Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/694

672 to Luther—are all examples of hallucinations which are entirely consistent with reason, and are not justly indicative of insanity or mental disease. They represent a habit of mind which naturally, under conditions of concentrated attention, intensified in an age tolerant of all forms of superstitions, "seeks for and creates, if need be, with or without consciousness, an outward object as the cause of its feelings." Luther, for example, saw with his "mind's eye" the image of the devil, which, in that age of religious excitement and credulity, was ever expectant in all minds, and generally present everywhere. "Hallucinations were," says De Boismont, "in the whole social community, not in individuals"; and hence it was that under the dominion of a general belief, however vague or irrational it may have been, the individual mind "demanded of imagination the realization of the phantasms of its dreams; and imagination, despite of the resistance of reason, endowed them with form and substance." Herein is found a distinguishing factor "between real insanity and the separate phenomena of genius and moral exaltation,"

In further support of this opinion we may cite the hallucinations of Loyola, when he heard celestial voices; of Edward Irving, who received the gift of prophecy and the "power of tongues"; of Dr. Johnson, when the voice of his dead mother came to him; of Male-branche, when the deep feelings of his soul were to him the audible voice of Deity, and of Joan of Arc, who, under the guidance of saints, led the French arms to victory.

That genius "has its roots in a nervous organization of exceptional delicacy," is undoubtedly true, but it does not necessarily follow that the liability to mental discord and confusion is thereby increased, because this delicacy of brain-structure and its functions are admirably adjusted, and the very perfection of the mechanism enables it to work with the least possible friction or injury.

Under certain conditions, however, we have eccentricities of thought, feeling, and action, which indicate an unstable condition of nerve-element; but it does not follow that this instability necessarily impairs the integrity of the mind; much less does it imply that "genius," more than the lower expressions of mental power, is nearer the border-land of mental disease. I doubt not that permutations of this unstable condition may occur which, by supplementing the natural gifts of mind, cause a variety of individual traits. It may give to the poet Campbell indecision and indolence; make Carlyle cross and pessimistic; Byron proud, generous, and reckless; Schlegel foppish in his vanity; Keats despondent; Pope crafty and pretentious; Swift satirical, avaricious, and irascible; Chateaubriand egotistic and vain; Burns and Poe convivial and intemperate; Eliot sensitive and dependent; Hawthorne shy and modest; Wordsworth simple-hearted yet full of conceit; and Ampere absent-minded and unpractical. Thus might I show certain peculiarities which belong to