The Story of the Mind

by James Mark Baldwin

In undertaking this task we must try to judge the genius with reference to the sane social man, the normal Socius. What he is we have seen. He is a person who learns to judge by the judgments of society. What, then, shall we say of the genius from this point of view? Can the hero worshipper be right in saying that the genius teaches society to judge; or shall we say that the genius, like other men, must learn to judge by the judgments of society?

The most fruitful point of view is, no doubt, that which considers the genius a variation. And unless we do this it is evidently impossible to get any theory which will bring him into a general scheme. But how great a variation? And in what direction?—these are the questions. The great variations found in the criminal by heredity, the insane, the idiotic, etc., we have found excluded from society; so we may well ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our determination of the limits within which society decides who is to be excluded is correct, then the genius must come within these limits. He can not escape them and live socially.

The Intelligence of the Genius.—The directions in which the genius actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact. He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great "constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason for excluding him from society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts, thoughts which will work, thoughts which will bring in a new area in the discovery of principles, or of their application. This is just what all development depends upon, this attainment of novelty, which is consistent with older knowledge and supplementary to it. But suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges, or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist, or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical workability—in short, to sum it up, "fitness." Any thought, to live and germinate, must be a fit thought. And the community's sense of the fitness of the thought is their rule of judgment.

Now, the way the community got this sense—that is the great result we have reached above. Their sense of fitness is just what I called above their judgment. So far, at least, as it relates to matters of social import, it is of social origin. It reflects the outcome of all social heredity, tradition, education. The sense of social truth is their criterion of social thoughts, and unless the social reformer's thought be in some way fit to go into the setting thus made by earlier social development, he is not a genius but a crank.

I may best show the meaning of the claim that society makes upon the genius by asking in how far in actual life he manages to escape this account of himself to society. The facts are very plain, and this is the class of facts which some writers urge, as supplying an adequate rule for the application of the principles of their social philosophy. The simple fact is, say they, that without the consent of society the thoughts of your hero, whether he be genius or fool, are practically valueless. The fulness of time must come; and the genius before his time, if judged by his works, can not be a genius at all. His thought may be great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it as its richest outcome and its profoundest intuition; but before, that time, it is as bizarre as a madman's fancies and as useless. What would be thought, we might be asked by writers of this school, of a rat which developed upon its side the hand of a man, with all its mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of delicate manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true to the pattern of a rat? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be justified in leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole where his singular appendage held him fast? Is such a rat any the less a monster because man finds use for his hands.

To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the premature genius is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way which renders it still more plausible. The variations which occur in intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is, theoretically, an average man. The differences among men which can be taken account of in any philosophy of life must be in some way referable to this mean. The variation which does not find its niche at all in the social environment, but which strikes all the social fellows with disapproval, getting no sympathy whatever, is thereby exposed to the charge of being the "sport" of Nature and the fruit of chance. The lack of hearing which awaits such a man sets him in a form of isolation, and stamps him not only as a social crank, but also as a cosmic tramp.

Put in its positive and usual form, this view simply claims that man is always the outcome of the social movement. The reception he gets is a measure of the degree in which he adequately represents this movement. Certain variations are possible—men who are forward in the legitimate progress of society—and these men are the true and only geniuses. Other variations, which seem to discount the future too much, are "sports"; for the only permanent discounting of the future is that which is projected from the elevation of the past.

The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which, to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle, Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone have set guide-posts to history, and given to the world large portions of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations—that is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand, he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow processes of evolution!

It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is no connection.

But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the interaction which actually takes place between physical and social heredity. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which we do find, the inroads made by the counts and the marquises, due to influences which are quite social and psychological? Again, on the other hand, what leads the count and the marquis, to lay their titles at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their chances just on social and psychological grounds? Novelists have rung the changes on this intrusion of social influences into the course of physical heredity. Bourget's Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence of social race characteristics on natural heredity, with the reaction of natural heredity again upon the new social conditions.