Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/889

 REVIEWS.

Genius and Degewration. A psychological study. By DR. WILLIAM HIRSCH. D. Appleton & Co., 1896.

Genius and Degeneration is the title of a book opposed to the teachings of the alarmist school. Lombroso, Nordau, and the others who form this school have startled the public by elaborating the idea that civilized communities are largely composed of degenerate individ- uals. With facile pens, large vocabularies, and fragmentary citations these writers have set out to stigmatize the intellectual leaders of the world as more or less degenerate.

The laity has been rather overawed by the vigor of their accusa- tions, so that a book presenting the othei side of the question was needed. Dr. Hirsch writes as a psychiatrist and is at pains to show that the argument for degeneration lacks positive evidence; that its logic is faulty and that its leading terms are employed without exact definition. Furthermore, in comparing the present with the past, the authors in question are wanting in a sense of historical perspective.

It must be kept in mind that the fraction of the community which any author calls healthy or normal depends upon the narrowness of his definition of health. This will vary with different writers, but the definition once chosen must be rigidly applied, and it is by no means fair to describe as stigmata in geniuses what would pass for mere peculiarities in individuals unknown to fame. Moreover, the term genius is used by these writers even more loosely than the difficulties of defining it would warrant. Dr. Hirsch points out that, psycholog- ically, geniuses do not form a homogeneous group, and that the same deviations from the normal would therefore have different values in different cases. Furthermore, in properly diagnosing mental ailments, groups of symptoms are used as indices of disease, and their signifi- cance depends largely on their grouping. To take one symptom out of the group and consider it as indicative of that disturbance for which the entire group stands is a patent error, yet this has been done time after time by those seeking to prove degeneracy.

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