However much or however little of these ideas may be found to possess permanent value, one point of unquestionable importance is Lombroso’s demand that among the conditions of the work of genius we must study the personality of the genius himself with all his individual peculiarities. A glance at the almost interminable series of “pathographies” of highly-talented persons proves to us how strong an influence Lombroso’s ideas exercised upon the intellectual world of Germany, and to what an extent they gave rise to an anthropological method of study of the nature of the man of genius.
We Germans must see, unless we are blind, the enormous importance in relation to the work produced by the two most distinguished figures of our recent intellectual history—Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—of the severe suffering with which both were afflicted. Even if it be not true that pathology is the root of genius, at any rate, pathos, not ethos, will persist as the sphere in which mortal man attains the highest perfection, and the one in which he performs the greatest deeds. And Lombroso’s own path through life, overburdened as he was with sorrows, struggles, pains, and deprivations, shows us that, in default of the forcible over-stimulation which severe suffering induces in rich and deep natures, the energy of the highest spiritualization is unable to radiate from the hidden depths of our nature; and yet these same sorrows and struggles are likely, in those in whom the divine fire of Prometheus has not glowed from the first, to lead to crime or to insanity.
In the light of this idea, the life-work of the master, who displayed the close relationship between these three great manifestations of suffering humanity, genius, insanity, and crime, will no longer appear so strange as his isolated and detached ideas appeared to his contemporaries. And we shall continue to return again and again to his works, as to an arsenal of means to help us to the understanding of the highest and of the deepest endowments of mankind.
If we wish to do justice to the life-work of Lombroso, we must not omit the study of his own personality, to which, therefore, a final glance may be directed. By his birth and by his own peculiar temperament he belonged to that Jewish aristocracy to which, as Bismarck pointed out, Disraeli also belonged. The former well-to-do position and the high standing of his family were changed greatly for the worse in consequence of the Austrian domination in Italy. Lombroso was compelled to be not merely his own teacher, but also his own bread-winner; and when at length he had attained a good position as a consulting physician and University Professor, owing to his espousal of the cause of the Italian peasantry he lost the material advantages of a position which would otherwise have led him to acquire considerable wealth in the industrially powerful Northern Italy.
These losses freed him completely from the desire to strive for outward success, and restored to him the leisure without which he could never have collected his enormous materials, or carried on his incessant polemic for clearer ideas, and effected the systematic arrangement of his material. Thus his life attained a harmonious character such as rarely belongs to the learned life of a successful physician; and whilst he remained outwardly unpretending and modest, always ready to help others both in word and deed, he continued to be the intellectual father of new and ever new sensational hypotheses. He, “the slave of facts,” never boasted of his diligence; and although in innumerable controversies he unweariedly defended his ideas, his zeal was always on behalf of the ideas themselves, never to gain material advantages. Lombroso never sought for personal gain from the conceptions of whose value and importance he was so firmly convinced, and which came to him, as it were, intuitively. Indeed, his principal strength lay in intuition, in his ready grasp of the essential. His theories of intuitive genius lay stress upon certain analogies between intuition and epileptoid states; and the great reverence paid by him to truth may possibly have led him at times to underestimate the powerful, although not always fully conscious, intellectual activity which paves the way to every happy discovery.
We cannot here attempt to show the extent and importance of Lombroso’s contributions to Italian culture outside the domain of anthropological researches. From his house in Turin, and from the circle of thinkers, officials and artists who assembled there, there was diffused a powerful influence, and at times the very consciousness of Italy seemed to be centred here at work. And, unceasingly, a manifold receptivity and activity found the unity and the energy requisite for their concentrated effects in the fiery soul in whose ardour the most heterogeneous elements were fused, and whose spirit lives on in his successors and disciples—
“cursores qui vitai lampada tradunt.”
APPENDIX A
LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES
During the correction of the previous chapters I have read Lombroso’s final and posthumous work, and I feel that it is expedient to append a brief account of Lombroso’s dealings with the spiritualists, which were, indeed, characteristic of his peculiar personality, but are without significance in relation to his more important investigations—those which interest us and will interest posterity.
It was about the year 1890 that throughout Europe the investigations of psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists into the subject of hypnotism attained their acme. During the years 1885 to 1890 there was an unceasing current of hypnotic experiments. Almost every clinic had its own mediums; and soon some of these mediums, of whom not a few attended more than one clinic, produced occult phenomena, such as the action of medicaments at a distance (Bourru and others), the polarizing effect of magnets, thought-transference, and thought-reading, in addition to the phenomena of the hypnotic sleep and hypnotic suggestion. Not infrequently such séances as these, instituted by serious men of science, closely resembled the phenomena of the “animal magnetism” of the first third of the nineteenth century and the séances of the spiritualists during the middle third of the century. Men who, unquestionably, were well experienced in observation and in rigorous experiment—such men as Charcot, Richet, Preyer, Forel, and Zöllner—believed in the reality of the occult phenomena which gradually made their appearance in the hypnotic mediums.