Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/687

Rh environment limits and modifies the development of the capacities of the organization.

The explanation of genius through the operation of the biologic law of heredity is very satisfactory so long as antecedent and sequence bear to each other definite and ascertainable relations; but trouble begins when the genetic record fails in its apparent unity—as when genius and mediocrity have kinship.

Whence came the genius of Phidias, which enabled him with such immortal art to create in carved ivory and fretted gold the Lemnian statue of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia; whence came the power of Michael Angelo, Salvator Rosa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rubens, to paint in matchless beauty, on canvas and in fresco, the wondrous imagery of their minds; or of Beethoven, to record in his symphonies the raptures of his soul; or of Scott, to clothe with the habiliments of life the ideals of his brain; or of Spenser, Burns, and Byron, to write with such rhythmic beauty; or of Goethe, to garnish with poetic dress the deep philosophy of his thought? In what cloudland of the past were hidden the possibilities of Dante and Milton, who made their visions of the eternal realms the subject of impassioned verse—at once gorgeous in its rich tracery of thought, and sublime in its pageantry of bliss and woe? In what ancestral brain did sleep the transcendent genius of Shakespeare that read every page "in Nature's infinite book of secrecy"; or did smolder the giant intellect of Newton, which weighed the planets and bound with the force of gravity atoms and worlds in a bond of unity?

Such examples seem indicative of conditions powerful to modify, transform, or deflect the action of the laws of heredity, and to cause "indefinite variability" in psychological phenomena, as is done in material forms. This variability, this new psychic manifestation, is robed with the insignia of a new creation; a new species has been born into the realm of mind, displaying new and more exalted powers, but nevertheless restrained in its action by the organization which, under law, presides with such tyranny over every mental expression, and makes us, to a greater extent than we commonly think, creatures of an inexorable destiny. The contrast between the exalted ideals and grand achievements of genius, and the feeble, discordant expressions of madness, is as pathetic as it is striking. The citadel of thought has been despoiled of its most precious adornment, and in the place where once the Muses sat, mocking echoes now hold carnival, and "melancholy sits on brood."

To give a definition of insanity which shall prove acceptable to medical psychology and to practical jurisprudence, is a more difficult task than it may appear. This is because of the differences in the appreciation of causes and effects in mental phenomena which exist between minds trained in the technical details of physiological and pathological knowledge, and those who witness merely a few of the