The theory of genius which it is my purpose to present and defend has little in common with the views held by most students of this world-old problem. Especially does it differ from the well-known and at present dominant doctrine of the Moreau-Lombroso-Hagen school of investigators, by whom the man of genius is regarded as an aberrant, even degenerate, type of humanity, closely allied to the insane, and hence by implication deserving to be repressed rather than encouraged. Nor am I at one with those who, justly protesting against the degeneracy theory, themselves contend that genius is an anomaly in the scheme of Nature, and that the man of genius, biologically speaking, is a “variation” dependent on unknown, perhaps unknowable, laws of heredity.
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On the contrary, following the lead of the late Frederic W. H. Myers—the first, in my opinion, to glimpse the true significance and fundamental characteristics of genius—I shall endeavour to show that in the man of genius there is, at bottom, no real departure from normality, and that he differs from the “average man” only in being the fortunate possessor of a power for utilising more freely than other men faculties common to all. More than this, going beyond Myers, I venture to affirm that genius is to an appreciable extent susceptible of cultivation, so as to become a far more frequent phenomenon than it is to-day.
In other words, I maintain that God, in giving to the world its Dantes, Newtons, and Emersons, has not intended them as mere objects of admiration and bewilderment, but as indications of possibilities open to the generalty of mankind.
Such a view, it may at once be conceded, could not reasonably have been advanced many years ago. It rests mainly on facts then unknown or misunderstood,73 and even now little appreciated outside of a narrow circle of scientific investigators. Foremost in importance is the discovery that, in addition to the ordinary realm of conscious thought, there exists in all of us a second realm—that of the so-called subconscious—in which, quite without any will-directed effort of our own, the most varied mental processes are carried on.
The subconscious, in fact, is a kind of vast store-house, wherein are preserved, seemingly without time limit and in the most perfect detail, memory-images of everything we have seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through our sense-organs. It is also a kind of workshop for the facile manipulation of ideas, including even the elaboration of complicated trains of thought. Manifestly, the more freely and habitually one can draw on its resources, the more one ought to be able to accomplish with regard to any set task or chosen field of work. And in this, I am persuaded, we have the clue to the true explanation of the brilliant achievements of the man of genius.
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He does what he does so well, not because he is of an abnormal type of mentality, as the Lombrosians ask us to believe, nor yet because he is born with gifts transcending those of other men, but simply because he has found a way more readily, more frequently, and more profitably than others to avail himself of the subconscious powers that are the common heritage of the race. Or, to put it more elaborately in the words of Frederic Myers:
“I would suggest that genius—if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition—should be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all—a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought; so that an ‘inspiration of genius’ will be, in truth, a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will in pro75founder regions of his being. I would urge that here there is no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but, rather, a fulfilment of the true norm of man.”
That the inspirations of genius are really nothing more than spontaneous upsurgings from the depths of the subconscious, is indeed demonstrable from the recorded statements of men of genius themselves. To the modern psychologist one of the most impressive proofs of the actuality of subconscious mental processes, is the occasional solution in dreams of problems that have long baffled the waking consciousness. In this way abstruse mathematical problems have sometimes been worked out after all hope of solving them had been abandoned; and troublesome clerical errors, the perpetual dread of book-keepers, have been cleared away during sleep, as in the following typical instance, reported by a successful business man to the Society for Psychical Research:
“I had been bothered since September with an error in my cash account for that month, and, despite76 many hours’ examination, it defied all my efforts, and I had almost given it up as a hopeless case. It had been the subject of my waking thoughts for many nights, and had occupied a large portion of my leisure hours. Matters remained thus unsettled until December 11. On this night I had not, to my knowledge, once thought of the subject, but I had not been long in bed, and asleep, when my brain was as busy with the books as if I had been at my desk. The cash-book, banker’s pass-book, etc., appeared before me, and without any apparent trouble I almost immediately discovered the cause of the mistake, which had arisen out of a complicated cross-entry.
“I perfectly recollect having taken a slip of paper in my dream and making such a memorandum as would enable me to correct the error at some leisure time; having done this, the whole of the circumstances had passed from my mind. When I awoke in the morning I had not the slightest recollection of my dream, nor did it once occur to me during the day, although I had the very books before me on which I77 had apparently been engaged in my sleep. When I returned home in the afternoon, as I did early for the purpose of dressing, and proceeded to shave, I took up a piece of paper from my dressing-table to wipe my razor, and you may imagine my surprise at finding thereon the very memorandum I fancied had been made during the night.
“The effect on me was such that I returned to our office and turned to the cash-book, when I found that I had really, when asleep, detected the error which I could not detect in my waking hours, and had actually jotted it down at the time.”
The modern psychological explanation of all this would be that in his many hours of searching through the books he had, though without being in the least aware of it, gradually brought together the data necessary to the solution of his problem; and that in this case this happened to be first definitely formulated in his mind while he slept, thus giving rise to the dream that caused him such astonishment. Or he might from the outset have subconsciously been aware of78 the cause of his error, but without being able to profit from the knowledge until a favouring condition in sleep permitted its emergence above the threshold of his consciousness.
Now, suppose that instead of being a business man he had been a novelist, artist, or musician, and had been preoccupied with some special or general problem peculiar to his art. If in that event he had had a dream in which was presented to his sleeping consciousness a plot or subject or theme, which, being afterward given permanent form on paper or canvas, proved to have the qualities of a “work of genius,” would it not be logical to infer that precisely the same mental processes were operant in the second instance as in the first, the only difference being in the character of the product? This is what, from their own statement, has happened to not a few men of high achievement.
Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” was a dream composition. So was the sonata by which the composer Tartini is best known, and to which he appro79priately gave the name of “The Devil’s Sonata,” in recognition of the fact that he owed it to a dream of selling his soul to the devil, and being rewarded by hearing the latter play on a violin the music out of which grew what Tartini himself regarded as his best piece of work. Benjamin Franklin was another man of genius who gained something from his dreams, as was Condillac. But the most striking illustration is afforded by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose marvellous “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was only one of several novels and stories that he conceived in dreams. Stevenson, it is worth adding, in his delightful “Chapter on Dreams,” frankly recognises and acknowledges the debt he owed to his subconsciousness, which, with characteristic felicity and whimsicality, he personified as “Brownies” and “little people.”
“This dreamer, like many other persons,” is the way he puts it, “has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that80 is his readiest bread-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness—for he takes all the credit—and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry ‘I have it; that’ll do!’ upon his lips—with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas; with such outbreaks, like Cassius in the play, he scatters the performance in the midst.
“Often enough the waking is a disappointment. He has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people; they have gone stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the wakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet, how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him,81 as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself.
“The more I think of it,” Stevenson goes on, “the more I am moved to press upon the world my question, ‘Who are the little people?’ They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his training; they have plainly learned, like him, to build the scheme of a considerable story, and to arrange emotion in progressive order. Only, I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt—they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him the while in ignorance of where they aim.
“That part of my work which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part, beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show that the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”
Than these exquisite paragraphs, it would be hard to find—and I have quoted them for that reason—anything more graphically descriptive of the mechan82ism which I am convinced is always operant in the production of works of genius. Asleep or awake, it is from the resources of the subconscious region of their minds that men of genius gain the “inspirations” that delight, benefit, or amaze posterity.
Mostly, of course, the subconscious upsurgings come to them when they are awake, sometimes in momentary gleams of insight, sometimes continuing through comparatively long periods, when they write, compose, or develop valuable discoveries without conscious effort. In fact, there even is one type of genius—although by no means the most useful—in which, within a certain limited field, the subconscious is perpetually in evidence, and perpetually responsive to the demands of the upper consciousness. I refer to the so-called “lightning calculators,” those prodigies whose mathematical feats, performed without the aid of pencil and paper, have been a source of unending surprise to the world, and have at times been so remarkable as to be well-nigh incredible.
Thus, Zerah Colburn, an American lightning calcu83lator, when only six years old, unable to read, and ignorant of the name and value of any numeral set down on paper, is known to have stated correctly the number of seconds in a period as long as two thousand years, and to have returned the correct answer (9,139,200) to the question, “Supposing I have a corn-field, in which are 7 acres, having 17 rows to each acre, 64 hills to each row, 8 ears on a hill, and 150 kernels on the ear, how many kernels in the corn-field?”
A little later, having been taken by his father to England, it is recorded that, in the presence of a number of witnesses:
“He undertook and succeeded in raising the number 8 to the sixteenth power, 281,474,976,780,656. He was then tried as to other numbers, consisting of one figure, all of which he raised as high as the tenth power, with so much facility that the person appointed to take down the results was obliged to enjoin him not to be too rapid. With respect to numbers of two figures, he would raise some of them to the84 sixth, seventh, and eighth power, but not always with equal facility; for the larger the products became the more difficult he found it to proceed. He was asked the square root of 106,929, and before the number could be written down he immediately answered 327. He was then requested to name the cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and promptness he replied 645.”
Henri Mondeux, Vito Mangiamele, Jacques Inaudi, Zacharias Dase, Jedediah Buxton, Truman Safford, André Ampère, Karl Gauss, George Bidder and his son of the same name, were other world famous calculators. From some of them direct evidence as to the subconscious character of their calculations has been forthcoming. One of the most remarkable in this group, the elder Bidder, in a paper contributed to a scientific journal, declared, “Whenever I feel called upon to make use of the stores of my mind, they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning.” In a later issue of the same journal it is asserted regarding him:
“He had an almost miraculous power of seeing, as85 it were, intuitively, what factors would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he were given the number 17,861, he would instantly remark that it was 327 × 53. He could not, he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct with him.”
Another expert calculator, an English civil engineer named Blyth, says in a letter:
“I am conscious of an intuitive recognition of the relations of figures. For instance, in reading statements of figures in newspapers, which are often egregiously wrong, it seems to come to me intuitively that something is wrong, and when that occurs I am usually right.”
In the case of at least one lightning calculator there is proof positive of the concurrent operation of two trains of thought, the one conscious, the other subconscious. This is Jedediah Buxton, who “would talk freely while doing his questions, that being no molestation or hindrance to him.”
Moreover, prodigious memory power is nearly always characteristic of the lightning calculator.86 This of itself is evidence of unusual access to the subconscious, since it is in the subconscious that memories are stored. Most impressive of all, however, is the rapid, almost instantaneous emergence of the answers to the problems propounded by those testing the calculator’s powers. It is as though the mere putting of the problem, and the mere desire to solve it, were enough to set in motion a “thinking machine” that automatically brought about the desired result. It is significant that in most cases, as in Bidder’s, the calculators themselves are unable to give any satisfactory account of the methods they employ, and sometimes frankly admit that they “do not know how the answers come.”
Now, this sudden irruption of ideas, this dazzling solution of problems, is characteristic not only of calculating prodigies, but also of all men of genius. They may not have—in truth, they have comparatively seldom—such a spectacular resort to the subconscious; but they assuredly have it in an astonishing measure, and to better purpose. Precisely as87 we find the answers to mathematical puzzles rising spontaneously in the minds of ready reckoners, so, time and again, do we find great thoughts, amounting it may be to epoch-making conceptions, forcing themselves upon men of genius, frequently at moments when they are consciously thinking of some other matter, or are not consciously exercising their minds at all. And again we have only to go to the published testimony of men of genius themselves to obtain a strong body of evidence bearing out this statement.
Many a poet of the first order, puzzling over the state of his mind during his creative moments, has declared that his works were composed as in a dream, the main ideas, sometimes even the phrases used, shaping themselves of their own accord in his consciousness. “Often it happened to me,” says Goethe, “that I would repeat a song to myself and then be unable to recollect it; that sometimes I would run to my desk, and, without taking time to lay my paper straight, would, without stirring from my place, write out the poem from beginning to end, slopingly. For the88 same reason I always preferred to write with a pencil, on account of its marking so readily. On several occasions, indeed, the scratching and spluttering of my pen awoke me from my somnambulistic poetising and distracted me so that it suffocated a little product in its birth.” (Hirsch’s “Genius and Degeneration,” p. 33.)
Elsewhere Goethe specifically states that his “Werther” was written “somewhat unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.” And, according to Vischer, the poet Schiller, Goethe’s almost equally great contemporary, complained that whenever he was consciously at work creating and constructing, his imagination was hampered and did not perform “with the same freedom as it had done when nobody was looking over its shoulder.”
“It is not I who think,” confesses Lamartine, “but my ideas which think for me.” Dante had much the same feeling, as recorded in his famous lines, “I am so constituted that when love inspires me, I attend; and according as it speaks in me, I express myself.89” Voltaire, who wrote to Diderot that “in the works of genius instinct is everything,” on seeing one of his own tragedies performed, exclaimed, “Was it really I who wrote that?”
“My conceptions,” says Rémy de Gourmont, “rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or the flight of a bird.”
“One does not work, one listens; it is as though another were speaking into one’s ear,” writes De Musset. Exactly similar is the statement of the composer, Hoffman:
“When I compose, I sit down to the piano, shut my eyes, and play what I hear.”
From other great musicians comes equally emphatic testimony to the part played by the subconscious in the creation of their works. Mozart frankly avowed that his compositions came “involuntarily, like dreams.” Among eminent composers of to-day Saint-Saens has only to listen, like Socrates, to his D?mon; and Vincent d’Indy, writing to Dr. Paul Chabaneix (to whose “Le Subconsciente chez les90 Artistes, les Savants, et les Ecrivains” I am indebted for most of these French instances) relates that he “often has, on waking, a fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which—like the memory of a dream—needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.”
The situation is the same, in whatever field genius finds expression. Napoleon, by many considered the greatest military genius in the history of mankind, believed from his own experience that the fate of battles usually turned not so much on conscious planning and man?uvring as on tactics dictated by “latent thoughts” arising suddenly in the mind. “The decisive moment approached; the spark burst forth, and one was victorious.” In like manner there frequently has come to scientists and inventors, with the unexpectedness of lightning out of a clear sky, the discovery of natural laws or mechanical principles of which they previously had no conscious knowledge whatever.
Everybody has heard the story of Newton, the91 falling apple, and the discovery of the law of gravitation; and of Galileo’s invention of the pendulum, born of the thoughts springing up in his mind while idly watching the oscillations of the great bronze lamp swinging from the roof of Pisa Cathedral. Not so well known, but particularly impressive because of its revelation of the manner in which the desultory development of a train of thought in the mind of a man of genius may lead to a subconscious upsurging of the highest value, is Alfred Russel Wallace’s own account of his epoch-making discovery of the scientific doctrine of the origin of species—a discovery achieved by him, in the far-off Malay Archipelago, with no knowledge that the same doctrine had even then been worked out, though not as yet made public, by Charles Darwin.
“At the time in question,” Wallace relates, in his “My Life,” “I was suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever, and every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits had to lie down for several hours, during which time I had nothing to do but to think92 over any subjects then particularly interesting me. One day something brought to my mind Malthus’s ‘Principle of Population,’ which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of the ‘positive checks to increase’—disease, accidents, war, and famine—which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of more civilised peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes, or their equivalents, are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since they evidently do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been densely crowded with those that breed most quickly.
“Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole93 the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed on me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.
“At once I seemed to see the whole effect of this, that when changes of land and sea, or of climate, or of food-supply, or of enemies occurred—and we know that such changes have always been taking place—and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about; and as great changes in the environment are always slow, there would be ample time for the change to be effected by the survival of the best fitted in every generation. In this94 way every part of an animal’s organisation could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I had at last found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.”
This passage, with its significant phrases, “Then it suddenly flashed on me,” and “At once I seemed to see the whole effect of this,” makes very clear the subconscious element in the achieving of the momentous discovery. It also emphasises another fact indispensable to a complete understanding not alone of Wallace’s achievement but of the achievements of all men of genius: the fact that creative upsurgings from the subconscious would be valueless—would, indeed, be impossible of occurrence—in any but a mind rendered by conscious study, observation, and reflection, capable of appreciating their significance.
The subconscious, let me recall, is a kind of work95shop where the “ego” rummages among the memory-images of its past experiences to develop trains of thought and reach definite conclusions with a minimum of effort. Obviously the results of its rummaging will depend on the material it finds to work with; in proportion as this is rich and abundant, the subconscious upsurgings will be “worth while.” Obviously, too, both the richness of the material and the character and value of the subconscious upsurgings will ultimately depend on the character of the individual’s interests, and the extent to which these impel him to conscious study, observation, and reflection.
Wherefore it is that all men of genius have been great workers. Even when, as has been observed in certain cases, they indulge in more or less protracted periods of idleness, they later make amends by an unusual industry; and, for that matter, their idleness often is more seeming than real, their minds being busied all the while with some baffling problem. Ardent, whole-souled absorption in the thing he has96 set himself to do—that, unquestionably, is a distinguishing characteristic of the man of genius. It is almost as if by instinct he labours hard to provide his subconsciousness with the data it must have in order to afford him, by way of recompense, those flashes of insight, those moments of “inspiration,” that mean acknowledged leadership among his fellow-men.
I have already quoted Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of what his subconscious did for him. Let me now give his account of how he toiled to provide his subconscious with its working material. Never was there a man who strove more diligently and deliberately to attain success as an author; and this even while he was a student in college, where most of those who knew him thought that his chief occupation was “killing time.” As he tells us:
“All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my97 pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. When I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to write down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas.
“Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author—though I wished that, too—as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.... I worked in other ways, also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.
“This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was98 not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me—so far as I have learned them at all—the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word; things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.
“So that there was, perhaps, more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the coordination of parts.”
Balzac, the greatest novelist that France has ever99 produced, similarly exemplifies the laborious industry of the man of genius in providing his subconsciousness with material for future use, and training it to respond more fully to the demands of the upper consciousness. It was Balzac’s habit to wander for days among the people, inquiring into their customs, manners, motives, and ways of thinking; and he would travel a hundred miles to get the data for a few lines of description. The result, when his genius began to show itself, after a long and painful period of incubation, was the creation of a series of works that will be read and reread as long as books are printed.
Of Dante, Boccaccio tells us that “taken by the sweetness of knowing the truth of the things concealed in Heaven, and finding no other pleasure dearer to him in life, he left all other worldly care and gave himself to this alone; and, that no part of philosophy might remain unseen by him, he plunged with acute intellect into the deepest recesses of theology, and so far succeeded in his design that, caring nothing for heat or cold, or watchings or fastings, or any other100 bodily discomforts, by assiduous study he came to know of the divine essence and of the other separate intelligences that the human intellect can comprehend.”
Napoleon is known to have occupied his mind almost incessantly with problems of military strategy. Even at the opera he would forget the music in wrestling with such questions as, “I have ten thousand men at Strassburg, fifteen thousand at Magdeburg, twenty thousand at Würzburg. By what stages must they march so as to reach Ratisbon on three successive days?” Mozart, on the contrary, thought, lived, and moved in an atmosphere of music. He could not so much as go for a walk or play a game of billiards without humming to himself over and over again airs that he was striving to develop to his satisfaction.
“Nobody,” he once declared, “takes so much pains in the study of composition as I. You could not easily name a famous master in music whom I have101 not industriously studied, often going through his works several times.”
Schiller, even as a boy, “felt that without diligence no mastery can be won.” Halley once asked Newton how he had made his marvellous discoveries in the physical realm. “By always thinking about them,” was his reply. Thus the record might be continued down to the Edisons and Bergsons and Debussys of to-day.
Quite evidently, what happens is that the perpetual concentration of attention on some one problem or set of problems, not merely deposits in the subconscious an exceptional wealth of material, but also favours the emergence of the results of its manipulation of that material. Just as, in the case of the ordinary man, it is only when he is intensely interested in, say, the detection of an error in book-keeping, that he is likely to have the cause of that error made plain to him by a sudden “happy thought,” or through the medium of a dream.
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It may, then, be stated as a well-established fact that intense interest plus persistent effort is the prime essential to the highest success in any sphere of human activity. Of importance, also, is the fact that, as a general thing, the “set” of a man’s mind, the direction which his interest most readily takes, is indicated more or less clearly in the first years of life. This is proved not only by the early lives of the world’s most eminent men and women, but also by the results of careful statistical investigations into the life histories of “average” people. Especially impressive are the findings of an inquiry carried out not long ago by that well-known American psychologist, Edward L. Thorndike, and reported by him in The Popular Science Monthly, vol. lxxxi (1912).
Professor Thorndike submitted to one hundred third year students in Columbia College, Barnard College, and Teachers’ College, New York, a list of subjects of study, including mathematics, history, literature, science, drawing, and such hand-work as carving, carpentering, gardening, etc. Each stu103dent was required to fill in a tabular blank showing the order in which the various subjects were of greatest interest to that particular student: (1) during the last three years of elementary school attendance, (2) during the high school period, and (3) at the time of the investigation. Blanks were also to be filled indicating the student’s judgment as to his or her ability in each of the respective subjects during the period covered by the inquiry.
From the statistics thus gathered two things stood out clearly. No fewer than 60 per cent. of the students made returns showing that the subjects which appealed to them most strongly in their college work were the subjects that had most interested them in early life; and an even closer correspondence (65 per cent.) was shown between intensity of interest and intellectual ability. Professor Thorndike then extended his investigation to include two hundred other individuals, and obtained virtually the same results.
“These facts,” it is not surprising to find him say104ing in comment, “unanimously witness to the importance of early interests. They are shown to be far from fickle and evanescent.... It would indeed be hard to find any feature of a human being which was a more permanent fact of his nature than his relative degree of interest in different lines of thought and action.”
What this means, unquestionably, is that every parent, in planning the education of his children or in assisting them to choose a vocation, should make a real effort to gain some insight into their special interests. Not only so, but there is reason for adding that he should also endeavour to ascertain and cultivate those interests while his children are still quite young. Otherwise he is likely to find them growing to manhood and womanhood—as, under present conditions, most children do grow—with the strongest of their “worth while” interests so attenuated that really effective mental effort is next to impossible. In these circumstances—unless they chance, as Charles Darwin did, to come under the influence105 of a personality able to rouse their dormant powers into exceptional activity—the likelihood is that they will achieve only mediocre results, muddling along through life even when they happen to hit on vocations truly suited to them.
Are we to infer that children, at a tender age, should be encouraged to think seriously about serious subjects? Assuredly, provided the subjects be made sufficiently interesting to them. It is not without significance that a large majority of men of genius have been distinguished for their precocity; or, if not precocious in the ordinary sense of the term, they have busied themselves in childhood with mental activities allied to those for which they afterward attained eminence.
Napoleon’s interest in military problems dates from his boyhood. Lord Kelvin, the foremost physicist of the nineteenth century, was making electrical machines when only nine years old, and played with them as other children play with dolls and marbles. Thomas Hobbes translated the “Medea” of Euripi106des into Latin iambic verse before he was fourteen. Cicero at thirteen is credited with having written a treatise on the art of oratory. Fénelon preached his first sermon when only fifteen years old. Grotius at the age of fourteen was widely known for his learning. Hallam, the famous historian, could read well before he was five, and had turned author four years later. Galileo, like Lord Kelvin, constructed mechanical toys in his childhood.
Not to accumulate instances tediously, it need only be added that, in making a survey of the biographies of a thousand eminent British men and women, the English psychologist, Havelock Ellis, found that only forty-four were specifically mentioned as not having been precocious, while nearly three hundred were mentioned as having been distinctly precocious in one sense or another. Even in the case of the forty-four, Mr. Ellis discovered, several were really as precocious as any of the three hundred, being “already absorbed in their own lines of mental activity.” To this class belong, for example, Landor,107 Byron, and Wiseman, the last of whom is described as having been in boyhood, “dull and stupid, always reading and thinking.” Nor, according to the results of Mr. Ellis’s investigation, did precocity have any unfavourable effect on the health of these men and women of genius.
All similar investigations, in fact, go to show that intellectual activity makes for longevity—that those who think hardest are likely to live longest. Of one group of nearly eight hundred and fifty men of genius it was found that only two hundred and fifty died before they were sixty years old, while one hundred and thirty-one lived to be eighty or older. For another group of five hundred, an average life-span of nearly sixty-five years was found, as against a life-span of fifty-one years for all classes of people who pass the age of twenty. In the case of still another group, studied by a third investigator, an average of seventy-one years was established.
What gives these figures greater significance is the fact that in many instances the man of genius is108 exceptionally frail in early life. Mr. Ellis, in his statistical study, found that more than two hundred—or more than 20 per cent. of the eminent men and women included in his survey—were “congenitally of a notably feeble constitution,” yet that among these were some of the longest lived. How is this to be explained? Only on the theory that the joy they felt in doing work congenial to them promoted bodily as well as mental vigour. And, in point of fact, it is to-day a commonplace among psychologists that pleasurable emotions make for increased strength, while disagreeable feelings make for weakness.
Viewed from whatever angle, therefore, “being interested” is one of the most important things in the world to every one of us. The earlier we become interested—intensely interested—in some specific field of activity, the brighter our future prospects will be.
But—this is the crucial question in the present connection—is the awaking of a lively interest, an interest so intense that it spurs to incessant en109deavour in some special field, sufficient to account for the achievements of the man of genius? Granting that the man of genius depends for his results, as I have tried to show, on the extent to which he upbuilds and stimulates his subconscious powers by conscious observation and thought, must we not assume that he possesses, to begin with, an exceptional mental capacity? Or is favouring circumstance in his environment—the occurrence of events that make so profound an impression on his mind as to arouse a fervent longing for accomplishment—sufficient to explain him? In short, would it be possible, by careful education and the wise adjustment of environmental influences, so to develop any individual of normal mentality that he might achieve in his chosen life-work results usually regarded as bearing the stamp of genius?
Such, decidedly, is my belief. I base it partly on the repeated failure of investigators to demonstrate the operation of heredity in the making of the vast multitude of men of genius who, in the history of110 mankind, have sprung from all sorts and conditions of ancestors, rich and poor, proud and humble, wise and ignorant. Partly I base it on the many instances in which men of genius have themselves been able to trace the determination of their activities to fortunate happenings in early life. But most of all I base it on certain experiments in education undertaken by parents entirely unaware of the interrelationship between conscious thinking and subconscious “inspiration,” yet intuitively believing that the sooner a child is habituated to using his mind to good purpose the more he will accomplish in later life.