Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/620

 602 the anomaly is only an apparent one. The scholar, the historian, and the critic are alike dependent on an exceptional power of acquisition and of memory, and this is well known to be a precocious endowment. Moreover, it is an endowment which is fairly certain to be duly noted, seeing that it is precisely the aptitude which is at the basis of school-renown. This is borne out by the fact that the class of scholars, etc., though high up in respect of early manifestation of ability, are not so distinguished in the matter of early production or of early attainment of excellence.

The next group in our combined scale of precocity is scientists. Their high place is, I believe, largely owing to the mathematicians. The mathematical faculty is well known to be a precocious one. The fact that it is often found in the company of musical capacity suggests that there is a common mental ingredient. In each we note the play of inventive imagination on a circumscribed mass of material easily acquired, viz., tone-images in the one case, and symbol-images in the other. On the other hand, the representatives of the natural sciences which involve prolonged processes of observation, etc., are much less forward.

The shifting position of novelists in our three scales is, perhaps, the most curious outcome of our investigation. Like the poet, the novelist employs as his chief mental implement the faculty of sensuous imagination. Hence the relatively high position in our first table. At the same time the novel presupposes much more in the way of knowledge of the world and reflection on its ways than the poem. Its most distinctive aptitude, perhaps, is a minute knowledge of character; a circumstance which brings it into close relation to one of the most abstract of the sciences, viz., psychology.

Respecting philosophers little need be said. That a considerable fraction should begin to write after thirty, and almost as large a proportion attain fame after forty, is just what one might antecedently expect. Indeed, nowhere perhaps is early achievement so truly marvelous as in the severe domain of abstract speculation. It is not a mere coincidence, I take it, that the two most brilliant examples of this precocity, Berkeley and Schelling, are metaphysicians whose writings are so deeply tinged with the glow of a poetic imagination.

In this attempt to explain our results we have confined our attention to the intellectual ingredient in genius. But we might also take into account the emotional and volitional factor—that is to say, the specific impulse which prompts and sustains the creative activity. And by so doing we might still further illustrate the general agreement between our facts and the laws of mental development. Thus, for example, the artistic impulse, which according to our tables shows itself to be most precocious, appears also to be the one first manifesting itself in a decided form in the history of the average individual, and of the race. The child and the race alike develop a crude art before they