The psychic
organs have been created by the human intellect and they are
controlled by the intellect. Had man been dependent upon the
physical organs solely, he would have remained an animal. His
psychic organs have enabled him to create instruments, tangible,
such as tools and machines; intangible, such as works of art.
These are psychic organs and with their aid man has become a
civilized being.

The psychic organs are the creation of the man of genius. To
create such organs is his function. The characteristics, then,
of the genius are an immense capacity for sympathy and an immense
surplus of power; sympathy, that he may know the needs of mankind;
power, that he may fashion those great organs of life by which the
race may live and grow.

In the various chapters of his book, Collin analyzes in an
illuminating way the life and work of Wergeland, Ibsen, and
Bjornson as typical men of genius whose expansive sympathy gave
them insight and understanding and whose indefatigable energy
wrought in the light of their insight mighty psychic organs of
cultural progress.

He comes then to Shakespeare as the genius par excellence. The
chapter on the _Shakespearean Controversy_ gives first a survey
of the development of modern scientific literary criticism from
Herder to Taine and Saint Beuve. He goes on to detail the
application of this method to the plays and sonnets of
Shakespeare. Furnivall, Spalding, and Brandes have attempted to
trace the genesis and the chronology of the plays. They would have
us believe that the series of tragedies--_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_,
_Othello_, _Lear_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Troilus and Cressida_,
_Coriolanus_, and _Timon_ are the records of an increasing
bitterness and pessimism. Brandes and Frank Harris, following
Thomas Tyler have, on the basis of the sonnets, constructed a
fascinating, but quite fantastic romance.

Vagaries such as these have caused some critics, such as Sidney
Lee and Bierfreund, to declare that it is impossible on the basis
of the plays to penetrate to Shakespeare the man. His work is
too purely objective. Collin is not willing to admit this. He
maintains that the scientific biographical method of criticism
is fundamentally sound. But it must be rationally applied. The
sequence which Brandes has set up is quite impossib