THE ETHICS OF GENIUS
The anthropological sciences devote themselves almost exclusively to the study of the normal man—the man whom we ordinarily meet in our daily life and who represents the bulk of society. In scientific language, he is the ‘type.’ He represents the common and essential attributes of the class and does so in their proper relation and due proportion.
But the typical man does not exhaust the class. There are deviations from the type as well. There are instances where one or other of the class-qualities is developed beyond the ordinary limit; and this is probably counterbalanced by the undergrowth of another. Thus, broadly speaking, one who has more than the ordinary dose of hunger or sleep or even speech, does to that extent deviate from the type.
This remark applies to almost all human attributes. Very few men can be regarded as types in the strictest sense of the term. Almost every power or faculty is found just a little less or just a little more developed in some man or other. One, for instance, possesses more than ordinary imagination, and is a poet; another may possess very little of imagination, but may have more than the ordinary power of calculation and the sense of expediency; he will be probably a successful business man.
These are the most ordinary deviations; and, for that reason, do not attract much special attention. But still they are deviations, and are responsible for the diversity in society.
But there are more important deviations ; in the first place, there is the criminal, in the second, the man of genius.
That the criminal is an aberration from the type, has long been recognised. So long ago as the middle of the last century, the criminal was regarded more as a deviation from the moral type than anything else. He was a moral decrepit,
