The Colfax chronicle. [volume] (Colfax, Grant Parish, La.) 1877-1981, 1893-10-07
LOUISIANA.
INSANITY AND GENIUS.
PIato's "Divlne Madness" q Matter of Some
Truth.

Plato's "Divlne Madness" q Matter OF Some
Truth.
DIR. Arthur Mcdonald, well-known
author and specialist in mental phe-
nomena, divides human abnormality
into three forms: Insanity, genius and
crime. He believes that genius is often
very closely allied to insanity. In one
person cerebral action gives rise to
wonderful and original ideas, and is
called genius; in another, it produces
wonderful and original but absurd
thoughts, and is named insanity. Both
persons are equally original and imag-
NATIVE, but the insane man lacks the
critical spirit
Insane temperaments range all the
way from inspired idiots to inspired
geniuses," says this author. DeQuin-
cey, Cowper, Turner, Shelley, Tasso,
Lamb and Goldsmith had to some de-
gree the insane temperament. The
adopts of spiritualism, mind-reading,
clairvoyance and hypnotism are fire.
quent illustrations of this tempera-
ment. Voltaire says: Heaven, in form
ing us, mixed our life with reason and
insanity, which compose every man and
form his essence" So he would seem
to argue that no one is wholly sane.
But the higher gifts are more fire.
quently subject to diseased conditions
and idiosyncrasies. Genius, being the
highest expression of mental activity,
is sort of nervous disease half
morbid condition of brain-say some
specialists. Others do not go SO far,
but all agree as to the close relations
between genius and insanity. Dryden
says:
Great wit to madness nearly is allied"
Lord Beaconsfield believed that there
was only step between the deeply
imaginative and the insane mind.
Huxley says that genius among men
stands in the same position as a
sport" among animals and plants
Aristotle ascribes to congestion of the
head the influence under which per-
sons become poets, prophets and
sibyls. Plato affirms that the poet
must possess a spice of madness. Pas
cal says that extreme mind is close to
extreme insanity Genius never
marches by the beaten paths of COM
mon sense" says Mirabeau. Cicero
speaks of the poetic Juror" and Hor-
ace remarks upon the "amiable insan-
ity" of poets. Lamartine writes of
shat mental disease called genius"
Goethe declares "a certain cerebral
irritation necessary to poets"
Newton, Schopenhauer, George Sand,
Tolstoi, and others of the sacred guild
of genius, have confessed to mental
conditions in themselves very close to
insanity. Socrates, Julius Caesar, Luz
cretius, Charles w., Peter the Great,
Richelieu, Dcscartes, Oliver Cromwell,
Rosseau, Goethe and Sir Walter Scott
are few among the great geniuses of
of the earth who have been subject to
mental Authorizations.
In precocity DIR. Mcdonald finds a
symptom both of genius and insanity,
and instances Dante, Tasso and Mira
beau, poets at nine and ten; Compile
and Voltaire, great thinkers at thir-
teen, with Niebuhr, Jonathan Ed
wards, Bossuet, Pope, Goethe, Victor
Hugo, Fenelon, Mozart, Handel, Bee
thoven and Raphael, whose intellects
were abnormally developed in child
hood.
In the long list of persons of brilliant
genius who have shown symptoms of
insanity are included Swedenborg,
Loyola, Luther, Joan of Arc, Mo-
manned, Moliere, Mozart, Nine de
Stael, Byron, Shelley, Goldsmith,
Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Keats, Coleridge,
George Eliot, Newton, Beethoven,
Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Marl-
borough, and many other equally ia
nous and familiar personages.
So it would seem that the worlds
most famous statesmen, generals and
reformers, as well as it's artists and
poets, have had that abnormal devel.
opment closely allied to insanity, and
that with them brilliant genius has
been what Plato calls "a divine mad
ness" Let the world be thanked for
this sort of insanity which has lifted
its greatest men above the common
levels, and in commissioning them to
do special work has rendered them
abnormally devoted to one idea.
To these poets, prophets and reform
ers, these dreamers of high dreams and
seers of beatific visions, mankind owes
a debt it can never repay. If they have
been mad there hes been method in
their madness. In view of what they
have accomplished we forgive these
great geniuses that abnormal origin
ality-that egotism, vanity and irrita-
bility-which they are said to share
with the insane. To his contemporaries
the man of one idea is usually regarded
as insane, but often the crank of one
generation becomes the idol of the
next; his madness frequently lies in the
fact that he is in advance of his time.
In answer to the objection that it is
cruel to compare much that is highest
in the world with insanity, DIR. McDon-
aid says that we might just as we'll
object to CHASING man among the
bipeds, because vultures are bipeds.