Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and withal no sense of fitness—none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and that are harmless, we smile and let him talk; but if his lack of judgment extend to things of grave import, or be accompanied by equal illusions regarding himself and society in other relationships, then we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane. Two of the commonest forms of such impairment of judgment are seen in the victims of "fixed ideas" on the one hand, and theexaltéson the other. These men have no true sense of values, no way of selecting the fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some transcendently true and original thought were to flit through thediseased mind of such a one, it would go as it came, and the world would wait for a man with a sense of fitness to arise and rediscover it. The other class, theexaltés, are somewhat the reverse; the illusion of personal greatness is so strong that their thoughts seem to them infallible and their persons divine.
Men of such perversions of judgment are common among us. We all know the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in the æsthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so "visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not the man to produce a world movement.
Most of the men we call "cranks" are of this type. They are essentially lacking in judgment, and the popular estimate of them is exactly right.
It is evident, therefore, from this last explanation, that there is a second direction of variation among men:variation in their sense of the truth and value of their own thoughts, and with them of the thoughts of others. This is the great limitation which the man of genius shares with men generally—a limitation in the amount of variation which he may show in his social judgments, especiallyas these variations affect the claim which he makes upon society for recognition. It is evident that this must be an important factor in our estimate of the claims of the hero to our worship, especially since it is the more obscure side of his temperament, and the side generally overlooked altogether. This let us call, in our further illustrations, the "social sanity" of the man of genius.
The first indication of the kind of social variation which oversteps even the degree of indulgence society is willing to accord to the great thinker is to be found in the effect which education has upon character. The discipline of social development is, as we have seen, mainly conducive to the reduction of eccentricities, the levelling off of personal peculiarities. All who come into the social heritage learn the same great series of lessons derived from the past, and all get the sort of judgment required in social life from the common exercises of the home and school in the formative years of their education. So we should expect that the greater singularities of disposition which represent insuperable difficulty in the process of social assimilation would show themselves early. Here it is that the actual conflict comes—the struggle between impulse and social restraint. Many a genius owes the redemption of his intellectual gifts to legitimate social uses to the victory gained by a teacher and the discipline learned through obedience. And thus it is also that many who give promise of great distinction in early life fail to achieve it. They run off after a phantom, and society pronounces them mad. In their case the personal factor has overcome the social factor; they have failed in the lessons they should have learned, their ownself-criticism is undisciplined, and they miss the mark.
These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean. Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought, though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it. But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer.
This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may the social qualifications of men. There are men who find it their meat to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not need to learn the lessons of the social environment.
Now, such persons undoubtedly represent a variation toward suggestibility of the most delicate and singular kind. They surpass the teachers from whom they learn. It is hard to say that they "learn to judge by the judgments of society." They so judge without seeming to learn, yet they differ from the man whose eccentricities forbid him to learn through the discipline of society. The two are opposite extremes of variation; that seems to me the only possible construction of them. It is the difference between the ice boat which travels faster than the wind and the skater who braves the wind and battles up-current in it. The latter is soon beaten by the opposition; the former outruns its ally. The crank, the eccentric, the enthusiast—all these run counter to sane social judgment; but the genius leads society to his own point of view, and interprets the social movement so accurately, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that his very singularity gives greater relief to his inspiration.
Now let a man combine with this insight—this extraordinary sanity of social judgment—the power of great inventive and constructive thought, and then, at last, we have our genius, our hero, and one that we well may worship! To great thought he adds balance; to originality, judgment. This is the man to start the world movements if we want a single man to start them. For as he thinks profoundly, so he discriminates his thoughts justly, and assigns them values. His fellows judge with him, or learn to judge after him, and they lend to him the motive forces of success—enthusiasm, reward. He may wait for recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he may be muzzled for thinking his thoughts, he may die and with him the truth to which he gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his thought was recorded, posterity revives it in regretful sentences on his tomb.
The two things to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of the phenomenally great man—I mean on the side of our means of accounting for him in reasonable terms—are these: first, his intellectual originality; and, second, the sanity of his judgment. And it is the variations in this second sort of endowment which give the ground which various writers have for the one-sided views now current in popular literature.
We are told, on the one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on another hand, that he is to be classed with those of "insane" temper; and yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to outrage society by performing criminal acts. All these so-called theories rely upon facts—so far as they have any facts to rest upon—which, ifspace permitted, we might readily estimate from our present point of view. In so far as a really great man busies himself mainly with things that are objective, which are socially and morally neutral—such as electricity, natural history, mechanical theory, with the applications of these—of course, the mental capacity which he possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in these things may lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined relationships which are had in view by the writer in quest for degeneracy. It will still be admitted, however, by those who are conversant with the history of science, that the greatest scientific geniuses have been men of profound quietness of life and normal social development. It is to the literary and artistic genius that the seeker after abnormality has to turn; and in this field, again, the facts serve to show their own meaning.
As a general rule, these artistic prodigies do not represent the union of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of emotional experience which crystallize into single creations of art. They depend upon "inspiration"—a word which is responsible for much of the overrating of such men, and for a good many of their illusions. Not that they do not perform great feats in the several spheres in which their several "inspirations" come; but with it all they often present the sort of unbalance and fragmentary intellectual endowment which allies them, in particular instances, to the classes of persons whom the theories we are noticing have in view. It is only to be expected that the sharp jutting variation in the emotionaland æsthetic realm which the great artist often shows should carry with it irregularities in heredity in other respects. Moreover, the very habit of living by inspiration brings prominently into view any half-hidden peculiarities which he may have in the remark of his associates, and in the conduct of his own social duties. But mark you, I do not discredit the superb art of many examples of the artistic "degenerate," so-called; that would be to brand some of the highest ministrations of genius, to us men, as random and illegitimate, and to consider impure some of our most exalting and intoxicating sources of inspiration. But I do still say that wherein such men move us and instruct us they arein these spheresabove all things sane with our own sanity, and wherein they are insane they do discredit to that highest of all offices to which their better gifts make legitimate claim—the instruction of mankind.
Again one of Balzac's characters hits the nail on the head. "My dear mother," says Augustine, in the Sign of the Cat and Racket, "you judge superior people too severely. If their ideas were the same as other folks they would not be men of genius."
"Very well," replies Madame Guillaume, "then let men of genius stop at home and not get married. What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he is a genius it is all right! Genius! genius! It is not so very clever to say black one minute and white the next, as he does, to interrupt other people, to dance such rigs at home, never to let you know which foot you are to stand on, to compel his wife never to be amused unless my lord is in gay spirits, and to be dull when he is dull."
"But his imaginations...."
"What are such imaginations?" Madame Guillaume went on, interrupting her daughter again. "Fine ones are his, my word! What possesses a man, that all on a sudden, without consulting a doctor, he takes it into his head to eat nothing but vegetables? There, get along! if he were not so grossly immoral, he would be fit to shut up in a lunatic asylum."
"O mother, can you believe?"
"Yes, I do believe. I met him in the Champs Élysées. He was on horseback. Well, at one minute he was galloping as hard as he could tear, and then pulled up to a walk. I said to myself at that moment, 'There is a man devoid of judgment!'"
The main consideration which this chapter aims to present, that of the responsibility of all men, be they great or be they small, to the same standards of social judgment, and to the same philosophical treatment, is illustrated in the very man to whose genius we owe the principle upon which my remarks are based—Charles Darwin; and it is singularly appropriate that we should also find the history of this very principle, that of variations with the correlative principle of natural selection, furnishing a capital illustration of our inferences. Darwin was, with the single exception of Aristotle, possibly the man with the sanest judgment that the human mind has ever brought to the investigation of nature. He represented, in an exceedingly adequate way, the progress of scientific method up to his day. He was disciplined in all the natural science of his predecessors. His judgment was an epitome of the scientific insight of the ages which culminated then. The time wasripe for just such a great constructive thought as his—ripe, that is, so far as the accumulation of scientific data was concerned. His judgment differed then from the judgment of his scientific contemporaries mainly in that it was sounder and safer than theirs. And with it Darwin was a great constructive thinker. He had the intellectual strength which put the judgment of his time to the strain—everybody's but his own. This is seen in the fact that Darwin was not the first to speculate in the line of his great discovery, nor to reach formulas; but with the others guessing took the place of induction. The formula was an uncriticised thought. The unwillingness of society to embrace the hypothesis was justified by the same lack of evidence which prevented the thinkers themselves from giving it proof. And if no Darwin had appeared, the problem of evolution would have been left about where it had been left by the speculations of the Greek mind. Darwin reached his conclusion by what that other great scientific genius in England, Newton, described as the essential of discovery, "patient thought"; and having reached it, he had no alternative but to judge it true and pronounce it to the world.
But the principle of variations with natural selection had the reception which shows that good judgment may rise higher than the level of its own social origin. Even yet the principle of Darwin is but a spreading ferment in many spheres of human thought in which it is destined to bring the same revolution that it has worked in the sciences of organic life. And it was not until other men, who had both authority with the public and sufficient information to follow Darwin's thought, seconded his judgment, that hisformula began to have currency in scientific circles.
Now we may ask: Does not any theory of man which loses sight of the supreme sanity of Darwin, and with him of Aristotle, and Angelo, and Leonardo, and Newton, and Leibnitz, and Shakespeare, seem weak and paltry? Do not delicacy of sentiment, brilliancy of wit, fineness of rhythmical and æsthetic sense, the beautiful contributions of the talented special performer, sink into something like apologies—something even like profanation of that name to conjure by, the name of genius? And all the more if the profanation is made real by the moral irregularities or the social shortcomings which give some colour of justification to the appellation "degenerate"!
But, on the other hand, why run to the other extreme and make this most supremely human of all men an anomaly, a prodigy, a bolt from the blue, an element of extreme disorder, born to further or to distract the progress of humanity by a chance which no man can estimate? The resources of psychological theory are adequate, as I have endeavoured to show, to the construction of a doctrine of society which is based upon the individual, in all the possibilities of variation which his heredity may bring forth, and which yet does not hide nor veil those heights of human greatness on which the halo of genius is wont to rest. Let us add knowledge to our surprise in the presence of such a man, and respect to our knowledge, and worship, if you please, to our respect, and with it all we then begin to see that because of him the world is the better place for us to live and work in.
We find that, after all, we may be social psychologists and hero worshippers as well. And by being philosophers we have made our worship more an act of tribute to human nature. The heathen who bows in apprehension or awe before the image of an unknown god may be rendering all the worship he knows; but the soul that finds its divinity by knowledge and love has communion of another kind. So the worship which many render to the unexplained, the fantastic, the cataclysmal—this is the awe that is born of ignorance. Given a philosophy that brings the great into touch with the commonplace, that delineates the forces which arise to their highest grandeur only in a man here and there, that enables us to contrast the best in us with the poverty of him, and then we may do intelligent homage. To know that the greatest men of earth are men who think as I do, but deeper, and see the real as I do, but clearer, who work to the goal that I do, but faster, and serve humanity as I do, but better—that may be an incitement to my humility, but it is also an inspiration to my life.
[14]Only books in English. The order of mention is without significance.
[14]Only books in English. The order of mention is without significance.
[14]Only books in English. The order of mention is without significance.
Bain,The Senses and the Intellect(New York: Appletons London: Longmans).
----,The Emotions and the Will(the same).
James,Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Holt & Co. London: Macmillans. Abridged in Briefer Course).
Ladd,Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory(New York: Scribners. London: Longmans. Abridged inElements of Descriptive Psychology).
Stout,Analytic Psychology, 2 vols. (London: Sonnenschein. New York: Macmillans).
Wundt,Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology(the same).
Höffding,Outlines of Psychology(Macmillans).
Sterrett,The Power of Thought(New York: Scribners).
Baldwin,Handbook of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Holt. London: Macmillans. Abridged inElements of Psychology).
----, Articles inAppletons' Universal Cyclopædia(New York: Appletons).
Preyer,The Mind of the Child, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons).
Compayré,Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons).
Sully,Studies of Childhood(New York: Appletons. London: Longmans).
Baldwin,Mental Development in the Child and the Race(New York and London: Macmillans).
Ziehen,Introduction to Physiological Psychology(London: Sonnenschein. New York: Macmillans).
Ladd,Elements of Physiological Psychology(New York: Scribners. London: Longmans. Abridged inOutlines).
Donaldson,The Growth of the Brain(London: Walter Scott. New York: Scribners).
Külpe,Outline of Psychology(London: Sonnenschein New York: Macmillans).
Sanford,Course in Experimental Psychology(Boston: Heath & Co.).
Scripture,The New Psychology(London: Walter Scott. New York: Scribners).
RomanesMental Evolution in Animals and Man, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons).
----,Animal Intelligence(New York: Appletons).
----,Darwin and After Darwin, 3 parts (Chicago: Open Court Company. London: Longmans).
C. Lloyd Morgan,Comparative Psychology(London: W. Scott. New York: Scribners).
----,Animal Life and Intelligence(London and New York: Arnold).
----,Habit and Instinct(the same).
Groos,The Play of Animals(New York: Appletons. London: Chapman & Hall).
Spencer,Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons).
Hudson,The Naturalist in La Plata(London: Chapman & Hall).
Darwin,Descent of Man(New York: Appletons).
-----,Origin of Species(the same).
Wallace,Darwinism(New York and London: Macmillans),
Stanley,The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling(London: Sonnenschein, New York: Macmillans).
Baldwin,Mental Development in the Child and the Race(New York and London: Macmillans).
Maudsley,Pathology of Mind(Macmillans).
Starr,Familiar Forms of Nervous Disease(New York: Wood).
Collins,The Faculty of Speech(Macmillans).
Hirsch,Genius and Degeneration(Appletons).
Tuke,Dictionary of Psychological Medicine(Philadelphia: Blakiston).
Moll,Hypnotism(London: Scott. New York: Scribners).
Binet,Alterations of Personality(New York: Appletons. London: Chapman & Hall).
Parish,Hallucinations and Illusions(London: Scott. New York: Scribners).
Tarde,The Laws of Imitation(New York: Holt).
Le Bon,The Crowd(London: Scott. New York: Scribners)
Royce,Studies in Good and Evil(Appletons).
Baldwin,Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development(Macmillans).
Spencer,On Education(Appletons).
Guyau,Education and Heredity(Scribners).
Herbart,The Application of Psychology to Education(Scribners).
Harris,The Psychologic Foundations of Education(Appletons).
Paulsen,Introduction to Philosophy(Holt).
Royce,The Spirit of Modern Philosophy(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.).
Ormond,Basal Concepts in Philosophy(Scribners).
James,The Will to Believe(Longmans).
Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, with full bibliographies, French, German, and Italian equivalents, etc. (Macmillans).
Spencer,Principles of Sociology(Appletons).
Giddings,Principles of Sociology(Macmillans).
Mackensie,Introduction to Social Philosophy(Macmillans).
Marshall,Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics(Macmillans).
Galton,Inquiries into Human Faculty(Macmillans).
----,Natural Inheritance(Macmillans).
Pearson,The Chances of Death(Arnold).
The Psychological Review(Macmillans, all departments).
The American Journal of Psychology(Worcester: Orpha, experimental).
Mind(London: Williams & Norgate, mainly for philosophy).
A.Abnormal psychology,4.Aboulia,119.Action,16,22.SeeConduct.Æsthetic feeling,46,133.Algebra, study of,187,188.Amnesia,118.Anæsthesia,158.Animal psychology,2,24,55.Animals, instinct of,25;intelligence of,36;mind in,1,24;play of,43.Ants, instinct of,26.Aphasia,114,132,190;auditory,116,132;motor,114,132;sensory,115;visual,116,132.Apperception,12,15,17,42,108,121.Assimilation,14,41,133.Association of ideas,11,13,15,18,39,42,76.Attention,76,121,182,191.Auto-suggestion,151,163.B.Bashfulness,87note.Bees, instinct of,26.Birds, instinct of,26.Body, relation of mind to,101.Brain,102.C.Cat, instinct of,25.Catalepsy,158.Cerebellum,107.Chance,vii.Child, development of the,28,37,50,76,167.Child Psychology,2,25,37,51.Children, play games of,95.Christian Science,120."Chumming,"93.Cold sensations,124.Colour blindness,63.Colour sensations,62,64.Comparative psychology,2,24.Concept, the,42.Conduct,9,16.SeeAction.Contrariness in children,86,157.Contrary suggestion,157.Contrast, law of visual,136.Control suggestion,156.Copora striata,107.Cortex of brain,105,108.Criminals,205.Cures, mental,120.D.Darwin, Charles,229.Degeneracy,104,122,226.Dextrality,53,69.Diseases of mind,4,101,114.Distance, perception of,64,66.Dog, instinct of,26,39.Doubting insanity,139.Dual personality,118.E.Eccentricity,176.Educational psychology,5,166.Ejective self,90.Electric stimulus,103.Emotional expressions,22.Environment,24.Equivalents, kinesthetic,20,28,38,112.Ethical sense, the,90.Evolution, theory of, vi,24,31,33,54,202,229.Exaltation, sense,153.Exaltation of the faculties in hypnosis,160.Excitement,21.Experimental psychology,4,101,122.Experimenting with children,6,57,61.Expressions of emotions,22.Extirpation method,102.F.Feeling,10,21.Fluid attention,182.G.Galvanometer experiment,103.Games, of animals,42;of children,95;value of,50.Generalization,41,181.Genetic psychology,2.Genius,208,211.Geometry, study of,187,188.Grammar, study of,187,188,197.Guessing,189,198.H.Habit,77,80,168,192.Hallucination,12.Heating,10.Heat and cold sensations,10,124.Heredity,32,58,75,95,169,177,200,204,218.Heredity, social,200.Hypnotic cures,164.Hypnotism,17,121,148,158.I.Idiocy,205.Illusions,12;optical,132.Imagination,12,17,22,214.Imitation,28,38,47,53,78,80,88,91,211;persistent,39.Individual psychology,5.Inhibitory suggestion,155,170.Insanity,205.Inspiration,227.Instinct,17,25;lapsed intelligence theory,31;reflex theory,30,34;theory of,26.Intelligence,36,214;animal,36.Intoxication,102,104.Introspection,3,8.Invention,211.J.Judgement,133,208,220.K.Kinæsthetic equivalents,20,28,38,112.Kindergarten, value of,175.Knowledge,9,13,22.L.Laboratories, psychological,132.Language, study of,183,197.Lapsed intelligence theory of instinct,31.Left-handedness,53,69.Levels, of brain functions,105.Life, sensory and motor periods of,167.Localization of brain inactions,102,104.M."Make-believe," in animals and children,45.Mathematics, study of,187,197.Medulla,105.Memory,11,12,18,22,76,138,150;defects of,118.Mental pathology,4,101.Mind cure,120.Mind, of animals,1,24;relation of body to,101.Monkeys, instinct of,26,39.Motives,18.Motor centres of brain,111Motor period,167.Motor suggestion,17,67,80.Muscle sensations,10.Musical expression,76.N.Natural selection,202.O.Optic thalami,107.Optical illusion,132.Organic selection, principle of,34,50.Organic sensations,10.P.Pain,21,156.Pain-movement-pleasure,83.Pathology, mental,4,101.Pedagogical psychology,5.Perception,12,17,22.Personality, dual,118.Personality suggestion,80.Phrenology, unreliableness of,117.Physiological psychology,4,101,122.Play of animals,43;of children,95.Pleasure,21,156.Post-hypnotic suggestion,160.Projection fibres,109.Psychology,1,55;abnormal,4;animal,2,24;child,2,25,37,51;comparative,2,24;educational,5,166;experimental,4,101,122;genetic,2;individual,5;introspective,3,8;pedagogical,5;physiological,4,101,122;race,6;social,6,200;variational,5.Punishment, effect of,172.R.Race psychology,6.Rapport,161.Reaction-time experiments,126.Reason in animals,31.Reasoning,11,13,17.Recept, the,41.Reception,10.Re-evolution,122.Reflex actions,57,105,53.Reflex theory of instinct,30,34.Right-handedness,53,69.Rolandic region,112.S.Schools, public, advantages of,95;dangers of,61.Selection, natural,31,202;organic,34,50.Self-consciousness,43,54,80,86.Self-suggestion,151.Sensation,10,21,22,107,109,146,179.Senses, the,10,101,107,109.Sense exaltation,153.Sensory period,167.Sentiment,23.Sexes, difference in mental disposition,176.Sight,10;experiments on,132.Smell,10.Social heredity,200;social psychology,6,200.Social sense, the,90.Somnambulism,153,159.Speech,75,79;defects of,114.Speech zone,56,109,112.Spinal cord,105.Spiritual healing,120.Statistical method of investigation,143.Stimulation, artificial,103.Subconscious suggestion,149.Suggestion,17,21,67,80,120,145,148,168,172.Suggestion, motor,80.T.Taste,10.Temperature sense,10,124.Thought,9,11,12,21,23.Thought-transference,120.Touch,10.Toxic method,104.Tune suggestions,149.V.Variation,202;theory of,30,218.Variational psychology,5.Vision,133.Visual type of mind,128,193.W.Will,19,78;defects of,119Writing,14,79.