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learner by imitation, and he becomes in turn pos- sessor and teacher.
The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society agree; all must be born to learn the same things. They enter, if so be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems like a very com- monplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions; the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the genius.
There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a certain social understanding about ourselves generally — a Zeitgeist, an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in which it is different. The com- mon phrase " fish out of water " is often heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for sci- ence. The next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us say that there exists in every society a general system of values, found in social usages, conventions, institutions, and formulas, and that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be cor- THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY. 209 dial to a disagreeable neighbour shows good so- cial judgment in a small matter; not to quarrel with the homoeopathic enthusiast who meets you in the street and wishes to doctor your rheuma- tism out of a symptom book — that is good judg- ment. In short, the man gets to show more and more, as he grows up from childhood, a certain good judgment; and his good judgment is also the good judgment of his social set, community, or nation. The psychologist might prefer to say that a man " feels " this; perhaps it would be better for psychological readers to say simply that he has a " sense " of it; but the popular use of the word "judgment" fits so accurately into the line of distinction we are now making that we may adhere to it. So we reach the general position that the eligible candidate for social life must have good judgment as represented by the common standards of judgment of his people.
It may be doubted, however, by some of my readers whether this sense of social values called judgment is the outcome of suggestions operating throughout the term of one's social education. This is an essential point, and I must just assume it. It follows from what we said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the pains to observe the child's terv tative endeavours to act up to social usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are coming to see that even the child's sense of his own personal self is a gradual attainment, achieved step by step through his imitative responses to his personal environment. His thought of himself is an in- 210 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
terpretation of his thought of others, and his thought of another is due to further accommo- dation of his active processes to changes in his thought of a possible self. Around this funda- mental movement in his personal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I say that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his environment is the outcome of his very gradu- al learning of his personal place in these relation- ships.
We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our study, that the socially unfit person is the person of poor judgment. He may have learned a great deal; he may in the main repro- duce the activities required by his social tradi- tion; but with it all he is to a degree out of joint with the general system of estimated values by which society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad strain of heredity, what the theologians call " original sin "; he then is an " habitual criminal " in the current distinction of criminal types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teach- ings of society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simpi} because he is carried away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 211 current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in social judg- ment is forgotten: he is then the " occasional " criminal. It is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified 'private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents the level of social Tightness in his time and place. Then, as to the idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no good judgment, for the very adequate but pitiful reason that they have no judgment at all.
This, then, is the doctrine of Social Heredity; it illustrates the side of conformity, of personal acquiescence on the part of the individual in the rules of social life. Another equally important side, that of the personal initiative and influence of the individual mind in society, remains to be spoken of in the next chapter. Social Heredity emphasizes Imitation; the Genius, to whom we now turn, illustrates Invention.
CHAPTER X.
THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT.
THE facts concerning the genius seem to indi- cate that he is a being somewhat exceptional and apart. Common mortals stand about him with expressions of awe. The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves of our libraries most 212 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
accessible to the public, and even the wayfaring man, to whom life is a weary round, and his con- quests over nature and his fellows only the di- vision of honours on a field that usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimulate his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put nature and society so utterly to rout. He hears of men who swayed the destinies of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which condemn the or- dinary man. Every man has in him in some de- gree the hero worshipper, and gets inflamed some- what by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great.
Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong. The genius does accomplish the world movements. Napoleon did set the destiny of Europe, and Frederick did reveal, in a sense, a new phase of moral conduct. The truth of these things is just what makes the enthusiasm of the common man so healthy and stimulating. It is not the least that the genius accomplishes that he thus elevates the traditions of man and in- spires the literature that the people read. He sows the seeds of effort in the fertile soil of the newborn of his own kind, while he leads those who do not have the same gifts to rear and tend the growing plant in their own social gardens. This is true; and a philosophy of society should not overlook either of the facts — the actual deeds of the great man with his peculiar influence upon his own time, and his lasting place in the more inspiring social tradition which is embodied in literature and art.
Yet the psychologist has to present just the opposite aspect of these apparent exceptions to THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 213 the canons of our ordinary social life. He has to oppose the extreme claim made by the writers who attempt to lift the genius quite out of the normal social movement. For it only needs a moment's consideration to see that if the genius has no reasonable place in the movement of so- cial progress in the world, then there can be no possible doctrine or philosophy of such progress. To the hero worshipper his hero comes in simply to "knock out," so to speak, all the regular move- ment of the society which is so fortunate, or so unfortunate, as to have given him birth; and by his initiative the aspirations, beliefs, struggles of the community or state get a push in a new di- rection— a tangent to the former movement or a reversal of it. If this be true, and it be further true that no genius who is likely to appear can be discounted by any human device before his abrupt appearance upon the stage of action, then the history of facts must take the place of the science or philosophy of them, and the chroni- cler become the only historian with a right to be. For of what value can we hold the contribu- tion which the genius makes to thought if this contribution runs so across the acquisitions of the earlier time and the contributions of earlier genius that no line of common truth can be dis- covered between him and them? Then each so- ciety would have its own explanation of itself, and that only so long as it produced no new genius. It may be, of course, that society is so constituted — or, rather, so lacking in constitution — that simple variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its cataclysms; but a great many efforts will be made to prove the contrary before this highest of all spheres of human ac- 214 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
tivity is declared to have no meaning — no thread which runs from age to age and links mankind, the genius and the man who plods, in a common and significant development.
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 ex- cluded from society; so we may well ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our deter- mination of the limits within which society de- cides 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 aver- age 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 psvchol- ogists 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 ex- THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 215 eluding 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 supple- mentary 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 fanci- ful combinations of them; to that man we deny the name genius: he is a crank, an agitator, an anar- chist, 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, tradi- tion, 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 2l6 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
writers urge, as supplying an adequate rule for the application of the principles of their social phi- losophy. The simple fact is, say they, that with- out 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 pro- foundest 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 re- mainder of the creature were true to the pat- tern 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 mon- ster because man finds use for his hands.
To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social utility be our rule of defini- tion, then certainly the premature genius is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way which renders it still more plaus- ible. The variations which occur in intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is, theoretically, an average man. The dif- ferences 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 envi- ronment, but which strikes all the social fellows THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 217 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 legiti- mate 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 ele- vation 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 invent- or, 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 ap- peal 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 in- tellectual power? Rare such variations — that is their law: the greater the variation, the more 2l8 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
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 Jier 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 con- nection 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 physio- logical matter, in the sense that the son must in- herit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his par- ents, 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 considera- tions in selecting his wife? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 219 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 de- gree entertain. The Duchesse de Carigliano says to Madame de Sommervieux: " I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the dis- cretion 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 judg- ment and fitness. Suppose a large number of Northern advocates of social equality should mi- 220 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
grate 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, lead- ing to the production of a legitimate mulatto so- ciety? 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 condi- tions— 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 in- tellectual 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 condem- nation. 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 judg- ment. 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 require- ments laid down for his learning, his social hered- ity. 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 applica- tion, by a direct law of his own mental processes, to himself and to his own creations. The limita- tions which, in the judgment of society, his vari- ations must not overstep, are set by his own judg- THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 221 ment 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 re- gard to the fitness of them, although in particular cases this agreement ceases to be the emphatic thing. The essential thing comes to be the reflec- tion of the social standard in the thinker's own judgment; the thoughts thought must always be crit- ically 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 judg- ment 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 pro- nounced 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 re- garding himself and society in other relationships, then we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane. Two of the com- monest 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 se- lecting the fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some transcendently true and original thought were to flit through the 16 222 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
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 exaltis, 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 com- mon 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 eleva- tion 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 oc- casional 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 explana- tion, 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 gener- ally— a limitation in the amount of variation which he may show in his social judgments, especially THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 223 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 tempera- ment, and the side generally overlooked alto- gether. This let us call, in our further illustra- tions, 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 dis- position which represent insuperable difficulty in the process of social assimilation would show themselves early. Here it is that the actual con- flict comes — the struggle between impulse and so- cial restraint. Many a genius owes the redemp- tion 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