any merely
medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly
to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological
causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr.
Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree."
"Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration
of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity."
"Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently
illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of
profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category.... And
it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the
greater the unsoundness."[3]

[3] J. F. Nisbet: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp.
xvi., xxiv.

Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their
own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease,
consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the VALUE of the fruits? Do
they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of
existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the
productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that no
neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?

No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here,
and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical
consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw.
One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of
works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art,
namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using
medical arguments.[4] But for the most part the masterpieces are left
unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to
such secular productions as everyone admits to be intrinsically
eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious
manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations
have been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on
internal or spiritual grounds.

[4] Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.

In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone
to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic
constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by
experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It
should be no ot