The Story of the Mind

J >> James Mark Baldwin >> The Story of the Mind

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In undertaking this task we must try to judge the genius with
reference to the sane social man, the normal Socius. What he is we
have seen. He is a person _who learns to judge by the judgments of
society_. What, then, shall we say of the genius from this point of
view? Can the hero worshipper be right in saying that the genius
teaches society to judge; or shall we say that the genius, like other
men, must learn to judge by the judgments of society?

The most fruitful point of view is, no doubt, that which considers the
genius a variation. And unless we do this it is evidently impossible
to get any theory which will bring him into a general scheme. But how
great a variation? And in what direction?--these are the questions.
The great variations found in the criminal by heredity, the insane,
the idiotic, etc., we have found excluded from society; so we may well
ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our determination of the
limits within which society decides who is to be excluded is correct,
then the genius must come within these limits. He can not escape them
and live socially.

_The Intelligence of the Genius._--The directions in which the genius
actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact.
He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great
"constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us
believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater
thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason for excluding him from
society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts,
thoughts which will work, thoughts which will bring in a new area in
the discovery of principles, or of their application. This is just
what all development depends upon, this attainment of novelty, which
is consistent with older knowledge and supplementary to it. But
suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the
topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges,
or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that
man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist,
or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the
intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical
workability--in short, to sum it up, "fitness." Any thought, to live
and germinate, must be a fit thought. And the community's sense of the
fitness of the thought is their rule of judgment.

Now, the way the community got this sense--that is the great result we
have reached above. Their sense of fitness is just what I called above
their judgment. So far, at least, as it relates to matters of social
import, it is of social origin. It reflects the outcome of all social
heredity, tradition, education. The sense of social truth is their
criterion of social thoughts, and unless the social reformer's thought
be in some way fit to go into the setting thus made by earlier social
development, he is not a genius but a crank.

I may best show the meaning of the claim that society makes upon the
genius by asking in how far in actual life he manages to escape this
account of himself to society. The facts are very plain, and this is
the class of facts which some writers urge, as supplying an adequate
rule for the application of the principles of their social philosophy.
The simple fact is, say they, that without the consent of society the
thoughts of your hero, whether he be genius or fool, are practically
valueless. The fulness of time must come; and the genius before his
time, if judged by his works, can not be a genius at all. His thought
may be great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it
as its richest outcome and its profoundest intuition; but before, that
time, it is as bizarre as a madman's fancies and as useless. What
would be thought, we might be asked by writers of this school, of a
rat which developed upon its side the hand of a man, with all its
mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of delicate
manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true to the
pattern of a rat? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be justified in
leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole where his singular
appendage held him fast? Is such a rat any the less a monster because
man finds use for his hands.

To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social
utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the premature genius
is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way
which renders it still more plausible. The variations which occur in
intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is,
theoretically, an average man. The differences among men which can be
taken account of in any philosophy of life must be in some way
referable to this mean. The variation which does not find its niche at
all in the social environment, but which strikes all the social
fellows with disapproval, getting no sympathy whatever, is thereby
exposed to the charge of being the "sport" of Nature and the fruit of
chance. The lack of hearing which awaits such a man sets him in a form
of isolation, and stamps him not only as a social crank, but also as a
cosmic tramp.

Put in its positive and usual form, this view simply claims that man
is always the outcome of the social movement. The reception he gets is
a measure of the degree in which he adequately represents this
movement. Certain variations are possible--men who are forward in the
legitimate progress of society--and these men are the true and only
geniuses. Other variations, which seem to discount the future too
much, are "sports"; for the only permanent discounting of the future
is that which is projected from the elevation of the past.

The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim
at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made
social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the
vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see
over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which,
to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this
school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the
appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle,
Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone
have set guide-posts to history, and given to the world large portions
of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible
variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations--that
is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is
genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand,
he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put
in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he
would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat
Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow
processes of evolution!

It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have
led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite
out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius
brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to
harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of
expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a
brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him
and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is
no connection.

But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the
interaction which actually takes place between physical and social
heredity. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a
physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his
parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain
parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came
to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and
the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution
all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is
free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the
coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith
the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society
by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which
we do find, the inroads made by the counts and the marquises, due to
influences which are quite social and psychological? Again, on the
other hand, what leads the count and the marquis, to lay their titles
at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep
away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their
chances just on social and psychological grounds? Novelists have rung
the changes on this intrusion of social influences into the course of
physical heredity. Bourget's Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence
of social race characteristics on natural heredity, with the reaction
of natural heredity again upon the new social conditions.

A speech of a character of Balzac's is to the point, as illustrating a
certain appreciation of these social considerations which we all to a
degree entertain. The Duchesse de Carigliano says to Madame de
Sommervieux: "I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to
the discretion of a too superior man. You should know that one may
allow them to court one, but marry them--that is a mistake! Never--no,
no. It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of
the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant
illusions." To be sure, we do not generally deliberate in this wise
when we fall in love; but that is not necessary, since our social
environment sets the style by the kind of intangible deliberation
which I have called judgment and fitness. Suppose a large number of
Northern advocates of social equality should migrate to the Southern
United States, and, true to their theory, intermarry with the blacks.
Would it not then be true that a social theory had run athwart the
course of physiological descent, leading to the production of a
legitimate mulatto society? A new race might spring from such a purely
psychological or social initiation.

While not agreeing, therefore, with the theory which makes the genius
independent of the social movement--least of all with the doctrine
that physical heredity is uninfluenced by social conditions--the hero
worshipper is right, nevertheless, in saying that we can not set the
limitations of the genius on the side of variations toward high
intellectual endowment. So if the general position be true that he is
a variation of some kind, we must look elsewhere for the direction of
those peculiar traits whose excess would be his condemnation. This we
can find only in connection with the other demand that we make of the
ordinary man--the demand that he be a man of good judgment. And to
this we may now turn.

_The Judgment of the Genius._--We should bear in mind in approaching
this topic the result which follows from the reciprocal character of
social relationships. No genius ever escapes the requirements laid
down for his learning, his social heredity. Mentally he is a social
outcome, as well as are the fellows who sit in judgment on him. He
must judge his own thoughts therefore as they do. And his own proper
estimate of things and thoughts, his relative sense of fitness, gets
application, by a direct law of his own mental processes, to himself
and to his own creations. The limitations which, in the judgment of
society, his variations must not overstep, are set by his own
judgment also. If the man in question have thoughts which are
socially true, _he must himself know that they are true_. So we reach
a conclusion regarding the selection of the particular thoughts which
the genius may have: _he and society must agree in regard to the
fitness of them_, although in particular cases this agreement ceases
to be the emphatic thing. The essential thing comes to be the
reflection of the social standard in the thinker's own judgment; _the
thoughts thought must always be critically judged by the thinker
himself; and for the most part his judgment is at once also the social
judgment_. This may be illustrated further.

Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and withal no sense of
fitness--none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go
through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity
of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater
admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them
with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But
such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and
that are harmless, we smile and let him talk; but if his lack of
judgment extend to things of grave import, or be accompanied by equal
illusions regarding himself and society in other relationships, then
we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane.
Two of the commonest forms of such impairment of judgment are seen in
the victims of "fixed ideas" on the one hand, and the _exaltes_ on the
other. These men have no true sense of values, no way of selecting the
fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some
transcendently true and original thought were to flit through the
diseased mind of such a one, it would go as it came, and the world
would wait for a man with a sense of fitness to arise and rediscover
it. The other class, the _exaltes_, are somewhat the reverse; the
illusion of personal greatness is so strong that their thoughts seem
to them infallible and their persons divine.

Men of such perversions of judgment are common among us. We all know
the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us
sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his
creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some
eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or
depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in
the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is
the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or
paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so
"visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his
unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's
entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not
the man to produce a world movement.

Most of the men we call "cranks" are of this type. They are
essentially lacking in judgment, and the popular estimate of them is
exactly right.

It is evident, therefore, from this last explanation, that there is a
second direction of variation among men: _variation in their sense of
the truth and value of their own thoughts_, and with them of the
thoughts of others. This is the great limitation which the man of
genius shares with men generally--a limitation in the amount of
variation which he may show in his social judgments, especially as
these variations affect the claim which he makes upon society for
recognition. It is evident that this must be an important factor in
our estimate of the claims of the hero to our worship, especially
since it is the more obscure side of his temperament, and the side
generally overlooked altogether. This let us call, in our further
illustrations, the "social sanity" of the man of genius.

The first indication of the kind of social variation which oversteps
even the degree of indulgence society is willing to accord to the
great thinker is to be found in the effect which education has upon
character. The discipline of social development is, as we have seen,
mainly conducive to the reduction of eccentricities, the levelling off
of personal peculiarities. All who come into the social heritage learn
the same great series of lessons derived from the past, and all get
the sort of judgment required in social life from the common exercises
of the home and school in the formative years of their education. So
we should expect that the greater singularities of disposition which
represent insuperable difficulty in the process of social assimilation
would show themselves early. Here it is that the actual conflict
comes--the struggle between impulse and social restraint. Many a
genius owes the redemption of his intellectual gifts to legitimate
social uses to the victory gained by a teacher and the discipline
learned through obedience. And thus it is also that many who give
promise of great distinction in early life fail to achieve it. They
run off after a phantom, and society pronounces them mad. In their
case the personal factor has overcome the social factor; they have
failed in the lessons they should have learned, their own
self-criticism is undisciplined, and they miss the mark.

These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One
of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and
the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes
the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean.
Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest
influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It
is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius
should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The
fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct
society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men
up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal
praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of
fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar
judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as
his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of
their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his
single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be
true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought,
though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either
in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the
man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it.
But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer.

This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last
fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the
intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may
the social qualifications of men. There are men who find it their meat
to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the
lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in
planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by
instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They
gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the
acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They
seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not
need to learn the lessons of the social environment.

Now, such persons undoubtedly represent a variation toward
suggestibility of the most delicate and singular kind. They surpass
the teachers from whom they learn. It is hard to say that they "learn
to judge by the judgments of society." They so judge without seeming
to learn, yet they differ from the man whose eccentricities forbid him
to learn through the discipline of society. The two are opposite
extremes of variation; that seems to me the only possible construction
of them. It is the difference between the ice boat which travels
faster than the wind and the skater who braves the wind and battles
up-current in it. The latter is soon beaten by the opposition; the
former outruns its ally. The crank, the eccentric, the enthusiast--all
these run counter to sane social judgment; but the genius leads
society to his own point of view, and interprets the social movement
so accurately, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that
his very singularity gives greater relief to his inspiration.

Now let a man combine with this insight--this extraordinary sanity of
social judgment--the power of great inventive and constructive
thought, and then, at last, we have our genius, our hero, and one that
we well may worship! To great thought he adds balance; to originality,
judgment. This is the man to start the world movements if we want a
single man to start them. For as he thinks profoundly, so he
discriminates his thoughts justly, and assigns them values. His
fellows judge with him, or learn to judge after him, and they lend to
him the motive forces of success--enthusiasm, reward. He may wait for
recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he may be muzzled for
thinking his thoughts, he may die and with him the truth to which he
gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to
traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his
thought was recorded, posterity revives it in regretful sentences on
his tomb.

The two things to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of
the phenomenally great man--I mean on the side of our means of
accounting for him in reasonable terms--are these: first, his
intellectual originality; and, second, the sanity of his judgment. And
it is the variations in this second sort of endowment which give the
ground which various writers have for the one-sided views now current
in popular literature.

We are told, on the one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on
another hand, that he is to be classed with those of "insane" temper;
and yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to
outrage society by performing criminal acts. All these so-called
theories rely upon facts--so far as they have any facts to rest
upon--which, if space permitted, we might readily estimate from our
present point of view. In so far as a really great man busies himself
mainly with things that are objective, which are socially and morally
neutral--such as electricity, natural history, mechanical theory, with
the applications of these--of course, the mental capacity which he
possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in these things may
lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined relationships
which are had in view by the writer in quest for degeneracy. It will
still be admitted, however, by those who are conversant with the
history of science, that the greatest scientific geniuses have been
men of profound quietness of life and normal social development. It is
to the literary and artistic genius that the seeker after abnormality
has to turn; and in this field, again, the facts serve to show their
own meaning.

As a general rule, these artistic prodigies do not represent the union
of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often
distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their
insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of
emotional experience which crystallize into single creations of art.
They depend upon "inspiration"--a word which is responsible for much
of the overrating of such men, and for a good many of their illusions.
Not that they do not perform great feats in the several spheres in
which their several "inspirations" come; but with it all they often
present the sort of unbalance and fragmentary intellectual endowment
which allies them, in particular instances, to the classes of persons
whom the theories we are noticing have in view. It is only to be
expected that the sharp jutting variation in the emotional and
aesthetic realm which the great artist often shows should carry with it
irregularities in heredity in other respects. Moreover, the very habit
of living by inspiration brings prominently into view any half-hidden
peculiarities which he may have in the remark of his associates, and
in the conduct of his own social duties. But mark you, I do not
discredit the superb art of many examples of the artistic
"degenerate," so-called; that would be to brand some of the highest
ministrations of genius, to us men, as random and illegitimate, and to
consider impure some of our most exalting and intoxicating sources of
inspiration. But I do still say that wherein such men move us and
instruct us they are _in these spheres_ above all things sane with our
own sanity, and wherein they are insane they do discredit to that
highest of all offices to which their better gifts make legitimate
claim--the instruction of mankind.

Again one of Balzac's characters hits the nail on the head. "My dear
mother," says Augustine, in the Sign of the Cat and Racket, "you judge
superior people too severely. If their ideas were the same as other
folks they would not be men of genius."

"Very well," replies Madame Guillaume, "then let men of genius stop at
home and not get married. What! A man of genius is to make his wife
miserable? And because he is a genius it is all right! Genius! genius!
It is not so very clever to say black one minute and white the next,
as he does, to interrupt other people, to dance such rigs at home,
never to let you know which foot you are to stand on, to compel his
wife never to be amused unless my lord is in gay spirits, and to be
dull when he is dull."

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