TALENT AND MEMORY
The following observation bears on my henid theory:
I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from
which later on I was going to make an extract. Something was in my mind
in henid form. What I thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking
at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute
afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a
typical example of the henid.
The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex perception may be
the more easily does it reproduce itself. Clearness of the consciousness
is the preliminary condition for remembering, and the memory of the
mental stimulation is proportional to the intensity of the
consciousness. “I shall not forget that”; “I shall remember that all my
life”; “That will never escape my memory again.” Such phrases men use
when things have made a deep impression on them, of moments in which
they have gained wisdom or have become richer by an important
experience. As the power of being reproduced is directly proportionate
to the organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there can
be no recollection of an absolute henid.
As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his
accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will
he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever
thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely
in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal
remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the sure, most
general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If a common theory,
especially popular with the philosophers of the coffee-house, be true,
that productive men (because they are always covering new ground) have
no memory, it is often because they are productive only from being on
new ground.
The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of genius, which I
propose to lay down dogmatically as a necessary inference from my
theory, without attempting to prove it further, is not incompatible with
their rapid loss of the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of
Greek verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have
experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that was acquired for
examination purposes only so much will be retained as was in harmony
with the natural talent of the pupil. Thus a house-painter may have a
better memory for colours than a great philosopher; the most narrow
philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned by heart
better than his teacher, who may none the less be a great poet. The
uselessness of the experimental school of psychology (notwithstanding
their marvellous arsenal of instruments of experimental precision) is
shown by their expectation of getting results as to memory from tests
with letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. These experiments
have so little bearing on the true memory of man, on the memory by which
he recalls the experiences of his life, that one wonders if such
psychologists have realised that such a thing as the mind exists. The
customary experiments place the most different subjects under the same
conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of these subjects, and
treat them merely as good or bad registering apparatus. There is a
parable in the fact that the two German words “bemerken” (take notice
of) and “merken” (remember) come from the same root. Only what is
harmonious with some inborn quality will be retained. When a man
remembers a thing, it is because he was capable of taking some interest
in the thing; when he forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The
religious man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses
and the mathematician equations.
This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter,
and to another reason for the great memories of genius. The more
significant a man is, the more different personalities he unites in
himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his
memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of
perception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal
part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom
perception and apprehension are identical in their field. Of course no
such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has
apprehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we may take it
that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist; no male is quite without
a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal; no man is absolutely
without the quality, and no man possesses it completely. Apprehension or
absorption, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and
their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose
mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents
can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them
with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed
minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm
impressions made and the sureness with which they are absorbed. The
extreme of genius also does not exist, because even the greatest genius
is not wholly a genius at every moment of his life.
What is at once a deduction from the necessary connection between memory
and genius, and a proof of the actuality of the connection, lies in the
extraordinary memory for minute details shown by the man of genius.
Because of the universality of his mind, everything has only one
interpretation for him, an interpretation often unsuspected at the time;
and so things cling obstinately in his memory and remain there
inextinguishably, although he may have taken not the smallest trouble to
take note of them. And so one may almost take as another mark of the
genius that the phrase “this is no longer true” has no meaning for him.
There is nothing that is no longer true for him, probably just because
he has a clearer idea than other men of the changes that come with time.
The following appears to be one of the best means for the objective
examination of the endowment of a man: If after a long separation from
him we resume the new intercourse with the circumstances of the last,
then we shall find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing,
that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from where it was
left off with the fullest recollection of the details. How much ordinary
men forget of their lives any one can prove to his astonishment and
horror. It may happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged
with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he has forgotten all
about it. It is true that if one recalls all the circumstances to his
mind, he begins to remember, and, finally, with sufficient help, may
remember almost completely. Such experience has made me think that there
may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no absolute forgetting
ever occurs; that if the right method with the individual be chosen
recollection may always be induced.
It follows also that from one’s own experience, from what one has
thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest
possible to another, that the other does not already know. Consideration
of the amount that a man can take in from another would seem to serve as
a sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure that does not have
to wait for an estimation of his actual creative efforts. I am not going
to discuss the extent to which this theory opposes current views on
education, but I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it.
The extent to which a man can detect differences and resemblances must
depend on his memories. This faculty will be best developed in those
whose past permeates their present, all the moments of the life of whom
are amalgamated. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities of
detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons. They
will always seize hold of from the past what has the greatest
resemblance to the present experience, and the two experiences will be
combined in such a way that no similarities or differences will be
concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past against the
influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time
immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its
richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again
and again, or await our favourite images with impatience when we read
Homer or Shakespeare or Klopstock. To-day when, for the first time for a
century and a half, Germany is without great poets or painters, and when
none the less it is impossible to find any one who is not an “author,”
the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to have gone. A period
the nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious words,
the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy
of the unconscious can contain nothing great. Consciousness is the mark
of greatness, and before it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun
disperses a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, how
quickly voices that are now famous would become silent. It is only in
full consciousness, in which the experience of the present assumes
greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past,
that imagination, the necessary quality for all philosophical as for all
artistic effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women
have more imagination than men. The experiences on account of which men
have assigned higher powers of imagination to women come entirely from
the imaginative sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be
drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my work.
The absence of women from the history of music must be referred to
deeper causes; but it also supports my contention that women are devoid
of imagination. To produce music requires a great deal more imagination
than the malest woman possesses, and much more than is required for
other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. There is nothing in
nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, corresponding directly with
sound pictures. Music has no relation to the world of experience; there
is no “music,” no chords or melodies in the natural world; these have to
be evolved from the imagination of the composer. Every other art has
more definite relations to empirical art. Even architecture, which has
been compared with music, has definite relations to matter, although,
like music, it has no anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is
an entirely masculine occupation. The very idea of a female architect
excites compassion.
The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative or practical
musician (especially instrumental music) depends on the fact that even
the sense of smell is a better guide to man in the world of experience
than the contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete
absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, that
makes music specially unfitted to express the female nature. It also
explains why this peculiarity of his art demands the highest grade of
imagination from a musician, and why those to whom musical compositions
“come” seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. The
so-called “imagination” of women must be very different from that of
men, since there is no woman with even the same position in the history
of music that Angelica Kaufmann had in art.
Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding women have not the
smallest leaning towards its production, neither in philosophy nor in
music, in the plastic arts nor in architecture. Where, however, a weak
and vague sentimentality can be expressed with little effort, as in
painting or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, women
have sought and found a suitable field for their efforts. Their lack of
productiveness in the former sphere is in harmony with the vagueness of
the psychical life of women. Music is the nearest possible approach to
the organisation of a sensation. Nothing is more definite,
characteristic, and impressive than a melody, nothing that will more
strongly resist obliteration. One remembers much longer what is sung
than what is spoken, and the arias better than the recitatives.
Let us note specially here that the usual phrases of the defenders of
women do not apply to the case of women. Music is not one of the arts to
which women have had access only so recently that it is too soon to
expect fruits; from the remotest antiquity women have sung and played.
And yet....
It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting
women have now had opportunities for at least two centuries. Every one
knows how many girls learn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said
that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As
there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the
history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of
things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of
women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork. The
sensuous, physical element of colour is more suitable for them than the
intellectual work of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas
women have acquired some small distinction in painting they have gained
none in drawing. The power of giving form to chaos is with those in whom
the most universal memory has made the widest comprehension possible; it
is a quality of the masculine genius.
I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that
should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as
income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very
probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater
men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and
probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to
most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to
understand a genius.
There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their
lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is
probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain.
They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for
some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in
point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.
It must not be forgotten that quite ordinary men in moments of
excitement, in anger at some underhanded deed, have found words with
which they never would have been credited. The greater part of what is
called expression in art as in language depends (if the reader will
remember what I have said about the process of “clarification”) on the
fact that some individual more richly endowed clarifies, organises, and
exhibits some idea almost instantaneously, an idea which to a less
endowed person was still in the henid form. The course of clarification
is much shortened in the mind of the second person.
If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish,
that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through
which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of
genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to
make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being
untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the
others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.
There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from
giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less
experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a
thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could
only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could
have any meaning.
Because the life of the genius is more intense even in his earliest
years than that of other children, his memory can go further back. In
extreme cases the memory may be complete and vivid back to the third
year of life, whereas in most recollection begins much later. I know
some people whose earliest recollections date only from their eighth
year, and there are instances of an even later beginning of the
conscious life. I do not maintain that the date at which active memory
begins can be taken as a measure of relative genius, that he who
remembers from his second year is so much the more of a genius than he
who can go back only to his fourth or fifth year. But in a general way,
I believe the parallel to hold good.
Even in the cases of the greatest men, some time, greater or shorter,
elapsed between the date of their earliest recollection and the time
from which onwards they remember everything, from the time, in fact, in
which their genius was ripe. But in the case of most men there is
forgetfulness of the greater part of their lives; they are conscious
only that they themselves and none other have lived their lives. Out of
their whole lives there only remain certain moments, and scattered
recollections, which serve as sign-posts. If they are asked about any
particular thing they can only tell, for instance, because in such and
such a month they were so old, or they wore such and such clothes, they
lived at this place, or that their income was so much.
If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after great
trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. In such cases one is
surely justified in saying that such a person is ungifted, or at least
in not considering him conspicuously able.
The request for an autobiography would put most men into a most painful
position; they could scarcely tell if they were asked what they had done
the day before. Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely
associative. In the case of the man of genius every impression that he
has received endures; he is always under the influence of impressions;
and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from fixed ideas. The
psychical condition of men’s minds may be compared with a set of bells
close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings
only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment.
In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets
in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The
latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and
absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the
basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest human virtue.
People are often very conscious of how much they have borrowed, but they
neither can nor will try to remember the necessity in which they stood,
nor the freedom which that help brought them. Even if want of memory
were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not be sufficient for a
man to possess a marvellous memory to have a like spirit of gratitude. A
special condition is also necessary, but its description cannot be
undertaken here.
From the connection between giftedness and memory which is so often
mistaken and denied because it is not sought where it is to be found,
from the power of self recollection, a further fact is to be deduced.
The poet who feels urged to write without premeditation, without
reflection, without having willingly pressed the pedal; the musician to
whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must create whether he
will or no, even if he feels more inclined to sleep or to rest; these,
in such moments, will simply reproduce thoughts they have carried in
their heads all their lives. A composer who can remember none of his
songs or subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his
poems--without having carefully learned them--such men are in no sense
really great.
Before we apply these remarks to the consideration of the mental
differences of the sexes, we must make yet one more distinction between
different kinds of memory. The individual moments in the life of a
gifted man are not remembered as disconnected points, not as different
particles of time, each one separated and defined from the following
one, as the numerals one, two, and so on.
The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the limitations of
consciousness, the gaps in memory, even special experiences, appear to
be in some mysterious way one great whole; incidents do not follow each
other like the tickings of a watch, but they pass along in a single
unbroken stream. With ordinary men the moments which are united in a
close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few,
and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the
genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets
flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius
vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not
been gathered up and stored.
This peculiar continuity by which a man first realises that he exists,
that he is, and that he is in the world, is all comprehensive in the
genius, limited to a few important moments in the mediocre, _and
altogether lacking in woman_. When a woman looks back over her life and
lives again her experiences, there is presented no continuous, unbroken
stream, but only a few scattered points. And what kind of points? They
are just those which accord with woman’s natural instincts. Of what
these interests exclusively consist the second chapter gave a
preliminary idea; and those who remember the ideas in question will not
be astonished at the following facts: The female is concerned altogether
with one class of recollections--those connected with the sexual impulse
and reproduction. She thinks of her lovers and proposals, of her
marriage day, of every child as if it were a doll; of the flowers which
she received at every ball, the number, size, and price of the bouquets;
of every serenade; of every verse which (as she fondly imagines) was
written for her; of every phrase by which a lover has impressed her; but
above all--with an exactness which is as contemptible as it is
disquieting to herself--of every compliment without exception that has
ever been paid her.
That is _all_ that the _real_ woman recalls of her life. But it is just
those things which human beings never forget, and those they cannot
remember that give the clue to knowledge of their life and character. It
belongs to a later period of the book to go more thoroughly into the
reason why the female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some
important conclusion may be expected from reflection on the incredible
memory with which women recall all the adulation and flattery, all the
proofs of gallantry, which have happened to them since childhood.
Whatever may be urged against the present complete limitation of the
female memory to the sphere of sexuality and conjugal life, it is to me
quite evident. Various arguments about girls’ schools, and so forth, I
am prepared for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later.
But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be used as a
means of psychological definition of the individual, can include only
the memory of what has been learnt when learning means actual
experience.
The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life of women
(reference to which is introduced here, only because it is a necessary
psychological factor in the problem of memory, and without reference to
its spiritualistic or idealistic significance) can be reached only when
the nature of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest
problems of philosophy and psychology.
As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more than the
statement of Lotze, which has so often caused astonishment, that women
much more readily submit themselves to new relationships and more easily
accommodate themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be seen
much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the peasant from the
peeress, the woman brought up in poor surroundings from the patrician’s
daughter. Later on I shall deal more exhaustively with this subject.
At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, desire for
gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the better men write down
recollections of their lives, and how I perceive in this a strong
evidence of the connection between memory and giftedness. It is not as
if every man of genius wished to write an autobiography: the incitement
to autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated psychological
conditions. But on the other hand, the writing of a full autobiography,
if it is the outcome of a genuine desire, is always the sign of a
superior man. For real faithful memory is the source of reverence. The
really great would resist any temptation to give up his past in exchange
for material advantage or mental health; the greatest treasures of the
world, even happiness itself, he would not take in exchange for his
memories.
The desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the trait of mediocre
or inferior natures. And however much a really great man, as Goethe
says, may condemn and abhor his past failings, and although he sees
others clinging fast to theirs, he will never smile at those past
actions and failings of his own, or make merry over his early mode of
life and thought.
The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who claim to have
“conquered” their pasts, have the smallest possible claim to the word
“conquer.” They are those who idly relate that they formerly believed
this or the other, but have now “overcome” their beliefs, whereas they
are as little in earnest about the present as they were about the past.
They see only the mechanism, not the soul of things, and at no stage
what they believe themselves to have conquered was deep in their
natures.
In contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful care great
men render even the, apparently, most minute details in their own
biographies: for them the past and present are equal; with others
neither of the two are real.
The famous man realises how everything, even the smallest, most
secondary, matters played an important part in his life, how they have
helped his development, and to this fact is due his extraordinary
reverence for his own memoirs. And such an autobiography is not written
all at once, as it were, with one event treated like another, and
without meditation; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a man; the
material for such a work by a great man, so to speak, is always at hand.
His new experiences acquire a deeper significance because of the past,
which is always present to him, and hence the great man and only the
great man, feels that he himself is in very truth a “man of destiny.”
And so it comes that great men are always more “superstitious” than
average men. To sum up, I may say:
A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem
important to him.
In the course of further investigation this dictum will be seen to have
a deep significance even apart from its bearing on the universality,
comprehension, and comparison exhibited by the genius.
The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to explain. A
real woman never becomes conscious of a destiny, of her own destiny; she
is not heroic; she fights most for her possessions, and there is nothing
tragic in the struggle as her own fate is decided with the fate of her
possessions.
Inasmuch as woman is without continuity, she can have no true reverence;
as a fact, reverence is a purely male virtue. A man is first reverent
about himself, and self-respect is the first stage in reverence for all
things. But it costs a woman very little to break off with her past; if
the word irony could be fittingly used here, one might say that a man
does not easily regard his past with irony and superiority as women
appear to do--and not only after marriage.
Later on I shall show how women are exactly the opposite of that which
reverence means. I would rather be silent about the reverence of widows.
The superstition of women is psychologically absolutely different from
the superstitions of famous men.
The reverent relation to one’s own past, which depends on a real
continuity of memory, and which is possible only by comprehension, can
be shown in relation to a still wider and deeper subject.
Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or not, involves
the question as to whether he has a desire for immortality, or if the
idea of death is indifferent to him.
The desire for immortality is to-day, as a rule, treated shamefully, and
in a very different spirit.
Not only is the problem treated as merely ontological, but the
psychological side of it is only trifled with. It has been held that it
is connected, like the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, with the
feeling that we have all experienced, when, in doing something certainly
for the first time, we seem to remember having gone through the same
experience before. Another generally adopted view is to derive the idea
of immortality from the belief in spirits, as has been done by Tylor,
Spencer, Avenarius, and others, although in any other age than this age
of experimental psychology it would have been dismissed _a priori_. I am
sure that it must seem impossible to the majority of thinking men to
regard a belief so important to mankind, about which there has been so
much strife, as merely the last stage in a syllogism of which the first
premiss is the midnight dream of a dead man. How can phenomena of that
kind explain the belief in the continuity of their lives after death
held so firmly by Goethe or Bach, or the desire for immortality which
speaks to us in Beethoven’s last sonatas? The desire for the persistence
of the conscious self must spring from sources mightier than these
feeble rationalistic guesses.
The deeper source of the belief depends on the relation of a man to his
own past. Our consciousness and vision of the past is the strongest
ground for our desire to be conscious in the future. The man who values
his past, who holds his mental life in greater respect than his
corporeal life, is not willing to give up his consciousness at death.
And so this organic primary desire for immortality is strongest in men
of genius, in the men whose pasts are richest. This connection between
the desire for immortality and memory receives strong support from what
is related by those who have been rescued from sudden death. Even if
they had not thought it out before they relive their past in a few
moments, at once and with frantic rapidity. The feeling of what is
impending brings in violent contrast the intensity of the present
consciousness and the idea that it may cease for ever. In reality we
know very little of the mental state of the dying. It takes more than
an ordinary person to interpret it, and for reasons connected with what
I have been saying men of genius usually avoid death-beds. But it is
quite wrong to ascribe the sudden appearance of religion in so many
people who are fatally ill, to a desire to make sure of their future
state. It is extremely superficial to assume that the doctrine of hell
can for the first time assume such an importance to the dying as to make
them afraid to pass away “with a lie on their lips.”[10]
[10] I venture to remind readers how often at the approach of death
those who have been occupied with purely scientific matters have
turned to religious problems, _e.g._, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Weber.
The important point is this: Why do men who have lived throughout a
lying life feel towards the end a sudden desire for truth? And why are
others so horrified, although they do not believe in punishment in the
next world, when they hear of a man dying with a lie on his lips or with
an unrepented action? And why have both the hardness of heart until the
end and the death-bed repentance appealed so forcibly to the imagination
of poets? The discussion as to the “euthanasia” of atheists, which was
so popular in the eighteenth century, is more than a mere historical
curiosity as F. A. Lange considered it.
I adduce these considerations not merely to suggest a possibility which
is hardly more than a guess. It seems to be unthinkable that it is not
the case that many more people than actual geniuses have some trace of
genius. The quantitative difference in natural endowment will be most
marked at the moment when the endowment becomes active. And for most men
this moment is the point of death. If we were not accustomed to regard
men of genius as a separate class shut off from the others like the
payers of income-tax, we should find less difficulty in grafting these
new ideas on the old. And just as the earliest recollections of
childhood which a man has are not the result of some external event
breaking through the continuity of the past course of his life, but are
the result of his internal development, there comes to every one a day
on which his consciousness is so intensified that remembrance remains,
and from that time onwards, according to his endowment, more or fewer
remembrances are formed (a factor which by itself upsets the whole of
modern psychology), so in different men there are many different
stimulants of the consciousness of which the last is the hour of death,
and from the point of view of their degree of genius men might almost be
classified by the number of things that excite their consciousness. I
take this opportunity of again urging the falseness of a doctrine of
modern psychology (which treats men simply as better or worse pieces of
registering apparatus and takes no notice of the internal, ontogenetic
development of the mind); I mean the idea that in youth we retain the
greatest number of impressions. We must not confuse really experienced
impressions with the mere material on which to exercise memorising. Such
stuff a child learns more easily simply because it is not weighted with
mental impressions. A psychology which is opposed to experience in
matters so fundamental must be rejected. What I am attempting at present
is no more than to give the faintest indication of that ontogenetic
psychology or theoretical biography which sooner or later will replace
what now passes for the science of mind. Every programme represents some
definite conviction; before we wish to reach a goal we have some
definite conception of what the goal is to be. The name “theoretical
biography” will define the new subject from philosophy and physiology,
and the biological method of treatment introduced by Darwin, Spencer,
and others will be widened until it becomes a science capable of giving
a rational orderly account of the whole course of the mental life from
the cradle to the grave. It is to be called biography, not biology,
because it is to deal with the investigation of the permanent laws that
rule the mental development of an individual, whereas biology itself
concerns itself with individuals themselves. The new knowledge will
seek general points of view and the establishment of types. Psychology
must try to become theoretical biography. Existing psychology would find
its place in the branches of the new science, and in this way only would
Wundt’s desire to establish the foundations of a science of the mind be
fulfilled. It would be absurd to despair of this simply because of the
uselessness of the existing science of the mind which has not yet even
grasped its own object. In this way a justification for experimental
psychology might yet be found, in spite of the important results of the
investigations by Windelband and Rickert on the relation between natural
and psychical science, or the old dichotomy between the physical and
mental sciences.
The relation between the continuity of memory and the desire for
immortality is borne out by the fact that woman is devoid of the desire
for immortality. It is to be noted that those persons are quite wrong
who have attributed the desire for immortality to the fear of death.
Women are as much afraid of death as are men, but they have not the
longing for immortality.
My attempted explanation of the psychological desire for immortality is
as yet more an indication of the connection between the desire and
memory than a deduction from a higher natural law. It will always be
found that the connection actually exists; the more a man lives in his
past (not, as a superficial reader might guess, in his future) the more
intense will be his longing for immortality. The lack of the desire for
immortality in women is to be associated with the lack in them of
reverence for their own personality. It seems, however, that the absence
of both reverence and desire for immortality in woman is due to a more
general principle, and in the same fashion in the case of man the
co-existence of a higher form of memory and the desire for immortality
may be traced to some deeper root. So far, I have attempted only to show
the coincidence of the two, how the deep respect for their own past and
the deep desire for their own future are to be found in the same
individuals. It will now be my task to find the common origin of these
two factors of the mind.
Let us take as a starting-point what we were able to lay down as to the
universality of the memory of great men. To such everything is equally
real: what took place long ago and the most recent experience. Thus it
happens that a single experience does not end with the moment of time in
which it happened, does not disappear as this moment of time disappears,
but through the memory is wrested from the grasp of time. Memory makes
experience timeless; the essence of it is that it should transcend time.
A man can only remember the past because memory is free from the control
of time, because events which in nature are functions of time, in the
spirit have conquered time.
But here a difficulty crops up. How can memory be a negation of time if,
on the other hand, it is certain that if we had no memory we should be
unconscious of time? It is certainly true that we shall always be
conscious of the passing of time by our memory of the past. If the two
are in so intimate a relation how can the one be the negation of the
other?
The difficulty is easy to resolve. It is just because a living
creature--not necessarily a human being--by being endowed with memory is
not wholly absorbed by the experiences of the moment that it can, so to
speak, oppose itself to time, take cognisance of it, and make it the
subject of observation. Were the being wholly abandoned to the
experience of the moment and not saved from it by memory then it would
change with time and be a floating bubble in the stream of events; it
could never be conscious of time, for consciousness implies duality. The
mind must have transcended time to grasp it, it must have stood outside
it in order to be able to reflect upon it. This does not apply merely to
special moments of time, as, for instance, to the case that we cannot be
conscious of sorrow until the sorrow is over, but it is a part of the
conception of time. If we could not free ourselves from time, we could
have no knowledge of time.
In order to understand the condition of timelessness let us reflect on
what memory rescues from time. What transcends time is only what is of
interest to the individual, what has meaning for him; in fact, all that
he assigns value to. We remember only the things that have some value
for us even if we are unconscious of the value. It is the value that
creates the timelessness. We forget everything that has no value for us
even if we are unconscious of that absence of value.
What has value, then, is timeless; or, to put it the other way, a thing
has the more value the less it is a function of time. In all the world
value is in proportion to independence of time; only things that are
timeless have a positive value. Although this is not what I take to be
the deepest and fullest meaning of value, it is, at least, the first
special law of the theory of values.
A hasty survey of common facts will suffice to prove this relation
between value and duration. We are always inclined to pay little
attention to the views of those whom we have known only for a short
time, and, as a rule, we think little of the hasty judgments of those
who easily change their ideas. On the other hand, uncompromising
fixedness gains respect, even if it assume the form of vindictiveness or
obstinacy. The _ære perennius_ of the Roman poets and the Egyptian
pyramids lasting for forty centuries are favourite images. The
reputation a man leaves behind him would soon be depreciated were it
suspected that it would soon disappear instead of being handed down the
centuries. A man dislikes to be told that he is always changing; but let
it be put that he is simply showing new sides of his character and he
will be proud of the permanence through the changes. He who is tired of
life, for whom life has ceased to be of interest, is interesting to no
one. The fear of the extinction of a name or of a family is well known.
So also statute laws and customs lose in value if their validity is
expressly limited in time; and if two people are making a bargain, they
will be the more ready to distrust one another if the bargain is to be
only of short duration. In fact, the value that we attach to things
depends to a large extent on our estimate of their durability.
This law of values is the chief reason why men are interested in their
death and their future. The desire for value shows itself in the efforts
to free things from time, and this pressure is exerted even in the case
of things which sooner or later must change, as, for instance, riches
and position and everything that we call the goods of this world. Here
lies the psychological motive for the making of wills and the bestowal
of property. The motive is not care for relatives, because a man without
relatives very often is more anxious to settle his goods, not feeling,
perhaps, like the head of a family, that in any event his existence will
have some kind of permanence, that traces of him will be left after his
own death.
The great politician or ruler, and especially the despot, whose rule
ends with his death, seeks to increase his own value by making it
independent of time. He may attempt it through a code of laws or a
biography like that of Julius Cæsar, by some great philosophical
undertaking, by the founding of museums or collections, or (and this
perhaps is the favourite way) by alterations of the calendar. And he
seeks to extend his power to the utmost during his life-time, to
preserve it and make it stable by enduring contracts and diplomatic
marriages, and most of all by attacking and removing everything that
could endanger the permanence of his kingdom. And so the politician
becomes a conqueror.
Psychological and philosophical investigations of the theory of values
have neglected the time element. Perhaps this is because they have been
very much under the influence of political economy. I believe, however,
that the application of my principle to political economy would be of
considerable value. Very slight reflection will lead one to see that in
commercial affairs the time element is a most important factor in
estimating value. The common definition of value, that it is in
proportion to the power of the thing valued to relieve our wants, is
quite incomplete without the element of time. Such things as air and
water have no value only in so far as they are not localised and
individualised; but as soon as they have been localised and
individualised, and so received form, they have received a quality that
may not last, and with the idea of duration comes the idea of value.
Form and timelessness, or individuation and duration, are the two
factors which compose value.
Thus it can be shown that the fundamental law of the theory of value
applies both to individual psychology and to social psychology. And now
I can return to what is, after all, the special task of this chapter.
The first general conclusion to be made is that the desire for
timelessness, a craving for value, pervades all spheres of human
activity. And this desire for real value, which is deeply bound up with
the desire for power, is completely absent in the woman. It is only in
comparatively rare cases that old women trouble to make exact directions
about the disposition of their property, a fact in obvious relation with
the absence in them of the desire for immortality.
Over the dispositions of a man there is the weight of something solemn
and impressive--something which makes him respected by other men.
The desire for immortality itself is merely a specific case of the
general law that only timeless things have a positive value. On this is
founded its connection with memory. The permanence with which
experiences stay with a man is proportional to the significance which
they had for him. Putting it in a paradoxical form, I may say: Value is
created by the past. Only that which has a positive value remains
protected by memory from the jaws of time; and so it may be with the
individual psychical life as a whole. If it is to have a positive value,
it must not be a function of time, but must subdue time by eternal
duration after physical death. This draws us incomparably nearer the
innermost motive of the desire for immortality. The complete loss of
significance which a rich, individual, fully-lived life would suffer if
it were all to end with death, and the consequent senselessness of
everything, as Goethe said, in other words, to Eckermann (February 14,
1829) lead to the demand for immortality. The strongest craving for
immortality is possessed by the genius, and this is explained by all the
other facts which have been discussed as to his nature.
Memory only fully vanquishes time when it appears in a universal form,
as in universal men.
The genius is thus the only timeless man--at least, this and nothing
else is his ideal of himself; he is, as is proved by his passionate and
urgent desire for immortality, just the man with the strongest demand
for timelessness, with the greatest desire for value.[11]
[11] It is often a cause for astonishment that men with quite
ordinary, even vulgar, natures experience no fear of death. But it is
quite explicable: it is not the fear of death which creates the desire
for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes fear of
death.
And now we are face to face with an almost astonishing coincidence. The
timelessness of the genius will not only be manifest in relation to the
single moments of his life, but also in his relation to what is known as
“his generation,” or, in a narrower sense, “his time.” As a matter of
fact, he has no relations at all with it. The age does not create the
genius it requires. The genius is not the product of his age, is not to
be explained by it, and we do him no honour if we attempt to account for
him by it.
Carlyle justly noted how many epochs had called for great men, how badly
they had needed them, and how they still did not obtain them.
The coming of genius remains a mystery, and men reverently abandon their
efforts to explain it. And as the causes of its appearance do not lie in
any one age, so also the consequences are not limited by time. The
achievements of genius live for ever, and time cannot change them. By
his works a man of genius is granted immortality on the earth, and thus
in a threefold manner he has transcended time. His universal
comprehension and memory forbid the annihilation of his experiences with
the passing of the moment in which each occurred; his birth is
independent of his age, and his work never dies.
Here is the best place to consider a question which, strangely enough,
appears to have received no attention. The question is, if there be
anything akin to genius in the world of animals and plants? Although it
must be admitted that exceptional forms occur amongst animals and
plants, these cannot be regarded as coming under our definition of
genius. Talent may exist amongst them as amongst men below the standard
of genius. But the special gift, what Moreau, Lombroso, and others have
called the “divine spark,” we must deny to animals. This limitation is
not jealousy nor the anxious guarding of a privilege, but is founded on
good grounds.
Is there anything unexplained by the assumption that the first
appearance of genius was in man! In the first place, it is because of
this that the human race has an objective mind; in other words, that man
is the only organism with a history.
The history of the human race (naturally I mean the history of its mind
and not merely of its wars) is readily intelligible on the theory of the
appearance of genius, and of the imitation by the more monkey-like
individuals of the conduct of those with genius. The chief stages, no
doubt, were house-building, agriculture, and, above all, speech. Every
single word has been the invention of a single man, as, indeed, we still
see, if we leave out of consideration the merely technical terms. How
else could language have arisen? The earliest words were
“onomatopoetic”; a sound similar to the exciting cause was evolved
almost without the will of the speaker, in direct response to the
sensuous stimulation. All the other words were originally metaphors, or
comparisons, a kind of primitive poetry, for all prose has come from
poetry. Many, perhaps the majority of the greatest geniuses, have
remained unknown. Think of the proverbs, now almost commonplaces, such
as “one good turn deserves another.” These were said for the first time
by some great man. How many quotations from the classics, or sayings of
Christ, have passed into the common language, so that we have to think
twice before we can remember who were the authors of them. Language is
as little the work of the multitude as our ballads. Every form of speech
owes much that is not acknowledged to individuals of another language.
Because of the universality of genius, the words and phrases that he
invents are useful not only to those who use the language in which he
wrote them. A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and derives
from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding star serves also
as a light to other nations. As speech has been created by a few great
men, the most extraordinary wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which
reveals itself to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked
by the stupid professional philologists.
The genius is not a critic of language, but its creator, as he is the
creator of all the mental achievements which are the material of culture
and which make up the objective mind, the spirit of the peoples. The
“timeless” men are those who make history, for history can be made only
by those who are not floating with the stream. It is only those who are
unconditioned by time who have real value, and whose productions have an
enduring force. And the events that become forces of culture become so
only because they have an enduring value.
If we make a criterion of genius the exhibition of this threefold
“timelessness” we shall have a measure by which it is easy to test all
claimants. Lombroso and Türck have expanded the popular view which
ascribes genius to all whose intellectual or practical achievements are
much above the average. Kant and Schelling have insisted on the more
exclusive doctrine that genius can be predicated only of the great
creative artists. The truth probably lies between the two. I am inclined
to think that only great artists and great philosophers (amongst the
latter, I include, above all, the great religious teachers) have proved
a claim to genius. Neither the “man of action” nor “the man of science”
has any claim.
Men of action, famous politicians and generals, may possess a few traits
resembling genius (particularly a specially good knowledge of men and an
enormous capacity for remembering people). The psychology of such traits
will be dealt with later; they are confused with genius only by those
whom the externals of greatness dazzle. The man of genius almost
typically renounces such external greatness because of the real
greatness within him. The really great man has the strongest sense of
values; the distinguished general is absorbed by the desire for power.
The former seeks to link power with real value; the latter desires that
power itself should be valued. Great generals and great politicians,
like the bird Phœnix, are born out of fiery chaos and like it disappear
again in chaos. The great emperor or the great demagogue is the only man
who lives entirely in the present; he does not dream of a more
beautiful, better future; his mind does not dwell on his own past which
has already passed, and so in the two ways most possible to man, he does
not transcend time, but lives only in the moment. The great genius does
not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that
surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman
takes its direction and its termination. And so the great emperor is no
more than a phenomenon of nature, whereas the genius is outside nature
and is an incorporation of the mind. The works of men of action crumble
at the death of their authors, if indeed they have not already decayed,
or they survive only a brief time leaving no traces behind them except
what the chronicles record as having been done and later undone. The
emperor creates no works that survive time, passing into eternity; such
creations come from genius. It is the genius in reality and not the
other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is
outside and unconditioned by history. The great man has a history, the
emperor is only a part of history. The great man transcends time; time
creates and time destroys the emperor.
The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher (I think of
such names as Newton and Gauss, Linnæus and Darwin, Copernicus and
Galileo), deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.
Men of science are not universal; they deal only with a branch or
branches of knowledge. This is not due, as is sometimes said, merely to
the extreme modern specialisation that makes it impossible to master
everything. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there are
still amongst the learned men individuals with a knowledge as many-sided
as that of Aristotle or Leibnitz; the names of von Humboldt and William
Wundt at once come to my mind. The absence of genius comes from
something much more deeply seated in the men of science, and in science
itself, from a cause which I shall explain in the eighth chapter.
Probably some one may be disposed to argue that if even the most
distinguished men of science have not a knowledge so universal as that
of the philosopher, there are some who stand on the outermost fringes of
philosophy, and to whom it is yet difficult to deny the word genius. I
think of such men as Fichte, Schleiermacher, Carlyle, and Nietzsche.
Which of the merely scientific has felt in himself an unconditioned
comprehension of all men and of all things, or even the capacity to
verify any single thing in his mind and by his mind? On the contrary,
has not the whole history of the science of the last thousand years been
directed against this? This is the reason why men of science are
necessarily one-sided. No man of science, unless he is also a
philosopher, however eminent his achievements, has that continuous
unforgetting life that the genius exhibits, and this is because of his
want of universality.
Finally, it is to be observed that the investigations of the scientific
are always in definite relation to the knowledge of their day. The
scientific man takes possession of a definite store of experimental or
observed knowledge, increases or alters it more or less, and then hands
it on. And much will be taken away from his achievements, much will
silently disappear; his treatises may make a brave show in the
libraries, but they cease to be actively alive. On the other hand, we
can ascribe to the work of the great philosopher, as to that of the
great artist, an imperishable, unchangeable presentation of the world,
not disappearing with time, and which, because it was the expression of
a great mind, will always find a school of men to adhere to it. There
still exist disciples of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Berkeley
and Bruno, but there are now none who denote themselves as followers of
Galileo or Helmholtz, of Ptolemy or Copernicus. It is a misuse of terms,
due to erroneous ideas, to speak of the “classics” of science or of
pedagogy in the sense that we speak of the classics of philosophy and
art.
The great philosopher bears the name of genius deservedly and with
honour. And if it will always be the greatest pain to the philosopher
that he is not an artist, so the artist envies the philosopher his
tenacious and controlled strength of systematic thought, and it is not
surprising that the artist has taken pleasure in depicting Prometheus
and Faust, Prospera and Cyprian, Paul the Apostle and Il Penseroso. The
philosopher and the artist are alternate sides of one another.
We must not be too lavish in attributing genius to those who are
philosophers or we shall not escape the reproach of being merely
partisans of philosophy against science. Such a partisanship is foreign
to my purpose, and, I hope, to this book. It would only be absurd to
discuss the claims to genius of such men as Anaxagoras, Geulincx,
Baader, or Emerson. I deny genius either to such unoriginally profound
writers as Angelus Silesius, Philo and Jacobi, or to original yet
superficial persons such as Comte, Feuerbach, Hume, Herbart, Locke and
Karneades. The history of art is equally full of preposterous
valuations, whilst, on the other hand, the history of science is
extremely free from false estimations. The history of science busies
itself very little with the biographies of its protagonists; its object
is a system of objective, collective knowledge in which the individual
is swept away. The service of science demands the greatest sacrifice,
for in it the individual human being renounces all claim to eternity as
such.