Book Description

Excerpt from The Insanity of Genius and the General Inequality of Human Faculty: Physiologically Considered Men of genius have exercised a powerful influence in the world since history began. Yet they are still more or less of an enigma even to themselves. As chiefs and warriors among savage tribes, as men of letters, art, or science, statesmen or military commanders in civilised communities, they win the admiration of their fellows without furnishing in their own lives any conclusive indication of the means by which their success is achieved. They strike out a path for themselves, and seem to owe little or nothing to help or example. Genius has never been the monopoly of any class or system. It is as likely to manifest itself in the peasant as in the peer, and, indeed, in any list that might be drawn up of the great men of the world, examples would be found of intellectual capacity asserting itself in all conditions of life, and quite independently of the much-vaunted advantages of education. By what fatality a small number of Ts individuals thus find themselves born to pre-eminence in every successive generation - carrying, so to speak, the marshal's baton in their knapsack - is one of the most interesting questions that can engage the human mind, and many, accordingly, have been the speculations indulged in with regard to the nature and origin of the gifts which lift the favoured few above the general level of their species. For over two thousand years some subtle relationship has been thought to exist between genius and insanity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.