Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/695

Rh the personal mental outfit of almost every one whose individuality is sufficiently marked to make him worthy of notice; but these peculiarities or eccentricities are not essentially morbid, neither do they give affirmative evidence that genius is related to madness. Such peculiarities belong to all orders of mind—the humble as well as the exalted—and can not, therefore, have an exclusive application.

Add to the personal eccentricities of Pope, Byron, Johnson, Carlyle, and Swift the temper which at times became in them extravagant rage, and the proof is yet no stronger that genius and insanity are but different types of mental disease; for passion and appetite are, in all their forms, expressions of organic life and common to humanity, and therefore, as universal factors, they can not be dissociated and made to bear witness either for or against the subject before us. It has already been admitted that eccentricities of character imply a want of mental poise or equilibrium, which is even more apparent in the extravagant passions which at times hold individuals under despotic control, and often indicate decided moral obliquity. This I do not deny, but yet affirm that the violent passion at times observed in one of exalted powers of mind is no more evidence in favor of the kinship between those powers and mental disease, than is the same passion, when displayed in a low and vulgar mind, proof that stupidity is a congener of madness. Mr, Madden is quite as justified in asserting that "the maladies of genius have their main source in dyspepsia," or I in affirming that, because some eminent men have been physically puny and ill-formed, therefore their genius is related to, and dependent upon, bodily imperfections.

In trying to establish the kinship between mental greatness and disease, Mr. Sully states, what I do not deny, that "a number of great men have died from disease of the nerve-centers," naming Pascal, Cuvier, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Heine—none of whom, however, were insane.

That genius should be subject to "all the ills that flesh is heir to" challenges neither surprise nor dissent; but to hold this as evidence in support of the idea that "the extreme mind is near to extreme madness" is, as it seems to me, an erroneous interpretation of physiological and pathological facts. To prove that Pascal died in convulsions from an acute brain trouble, in connection with a disease of bodily organs, and that Mendelssohn and Rousseau died of apoplexy, and Heine of spinal disease, is not proof that there was any essential weakness or disease of nerve-element, but rather is it evidence of disease of blood-vessels through faulty nutrition. When haemorrhage occurs in the brain, its substance is disorganized, as it might be if any other foreign substance were forced into it, and nervous disturbance very naturally follows; and possibly secondary nervous or mental disease, but it is not correct to speak of the primary apoplexy as a disease of the brain, or to infer that, because a person of high mental endowments