Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/454

444 to the ordinary activities of the life it is born into is not prompted to find new adjustments to suit itself. The organic inhibition of ordinary activities is, necessarily, a highly favorable condition for the development of extraordinary abilities, when these are present in a latent condition. Hence it is that so many men of the highest intellectual aptitudes have so often shown the tendency to muscular incoordination and clumsiness which marks idiots, and that even within the intellectual sphere, when straying outside their own province, they have frequently shown a lack of perception which placed them on scarcely so high a level as the man of average intelligence. It is not surprising that by means of the idiots savants, the wonderful calculators, the mattoids and 'men of one idea,' and the men whose intellectual originality is strictly confined to one field, we may bridge the gulf that divides idiocy from genius.

Since a basis of organic inaptitude—a condition which in a more marked and unmitigated form we call imbecility—may thus often be traced at the foundation of genius, we must regard it as a more fundamental fact in the constitution of genius than the undue prevalence of insanity, which is merely a state of mental dissolution, in nearly every case temporarily or permanently abolishing the aptitude for intellectual achievement. But it must not, therefore, be hastily concluded that the prevalence of insanity among men of genius is an accidental fact, meaningless or unaccountable. In reality it is a very significant fact. The intense cerebral energy of intellectual creation involves an expenditure of tissue which is not the dissolution of insanity, for waste and repair must here be balanced, but it reveals an instability which may sink into the mere dissolution of insanity, if the balance of waste and repair is lost and the high pressure tension falls out of gear. Insanity is rather a Nemesis of the peculiar intellectual energy of genius exerted at a prolonged high tension than an essential element in the foundation of genius. But a germinal nervous instability, such as to the ordinary mind simulates some form of insanity, is certainly present from the first in many cases of genius and is certainly of immense value in creating the visions or stimulating the productiveness of men of genius. We have seen how significant a gouty inheritance seems to be. A typical example of this in recent years was presented by William Morris, a man of very original genius, of great physical vigor and strength, of immense capacity for work, who was at the same time abnormally restless, very irritable, and liable to random explosions of nervous energy. Morris inherited from his mothers side a peculiarly strong and solid constitution; on his father's side he inherited a neurotic and gouty strain. It is evident that, given the robust constitution, the germinal instability furnished by such a morbid element as this—falling far short of insanity—acts as a precious fermentative