Genius

In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons for their plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our more obvious grounds of doubt concerning them. The numerous facts of divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were unknown in Fechner’s time, and neither the phenomena of automatic writing and speech, nor of mediumship and ‘possession’ generally, had been recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner’s stock of analogies is scant compared with our present one. He did the best with what he had, however. For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior co-consciousness being possible.

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson’s individuality was, even more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious combination. Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept within them. “Stand by your order,” he used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and mission. The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good Spirit will give me.

What Shaw and his comrades stand for and show us is that in such an emergency Americans of all complexions and conditions can go forth like brothers, and meet death cheerfully if need be, in order that this religion of our native land shall not become a failure on earth. We of this Commonwealth believe in that religion; and it is not at all because Robert Shaw was an exceptional genius, but simply because he was faithful to it as we all may hope to be faithful in our measure when the times demand, that we wish his beautiful image to stand here for all time, an inciter to similarly unselfish public deeds. Shaw thought but little of himself, yet he had a personal charm which, as we look back on him, makes us repeat: “None knew thee but to love thee, none named thee but to praise.” This grace of nature was united in him in the happiest way with a filial heart, a cheerful will, and a judgment that was true and fair.

To Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of having been the first to see in evolution an absolutely universal principle. If any one else had grasped its universality, it failed at any rate to grasp him as it grasped Spencer. For Spencer it instantly became “the guiding conception running through and connecting all the concrete sciences” (vol. ii, page 196). Here at last was “an object at once large and distinct enough” to overcome his “constitutional idleness.” “With an important and definite end to achieve, I could work” (vol. i, page 215). He became, in short, the victim of a vivid obsession, and for the first time in his life seems to have grown genuinely ambitious. Every item of his experience, small or great, every idea in his mental storehouse, had now to be considered with reference to its bearing on the new universal principle. On pages 194-199 of volume two he gives an interesting summary of the way in which all his previous and subsequent ideas moved into harmonious coördination and subordination, when once he had this universal key to insight. Applying it wholesale as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his gamebag. And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here a merit. Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth and you fully justify the popular estimate of him as one of the world’s geniuses, in spite of the fact that the “temperament” of genius, so called, seems to have been so lacking in him.

No one could have foreseen in advance the extraordinary fertility of the more insipid mathematical aspects which these geniuses ferreted out. No one could have dreamed of the control over nature which the search for their concomitant variations would give. ‘Laws’ describe these variations; and all our present laws of nature have as their model the proportionality of v to t, and of s to t which Galileo first laid bare. Pascal’s discovery of the proportionality of altitude to barometric height, Newton’s of acceleration to distance, Boyle’s of air-volume to pressure, Descartes’ of sine to sine in the refracted ray, were the first fruits of Galileo’s discovery. There was no question of agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in this new way of taking nature. It was description only, of concomitant variations, after the particular quantities that varied had been successfully abstracted out. The result soon showed itself in a differentiation of human knowledge into two spheres, one called ‘Science,’ within which the more definite laws apply, the other ‘General Philosophy,’ in which they do not. The state of mind called positivistic is the result. ‘Down with philosophy!’ is the cry of innumerable scientific minds. ‘Give us measurable facts only, phenomena, without the mind’s additions, without entities or principles that pretend to explain.’ It is largely from this kind of mind that the objection that philosophy has made no progress, proceeds.

Professor Woodbridge’s Journal of Philosophy86 seems unintentionally to have become a sort of meeting place for those who follow these tendencies in America. There is only a dim identity among them; and the most that can be said at present is that some sort of gestation seems to be in the atmosphere, and that almost any day a man with a genius for finding the right word for things may hit upon some unifying and conciliating formula that will make so much vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into more definite form. I myself have given the name of ‘radical empiricism’ to that version of the tendency in question which I prefer; and I propose, if you will now let me, to illustrate what I mean by radical empiricism, by applying it to activity as an example, hoping at the same time incidentally to leave the general problem of activity in a slightly — I fear very slightly — more manageable shape than before. Mr.

The recent reading and re-reading of all of James’ known writings have impressed two things very deeply on my mind. First, there was one and only one James from the beginning to the end. With all of his versatility and openmindedness he remained unconsciously loyal to certain fundamental convictions. It is even permissible to say that there is one germinal idea from which his whole thought grew, provided we do not overlook the even more important fact that his thought did grow. This germinal idea is the idea of the essentially active and interested character of the human mind. Second, I have been impressed as never before by James’ extraordinary intellectual chivalry and hospitality, the reflection of his peculiar social genius. He was a man quick to reach to the heart of another man, quick to praise, quick to esteem the gifts of others, even when, as sometimes happened, no one else esteemed them at all. This gratitude which James felt so genuinely-and manifested with so much kindliness was not infrequently the foundation in others of their sustaining self-respect. Beginning with the older generation of his father and teachers, and ending with the younger generation of his children and students, his life was a continuous succession of marvellous human discoveries. As it was with his personal intercourse, so it was in his relations with those whom he knew more remotely or only through their writings. Most of these discoveries he has published to the world, in his prefaces and citations, or in those remarkable memorial addresses which have been reprinted in the Memories and Studies and which few men have known so well how to write.

Whether the position be that of a citizen properly filled with Nationalbewusstsein, of a competitor in the egoistic struggle for existence, of a subject of the Categorical Imperative, or of a Moment in the Weltprozess, is all one — we find everywhere that same cold-blooded self- corroboration and merging of the personal deed in universal considerations which, more than material spoliation and Draconian discipline, exasperated the French during the late invasion, and have made them call the Germans “hypocrites” ever since. Perhaps as striking an illustration of this overweening tendency to theorize as can be found is afforded by the popular German school of pessimistic philosophy, of which Professor Pfleiderer’s pamphlet is the latest and one of the ablest criticisms. In other countries, aristocratic misanthropes, dyspeptic pleasure-seekers, and unappreciated geniuses have existed, and their utterances never passed beyond the sphere of splenetic or pathetic individuality.