GENIUS AND INSANITY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 517, 13 November 1912, Page 6

GENIUS AND INSANITY.

When Dryden asserted in an immortal couplet that "great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide,", he was prophetically enunciating a conclusion to which the leading alienists and psycholoigsts of to-day seem to be slowly but surely tending. Lombroso has added to the terminology of the subject the hybrid word "geniusinsanity," and in his recent book, "Demi-lous et Demi-responsables," Professor J. Grosset, of the University of Montpalier, has designated as half-insane such men as Pascal, Comte, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Moliere, Wanger, Schiller, Descartes, Cromwell, Goethe, Mozart, Bryon, Tolstoy, Ampere, Dante, Columbus —and Shakespeare. But Professor Grosset refuses even to the commonplace average mortal the assurance that hia mediocrity is a symptom of perfect mental health. He refuses to divide humanity into two well-defined groups, the sane and the insane, and introduces such definitions as "semiresponsibility," "limited responsibility," and "attenuated responsibility" to describe the varying mental conditions of mankind. Professor Grosspt suggests, in fact, that the meaning popularly attached to the word "sanity" is misleading. Sanity, he would have us believe, is merely that state of mind which approximates most nearly to the average, or to the mean between the extremes of transcendental genius and doddering imbecility. The faculty for intense concentration upon a single idea, a single purpose or a single truth which has characterised the leaders of the great religious or political movements which have made their mark upon European history, alike with the phenomenal versatility of a Shakespeare or a Goethe, is abnormal and unusual; and, if sanity is to be a synonym for mediocrity, aa Professor Grosset seems inclined to teach, the term "insane" will be robbed of the meaning popular usage has assigned it.