Very mild epilepsy—from one fit a year to one in several years—instead of hindering, seems rather to help mentality, and many geniuses have been epileptic. These talented victims, are less rare than the public
suppose, owing to the jealous care with which symptoms of this disease are guarded. Socrates, Julius Cæsar, Mahomet, Joan of Arc, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Byron, Swinburne, and Dostoieffsky are but a few among many great names in the world of art, religion and statecraft. Epileptic princes, kings and kinglets who have achieved unenviable notoriety might be named by scores, Wilhelm II being the most notable of modern times.
This brilliant mentality is always accompanied by instability, and usually by marked disability in other ways. The success of these men often depends on an ability to view things from a new, quaint or queer standpoint, which appeals to their more normal fellows.
In matters that require great fertility, a quick grasp, ready wit, and brilliant but not sustained mental effort, numerous neuropaths excel. In things calling for calm, well-balanced judgment, or stern effort to conquer unforseen difficulties, they fail utterly.
Subtle in debate, they are but stumbling-blocks in council; brilliant in conception, they fail in execution; fanciful designers, they are not "builders of bridges". They are boastful, sparkling, inventive, witty, garrulous, vain and supersensitive, outraging their friends by the extravagance of their schemes; embarrassing their enemies by the subtlety of their intrigues.
They wing on exuberant imagination from height to height, but the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable results for visionary improvements.
Great and cunning strategists while fortune smiles,
they are impotent to direct a retreat, but flee before the fury they ought to face. They rarely have personal courage, but are timid, conciliatory and vacillating just when bravery, sternness, and determination are needed; furious, obstinate and reckless, when gentleness, diplomacy and wisdom would carry their point.
They are ready to forgive when there is magnanimity, vainglory and probably folly in forgiveness, but will not overlook the most trivial affront when there is every reason for so doing. They have brain, but not ballast, and their whole life is usually a lopsided effort to "play to the gallery".
In poetry and literature, fancy has free play, and they often succeed, sometimes rising to sublime heights; usually in the depiction of the whimsical, the wonderful, the sardonic, the bizarre, the monstrous, or the frankly impossible. They are not architects as much as jugglers of words, and descriptive writing from an acute angle of vision is their forte. They sometimes succeed as artists or composers, for in these spheres they need not elaborate their ideas in such clean-cut detail, but many who might succeed in these branches have not sufficient strength of purpose to do the preliminary "spadework".