Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

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 manœuvring 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, the 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 think 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 whole 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 this 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 workshop 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 has 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 my 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.