talent to descend from the neurotic and insane. This may easily be explained: talent, like genius, is accompanied by cortical excitation, only in a less degree and in a smaller brain. The true normal man is not the man of letters or of learning, but the man who works and eats— fruges consumere natus.
But our nature, it is customary to say, revolts against a conception which tends to lower the most sublime manifestation of humanity to the level of the sorrowfully degenerate, to idiocy and insanity. It is sad, I do not deny, but has not nature caused to grow from similar germs, and on the same clod of earth, the nettle and the jasmine, the aconite and the rose? The botanist cannot be blamed for these coincidences; and since they exist it is not a crime that he should record them as he finds them. Repugnance also is a sentiment, not a reason; and a sentiment, moreover, which has not been shared by the race generally, who long ago reached conclusions— repugnant to the academic world, which sometimes closes its eyes in order not to see—entirely in harmony with the results here presented. We may see this in the most ancient etymologies; in Hebrew as well as in Sanscrit the lunatic is synonymous with the prophet. We may see it, too, in proverbs: “I matti ed i fancialli indovinano;” “Kinder und Narren sprechen die Wahrheit;” “Un fol advise bien un sage;” “Sæpe enim est morio valde opportune locutus.” The lunatic, again, among barbarous people is feared and adored by the masses who often confide to him supreme authority.
In modern times the same conviction has been preserved, but in a form, it must be confessed, altogether disadvantageous to genius. Not only is fame (and until recent years even liberty), denied to men of genius during their lives, but even the means of subsistence. After death they receive monuments and rhetoric by way of compensation. And why is this? Neither the jealousy of rivals nor the envy of mediocre men is enough to explain it. The reason is that if we leave out certain great statesmen (though there are exceptions—Bismarck, for example), men of genius are lacking in tact, in moderation, in the sense of practical life, in the virtues which are alone
