Chapter IV: Part 4

It is to be remarked at the outset that for the correct diagnosis of a case of hallucinations the most detailed knowledge of the phenomena of the case is requisite, for there are most diverse varieties of hallucinations; and their occurrence depends upon the most manifold psychological conditions. To enter upon all the facts and upon the different theories is, of course, not possible in this place. For such information the reader is referred to the extensive literature of the subject. There are only one or two points that I desire here to touch upon in order to avail myself of the knowledge of psychiatrists for the special inquiry now in hand.

Since Esquirol, who first thoroughly investigated the subject, psychiatrists have distinguished two classes of deceptions of sense. The first are those which are not suggested by any outward appearance; these are termed _hallucinations_. In the second there is an outward object exciting sensations which are misinterpreted in the percept, and filled out with imaginary details, so as to appear in a falsified form; these phenomena are termed _illusions_. The two kinds of phenomena pass gradually the one into the other, so that in many cases it is impossible to distinguish between them.

It has been remarked above that certain hallucinations of the insane have their perfect analogue in the reproductive power of sense-impressions. We can reproduce in the mind any object which we have often seen. This power is developed in very different grades in different persons. Usually the reproduced image is decidedly weaker than its original, both in its outlines and in its colour. In rare cases we find the reproductive power so much heightened that the reproduced image is almost equal to the original percept. Thus Lombroso[57] reports of a painter that “he was able to sketch as many as three hundred portraits a year. He only needed to look at a person attentively for half an hour, and after that could call up a hallucinatory vision of him which he would proceed to copy in painting with as much distinctness and confidence as if he were looking at a real person.” This case is nothing but an intensification of a healthy action, much to the advantage of the artist concerned. It is certainly offensive to call such a gift by the name of hallucination. That, however, is a mere question of the usage of language. At any rate, such a phenomenon ought not to be confounded with insane hallucinations, for in the painter the action was under his control. He called up the “hallucination,” if you will call it so, when it served his purpose to do so, and dismissed it when it had served his turn. The hallucinations which torment and affright persons of diseased minds arise spontaneously and will not go at the patient’s bidding.

Meantime it is very doubtful whether the artist’s recollected image was really as distinct and definite as the original percept. To determine that would require evidence of a widely different kind from the report of the writer Ball, who was Lombroso’s informant. The fact that the painter was able to distinguish the recollected image from an object of direct visual perception, and did not mistake the face recollected for a face really there, would seem to show that his image differed from a perceived image somewhat in the same manner as do the recollections of ordinary people. But however that may be, such a phenomenon is certainly in no wise a morbid symptom.

Goethe describes the same faculty in himself. “My sensuous, apprehensive power is of so unusual a sort that I retain all outlines and forms most sharply in my memory; but I am moved in the most lively way by misshapen and defective forms.... Without that capacity for sharp apprehension and impression I could not have produced my characters so vividly and sharply individualized. This distinctness and precision led me, for many years, to entertain the delusion that I possessed a vocation and talent for drawing and painting.”

If we consider Goethe, as above suggested, as an ordinary man whose mental powers are seen under a magnifying glass, we shall find it quite a matter of course that the intensity of his reproduced images should be increased relatively to the intensity of his directly perceived images in the same proportion as all the other psychical factors. Hence, if we find that the distinctness of his perception is not exceeded by that of his memory, this is a phenomenon which differs as widely as possible from an insane hallucination, and it betokens rashness and want of good sense to call his condition morbid.

In another passage Goethe describes a state dependent partly upon an excitation of the retina and partly upon heightened ideation, so falling into the class, not of hallucinations, but of illusions: “If I shut my eyes and, letting my head hang down, thought of a flower in the middle of my field of vision, it did not endure an instant in its first shape, but separated, and from its interior a new flower unfolded itself of coloured and also green leaves. It was not a natural flower, but a fantastic yet regular one, like the conventionalized rosettes of the carver. It was impossible to fix the sprouting creation; yet it lasted as long as it was pleasing to me, without fading and without brightening. I could produce the same effect by thinking of the ornament of a variegated disk; and this immediately underwent a change starting at the middle and proceeding to the periphery, just like the subsequently invented kaleidoscope.”

Just as sense-impressions can be simply called back to memory, so also new combinations arise by fancy, which therefore have the character of original creations. In persons whose fancy is powerful, the images of fancy, altogether in the same way as those of memory, can become so clear and distinct as to be very near to actual percepts. Lombroso reports: “The painter Montina thought he saw his pictures before him before he had painted them. When one day somebody stood between him and the place where he thought he saw his picture he bade him stand aside, so as to let him see what he was painting from.”[58]

Here again the image was voluntarily excited, so that a doubt must remain as to whether it equalled a real sense image in clearness. The painter’s bidding anybody who stood in the way to step aside was quite a matter of course. When we wish to reproduce a former impression of sense we try first to shut out all other impressions of that sense. When we wish to call up the image of a person we always shut our eyes. With open eyes most people are, however, capable of making such a reproduction, provided that none but lifeless objects are in the field of vision. But in talking to one person and fixing the traits of his countenance, few people are able to call up the image of another person at the same time. In the same way, very few can recall one melody while another is heard.

Such phenomena are by no means rare among artists of lively fancy. They have nothing in common with the hallucinations of insanity. Hagen, therefore, calls them pseudo-hallucinations, Baillarger psychical hallucinations, and Kahlbaum apperceptional hallucinations. Von Krafft-Ebing[59] says: “Among artists this gift is found both in a simply reproductive and also in a fancifully deforming mode. The striking art of delineation of many an eminent dramatic artist, the plastic power of description of a Goethe, Ossian, or Homer, suggest such an endowment. Among some composers, too, the fineness of the instrumentation and the timbre of their tone poems lead us to suspect a specially fine and lively faculty of reproduction of their acoustic memory. Persons extraordinarily gifted in sensuous faculties can create hallucinations more easily than do those who are poor in fancy and who live in the realm of abstract ideas. This will readily be admitted. Even their recollections can sometimes be voluntarily raised to a plastic distinctness approaching hallucination.”

So far, we have only considered cases in which deceptions of sense were voluntarily called up, whether by a specially strong faculty of reproduction or by a play of fancy. The subjects were quite aware that the object before them was fantastic and not real.

On the other hand, it is recorded of a considerable number of famous men in different departments that they have had deceptions of the senses which arose independently of their will, and were consequently genuine hallucinations. Among these we must place many religious visions, such as those of St. Paul and other saints. Luther insists that he often saw the devil; and on one celebrated occasion he threw the inkstand at him.

Whether such deceptions of sense are to be regarded as morbid or not opinions differ. Many psychiatrists speak of hallucinations, and consider them compatible with complete health. Others hold that they are always symptoms of mental disorder. Hagen[60] occupies a peculiar position on this question, for he takes hallucinations to be invariably morbid symptoms, yet not symptoms of mental disease. This is connected with his theory that hallucination is a phenomenon of convulsion of certain blood vessels which I cannot here further set forth.

There is a quite arbitrary separation of psychical and somatic conditions at the bottom of this view. What Hagen means is, that the cause, or somatic concomitant, of the hallucination is a convulsion. It is presumable that every mental process whatever has a somatic concomitant, or “cause,” in the organic vehicle of the soul. Hallucinations may have different somatic concomitants from other mental processes, but they cannot be supposed to be peculiar in merely having somatic concomitants. There are some diseases of the brain which are accompanied by no symptoms of derangement of the mind, and are therefore exclusively somatic diseases. But just as soon as the stimulation of a path of sense enters into a psychical metamorphosis, we have to do with a mental process. If this is morbid, we have to do with a symptom of mental disease.

That which determines Hagen to pronounce hallucination under all circumstances to be a proof of a morbid state is its relative infrequency. “Hallucination is in every case a condition departing from the norm.” But if everything which “departs from the norm” is to be called morbid, then we return to the proposition that genius is morbid, since it “departs from the norm”; for the “normal” man is a tradesman and no “genius.” But I can only meet Hagen with his own maxim, “Quod sola affirmatione affirmatur, sola negatione negatur.”

It is a fact of daily observation that hallucinations can be produced by suggestion, and that not only in hypnosis but in the ordinary condition. If a woman who has never been electrified, and is therefore somewhat nervous, has the electrodes of a galvanic battery placed upon her head without the circuit being closed, while the faradic apparatus is caused to sound, she will not seldom imagine she feels the current distinctly, and perhaps complain that it is too strong. Though there is no current, the woman is positive she feels it. Every inward excitation, especially every emotion, favours such deceptions.

A timid or superstitious person is liable, in crossing a churchyard at night, to see figures, hear voices, etc. These deceptions may be of the class of illusions, shadows of trees being taken for ghosts, and the noise of the foliage for spiritual voices; or they may be pure hallucinations, the pseudo-perceptions not being formed by any outward sensations. An interesting case is described by H. Moore:[61]

“A whole ship’s crew were thrown into consternation by the ghost of the cook, who had died a few days before. He was distinctly seen by all of them walking on the water with a peculiar gait by which he was distinguished, one of his legs being shorter than the other. The cook, so plainly recognised, was only a piece of an old wreck.”

A child endowed with a rich fancy, whose mother has died, may, in the emotion of the pain and the excitement, see her image in heaven or hear her voice. Such phenomena are by no means rare. They depend upon a rich and vivid fancy and a powerful emotion of the heart. This play of fancy, called forth by emotions and moods, has never been better described, in its external resemblance to insanity, than by Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold--
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination;
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or, in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear.

Deceptions of sense arising in this way have their origin in the most central part of the organ of mind. They are consequences of ideas. Such hallucinations occur, of course, in the insane, and to distinguish them from those of peripheric origin--that is, from those that are independent of the thoughts that immediately preceded them--Kahlbaum terms them centrifugal hallucinations, or phantasms.

As an example of such a phantasm we may instance a well-known hallucination of Goethe, who, when he was once riding to Gesenheim, saw his own counterpart riding toward him. “I saw myself coming along the same path on horseback toward me, dressed, as I had never been, in pike-gray and gold. I shook myself out of the dream, and the figure was gone. But it is singular that eight years later, not at all by choice but only by chance, I found myself riding over the same path in the very direction my visionary self took, and clad in just those clothes, being again on my way to Frederica. Whatever the explanation of these things may be, the wonderful phantom gave me at that moment of separation some alleviation.”

The emotion excited by the separation from Frederica was enough, with Goethe’s lively fancy, to produce the phantom. Goethe himself judged his condition quite correctly. He recognised the shape as a fallacious one and said, “I shook myself out of this dream, and the figure was gone.” It is very characteristic of the condition that Goethe should himself class it along with dreams. Obviously, the actual impressions of sight were, at the time of hallucination, not apperceived; and all that Goethe thought he saw at that moment was a painting of fancy, parts of the hallucination being superposed upon and congruent with the objects that had been seen an instant before. Goethe further says that the phantom gave him consolation and relief. It thus evidently answered to his thoughts; and we can presume that his fancy prefigured to him the moment when he should again visit Frederica.

The circumstance of hallucinations being recognised as such by the subject or not, is no more decisive for the diagnosis of the case than is the simple occurrence of deception of sense. Whether the hallucination is recognised as such or not depends more upon its contents and upon the metaphysical opinions, religious turn of mind, and superstition of the subject. Luther believed in the existence of a personal devil. His hallucination was the outcome of this belief--that is, of his ideas. Consequently his holding the fallacious object to be real was no insane opinion, but was in consonance with his metaphysics. So it is with the visions of saints and prophets. We may admit that a considerable number of them were insane, but the hallucinations do not suffice to prove that every one of them was so. He who has devoted his whole life to religious meditations and tendencies and is fully convinced of the truth of his faith, who is penetrated with belief in the presence of a personal God, personal angels, tutelary spirits, etc., may, on an occasion of strong emotion, with a moderately lively fancy, have visions and hear voices, and hold them for real, without in the slightest degree justifying a suspicion of insanity. Such hallucinations, called forth by _suggestion_ or auto-suggestion, occur less infrequently in men endowed with fancy. While Benvenuto Cellini was praying that God would once more let him see the sunlight a hallucination came to him. It was that of a landscape with the sun shining upon it. Napoleon, before important events, battles, etc., saw his star in the sky. Pascal, in consequence of a great fright, saw a precipice before him. If we are to accept Plutarch’s story, the hallucination of Brutus is explicable in the same way.

The question whether hallucinations always betoken some unsoundness of mind can not be answered from a theoretical standpoint. Like the whole of psychiatry, it is a question of experience. Should experience show that hallucinations occur only among those whose minds are disordered, then we should be right in considering them as symptoms of derangement. But it is not so. Experience shows that sane persons, especially men of lively fancy, like great artists and poets, are subject to hallucinations; and though such phenomena are exceptional, and in that sense may be called not “normal,” yet nothing could be more preposterous than to regard all those great men as subject to occasional disorders of mind, or as approaching insanity in any way.

I have shown above what an influence emotion can exert upon all the organs of the body. A permanent acceleration of the pulse is, as we know by experience, always a morbid symptom. But would it ever occur to a pathologist to pronounce a person diseased because some emotion--such as fright, anxiety, or joy--made his heart beat faster? Emotion may produce in one man beating of the heart, in another vasomotor phenomena, such as blushing or blanching, and in a third any one of manifold nervous states, without there being anything morbid in those effects. In men of uncommonly strong fancy the emotion may sometimes call up supervenient hallucinations. But that is merely a phenomenon analogous to the beating of the heart, which we observe every day, except that it is relatively infrequent.

Hallucinations that are held to be true always make us fear for the preservation of an unclouded self-consciousness and of an unfalsified reaction between the ego and the outer world. In deciding whether, in a given case, hallucinations are to be denominated morbid, the decisive circumstance will be whether and how far the self-consciousness and free will have been influenced, and whether and how far responsibility for actions has been diminished.

Besides hallucinations, other phenomena connected with the rich fancy of famous poets and artists have many points of similarity with symptoms of insanity, and in many cases may lead to actual insanity.

Although we have seen that in Goethe’s case the gushing fancy was always in harmony with the high faculty of his intellect, and that, in spite of the apparent independence of his fancy, it was nevertheless directed by the purpose of an intellectual will, yet in many poets we find this harmonic interaction seriously disturbed and the inward equilibrium deranged. Alfieri calls his condition during composition a fever. He says:[62] “That part of composition which I have called creation is a fever, and during its access one feels nothing else.” And in another passage: “The whole day I pondered as I always do as soon as the fever by means of which I begin and carry through a work seizes me, I know not how.”

Byron owns that his poetry is the dream of sleeping passions. If he be awakened, he can not speak its language, which he only knows while sleepwalking. Any shock or effort awakens the elasticity of his mind and always makes him what he must be. Of the third canto of Childe Harold, he says: “It is a fine piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad, during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.”[63] His biographer, Moore, says that Byron saw only the reflection of his own brilliant ideas in every new object.

Although such conditions are not quite pathological, yet they stand hard by the borders of insanity, and certainly indicate a decided disposition to mental derangement. Byron often fell into a state of melancholia, and showed manifest defects of a moral kind.

One of the most peculiar symptoms of some deranged minds is lying. All authors, without exception, who have treated of hysteria, emphasize lying as one of the most characteristic symptoms of that malady. Charcot[64] is astonished at the perseverance and energy with which hysterical patients understand how to deceive those about them. Numerous examples of the same phenomenon are recorded by Morel[65], Lasègne,[66] and others. Delbrück[67] has described a special form of morbid lying, and has proposed for it the designation “pseudologia phantastica.” As a general rule, this lying is not motived by personal interest, as, for example, to escape punishment or to attain some advantage; but it is some creation of fancy which is narrated as a true event. Such patients, mostly weak-minded, possess, in consequence of their small intellectual powers, a fancy very rich in proportion to their intellectual function. Such persons sometimes narrate whole romances as true occurrences, and may, upon superficial consideration, be taken for intellectual. Dr. Paul Sollier[68] also paints this symptom: “Among imbeciles, in opposition to idiots, an ungoverned imagination is often observed. This shows itself in their love of grotesque comparisons, which prove that they are capable of associating disparate ideas only remotely related to one another. This tendency is sometimes carried to an extraordinary pitch, and gives them a false air of being bright. On the other hand, we know how mendacious they are. They are all more or less so. They do not content themselves with simply denying anything of which they are accused. They invent a story quite different from the truth. Some of them do not stop at distorting the facts, but insert additional details, or make a story out of whole cloth. They not only do this to clear themselves, or to throw the blame on their comrades, but even when it is to their disadvantage--boasting of tricks they have not played, for the purpose of exciting interest and admiration.”

While in imbeciles this impulse to express such pictures of fancy is to be regarded as a consequence of a degradation of intelligence, a similar condition is found in poetical men, owing to an overdevelopment of the ideation and the fancy. Hence it becomes interesting to trace out this phenomenon of “pseudologia phantastica” in the childhood of poets. Delbrück adduces as examples Goethe and Gottfried Keller, both of whom themselves remarked this symptom of their childhood. Goethe tells how he narrated to his schoolmates histories drawn from his fancy as actual events, and how he himself often wondered at their believing him. Later he passes this judgment: “Had I not gradually, in conformity with my nature, learned to convert these forms of air and empty boastings into artistic productions, such swaggering beginnings would certainly not have been without bad consequences to me. If this impulse be accurately observed, there may be recognised in it the same pretension with which the poet, as such, sets forth dictatorially the most improbable thing and requires the reader to take for true what in any sense appears true to him, the inventor.”

In the previous chapter a characteristic of great poets and artists was described under the name of the impulse to expression, whose analogue in great men of a different constitution of mind, especially in those who follow science, takes the form of a creative impulse. This impulse which prompts the true artist to abandon himself unselfishly to his art and to produce what nobody has demanded, and spurs the scientific man to untiring research and opens to him new paths, is the most important mark of the truly great man. Hagen[69] says: “Just as the instinct of the beast impels him to certain actions though they cost him his life, so is it originally far less a conscious purpose than a force of nature which impels genius to producing, versifying, endeavouring. He is filled with one idea, and divided interests are impossible for him. A heroic genius, an Alexander or a Napoleon, conquers continually, not from mere desire of glory or of rule, but because it is his nature to make war upon others, and because continual victory is his natural need. In like manner the scientific genius knows no rest, but forever places before itself a new problem. It must equally always be conquering. The artist must ever be producing. Each man’s action appears to him to be free choice. In reality it is so only in a very narrow sense. Genius acts less because it would than because it must.”

So says Schopenhauer:[70] “Everything comes at last to this question, Where does the first motive--the _Ernst_--of the man lie? For almost everybody it lies exclusively in his own well-being and that of those that belong to him. Hence he is able to further that and nothing else, for no deliberate purpose, no voluntary and intentional excitation, can borrow the true, deep, personal _Ernst_, nor produce it, nor rightly replace it; for such a purpose is an attempt to wrench Nature; nor without _Ernst_ can anything be but half willed. For the same reason, persons of genius look out ill for their own well-being. As a leaden counterpoise will always bring a body back to the situation which its centre of gravity requires, so the true _Ernst_ of the man ever carries the force and attention of his intellect back to where it lies; everything else the man desires without true _Ernst_. Hence only those rare abnormal men, whose true _Ernst_ does not lie in the personal and practical but in the objective and the theoretical, are able to embrace the essences of things and of the world as the highest truths, and to render them again. For such an _Ernst_, falling without the individual in the objective, is something foreign to human nature--something unnatural and supernatural. Yet by that alone is man great. And in accordance with that is what he does ascribed to something different from himself--namely, to his genius, which takes possession of him. Such a man has no ulterior purpose behind his images, his poems, or his thoughts; and everything personal is but means to those as end. Other men seek the main chance, and generally know how to advance themselves, for they insinuate themselves with their contemporaries, ready to subserve their needs and whims. Hence they live, for the most part, in good circumstances, while the externally centred man is in misery. For he sacrifices his well-being to his objective end. He can not help it. There lies his _Ernst_. With them it is the reverse; and that is why they are small and he is great. His work is for all time, though the recognition of it generally begins in future ages. But they live and die with their day.”

This _Ernst_ of the man of which Schopenhauer here speaks corresponds exactly with the above-described impulse to expression and to creation. The neglect of personal interests, the entire abandonment to his work, the restless strife for an ideal, are characteristics of the great man.

Here again we remark a surprising similitude between the so-called genius and many forms of insanity. But it is merely a similitude, and not an affinity, as Lombroso, Hagen, and others take it to be. For affinity supposes a community of essence deeper than mere similitude of external phenomena. It is this latter alone that we meet with here. The causal conditions are separated by the whole diameter of being.

In great artists and scholars on the one hand, and in the insane on the other, there is a great irresistible impulse which fills them to overflowing and makes them forget all personal considerations. But while in the former the restless compulsion to create, the hot aspiration, is the kernel of the highest and noblest perfection of man, in the latter there is a morbid impulse which is usually directed to the silliest things. Formerly such a state was called a monomania, since this irresistible impulse seemed to be the only pathological symptom; but careful observation has shown that there is always a more general psychical malady, usually the consequence of arrested development. It is perfectly astonishing with what tenacity and untiring persistence such patients go to work. Trélat[71] reports a suitable example as follows:

“M. de W. is forty-five years old. He lives almost all the time shut up in his room, where he is supposed to be carrying on serious studies. He is seldom seen, and when he is seen complains of headache caused by overwork and the fatigue of his continued night labours. He has an amiable and accomplished wife. People talk to her about the health of her husband, and how wrong it is for him to misuse his forces, and beg her to influence him to pursue his studies with less ardour. She answers sadly that all her endeavours are vain; but she does nothing to shake the conviction of his friends, although she knows very well what she has to endure in this difficult situation. The poor lady is absorbed by her attempts to maintain the sense and dignity of her husband.

“In fact, he employs the whole time passed in his room in counting how often the same letter--_s_, or _t_, or _g_, or _z_--occurs in Genesis, in Exodus, in Leviticus, in Numbers, in Deuteronomy, in the books of Kings, in the books of Chronicles, in the book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, in the Song of Solomon, in the book of Revelation, etc. How many pages in one book begin with a _p_, with a _b_, with an _a_; how many end with a _t_, with a _c_, etc.

“Other studies of such seriousness as to cause this man of science to pass a fortnight without any attention to his toilette, or even washing himself, consist in counting all the contradictions he can find in the same author. Having passed one, two, or three years without interruption in these works, this indefatigable worker throws himself with the same ardour into taking his watch to pieces, down to its minutest parts, and putting it together again. During six months he undoes every morning what he had completed the night before. Everybody who calls upon him receives the invariable answer, Monsieur is too busy to be disturbed. Everybody thinks that this writer is too modest to publish his book, and will leave behind Titanic works. The poor wife alone contrives to procure to so utter a nonentity honour and esteem to the last day of his life.”

Here is a state of compulsory counting termed arithmomania. A great variety of such symptoms are distinguished. These interest us less as such, at present, than does the way in which they come about, the complete absorption of the mental action in the impulse, which shows much resemblance to the creative impulse of men of genius.

Those patients exhibit the same phenomena who may be termed inventors and Utopians. They not seldom sacrifice their means and bring themselves and their families to ruin by their unconquerable desire of making inventions and discoveries. They are fully convinced, in their folly, of the epoch-making importance of their improvements, and all pains are lost to cause them to desist from their ridiculous performances.

Morel had a patient who thought he could alter the weather and bring on rain. Lombroso reports the case of a patient who wrote a book entitled Dominatmosphere, in which he undertook to teach husbandmen how to get two annual harvests, and to put sailors in possession of a means of blowing the winds out of their way. The alchemists, who forfeited their lives in trying to make gold, the searchers for the philosopher’s stone, were, for the most part, weak-minded persons of this sort. In modern times perpetual motion has been one of the great objects of crazy inventors. Trélat knew a man who had brought his family to want by his discoveries and inventions. He asserted that in order to bring a wheel into perpetual motion nothing was wanted but a supply of still water. In every discussion he objected to the competence of his opponent. To put an end to this, the physician of Bicêtre carried him to Arago, who proved to him that his inventions would not work. The poor devil was taken aback for an instant and burst into tears; but in a moment he raised his head and exclaimed with confidence, “No matter! Arago is mistaken!”

We have seen in the preceding chapter how important a part feelings and moods play in the psychical processes of great artists. In opposition to students, in whom the turning point of their mental action lies in the understanding, in artists moods and feelings are often the starting point of their productions. Hence we find that in them this part of the mental organ has not infrequently an enormous development. As with the other psychical characters, so likewise here we find that the high refinement of a single factor--always, however, in just proportion to the total action of the organ--produces outward phenomena having some similarity with those states which are due to disturbed inward equilibrium, and which we often have occasion to observe in the insane.

“Exulting to heaven, to death beaten down,” expresses a temperament not uncommon among great poets and artists, causing those oscillations of moods which justify that reproach of caprice which is often addressed to them. This is one of the commonest symptoms of mental disease, above all of hysteria. But the similarity between the phenomena is merely external. They are rooted in widely divergent causal conditions. The practised psychiatrist will distinguish without difficulty between changes of mood such as Goethe observed in himself, which had their origin in the highest refinement of the psychical organism, and the capriciousness of a hysterical woman at whose bidding there stands always ready, in case of need, a rich well of tears, whose sluices have but to be opened to allow the never-drained stream to flow.

The restless energy of great men--who, with a new goal before their eyes, press ceaselessly forward, and who, as soon as they have climbed one height of science or of art, see new heights rise before them yet to be essayed--keeps them in continual discontent with themselves and their performances.

Fate such a bold, untrammelled spirit gave him
As forward, onward ever must endure;
Whose over-hasty impulse drave him
Past earthly joys he might secure.
Dragged through the wildest life will I enslave him
Through flat and stale indifference;
With struggling, chilling, checking, so deprave him
That to his hot, insatiate sense,
The dream of drink shall mock, but never lave him;
Refreshment shall his lips in vain implore.
Had he not made himself the devil’s, naught could save him,
Still were he lost forevermore![72]

In this destiny of Faust, Goethe painted his own sensations, and, like a genuine poet, in the particular touched the general. Goethe felt within him the restless mind which “drave him past earthly joys.” He himself acknowledged that he could scarce call four weeks of his life happy. His feeling of misery incited him sometimes to thoughts of suicide, though he was always able to master it. He says: “Among a fine collection of arms I possessed a costly and sharp poniard. This I always placed beside my bed, and before I put out the light I would consider whether it would suit me to strike the sharp point a couple of inches into my breast or not; but since it never did suit, I laughed myself out of the habit, and, casting aside hypochondriacal grimaces, concluded to live.”

Happiness and contentment are feelings denied to truly great men. And hence, as Aristotle says, those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and art have been predisposed to melancholy. But this kind of melancholy is as different as possible from pathological melancholia. Far from being of a morbid nature, it is an inevitable and eminently sane consequence of the psychical constitution of such men.

In contrast to it stands the self-satisfied good humour of degenerate simpletons, who are always convinced of their own merits and live in the most comfortable self-conceit. The dissatisfaction of the great man, which finds no relief but in creation and in ceaseless endeavour, is the noblest mainspring of the human race, to which all civilization is due.

In the mode of life of great men we shall find much that departs from the everyday habits of the conventional son of Adam. The Philistine, to whom all that is unusual appears unsuitable, is often heard to remark that great artists and scholars are all a little crazy. He says so because he unthinkingly confounds the uncommon with the irrational. The thinker will judge otherwise. The psychologist’s business is to ascertain the causes of these phenomena.

Lombroso has, in his psychological researches into genius, adduced many such phenomena, and has dwelt upon their incontestable similarity with the symptoms of many insane patients. “What is observed in the insane has been asserted of the man of genius--that he walks solitary in the world, and solitary departs from it, a stranger to the warmth of family life and untouched by the charms of society.”[73] But this is not precisely the fact. History sufficiently assures us that great men are frequently by no means strangers to family feeling. But what is observable in great men is that they are relatively indifferent to everything which does not answer to their inward endeavours, that the ideas of which they are full absorb their attention, and that they consequently seem uninterested in what goes on about them. For this reason the genius, like the madman, has been called a stranger to the world.

As we have already said, such egotism as often characterizes the insane is in the great man impossible. Self-forgetfulness is the first condition of true greatness. Nor is it accurate to call the poet or artist a stranger to the world. We have seen that Goethe had a rare insight into the world; nor can we conceive of a true poet without knowledge of the world. Jürgen Meyer is quite right when he says: “A poet who should sing what he had not seen and heard, but what he freely imagined without any experience of life, must sing without vitality. Creative fancy requires supplies from life, and can not draw its wondrous threads from out of its own body as a silkworm does.”[74]

Here, as before, the similarity is merely external, and the determining causes are essentially different.

If the conduction of impressions over the nerves of sense is impaired or destroyed, so that the individual concerned is in a measure cut off from the external world, his attention will naturally be more directed to his inner life. Hence it is that people who become deaf or blind are apt to seem selfish. But without any defect of the conduction of the nerves a loss of perceptions may be brought about by a weakening of the perceptive centres or of the paths of association. Such weakening, which, in degenerate subjects, is not seldom very considerable, will, of course, result in a preponderance of inward perceptions. If there is a concurrent want of power of concentration of the attention upon outward things, as there generally is, we have the type of a person of weak mind, who is unable to comprehend the relations of things about him, who, occupied with himself, remains a stranger to the world, and who displays a characteristic selfishness and vanity.

No doubt poets and artists, as well as scholars, often exhibit an outward appearance of self-absorption and of indifference to their surroundings. This is common to them with many of the insane.[75] But how disparate are the causes underlying these phenomena! With the weak-minded it is the want of power to concentrate the attention which renders them uninterested and indifferent to the outward world; but with poets and scholars it is, on the contrary, the high degree of that power which brings about similar phenomena. As we know, the centrifugal condition which we term attention not only extends its power to the organ of sense whose action is emphasized, but it must also be able to order off all the rest of the impressions of sense. The great thinker appears uninterested in surrounding things because his whole attention is directed to the well-ordered sequence of his logical thoughts, to which end, with fullest consciousness, the outward impressions are ordered off. The weak-minded man is present at a performance. The sounds of the words of the orator ring in his ears, but the slightest outward or inward impression suffices to make his attention wander. His thoughts ramble. They are everywhere and nowhere. The mentally gifted man, on the contrary, constantly has his mind on the matter in hand. If he wishes to concentrate his thoughts upon an outward object, nothing that takes place is able to escape him. His attention is stronger than the promiscuous spontaneous suggestions; and outward impressions of sense which do not relate to the matter in hand will not be apperceived.

The average man, when he walks the street, perceives all the impressions that strike his senses. He meets, we will say, two persons whom he knows, both of whom look him full in the face and fail to recognise him. They pass him by, and at the next crossing are nearly run over because they do not hear or see a coming vehicle. One of them is an idiot. His attention is not concentrated upon anything. He is drowsy, his thoughts breed lawlessly around, without being directed by his will. The second is a learned man who is occupied in solving a scientific problem. He is deep in his logical train of thought, and the requisite attention has ordered off all outward impressions of sense.

We see, then, that we have here a phenomenon common to the idiot and the genius. Yet how contrary are the causes of the two phenomena!

Lombroso sets up insensibility to heat and cold, to hunger and thirst, as a phenomenon common to genius and insanity. He brings forward this example:

“When Beethoven had sat down to compose, and Newton to study a mathematical problem, they so completely forgot the needs of the stomach that they would scold the servant who brought them a meal, under the impression that they had already eaten.”

To explain this abstractedness Lombroso says:

“The unnatural tension of the power of sensation, and the consequent drain of all the forces and faculties, is undoubtedly the cause of this surprising behaviour found equally among men of genius and among the insane.”

I do not think it is accurate to refer these peculiarities of genius to a “draining” or exhaustion. On the contrary, I would rather explain it by the heightening of the mental action. In the concentration of the attention upon inward conditions, in which, as we have seen, the impressions of all organs of sense not directly concerned are ordered off, the feeling of hunger will not be perceived. Nor need one be either a genius or a fool to forget eating and drinking over an arduous work. Moreover, in extreme idiots, who are unable to concentrate their attention at all, as a rule a bestial impulse to eat is observable.

The insane refuse to take nourishment, or forget their bodily needs, from a great variety of causes. In one case, like that of a sane man immersed in his work, the attention may be directed to inward processes, and all the other impressions of sense may be ordered off. Only, the patient’s inward process, instead of consisting in an ordered sequence of thoughts, is composed of hallucinations, which foster his whole attention; or he may have religious visions which so completely absorb all his senses that he not only feels no hunger but is insensible to all physical pain whatever. Another patient may decline food because he thinks himself persecuted, and believes the food is poisoned. A hallucinatory subject refuses to eat because a voice from heaven has forbidden him to do so. A victim of melancholia does not eat because he thinks himself too great a criminal to receive God’s gift. A hypochondriac imagines his stomach is not in condition to digest food, and will not take food for that reason. Another may be unable to assign any reason for not eating, but still he will not do so. The outward effect is the same in all these cases. It is the business of the psychiatrist to trace out the causes, and thus diagnostically to estimate the symptom.

We thus see that neither the psychologist nor the psychiatrist ought to be content to observe behaviour superficially, but must trace out the motive of it in order to draw any inference from it. The most absurd conduct sometimes has reasons consistent with health, while conduct which would not surprise a layman at all may be regarded by a psychiatrist as a well-recognised symptom of insanity.

A further explanation of many peculiarities of men of genius is to be sought in their relations to the society in which they live. A man with a reputation for high talents, distinguished from his youth for his superiority and genius, always has his circle of admirers with its proportion of flatterers. If he had the misfortune to be a precocious child he will have been accustomed from his earliest youth to the idea that his genius is far above ordinary men and above the rules that apply to those men. If such a man is, in later years, attacked by a competent critic upon this or that point, or if schools and parties are formed unfavourable to his method, whether in art or in science, he will, of course, react otherwise than a man would do who was accustomed to opposition of every description. He will, perhaps, regard his just critic as a personal enemy; he will complain that he is misunderstood by his contemporaries, and his passion may go so far that the public at large, and superficial observers among psychiatrists, may consider him to be the victim of a delusion of persecution.

Peculiar inclinations and other mental idiosyncrasies of men of genius can mostly be very readily explained. Everybody accustomed psychologically to study and dissect those whom he meets, so far as opportunity is afforded, is familiar with the remark that each individual of the human race has his peculiarities, more or less odd, his “weaknesses,” his _locus minoris resistentiæ_, as we say in somatic medicine.

The ordinary man, if he has the least breeding, has been accustomed from his youth up to hold in check one inclination or another which violates the usages of society, or even perhaps of good morals. He has learned to attend sufficiently to his own conduct not to allow habits to take root which might appear unusual or be disagreeable to others. But the man of genius is far too much governed by his inward processes, his fancy, and his work, to pay attention to trifling details of manner. He therefore appears what he really is, while the average man would not do this. Consequently chance peculiarities and special inclinations appear in the former more than in the latter.

Thus it is that the behaviour of great men is not to be measured by the same standard as that of others, that we have to take account of the motives of their actions, and that the psychical conditions must be kept in view if we are to draw any trustworthy inferences from their behaviour. Those mighty natures must be judged from their own organization, and not from the Philistine standpoint of the so-called average man.

As a further proof of the affinity of genius to insanity it has been alleged that a great number of eminent men have actually had attacks of insanity. Among poets are mentioned Lucretius, Tasso (who suffered from periodical melancholia with hallucinations and fits of excitement), Lenau, Swift, and Reinhold Lenz (who died insane). Hölderlin was thoroughly mad during the greater part of his life. Lessmann suffered from melancholy and committed suicide. Von Sonnenberg, Southey, and Ben Jonson were likewise attacked by insanity. Molière had repeated fits of melancholy. Rousseau suffered during much of his life from insanity.[76] Gutzkow and Cowper were insane; also the French poets Berthes, Dubellay, Duboys, Bataille, Baudelaire, and Guy de Maupassant. Kleist, Merk, Raimund, Stieglitz, Louise Brachmann, and Nerval committed suicide.

Insane students of nature were Swammerdam (who was attacked with _melancholia religiosa_, thinking he had insulted God, and therefore burned his writings) and Albrecht von Haller (who was also melancholy). The mathematician Bolyai, Cardan, and Johann Georg Zimmermann were likewise insane. So was the celebrated physiologist Johannes Müller, who committed suicide.

Among insane philosophers may be mentioned Auguste Comte and Engel.

Of composers who were attacked by insanity, Schumann and Donizetti are examples. Gounod had a superinduced insanity.

Insane painters were van Goes, van Leyden, Wiertz, Carlo Dolce, etc.

The question whether we are justified, from the alleged frequency of insanity among famous men, to draw any conclusion whatever--as, for example, in regard to a predisposition to insanity among great minds, more than among average men--or that there is an intimate connection between genius and insanity, can only be answered from the standpoint of experience.

That is to say, it can only be based upon severely critical statistics. But we are very far from possessing any data that are even approximately sufficient. If we are to go to work scientifically, of what use can a list of famous men who have been insane be to us? Even were the number of examples multiplied by ten, what could be inferred? The question is not whether there have been great men who were insane, but whether the proportion of those who have at some period of their lives been attacked by insanity of different types has been markedly greater or less among famous personages than among the general run of mankind.

In order to decide this, we should be in a condition to state with exactitude what the percentage of insane among the total population was at a given period of history, how many men of genius there were at that time, and how many of these were insane? Such researches must be repeated at different times of history; then, if they were irreproachably exact and sufficient, it would be possible that some conclusion might be drawn. But we can not even make such comparisons for the present day, far less for bygone ages. The most we can do to-day is to count the inmates of asylums. But extremely few of those insane geniuses who have been reported were ever confined in asylums. Most of them belonged to that class of deranged persons who are cared for by their family. Manifestly, then, sufficient statistics fail us, even for the present time. Everybody will see, without going further, how futile it is to make a list of insane poets from the early Roman literature to the end of the nineteenth century, and to offer this as supporting any assertion of the kind. Do but consider how hard it is for us to attain any reliable conclusions upon matters much more within our control. For a long time there has been a serious dispute among psychiatrists as to whether there is any connection between syphilis and general paresis. Both are accurately limited and well-defined terms, and not, like genius and insanity, two terms, neither of which can be defined. They are perfectly typical and exactly characterized forms of disease. Yet all the researches of the two parties have been powerless to settle the question. The most diverse theories about the matter still find numerous defenders.