fact, between any form of disease and health there are only differences of degree. No disease is anything more than an exaggeration, or disproportion, or anharmony of normal phenomena.”⁠[49] This is true of all diseases whatsoever, whether they be of corporeal or of mental origin. Hence the decision whether anything is to be considered as a disease or not cannot be made to depend upon how far the phenomena depart from a norm. The only question is, whether the vital action of the organism is prejudiced or the performance of the individual deranged. Take, for example, bodily deformities or other perturbations of development. The only question is whether the individual concerned is disabled or not. A woman with a contracted pelvis, if she be otherwise normal and her organs act normally, will not be called diseased; but as soon as she becomes pregnant she becomes a pathological subject, because parturition can not take place in the normal way. A man whose lungs are ill developed, so that the slightest exertion produces dyspnœa, must be considered as ill, while another man with uncommonly large lungs, such as fast runners generally have, is certainly not to be called diseased on account of this abnormality.

People with bodily deformities, or anomalies of development, frequently find themselves in situations in which they cannot fulfil some requirements of business; and it depends upon the degree of their incapacity how far their anomalies are to be reckoned as pathological. The laity are frequently able to decide what can be expected of such people, and what not. The subjects can often estimate for themselves what they can undertake. Nobody would accept a dwarf for military service, and a weak man will be conscious that he is not fit to be a drawer of stones.

It is the same in regard to mental departures from the average proportions. Only, people with mental deformities are commonly less able than those misshapen in body to decide for themselves in regard to their capabilities, being generally not at all aware of their defects. Nor are the laity in condition to form a sound judgment of the mental state of such people. It is therefore for the best interests of these subjects, as well as for society, that the question of their accountability and responsibility should be left to experts.

Now, how is it with corporeally overdeveloped men, or giants? According to the investigations of Lange, Bollinger, Ecker, and Ranke, a number of those giants who have been exactly described are disproportioned. “In some cases there is a surprising disproportion between the relatively small development of the central nervous system and their overgrown bodies. Most commonly their excessively developed bones are pathologically brittle, with irregular partial thickenings, curvatures, or absolute deformities.”⁠[50] Nevertheless, cases do occur, according to Ranke, in which these men are well proportioned and can fulfil the requirements of life. The question whether giants, or overgrown men, are to be regarded as diseased depends entirely upon the proportionate development of their parts. Gigantic growth per se is surely not morbid. But if it is carried out in some parts of the body at the expense of the development of other parts, be it with reference to the structure of the tissues or to the general growth, we have a deformity which consists in an anomaly of development analogous to a congenital crippling or dwarfish growth.

There is no reason for regarding mental giants from a different point of view. In order to judge of them, we have to inquire whether their development is proportional, or whether there is an overdevelopment of one part of the psychical organ at the expense of other parts, so as to disturb their inward equilibrium and give rise to a morbid state. No doubt, if we are to assume that whatever does not conform to the norm is to be considered as diseased, every man mentally famous must be set down, without further parley, as a pathological subject. This opinion has found many advocates, who maintain that careful research signally confirms their theory, and that most, if not all, famous men exhibit symptoms of mental disease.

The first writer to discuss the subject at length was Moreau de Tours,⁠[51] who considers genius as a positive disease of the mind, consequent upon an overexcitation of the brain. “Genius,” he says, “like every other intellectual condition of dynamism, necessarily has its material substratum. This substratum is a semi-morbid state of the brain, a true nervous erethism (orgasm or excited state), the source of which is from this moment well known....

“Whenever the psychic forces surpass the ordinary limits of their action, whether we consider them in their most elevated manifestations—those in appearance the most independent of the organization—or in their simplest and most rudimentary expression, whether in the most transcendent operations of the intellect, or in the unelaborated and almost material fact of sensation—the cause must be sought in certain neuropathic conditions of the subjects.”

No attempt is made by Moreau to define genius or to attach a psychological meaning to the term. In his examples he treats all men as geniuses who have accomplished anything famous in any department, without regard to their psychical divergencies. He might therefore just as well have stated his proposition in these terms: All men who have ever accomplished anything very remarkable were insane. This seems to be a fair statement of his real position.

This opinion was supposed to have been completely confirmed by the discovery of the many “morbid symptoms” which men of genius present. Moreau collected a very considerable number of such cases, which have been injudiciously accepted by the other authors who have elaborated the same theme, and have received great accessions from new discoveries. One of the most comprehensive works in this department is that of Lombroso, whose book⁠[52] has created a general sensation. Extensive as it is, its author makes no attempt to define genius, but seems to regard the meaning of the word as well settled. In the chapter entitled The Physiology of Genius, in which we might expect to find the writer’s opinion upon this point set forth, he tells us that men of genius commonly have cold feet and warm heads, etc., but unfortunately omits to inform us what he means by a man of genius. Throughout the book all sorts of men who have ever attained any sort of eminence are adduced as examples of men of genius. Such characters as Columbus and Donizetti are treated promiscuously. The greatest men in the history of art and science are placed cheek by jowl with any weak-minded persons whose names have by some accident come before the public. Lombroso’s conclusion is that “between the physiology of the man of genius and the pathology of the insane there are not a few points of agreement.” At the same time, in the book of which we are speaking, he says that there have been men of genius who, “allowance being made for some eccentricities of sense,” have never become insane. His list of these “sane geniuses” is “Spinoza, Columbus, Dante, Michel Angelo,” etc.—a wonderfully harmonious assemblage. But subsequent studies have led this distinguished writer to modify this last opinion, and he has since declared that “cases of genuine men of genius in which anomalies are wanting are probably illusory. In such cases either anomalies have escaped notice or defective data prevent our knowing of them.”⁠[53] What a pity that we neither know what he means by “genuine men of genius” nor by “anomalies”!

Before we go on to examine the numerous “morbid symptoms of genius” which Moreau and Lombroso are supposed to have discovered, let us briefly call to mind in what way we have come to specify certain phenomena as symptoms of mental derangement.

Psychiatry is, more than others, an empirical science. Whatever we know about it we have learned by experience and observation. As I have repeatedly insisted, neither in somatic nor in psychical medicine are there any sharp boundaries between health and disease. In reference to the body, “feeling well” is the chief mark of health. Everybody who is sick knows it. Connected with the majority of diseases there are positive pains, in consequence of which those who are taken ill send for the doctor. Pain has rightly been called the sentinel of health; but with the mind it is otherwise. Here there is no such connection between health and feeling well. The illness gives no pain, at least not directly; and the patient is in very little condition to say whether he is well or not. On the contrary, the consciousness of being deranged is recognised as the most marked symptom of convalescence. The question has here to be decided in quite other ways. Disease is not an entity, and no precise definition can be given of it. The chief point upon which the decision must turn is the person’s ability to do his duties to society.

We have learned by experience that there are certain typically recurring forms of a psychical process in which a disorder of self-consciousness has taken place, so that the persons affected were deprived of their self-control. We have become acquainted with well-marked cases in which a general decay of the mental powers commenced; and this has gone on until the capacity of the patients for business has sunk to nothing, etc. In this purely experimental way we have come to recognise classes of mental diseases which are marked by certain phenomena and by a certain course.

The next step in the progress of science was the comparison of the psychological conditions of those who were undoubtedly insane with mentally sane men. Here we had a right to the premises that on the one side we had minds mentally sound, and on the other minds mentally deranged. Having studied the psychological distinctions between the two, psychiatrists came to recognise the so-called symptoms of insanity.

It is important to remark that, although the aggregate of the symptoms constitutes the disease, yet it was not the symptoms which primarily presented themselves to our recognition. On the contrary, we first attained it by the study of the single elements of the diseases. For example, in early times hallucinations were explained in all sorts of mystical ways, as seeing ghosts, divine visions, suggestions of the devil, etc.; but by the study of mental diseases psychiatrists came to recognise that in such cases hallucinations are extraordinarily frequent. They thus become accustomed to consider the occurrence of hallucinations as in every case a morbid symptom. In fact, it became apparent that wherever there were illusions of the senses, as a rule, a mental disorder could be made out.

By a further study of the symptoms and of the course of mental diseases, psychiatrists ultimately became able to diagnose mental derangements at a time at which ordinary people would have been able to perceive little or no alteration of the mental processes of the patients. All this rests solely on experience. Only through experience has it come to pass that we can now, on recognising a certain set of symptoms, predict a certain course of the psychical process.

Should our experiences in the department of psychiatry receive an augmentation, we shall have every reason to be thankful; for, in spite of all our efforts, we stand upon the threshold of the science. But every new experience brings new difficulties with it, for it is from experience that we have to draw our conclusions. Now, new experiences often wreck our finest theories, in one or other of two ways—namely, first, by not confirming them, or, secondly, by conflicting with them. That is the way with unprejudiced tests and objective judgments.

Accordingly, after a great number of mental maladies, such as paranoia, progressive paralysis, certain forms of melancholia, mania, etc., had been found to be accompanied by hallucinations as an important symptom, the discovery was made that a great number of famous men—the so-called men of genius—were equally subject to deceptions of the senses. What does that show? Does it show that those men were insane? Such is the inference drawn by Moreau and Lombroso. But is it logical? Why not rather conclude that hallucination is not such an unfavourable symptom as we had supposed?

Moreau and Lombroso take it for granted that hallucinations only occur in mental disease. How do they prove that? Do not the very facts they adduce, if they be facts, disprove it?

We find a man full of crazy notions, with his self-consciousness gone, or with general loss of intelligence; and we mark him as unquestionably insane, and proceed to study the phenomena of his mind as symptoms of insanity. We meet another man whose achievements are positively great, who has, all his life long, excited the admiration and astonishment of his fellows, and who behaves in the most complete consciousness of what he is about. Ought we not to reckon him as sane beyond a doubt, and take his psychological processes as the very type of purely healthy phenomena?

Charles Lamb⁠[54] says, “It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare.” There is much truth in that. Shakespeare, however, is only known to us as a poet. Goethe is a better example, because we know him as a man as well. Indeed, we have a clearer insight into his inmost feelings than we have into those of almost any man that ever lived. If we wish to call up the typical idea of a perfect man we naturally think of Goethe. Whoever came into personal contact with him was ravished of his soul and inspired by the greatness of his mind. Heine, the poet of the senses, greets him as a “fiery spirit with eagle wings, as a genius of the whirlpool from top to toe”; the Christian enthusiast Lavater terms him a genius whose characteristic was love; the sensible Jung-Stilling regrets that so few people were acquainted with the heart of this admirable man with the great, clear eyes, the beautiful brow, and the stately stature; the forcible Klinger writes that posterity will be astounded that such a man ever lived; and the poetical philosopher Jacobi holds it as impossible for any one who had not seen and heard Goethe to conceive of this extraordinary creation of God. It is ridiculous to desire that he should think and act otherwise than he does; that does not mean that no change could make him finer or better, but that no change would be possible any more than the flower could bloom otherwise, the grain could ripen otherwise, or the tree could grow and crown itself otherwise than it does. When he would walk down the Rhine between Lavater and Basedow—“a prophet to the right, a prophet to the left, and the world-child in the middle”—there was a picture of how he understood everybody and had something to proffer to everybody. It was because he aimed at all-sidedness, at a full and free humanity; and Wieland acknowledges that never in God’s world did a son of man show himself who so combined all that was good and all that was mighty, who so deeply impressed himself upon every soul, and yet who lived so entirely within himself.

In entering upon the psychological analysis of Goethe, we are justified in assuming as a premise that we have here a case of a mentally sound man. Whatever we may find, however uncommon it may be, must be set down as a healthy condition. If, then, Goethe, as we have seen, was subject to occasional illusions of sense, it would be illogical to infer that Goethe was insane. We must rather conclude that we have been in error if we have been supposing that deceptions of sense occur only in the insane; and the problem set before us is to ascertain the distinction between the hallucinations of the sane and the hallucinations of the insane.

It might be objected that, in spite of Goethe’s greatness of mind, there was a supervenient morbid condition. But this assumption is directly contradicted by the fact that deceptions of sense are relatively frequent among famous men. Hence, even Moreau does not say that there is a supervenient disease by the side of, and in spite of, the mental greatness, but holds the latter to be itself a sign of incipient insanity.

I am therefore of the opinion that the sporadic sense-deceptions of famous men, like other so-called “morbid symptoms of genius” which we shall have to consider, can not be regarded as morbid symptoms, but that they are phenomena of health which it is the task of science to explain and account for.

The chief condition of mental sanity, as I have already several times remarked, is a well-proportioned development of the different psychical factors. But as in the development of the different mental faculties, so also in their proportion to one another, a certain latitude of health is to be allowed. In one man fancy is preponderant; in another, consecutive thought; while a third may have particularly strong feelings as his characteristic. Yet we have no reason to say that these minds transgress the border of health. It is the difference in the relation of the different psychical elements that makes the diversity of men’s characters. Now we know that there are no two characters in the world that are precisely alike. It follows that there is no norm for these relations.

The higher the grade of development of the genius and of the individual, the more prominent will differences of psychical factors become, and a correspondingly greater latitude of health must be allowed. If a sculptor models a small statue, and in doing so makes a slight error, so that there is a difference between the two sides, probably it will strike nobody. But let the statuette be five times larger, and the difference will become prominent, though the proportions should remain the same. In like manner, for persons of the highest mental development—the so-called geniuses—we have to use a larger measure. They appear to us like ordinary men seen through a magnifying glass.

We now proceed to examine the different symptoms which have been discovered in great men, and to endeavour to ascertain the distinctions between these and symptoms of insanity.

Moreau and Lombroso have collected a large catalogue of famous men who are said to have experienced hallucinations. I will not enumerate them all, but among them are Napoleon, Luther, Bernadotte, Benvenuto Cellini, Byron, Cardanus, Cromwell, Socrates, Brutus, etc.

It must be remarked at the outset that all the data are extremely doubtful. Everybody knows how the lives of great men become daubed over with anecdotes and tales, how—in part consciously, in part unconsciously—the facts are enveloped in a tissue of the most wonderful legends, until each great historical figure becomes surrounded by a nimbus. These inventions mingle with the real events; one writer copies them from another; the original documents are lost; and the tale becomes universally accepted as a fact.

Every psychiatrist is well aware that it is not always an easy matter to make certain that there are hallucinations, even when the patients are under our eyes. Neither the testimony of the patients themselves nor that of their guardians is, as a rule, sufficient to exclude the possibility of error; and the physician will, in most cases, form his judgment only upon his own personal observation. When it comes, then, to a notice, by a writer who has copied from some previous writer, of some hallucination that somebody is supposed to have had several centuries ago, the fact cannot but be regarded as dubious. Plutarch, for example, informs us that during the night before the battle of Philippi the ghost of murdered Cæsar appeared to Brutus. Are we to accept this as a case of hallucination, without further information, or not? We should like to cross-examine the witness; at least to inquire whence he got his information. But that can not be done. Here is the whole passage:⁠[55] “It was late one night. The tent of Brutus was dimly lighted, and a deep silence reigned over the whole camp. He himself was sunk in thought, when he suddenly thought he heard somebody coming. He looked toward the door, and saw there a dreadful and extraordinary sight. It was a dismal, frightful figure which silently stood by him. He ventured to ask it, ‘Who art thou, man or god? What wouldst thou? Why comest thou to me?’ The ghost answered: ‘Thy evil spirit, Brutus. At Philippi thou shalt see me.’ And Brutus without being terrified, answered, ‘So be it.’”

Plutarch gives no authority for this statement. How can we determine to-day whether the narrative has any truth in it, or whether Plutarch has not repeated an unfounded legend? In another place⁠[56] we read: “During that night the spirit is said to have appeared a second time before the eyes of Brutus. Its appearance was the same; but this time it disappeared without uttering a word.” But Plutarch adds: “It is true that Publius Volumnius, a philosophical man and a follower of Brutus from the beginning to this battle, does not mention this portent.” Plutarch thus seems to be himself doubtful about the fact. But even supposing Brutus really told of it, would that be proof of a hallucination? Might it not, considering that it happened in the night, have been a vivid dream which Brutus, excited, as we may easily imagine him to have been, mistook for a reality?

Of Cromwell, Moreau tells us that once in his youth he was lying tired on his bed, but not yet asleep, when a woman of gigantic stature appeared to him and told him that he would be the greatest man of England. But who shall prove that Cromwell, while he lay on the bed, had not fallen asleep, so that it was only a dream? Or who will vouch for it that the worthy Cromwell may not have been partaking of the ale of merry England?

To prove that Luther was a hallucinant, Lombroso adduces the following narrative of the great reformer himself: “When, in the year 1521, I lived in my Patmos, in a room in which nobody except two pages who brought me my food ever set foot, one evening while I lay in bed I heard the hazelnuts move in their sack, and quite spontaneously throw themselves against the roof and all about where I lay. I was scarcely asleep when I heard a great noise, as if a quantity of nuts had been poured out. I raised myself and called out, ‘Who art thou? I commit myself to Jesus Christ.’” Here, then, Luther himself admits that during the last event he was asleep. This circumstance, certainly significant to a psychiatrist, is left entirely unmentioned by Radestock, who reports the fact. Who knows in what form the story will next appear? Isolated hallucinations occurring at night in bed are, in all cases, decidedly questionable.

Hagen emphasizes this circumstance in patients: “At the commencement of insanity, and indeed throughout its course, vivid dreams are narrated by patients as if they were real events. They will say that they have been to one place and another during the night, or that they have seen heaven with all the angels. The true state of things may either be plain enough or, when patients sophisticate the dream in their memory, no little pains and penetration may be requisite not to be misled, so as to take the dream for a subjective perception in the waking state.”

This is a fair sample of the whole material; and I must openly confess that I should not easily be induced to erect a scientific theory upon such observations. At the same time, it is desirable to collect as many data as possible, in order to augment our stock of knowledge of great men. Yet we must not allow ourselves to be seduced into drawing positive conclusions from such uncertain facts.

But how sceptically soever we may approach these narratives, which are certainly in part legendary, they nevertheless contain some facts which cannot be avoided. That great men, as the example of Goethe shows, have had illusions of sense is an undeniable fact; and this is a phenomenon which we must endeavour to explain.

It is to be remarked at the outset that for the correct diagnosis of a case of hallucinations the most detailed knowledge of the phenomena of the case is requisite, for there are most diverse varieties of hallucinations; and their occurrence depends upon the most manifold psychological conditions. To enter upon all the facts and upon the different theories is, of course, not possible in this place. For such information the reader is referred to the extensive literature of the subject. There are only one or two points that I desire here to touch upon in order to avail myself of the knowledge of psychiatrists for the special inquiry now in hand.

Since Esquirol, who first thoroughly investigated the subject, psychiatrists have distinguished two classes of deceptions of sense. The first are those which are not suggested by any outward appearance; these are termed hallucinations. In the second there is an outward object exciting sensations which are misinterpreted in the percept, and filled out with imaginary details, so as to appear in a falsified form; these phenomena are termed illusions. The two kinds of phenomena pass gradually the one into the other, so that in many cases it is impossible to distinguish between them.

It has been remarked above that certain hallucinations of the insane have their perfect analogue in the reproductive power of sense-impressions. We can reproduce in the mind any object which we have often seen. This power is developed in very different grades in different persons. Usually the reproduced image is decidedly weaker than its original, both in its outlines and in its colour. In rare cases we find the reproductive power so much heightened that the reproduced image is almost equal to the original percept. Thus Lombroso⁠[57] reports of a painter that “he was able to sketch as many as three hundred portraits a year. He only needed to look at a person attentively for half an hour, and after that could call up a hallucinatory vision of him which he would proceed to copy in painting with as much distinctness and confidence as if he were looking at a real person.” This case is nothing but an intensification of a healthy action, much to the advantage of the artist concerned. It is certainly offensive to call such a gift by the name of hallucination. That, however, is a mere question of the usage of language. At any rate, such a phenomenon ought not to be confounded with insane hallucinations, for in the painter the action was under his control. He called up the “hallucination,” if you will call it so, when it served his purpose to do so, and dismissed it when it had served his turn. The hallucinations which torment and affright persons of diseased minds arise spontaneously and will not go at the patient’s bidding.

Meantime it is very doubtful whether the artist’s recollected image was really as distinct and definite as the original percept. To determine that would require evidence of a widely different kind from the report of the writer Ball, who was Lombroso’s informant. The fact that the painter was able to distinguish the recollected image from an object of direct visual perception, and did not mistake the face recollected for a face really there, would seem to show that his image differed from a perceived image somewhat in the same manner as do the recollections of ordinary people. But however that may be, such a phenomenon is certainly in no wise a morbid symptom.

Goethe describes the same faculty in himself. “My sensuous, apprehensive power is of so unusual a sort that I retain all outlines and forms most sharply in my memory; but I am moved in the most lively way by misshapen and defective forms.... Without that capacity for sharp apprehension and impression I could not have produced my characters so vividly and sharply individualized. This distinctness and precision led me, for many years, to entertain the delusion that I possessed a vocation and talent for drawing and painting.”

If we consider Goethe, as above suggested, as an ordinary man whose mental powers are seen under a magnifying glass, we shall find it quite a matter of course that the intensity of his reproduced images should be increased relatively to the intensity of his directly perceived images in the same proportion as all the other psychical factors. Hence, if we find that the distinctness of his perception is not exceeded by that of his memory, this is a phenomenon which differs as widely as possible from an insane hallucination, and it betokens rashness and want of good sense to call his condition morbid.

In another passage Goethe describes a state dependent partly upon an excitation of the retina and partly upon heightened ideation, so falling into the class, not of hallucinations, but of illusions: “If I shut my eyes and, letting my head hang down, thought of a flower in the middle of my field of vision, it did not endure an instant in its first shape, but separated, and from its interior a new flower unfolded itself of coloured and also green leaves. It was not a natural flower, but a fantastic yet regular one, like the conventionalized rosettes of the carver. It was impossible to fix the sprouting creation; yet it lasted as long as it was pleasing to me, without fading and without brightening. I could produce the same effect by thinking of the ornament of a variegated disk; and this immediately underwent a change starting at the middle and proceeding to the periphery, just like the subsequently invented kaleidoscope.”

Just as sense-impressions can be simply called back to memory, so also new combinations arise by fancy, which therefore have the character of original creations. In persons whose fancy is powerful, the images of fancy, altogether in the same way as those of memory, can become so clear and distinct as to be very near to actual percepts. Lombroso reports: “The painter Montina thought he saw his pictures before him before he had painted them. When one day somebody stood between him and the place where he thought he saw his picture he bade him stand aside, so as to let him see what he was painting from.”⁠[58]⁠

Here again the image was voluntarily excited, so that a doubt must remain as to whether it equalled a real sense image in clearness. The painter’s bidding anybody who stood in the way to step aside was quite a matter of course. When we wish to reproduce a former impression of sense we try first to shut out all other impressions of that sense. When we wish to call up the image of a person we always shut our eyes. With open eyes most people are, however, capable of making such a reproduction, provided that none but lifeless objects are in the field of vision. But in talking to one person and fixing the traits of his countenance, few people are able to call up the image of another person at the same time. In the same way, very few can recall one melody while another is heard.

Such phenomena are by no means rare among artists of lively fancy. They have nothing in common with the hallucinations of insanity. Hagen, therefore, calls them pseudo-hallucinations, Baillarger psychical hallucinations, and Kahlbaum apperceptional hallucinations. Von Krafft-Ebing⁠[59] says: “Among artists this gift is found both in a simply reproductive and also in a fancifully deforming mode. The striking art of delineation of many an eminent dramatic artist, the plastic power of description of a Goethe, Ossian, or Homer, suggest such an endowment. Among some composers, too, the fineness of the instrumentation and the timbre of their tone poems lead us to suspect a specially fine and lively faculty of reproduction of their acoustic memory. Persons extraordinarily gifted in sensuous faculties can create hallucinations more easily than do those who are poor in fancy and who live in the realm of abstract ideas. This will readily be admitted. Even their recollections can sometimes be voluntarily raised to a plastic distinctness approaching hallucination.”

So far, we have only considered cases in which deceptions of sense were voluntarily called up, whether by a specially strong faculty of reproduction or by a play of fancy. The subjects were quite aware that the object before them was fantastic and not real.

On the other hand, it is recorded of a considerable number of famous men in different departments that they have had deceptions of the senses which arose independently of their will, and were consequently genuine hallucinations. Among these we must place many religious visions, such as those of St. Paul and other saints. Luther insists that he often saw the devil; and on one celebrated occasion he threw the inkstand at him.

Whether such deceptions of sense are to be regarded as morbid or not opinions differ. Many psychiatrists speak of hallucinations, and consider them compatible with complete health. Others hold that they are always symptoms of mental disorder. Hagen⁠[60] occupies a peculiar position on this question, for he takes hallucinations to be invariably morbid symptoms, yet not symptoms of mental disease. This is connected with his theory that hallucination is a phenomenon of convulsion of certain blood vessels which I cannot here further set forth.

There is a quite arbitrary separation of psychical and somatic conditions at the bottom of this view. What Hagen means is, that the cause, or somatic concomitant, of the hallucination is a convulsion. It is presumable that every mental process whatever has a somatic concomitant, or “cause,” in the organic vehicle of the soul. Hallucinations may have different somatic concomitants from other mental processes, but they cannot be supposed to be peculiar in merely having somatic concomitants. There are some diseases of the brain which are accompanied by no symptoms of derangement of the mind, and are therefore exclusively somatic diseases. But just as soon as the stimulation of a path of sense enters into a psychical metamorphosis, we have to do with a mental process. If this is morbid, we have to do with a symptom of mental disease.

That which determines Hagen to pronounce hallucination under all circumstances to be a proof of a morbid state is its relative infrequency. “Hallucination is in every case a condition departing from the norm.” But if everything which “departs from the norm” is to be called morbid, then we return to the proposition that genius is morbid, since it “departs from the norm”; for the “normal” man is a tradesman and no “genius.” But I can only meet Hagen with his own maxim, “Quod sola affirmatione affirmatur, sola negatione negatur.”

It is a fact of daily observation that hallucinations can be produced by suggestion, and that not only in hypnosis but in the ordinary condition. If a woman who has never been electrified, and is therefore somewhat nervous, has the electrodes of a galvanic battery placed upon her head without the circuit being closed, while the faradic apparatus is caused to sound, she will not seldom imagine she feels the current distinctly, and perhaps complain that it is too strong. Though there is no current, the woman is positive she feels it. Every inward excitation, especially every emotion, favours such deceptions.

A timid or superstitious person is liable, in crossing a churchyard at night, to see figures, hear voices, etc. These deceptions may be of the class of illusions, shadows of trees being taken for ghosts, and the noise of the foliage for spiritual voices; or they may be pure hallucinations, the pseudo-perceptions not being formed by any outward sensations. An interesting case is described by H. Moore:⁠[61]⁠

“A whole ship’s crew were thrown into consternation by the ghost of the cook, who had died a few days before. He was distinctly seen by all of them walking on the water with a peculiar gait by which he was distinguished, one of his legs being shorter than the other. The cook, so plainly recognised, was only a piece of an old wreck.”

A child endowed with a rich fancy, whose mother has died, may, in the emotion of the pain and the excitement, see her image in heaven or hear her voice. Such phenomena are by no means rare. They depend upon a rich and vivid fancy and a powerful emotion of the heart. This play of fancy, called forth by emotions and moods, has never been better described, in its external resemblance to insanity, than by Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Deceptions of sense arising in this way have their origin in the most central part of the organ of mind. They are consequences of ideas. Such hallucinations occur, of course, in the insane, and to distinguish them from those of peripheric origin—that is, from those that are independent of the thoughts that immediately preceded them—Kahlbaum terms them centrifugal hallucinations, or phantasms.

As an example of such a phantasm we may instance a well-known hallucination of Goethe, who, when he was once riding to Gesenheim, saw his own counterpart riding toward him. “I saw myself coming along the same path on horseback toward me, dressed, as I had never been, in pike-gray and gold. I shook myself out of the dream, and the figure was gone. But it is singular that eight years later, not at all by choice but only by chance, I found myself riding over the same path in the very direction my visionary self took, and clad in just those clothes, being again on my way to Frederica. Whatever the explanation of these things may be, the wonderful phantom gave me at that moment of separation some alleviation.”

The emotion excited by the separation from Frederica was enough, with Goethe’s lively fancy, to produce the phantom. Goethe himself judged his condition quite correctly. He recognised the shape as a fallacious one and said, “I shook myself out of this dream, and the figure was gone.” It is very characteristic of the condition that Goethe should himself class it along with dreams. Obviously, the actual impressions of sight were, at the time of hallucination, not apperceived; and all that Goethe thought he saw at that moment was a painting of fancy, parts of the hallucination being superposed upon and congruent with the objects that had been seen an instant before. Goethe further says that the phantom gave him consolation and relief. It thus evidently answered to his thoughts; and we can presume that his fancy prefigured to him the moment when he should again visit Frederica.

The circumstance of hallucinations being recognised as such by the subject or not, is no more decisive for the diagnosis of the case than is the simple occurrence of deception of sense. Whether the hallucination is recognised as such or not depends more upon its contents and upon the metaphysical opinions, religious turn of mind, and superstition of the subject. Luther believed in the existence of a personal devil. His hallucination was the outcome of this belief—that is, of his ideas. Consequently his holding the fallacious object to be real was no insane opinion, but was in consonance with his metaphysics. So it is with the visions of saints and prophets. We may admit that a considerable number of them were insane, but the hallucinations do not suffice to prove that every one of them was so. He who has devoted his whole life to religious meditations and tendencies and is fully convinced of the truth of his faith, who is penetrated with belief in the presence of a personal God, personal angels, tutelary spirits, etc., may, on an occasion of strong emotion, with a moderately lively fancy, have visions and hear voices, and hold them for real, without in the slightest degree justifying a suspicion of insanity. Such hallucinations, called forth by suggestion or auto-suggestion, occur less infrequently in men endowed with fancy. While Benvenuto Cellini was praying that God would once more let him see the sunlight a hallucination came to him. It was that of a landscape with the sun shining upon it. Napoleon, before important events, battles, etc., saw his star in the sky. Pascal, in consequence of a great fright, saw a precipice before him. If we are to accept Plutarch’s story, the hallucination of Brutus is explicable in the same way.

The question whether hallucinations always betoken some unsoundness of mind can not be answered from a theoretical standpoint. Like the whole of psychiatry, it is a question of experience. Should experience show that hallucinations occur only among those whose minds are disordered, then we should be right in considering them as symptoms of derangement. But it is not so. Experience shows that sane persons, especially men of lively fancy, like great artists and poets, are subject to hallucinations; and though such phenomena are exceptional, and in that sense may be called not “normal,” yet nothing could be more preposterous than to regard all those great men as subject to occasional disorders of mind, or as approaching insanity in any way.

I have shown above what an influence emotion can exert upon all the organs of the body. A permanent acceleration of the pulse is, as we know by experience, always a morbid symptom. But would it ever occur to a pathologist to pronounce a person diseased because some emotion—such as fright, anxiety, or joy—made his heart beat faster? Emotion may produce in one man beating of the heart, in another vasomotor phenomena, such as blushing or blanching, and in a third any one of manifold nervous states, without there being anything morbid in those effects. In men of uncommonly strong fancy the emotion may sometimes call up supervenient hallucinations. But that is merely a phenomenon analogous to the beating of the heart, which we observe every day, except that it is relatively infrequent.

Hallucinations that are held to be true always make us fear for the preservation of an unclouded self-consciousness and of an unfalsified reaction between the ego and the outer world. In deciding whether, in a given case, hallucinations are to be denominated morbid, the decisive circumstance will be whether and how far the self-consciousness and free will have been influenced, and whether and how far responsibility for actions has been diminished.

Besides hallucinations, other phenomena connected with the rich fancy of famous poets and artists have many points of similarity with symptoms of insanity, and in many cases may lead to actual insanity.

Although we have seen that in Goethe’s case the gushing fancy was always in harmony with the high faculty of his intellect, and that, in spite of the apparent independence of his fancy, it was nevertheless directed by the purpose of an intellectual will, yet in many poets we find this harmonic interaction seriously disturbed and the inward equilibrium deranged. Alfieri calls his condition during composition a fever. He says:⁠[62] “That part of composition which I have called creation is a fever, and during its access one feels nothing else.” And in another passage: “The whole day I pondered as I always do as soon as the fever by means of which I begin and carry through a work seizes me, I know not how.”

Byron owns that his poetry is the dream of sleeping passions. If he be awakened, he can not speak its language, which he only knows while sleepwalking. Any shock or effort awakens the elasticity of his mind and always makes him what he must be. Of the third canto of Childe Harold, he says: “It is a fine piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad, during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.”⁠[63] His biographer, Moore, says that Byron saw only the reflection of his own brilliant ideas in every new object.

Although such conditions are not quite pathological, yet they stand hard by the borders of insanity, and certainly indicate a decided disposition to mental derangement. Byron often fell into a state of melancholia, and showed manifest defects of a moral kind.

One of the most peculiar symptoms of some deranged minds is lying. All authors, without exception, who have treated of hysteria, emphasize lying as one of the most characteristic symptoms of that malady. Charcot⁠[64] is astonished at the perseverance and energy with which hysterical patients understand how to deceive those about them. Numerous examples of the same phenomenon are recorded by Morel⁠[65]⁠, Lasègne,⁠[66] and others. Delbrück⁠[67] has described a special form of morbid lying, and has proposed for it the designation “pseudologia phantastica.” As a general rule, this lying is not motived by personal interest, as, for example, to escape punishment or to attain some advantage; but it is some creation of fancy which is narrated as a true event. Such patients, mostly weak-minded, possess, in consequence of their small intellectual powers, a fancy very rich in proportion to their intellectual function. Such persons sometimes narrate whole romances as true occurrences, and may, upon superficial consideration, be taken for intellectual. Dr. Paul Sollier⁠[68] also paints this symptom: “Among imbeciles, in opposition to idiots, an ungoverned imagination is often observed. This shows itself in their love of grotesque comparisons, which prove that they are capable of associating disparate ideas only remotely related to one another. This tendency is sometimes carried to an extraordinary pitch, and gives them a false air of being bright. On the other hand, we know how mendacious they are. They are all more or less so. They do not content themselves with simply denying anything of which they are accused. They invent a story quite different from the truth. Some of them do not stop at distorting the facts, but insert additional details, or make a story out of whole cloth. They not only do this to clear themselves, or to throw the blame on their comrades, but even when it is to their disadvantage—boasting of tricks they have not played, for the purpose of exciting interest and admiration.”

While in imbeciles this impulse to express such pictures of fancy is to be regarded as a consequence of a degradation of intelligence, a similar condition is found in poetical men, owing to an overdevelopment of the ideation and the fancy. Hence it becomes interesting to trace out this phenomenon of “pseudologia phantastica” in the childhood of poets. Delbrück adduces as examples Goethe and Gottfried Keller, both of whom themselves remarked this symptom of their childhood. Goethe tells how he narrated to his schoolmates histories drawn from his fancy as actual events, and how he himself often wondered at their believing him. Later he passes this judgment: “Had I not gradually, in conformity with my nature, learned to convert these forms of air and empty boastings into artistic productions, such swaggering beginnings would certainly not have been without bad consequences to me. If this impulse be accurately observed, there may be recognised in it the same pretension with which the poet, as such, sets forth dictatorially the most improbable thing and requires the reader to take for true what in any sense appears true to him, the inventor.”

In the previous chapter a characteristic of great poets and artists was described under the name of the impulse to expression, whose analogue in great men of a different constitution of mind, especially in those who follow science, takes the form of a creative impulse. This impulse which prompts the true artist to abandon himself unselfishly to his art and to produce what nobody has demanded, and spurs the scientific man to untiring research and opens to him new paths, is the most important mark of the truly great man. Hagen⁠[69] says: “Just as the instinct of the beast impels him to certain actions though they cost him his life, so is it originally far less a conscious purpose than a force of nature which impels genius to producing, versifying, endeavouring. He is filled with one idea, and divided interests are impossible for him. A heroic genius, an Alexander or a Napoleon, conquers continually, not from mere desire of glory or of rule, but because it is his nature to make war upon others, and because continual victory is his natural need. In like manner the scientific genius knows no rest, but forever places before itself a new problem. It must equally always be conquering. The artist must ever be producing. Each man’s action appears to him to be free choice. In reality it is so only in a very narrow sense. Genius acts less because it would than because it must.”

So says Schopenhauer:⁠[70] “Everything comes at last to this question, Where does the first motive—the Ernst—of the man lie? For almost everybody it lies exclusively in his own well-being and that of those that belong to him. Hence he is able to further that and nothing else, for no deliberate purpose, no voluntary and intentional excitation, can borrow the true, deep, personal Ernst, nor produce it, nor rightly replace it; for such a purpose is an attempt to wrench Nature; nor without Ernst can anything be but half willed. For the same reason, persons of genius look out ill for their own well-being. As a leaden counterpoise will always bring a body back to the situation which its centre of gravity requires, so the true Ernst of the man ever carries the force and attention of his intellect back to where it lies; everything else the man desires without true Ernst. Hence only those rare abnormal men, whose true Ernst does not lie in the personal and practical but in the objective and the theoretical, are able to embrace the essences of things and of the world as the highest truths, and to render them again. For such an Ernst, falling without the individual in the objective, is something foreign to human nature—something unnatural and supernatural. Yet by that alone is man great. And in accordance with that is what he does ascribed to something different from himself—namely, to his genius, which takes possession of him. Such a man has no ulterior purpose behind his images, his poems, or his thoughts; and everything personal is but means to those as end. Other men seek the main chance, and generally know how to advance themselves, for they insinuate themselves with their contemporaries, ready to subserve their needs and whims. Hence they live, for the most part, in good circumstances, while the externally centred man is in misery. For he sacrifices his well-being to his objective end. He can not help it. There lies his Ernst. With them it is the reverse; and that is why they are small and he is great. His work is for all time, though the recognition of it generally begins in future ages. But they live and die with their day.”

This Ernst of the man of which Schopenhauer here speaks corresponds exactly with the above-described impulse to expression and to creation. The neglect of personal interests, the entire abandonment to his work, the restless strife for an ideal, are characteristics of the great man.

Here again we remark a surprising similitude between the so-called genius and many forms of insanity. But it is merely a similitude, and not an affinity, as Lombroso, Hagen, and others take it to be. For affinity supposes a community of essence deeper than mere similitude of external phenomena. It is this latter alone that we meet with here. The causal conditions are separated by the whole diameter of being.

In great artists and scholars on the one hand, and in the insane on the other, there is a great irresistible impulse which fills them to overflowing and makes them forget all personal considerations. But while in the former the restless compulsion to create, the hot aspiration, is the kernel of the highest and noblest perfection of man, in the latter there is a morbid impulse which is usually directed to the silliest things. Formerly such a state was called a monomania, since this irresistible impulse seemed to be the only pathological symptom; but careful observation has shown that there is always a more general psychical malady, usually the consequence of arrested development. It is perfectly astonishing with what tenacity and untiring persistence such patients go to work. Trélat⁠[71] reports a suitable example as follows:

“M. de W. is forty-five years old. He lives almost all the time shut up in his room, where he is supposed to be carrying on serious studies. He is seldom seen, and when he is seen complains of headache caused by overwork and the fatigue of his continued night labours. He has an amiable and accomplished wife. People talk to her about the health of her husband, and how wrong it is for him to misuse his forces, and beg her to influence him to pursue his studies with less ardour. She answers sadly that all her endeavours are vain; but she does nothing to shake the conviction of his friends, although she knows very well what she has to endure in this difficult situation. The poor lady is absorbed by her attempts to maintain the sense and dignity of her husband.

“In fact, he employs the whole time passed in his room in counting how often the same letter—s, or t, or g, or z—occurs in Genesis, in Exodus, in Leviticus, in Numbers, in Deuteronomy, in the books of Kings, in the books of Chronicles, in the book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, in the Song of Solomon, in the book of Revelation, etc. How many pages in one book begin with a p, with a b, with an a; how many end with a t, with a c, etc.

“Other studies of such seriousness as to cause this man of science to pass a fortnight without any attention to his toilette, or even washing himself, consist in counting all the contradictions he can find in the same author. Having passed one, two, or three years without interruption in these works, this indefatigable worker throws himself with the same ardour into taking his watch to pieces, down to its minutest parts, and putting it together again. During six months he undoes every morning what he had completed the night before. Everybody who calls upon him receives the invariable answer, Monsieur is too busy to be disturbed. Everybody thinks that this writer is too modest to publish his book, and will leave behind Titanic works. The poor wife alone contrives to procure to so utter a nonentity honour and esteem to the last day of his life.”

Here is a state of compulsory counting termed arithmomania. A great variety of such symptoms are distinguished. These interest us less as such, at present, than does the way in which they come about, the complete absorption of the mental action in the impulse, which shows much resemblance to the creative impulse of men of genius.

Those patients exhibit the same phenomena who may be termed inventors and Utopians. They not seldom sacrifice their means and bring themselves and their families to ruin by their unconquerable desire of making inventions and discoveries. They are fully convinced, in their folly, of the epoch-making importance of their improvements, and all pains are lost to cause them to desist from their ridiculous performances.

Morel had a patient who thought he could alter the weather and bring on rain. Lombroso reports the case of a patient who wrote a book entitled Dominatmosphere, in which he undertook to teach husbandmen how to get two annual harvests, and to put sailors in possession of a means of blowing the winds out of their way. The alchemists, who forfeited their lives in trying to make gold, the searchers for the philosopher’s stone, were, for the most part, weak-minded persons of this sort. In modern times perpetual motion has been one of the great objects of crazy inventors. Trélat knew a man who had brought his family to want by his discoveries and inventions. He asserted that in order to bring a wheel into perpetual motion nothing was wanted but a supply of still water. In every discussion he objected to the competence of his opponent. To put an end to this, the physician of Bicêtre carried him to Arago, who proved to him that his inventions would not work. The poor devil was taken aback for an instant and burst into tears; but in a moment he raised his head and exclaimed with confidence, “No matter! Arago is mistaken!”

We have seen in the preceding chapter how important a part feelings and moods play in the psychical processes of great artists. In opposition to students, in whom the turning point of their mental action lies in the understanding, in artists moods and feelings are often the starting point of their productions. Hence we find that in them this part of the mental organ has not infrequently an enormous development. As with the other psychical characters, so likewise here we find that the high refinement of a single factor—always, however, in just proportion to the total action of the organ—produces outward phenomena having some similarity with those states which are due to disturbed inward equilibrium, and which we often have occasion to observe in the insane.

“Exulting to heaven, to death beaten down,” expresses a temperament not uncommon among great poets and artists, causing those oscillations of moods which justify that reproach of caprice which is often addressed to them. This is one of the commonest symptoms of mental disease, above all of hysteria. But the similarity between the phenomena is merely external. They are rooted in widely divergent causal conditions. The practised psychiatrist will distinguish without difficulty between changes of mood such as Goethe observed in himself, which had their origin in the highest refinement of the psychical organism, and the capriciousness of a hysterical woman at whose bidding there stands always ready, in case of need, a rich well of tears, whose sluices have but to be opened to allow the never-drained stream to flow.

The restless energy of great men—who, with a new goal before their eyes, press ceaselessly forward, and who, as soon as they have climbed one height of science or of art, see new heights rise before them yet to be essayed—keeps them in continual discontent with themselves and their performances.

In this destiny of Faust, Goethe painted his own sensations, and, like a genuine poet, in the particular touched the general. Goethe felt within him the restless mind which “drave him past earthly joys.” He himself acknowledged that he could scarce call four weeks of his life happy. His feeling of misery incited him sometimes to thoughts of suicide, though he was always able to master it. He says: “Among a fine collection of arms I possessed a costly and sharp poniard. This I always placed beside my bed, and before I put out the light I would consider whether it would suit me to strike the sharp point a couple of inches into my breast or not; but since it never did suit, I laughed myself out of the habit, and, casting aside hypochondriacal grimaces, concluded to live.”

Happiness and contentment are feelings denied to truly great men. And hence, as Aristotle says, those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and art have been predisposed to melancholy. But this kind of melancholy is as different as possible from pathological melancholia. Far from being of a morbid nature, it is an inevitable and eminently sane consequence of the psychical constitution of such men.

In contrast to it stands the self-satisfied good humour of degenerate simpletons, who are always convinced of their own merits and live in the most comfortable self-conceit. The dissatisfaction of the great man, which finds no relief but in creation and in ceaseless endeavour, is the noblest mainspring of the human race, to which all civilization is due.

In the mode of life of great men we shall find much that departs from the everyday habits of the conventional son of Adam. The Philistine, to whom all that is unusual appears unsuitable, is often heard to remark that great artists and scholars are all a little crazy. He says so because he unthinkingly confounds the uncommon with the irrational. The thinker will judge otherwise. The psychologist’s business is to ascertain the causes of these phenomena.

Lombroso has, in his psychological researches into genius, adduced many such phenomena, and has dwelt upon their incontestable similarity with the symptoms of many insane patients. “What is observed in the insane has been asserted of the man of genius—that he walks solitary in the world, and solitary departs from it, a stranger to the warmth of family life and untouched by the charms of society.”⁠[73] But this is not precisely the fact. History sufficiently assures us that great men are frequently by no means strangers to family feeling. But what is observable in great men is that they are relatively indifferent to everything which does not answer to their inward endeavours, that the ideas of which they are full absorb their attention, and that they consequently seem uninterested in what goes on about them. For this reason the genius, like the madman, has been called a stranger to the world.

As we have already said, such egotism as often characterizes the insane is in the great man impossible. Self-forgetfulness is the first condition of true greatness. Nor is it accurate to call the poet or artist a stranger to the world. We have seen that Goethe had a rare insight into the world; nor can we conceive of a true poet without knowledge of the world. Jürgen Meyer is quite right when he says: “A poet who should sing what he had not seen and heard, but what he freely imagined without any experience of life, must sing without vitality. Creative fancy requires supplies from life, and can not draw its wondrous threads from out of its own body as a silkworm does.”⁠[74]⁠

Here, as before, the similarity is merely external, and the determining causes are essentially different.

If the conduction of impressions over the nerves of sense is impaired or destroyed, so that the individual concerned is in a measure cut off from the external world, his attention will naturally be more directed to his inner life. Hence it is that people who become deaf or blind are apt to seem selfish. But without any defect of the conduction of the nerves a loss of perceptions may be brought about by a weakening of the perceptive centres or of the paths of association. Such weakening, which, in degenerate subjects, is not seldom very considerable, will, of course, result in a preponderance of inward perceptions. If there is a concurrent want of power of concentration of the attention upon outward things, as there generally is, we have the type of a person of weak mind, who is unable to comprehend the relations of things about him, who, occupied with himself, remains a stranger to the world, and who displays a characteristic selfishness and vanity.

No doubt poets and artists, as well as scholars, often exhibit an outward appearance of self-absorption and of indifference to their surroundings. This is common to them with many of the insane.⁠[75] But how disparate are the causes underlying these phenomena! With the weak-minded it is the want of power to concentrate the attention which renders them uninterested and indifferent to the outward world; but with poets and scholars it is, on the contrary, the high degree of that power which brings about similar phenomena. As we know, the centrifugal condition which we term attention not only extends its power to the organ of sense whose action is emphasized, but it must also be able to order off all the rest of the impressions of sense. The great thinker appears uninterested in surrounding things because his whole attention is directed to the well-ordered sequence of his logical thoughts, to which end, with fullest consciousness, the outward impressions are ordered off. The weak-minded man is present at a performance. The sounds of the words of the orator ring in his ears, but the slightest outward or inward impression suffices to make his attention wander. His thoughts ramble. They are everywhere and nowhere. The mentally gifted man, on the contrary, constantly has his mind on the matter in hand. If he wishes to concentrate his thoughts upon an outward object, nothing that takes place is able to escape him. His attention is stronger than the promiscuous spontaneous suggestions; and outward impressions of sense which do not relate to the matter in hand will not be apperceived.

The average man, when he walks the street, perceives all the impressions that strike his senses. He meets, we will say, two persons whom he knows, both of whom look him full in the face and fail to recognise him. They pass him by, and at the next crossing are nearly run over because they do not hear or see a coming vehicle. One of them is an idiot. His attention is not concentrated upon anything. He is drowsy, his thoughts breed lawlessly around, without being directed by his will. The second is a learned man who is occupied in solving a scientific problem. He is deep in his logical train of thought, and the requisite attention has ordered off all outward impressions of sense.

We see, then, that we have here a phenomenon common to the idiot and the genius. Yet how contrary are the causes of the two phenomena!

Lombroso sets up insensibility to heat and cold, to hunger and thirst, as a phenomenon common to genius and insanity. He brings forward this example:

“When Beethoven had sat down to compose, and Newton to study a mathematical problem, they so completely forgot the needs of the stomach that they would scold the servant who brought them a meal, under the impression that they had already eaten.”

To explain this abstractedness Lombroso says:

“The unnatural tension of the power of sensation, and the consequent drain of all the forces and faculties, is undoubtedly the cause of this surprising behaviour found equally among men of genius and among the insane.”

I do not think it is accurate to refer these peculiarities of genius to a “draining” or exhaustion. On the contrary, I would rather explain it by the heightening of the mental action. In the concentration of the attention upon inward conditions, in which, as we have seen, the impressions of all organs of sense not directly concerned are ordered off, the feeling of hunger will not be perceived. Nor need one be either a genius or a fool to forget eating and drinking over an arduous work. Moreover, in extreme idiots, who are unable to concentrate their attention at all, as a rule a bestial impulse to eat is observable.

The insane refuse to take nourishment, or forget their bodily needs, from a great variety of causes. In one case, like that of a sane man immersed in his work, the attention may be directed to inward processes, and all the other impressions of sense may be ordered off. Only, the patient’s inward process, instead of consisting in an ordered sequence of thoughts, is composed of hallucinations, which foster his whole attention; or he may have religious visions which so completely absorb all his senses that he not only feels no hunger but is insensible to all physical pain whatever. Another patient may decline food because he thinks himself persecuted, and believes the food is poisoned. A hallucinatory subject refuses to eat because a voice from heaven has forbidden him to do so. A victim of melancholia does not eat because he thinks himself too great a criminal to receive God’s gift. A hypochondriac imagines his stomach is not in condition to digest food, and will not take food for that reason. Another may be unable to assign any reason for not eating, but still he will not do so. The outward effect is the same in all these cases. It is the business of the psychiatrist to trace out the causes, and thus diagnostically to estimate the symptom.

We thus see that neither the psychologist nor the psychiatrist ought to be content to observe behaviour superficially, but must trace out the motive of it in order to draw any inference from it. The most absurd conduct sometimes has reasons consistent with health, while conduct which would not surprise a layman at all may be regarded by a psychiatrist as a well-recognised symptom of insanity.

A further explanation of many peculiarities of men of genius is to be sought in their relations to the society in which they live. A man with a reputation for high talents, distinguished from his youth for his superiority and genius, always has his circle of admirers with its proportion of flatterers. If he had the misfortune to be a precocious child he will have been accustomed from his earliest youth to the idea that his genius is far above ordinary men and above the rules that apply to those men. If such a man is, in later years, attacked by a competent critic upon this or that point, or if schools and parties are formed unfavourable to his method, whether in art or in science, he will, of course, react otherwise than a man would do who was accustomed to opposition of every description. He will, perhaps, regard his just critic as a personal enemy; he will complain that he is misunderstood by his contemporaries, and his passion may go so far that the public at large, and superficial observers among psychiatrists, may consider him to be the victim of a delusion of persecution.

Peculiar inclinations and other mental idiosyncrasies of men of genius can mostly be very readily explained. Everybody accustomed psychologically to study and dissect those whom he meets, so far as opportunity is afforded, is familiar with the remark that each individual of the human race has his peculiarities, more or less odd, his “weaknesses,” his locus minoris resistentiæ, as we say in somatic medicine.

The ordinary man, if he has the least breeding, has been accustomed from his youth up to hold in check one inclination or another which violates the usages of society, or even perhaps of good morals. He has learned to attend sufficiently to his own conduct not to allow habits to take root which might appear unusual or be disagreeable to others. But the man of genius is far too much governed by his inward processes, his fancy, and his work, to pay attention to trifling details of manner. He therefore appears what he really is, while the average man would not do this. Consequently chance peculiarities and special inclinations appear in the former more than in the latter.

Thus it is that the behaviour of great men is not to be measured by the same standard as that of others, that we have to take account of the motives of their actions, and that the psychical conditions must be kept in view if we are to draw any trustworthy inferences from their behaviour. Those mighty natures must be judged from their own organization, and not from the Philistine standpoint of the so-called average man.

As a further proof of the affinity of genius to insanity it has been alleged that a great number of eminent men have actually had attacks of insanity. Among poets are mentioned Lucretius, Tasso (who suffered from periodical melancholia with hallucinations and fits of excitement), Lenau, Swift, and Reinhold Lenz (who died insane). Hölderlin was thoroughly mad during the greater part of his life. Lessmann suffered from melancholy and committed suicide. Von Sonnenberg, Southey, and Ben Jonson were likewise attacked by insanity. Molière had repeated fits of melancholy. Rousseau suffered during much of his life from insanity.⁠[76] Gutzkow and Cowper were insane; also the French poets Berthes, Dubellay, Duboys, Bataille, Baudelaire, and Guy de Maupassant. Kleist, Merk, Raimund, Stieglitz, Louise Brachmann, and Nerval committed suicide.

Insane students of nature were Swammerdam (who was attacked with melancholia religiosa, thinking he had insulted God, and therefore burned his writings) and Albrecht von Haller (who was also melancholy). The mathematician Bolyai, Cardan, and Johann Georg Zimmermann were likewise insane. So was the celebrated physiologist Johannes Müller, who committed suicide.

Among insane philosophers may be mentioned Auguste Comte and Engel.

Of composers who were attacked by insanity, Schumann and Donizetti are examples. Gounod had a superinduced insanity.

Insane painters were van Goes, van Leyden, Wiertz, Carlo Dolce, etc.

The question whether we are justified, from the alleged frequency of insanity among famous men, to draw any conclusion whatever—as, for example, in regard to a predisposition to insanity among great minds, more than among average men—or that there is an intimate connection between genius and insanity, can only be answered from the standpoint of experience.

That is to say, it can only be based upon severely critical statistics. But we are very far from possessing any data that are even approximately sufficient. If we are to go to work scientifically, of what use can a list of famous men who have been insane be to us? Even were the number of examples multiplied by ten, what could be inferred? The question is not whether there have been great men who were insane, but whether the proportion of those who have at some period of their lives been attacked by insanity of different types has been markedly greater or less among famous personages than among the general run of mankind.

In order to decide this, we should be in a condition to state with exactitude what the percentage of insane among the total population was at a given period of history, how many men of genius there were at that time, and how many of these were insane? Such researches must be repeated at different times of history; then, if they were irreproachably exact and sufficient, it would be possible that some conclusion might be drawn. But we can not even make such comparisons for the present day, far less for bygone ages. The most we can do to-day is to count the inmates of asylums. But extremely few of those insane geniuses who have been reported were ever confined in asylums. Most of them belonged to that class of deranged persons who are cared for by their family. Manifestly, then, sufficient statistics fail us, even for the present time. Everybody will see, without going further, how futile it is to make a list of insane poets from the early Roman literature to the end of the nineteenth century, and to offer this as supporting any assertion of the kind. Do but consider how hard it is for us to attain any reliable conclusions upon matters much more within our control. For a long time there has been a serious dispute among psychiatrists as to whether there is any connection between syphilis and general paresis. Both are accurately limited and well-defined terms, and not, like genius and insanity, two terms, neither of which can be defined. They are perfectly typical and exactly characterized forms of disease. Yet all the researches of the two parties have been powerless to settle the question. The most diverse theories about the matter still find numerous defenders.

There has also been an attempt to trace a connection between genius and insanity through facts of heredity. In spite of some valuable works in this department,⁠[77] it must be admitted that the observations hitherto adduced are still far from sufficient to have any scientific value. The fact that in several families of eminent men insanity has occurred in no wise justifies us in drawing any conclusion. In order to do that we must, as in the former case, be in a condition to establish statistical comparisons which shall be absolutely exact between the proportionate occurrence of insanity in the families of men of genius and those of ordinary men. The past must therefore be left altogether out of account; nor is it any exaggeration to say that the difficulties of establishing the facts for the present time with absolute exactitude are unconquerable. Independently of all else, the flexibility and indeterminacy of the terms of the question—genius and insanity—give room for inexactitude in the conclusions.

Every disinterested observer must be struck with the contradictions and inadequacy of the investigations that have been made in this field. Lombroso, for example,⁠[78] says: “Galton and Ribot remark that genius is as hereditary as insanity, and that especially the gift for music, which drives so many into the madhouse, is transmitted from parents to children. Palestrina, Benda, Düssek, Stiller, Mozart, and Eichhorn all had musically gifted children. The Bach family presented to the world eight generations of musicians, and among them fifty-seven individuals distinguished themselves not a little. Among painters of renown, von der Weld, von Eyck, Murillo, Veronese, Bellini, Caracci, Correggio, Mieris, Bassano, Tintoretto, Caliare (uncle, father, and son), all sprang from families which were more or less occupied with their art. Among poets, Æschylus had two sons and two grandsons who were poets; Swift was the nephew of Dryden; Lucian was Seneca’s grandson or nephew; Torquato Tasso was the son of Bernardo Tasso; Ariosto’s brother and nephew were poets; two sons of Aristophanes were dramatists; Corneille, Racine, Sophocles, Coleridge, were each the father or grandfather of a not insignificant poet.” But in flat contradiction to this stands the following assertion of Lombroso:⁠[79] “Moreover, the inheritance of genius does not occur so easily as it otherwise would for the reason that men of genius are often childless and often have degenerate offspring, as we see in the lines of noble houses.” Thus he amply refutes his own previous proposition, and saves other people the trouble of doing so. To prove his last point he says: “Schopenhauer, Descartes, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Comte, Kant, Spinoza, Michel Angelo, Newton, Foscolo, and Alfieri were unmarried; and those great men who did not shrink from the bonds of wedlock, like Shakespeare, Dante, Arzolo, etc., found no happiness in that life.” As if celibacy, or an unhappy marriage, could have no other cause than impotence! Other psychiatrists have remarked the sterility of great men. Thus, Arndt says:⁠[80] “Hence we often see, I might say without exception, that genius makes the summit of the family tree, or at least is the last living twig of one branch, which bears many flowers and fruits, but loses its capacity of putting forth new shoots in creating genius. Thereafter it buds but scantily, or even loses the power of doing even that, but comes to an end without progeny.”

This opinion is somewhat exaggerated, as Lombroso’s own report shows; and we should lay ourselves open to the charge of inexcusable superficiality were we to attempt to erect a scientific theory upon such a foundation.

It is true that between famous men—the so-called geniuses—and the insane many resemblances may be traced. Nevertheless, they are, as we have seen, mere resemblances, not real affinities. Just as every symptom of mental disease has its analogue in health, so has it also an analogue in genius. But, owing to the entire mental action being higher than in average men, the states analogous to morbid symptoms here come out more markedly. Genius resembles insanity as gold resembles brass. The similarity is merely in the appearance. When we go deeper into the facts we find the two states so widely disparate that we are not justified in saying that they are allied; still less, with Moreau, that genius is a morbid condition.

Finally, let the fact be considered that most of the great men, both of art and of science, were misunderstood by their contemporaries, and were only appreciated after they were dead. In recognition of this truth, Goethe pronounces that a genius is in touch with his century only by virtue of his defects, only in so far as he shares the weaknesses of his times. The genius of the truly great man outstrips, with its great wing strokes, the rest of the flock. Those who can not keep up with him can not comprehend him. They are puzzled at first, and finally set him down as a fool. In short, they confound genius and insanity.