Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/476

458, or at least exaggerated, some of the alleged morbid characteristics of the great; and as a matter of fact there is good reason to suppose that this falsifying of the record of greatness has taken place. I may refer to the story of the madness and suicide of Lucretius, which is extremely doubtful, and may have grown out of a religious horror at the supposed tendency of his writings. The story of Newton's madness, again, which is given by a French biographer, and which is ably refuted by Sir David Brewster, may owe much of its piquancy to what may be called the unconscious inventiveness of prejudice. Very possibly the stories of the visions of Brutus, Cromwell, and others, have had a like origin.

Again, it will be said that even medical men—wishing like others to magnify their office—may have been too ready in spying out the symptoms of insanity. If they are fallible in dealing with the living subject, all of whose physical and mental characteristics are accessible to observation, how much more likely are they to err in diagnosing the minds of the dead by help of a few fragmentary indications only! I think the force of this objection, too, must be allowed. When, for example, a French alienist thinks it worth while to write a book in order to prove that the belief of Socrates in a controlling divinity (xxx xxx) was a symptom of mental disease, a layman may be pardoned for demanding a mode of investigation more in accordance with the proud claims of science to our absolute and unstinted confidence. A well-informed and critical reader of M. Moreau's tables of biographical facts will not fail to challenge more than one statement of his respecting the morbid characteristics of great men, ancient and modern.

Allowing, however, for a margin of error, I do not think any candid mind will fail to see that such a body of facts as remains is sufficient to justify us in drawing a conclusion. If men of the highest intellectual caliber were not more liable to mental and nervous disorders than others, no such list out of the short roll of great names could have been obtained. No elaborate calculations are needed, I think, to show that mental malady occurs too often in the history of genius.

One might perhaps try to evade the unpalatable conclusion by saying that there is genius and genius; that it is weakly, one-sided, and bizarre originality which exhibits these unhealthinesses, whereas the larger and more vigorous productiveness of an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, or a Goethe, is free from such blemishes. I think, however,