recognized as real by the masses, and which alone are useful in social affairs. “Le bon sens vaut mieux que le génie,” says an old French adage. And as Mirabeau said, “Good sense is the absence of every strong passion, and only men of strong passions can be great.” Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics, while the lettered crowd cry out when—as I have attempted to do here— this general opinion is attached to a theory.
By some of those persons who have too much good sense—and who do not know that that destroys every great truth, because we reach truth more by remote paths than by smooth and ordinary roads—it has been objected: “Many of these defects that you find in great men may be found also in those who are not men of genius.” This is very true, but it is by the quality and quantity that the abnormal character is marked; and, above all, by the contradiction with the whole of the other characters of their personality, that the abnormality appears. Cooks are vain, but in those matters which refer to their occupation they are not so vain as to believe themselves gods. The nobleman will boast of descent from a mediæval hero, but not of being a sculptor. We are all forgetful sometimes, but not so far forgetful that we cannot recall our own names while at the same time we have an extraordinary memory for our own discoveries. Many have said what Michelangelo said of monks, but they have not afterwards spent large sums in fattening monasteries. In short, it is the doubling and contradiction of personality in genius which reveals the abnormality.
It has again been objected to me that these studies are deficient in utility. To this I might reply with Taine that it is not always necessary that the true should be useful. Yet numerous practical applications arise out of these researches; they furnish us with explanations of those strange religious insanities which become the nucleus of great historical events. The examination of the productions of the insane supply us with new sources of analysis and criticism for the study of genius in art and literature; and, above all, these data bring an important
