[1] The result sometimes is that the ambitious doctor seeks to become a specialist in at least one subject, and instals a single expensive method of treatment to which he enthusiastically subjects all his patients. This would be comic if it were not sometimes rather tragic.
XIII — EUGENICS AND GENIUS
The cry is often heard to-day from those who watch with disapproval the efforts made to discourage the reckless procreation of the degenerate and the unfit: You are stamping out the germs of genius! It is widely held that genius is a kind of flower, unknown to the horticulturist, which only springs from diseased roots; make the plant healthily sound and your hope of blossoms is gone, you will see nothing but leaves. Or, according to the happier metaphor of Lombroso, the work of genius is an exquisite pearl, and pearls are the product of an obscure disease. To the medical mind, especially, it has sometimes been, naturally and properly no doubt, a source of satisfaction to imagine that the loveliest creations of human intellect may perhaps be employed to shed radiance on the shelves of the pathological museum. Thus we find eminent physicians warning us against any effort to decrease the vigour of pathological processes, and influential medical journals making solemn statements in the same sense. "Already," I read in a recent able and interesting editorial article in the British Medical Journal, "eugenists in their kind enthusiasm are threatening to stamp out the germs of possible genius."
Now it is quite easy to maintain that the health, happiness, and sanity of the whole community are more precious even than genius. It is so easy, indeed, that if the question of eugenics were submitted to the Referendum on this sole ground there can be little doubt what the result would be. There are not many people, even in the most highly educated communities, who value the possibility of a new poem, symphony, or mathematical law so highly that they would sacrifice their own health, happiness, and sanity to retain that possibility for their offspring. Of course we may declare that a majority which made such a decision must be composed of very low-minded uncultured people, altogether lacking in appreciation of pathology, and reflecting no credit on the eugenic cause they supported; but there can be little doubt that we should have to admit their existence.
We need not hasten, however, to place the question on this ground. It is first necessary to ascertain what reason there is to suppose that a regard for eugenic considerations in mating would tend to stamp out the germs of genius. Is there any reason at all? That is the question I am here concerned with.
The anti-eugenic argument on this point, whenever any argument is brought forward, consists in pointing to all sorts of men of genius and of talent who, it is alleged, were poor citizens, physical degenerates the prey of all manner of constitutional diseases, sometimes candidates for the lunatic asylum which they occasionally reached. The miscellaneous data which may thus be piled up are seldom critically sifted, and often very questionable, for it is difficult enough to obtain any positive biological knowledge concerning great men who died yesterday, and practically impossible in most cases to reach an unquestionable conclusion as regards those who died a century or more ago. Many of the most positive statements commonly made concerning the diseases even of modern genius are without any sure basis. The case of Nietzsche, who was seen by some of the chief specialists of the day, is still really quite obscure. So is that of Guy de Maupassant. Rousseau wrote the fullest and frankest account of his ailments, and the doctors made a post-mortem examination. Yet nearly all the medical experts—and they are many—who have investigated Rousseau's case reach different conclusions. It would be easy to multiply indefinitely the instances of great men of the past concerning whose condition of health or disease we are in hopeless perplexity.
This fact is, however, one that, as an argument, works both ways, and the important point is to make clear that it cannot concern us. No eugenic considerations can annihilate the man of genius when he is once born and bred. If eugenics is to stamp out the man of genius it must do so before he is born, by acting on his parents.
Nor is it possible to assume that if the man of genius, apart from his genius, is an unfit person to procreate the race, therefore his parents, not possessing any genius, were likewise unfit to propagate. It is easy to find persons of high ability who in other respects are unfit for the ends of life, ill-balanced in mental or physical development, neurasthenic, valetudinarian, the victims in varying degrees of all sorts of diseases. Yet their parents, without any high ability, were, to all appearance, robust, healthy, hard-working, commonplace people who would easily pass any ordinary eugenic tests. We know nothing as to the action of two seemingly ordinary persons on each other in constituting heredity, how hypertrophied intellectual aptitude comes about, what accidents, normal or pathological, may occur to the germ before birth, nor even how strenuous intellectual activity may affect the organism generally. We cannot argue that since these persons, apart from their genius, were not seemingly the best people to carry on the race, therefore a like judgment should be passed on their parents and the germs of genius thus be stamped out.