Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/313

298 has to deal with the criminal; but for genius, the usual attitude is admiration from a distance rather than study at close quarters. But like crime, genius, too, is a problem.

Ordinary psychology usually stops at the level which development reaches in the case of a normal mind; yet, although geniuses are not as plentiful as ordinary minds, there is no reason why the science of mind, should not venture further out and investigate the laws and nature of the development which culminates in the production of a genius.

Ordinary Ethics, similarly, stops with the ordinary man. It sets up an ideal which is presumably intended for the ordinary run of mortals. But it forgets that in setting up an ideal which excludes the extra-ordinary, it tends to perpetuate mediocrity. Apart from this, geniuses, too, are men and have got to be adjusted with the moral idea. The sub-normal, i.e., the criminal, may be ignored, because, for him, Ethics still has nothing but condemnation; but the super-normal or genius, cannot be ignored with impunity; because, the very fact that he is adored, shows that he is more or less an ideal. For Ethics, therefore, genius is far more important than criminality.

In fact, genius, too, is coming in for its share of attention from the sciences. But the first fruits of such investigation are hardly very complimentary to it.

On the physical—rather, psycho-physical—side, genius has been found to be not only abnormal but sub-normal—not only a deviation from the type, but a disadvantageous deviation,—far below the normal. Physically and mentally, he has been declared to be unsound. Genius has been proclaimed to be a disease of the brain and nerves, and consequently of the mind—and a disease of the same kind as what is ordinarily called ‘insanity.’ “Medical materialism,” as William James characteristically calls it, has discovered that genius does not denote a healthy mind. Probably there is no