the more scientific mind of Aristotle it appeared certain (according to Seneca) that there was no great intellect (magnum ingenium) without some mixture of madness (dementiæ).
It must be remembered, however, that in the eyes of the ancients genius was hardly degraded by this companionship with madness. Men had not yet begun to look on insanity as one of the most pitiable of maladies. So far from this, it was a common idea that the insane were themselves inspired by the action of deity. We have a striking illustration of the absence even among the educated Greeks of the modern feeling toward madness in the fact that Plato was able to argue, with no discoverable trace of his playful irony, that certain sorts of madness are to be esteemed a good rather than an evil.[1]
The influence of Christianity and of the Church served at first to brand mental derangement with the mark of degradation. The doctrine of possession now assumed a distinctly repellent form by the introduction of the Oriental idea of an evil spirit taking captive the human frame and using it as an instrument of its foul purposes. The full development of this idea of demoniacal possession in the middle ages led, as we know, to many cruelties. And, though Christianity showed its humane side in making provision for the insane by asylums, the treatment of mental disease during this period was, on the whole, marked by much harshness.[2]
This debasement of the idea of madness had, however, no appreciable effect in dissolving the companionship of the two ideas in popular thought. For the attitude of the Church was, for the most part, hostile to new ideas, and so to men of original power. In sooth, we know that they were again and again branded as heretics, and as wicked men possessed by the devil. And thus genius was attached to insanity by a new bond of kinship.
The transition to the modern period introduces us to a new conception both of genius and of insanity. The impulse of inquisitiveness, the delight in new ideas, aided by the historical spirit with its deep sense of indebtedness to the past, have led the later world to extol intellectual greatness. We have learned to see in it the highest product of Nature's organic energy, the last and greatest miracle of evolution. On the other hand, the modern mind has ceased to see in insanity a supernatural agency, and in assimilating it to other forms of disease has taken up a humane and helpful attitude toward it.
Such a change of view might seem at first to necessitate a sharp severance of the new ideas. For, while it places genius at the apex of
- ↑ "Phædrus," loc. cit. Mr. Lecky points out that the Greeks had no asylums for the insane ("History of European Morals," vol. ii, p. 90). On the other hand, Dr. Maudsley tells us that Greek scientific opinion on the subject was an anticipation of modern ideas ("Responsibility in Mental Disease," p. 6).
- ↑ See Lecky, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 92, etc.; cf. Maudsley, op. cit., p. 10.
