Lombroso genius and madness summary. Genius and madness

The author analyzes genius as a psychological phenomenon using the example of many interesting facts from the lives of world celebrities. The book reveals a very interesting topic - the influence of talent on the human psyche, the deep connection of genius with mental disorders and even diseases. What is genius? A gift from above or a dangerous disease, an inevitable curse for its carrier? Personal psychological dramas, the ups and downs of the greats of this world are revealed through specific historical examples in the work of the outstanding psychiatrist of the past era, C. Lombroso.

* * *

The given introductory fragment of the book Genius and Madness (Cesare Lombroso) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

GENIUS AND INSANE

INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL REVIEW

Our duty is extremely sad - through inexorable analysis, to destroy and destroy, one after another, those bright, rainbow-colored illusions with which man deceives and exalts himself in his arrogant insignificance; it is all the more sad that in return for these pleasant delusions, these idols, which have served as objects of adoration for so long, we can offer him nothing but a cold smile of compassion. But the servant of truth must strictly obey its laws. Thus, due to fatal necessity, he comes to the conviction that love is, in essence, nothing more than the mutual attraction of stamens and pistils... and thoughts are the simple movement of molecules. Even genius - this is the only sovereign power belonging to a person, before which one can kneel without blushing - even many psychiatrists have put it on the same level with the tendency to crime, even in it they see only one of the teratological (ugly) forms of the human mind, one of the varieties of madness. And note that such profanation, such blasphemy is not only allowed by doctors, and not exclusively in our skeptical times.

Even Aristotle, this great ancestor and teacher of all philosophers, noted that under the influence of a rush of blood to the head, “many individuals become poets, prophets or soothsayers and that Mark of Syracuse wrote quite good poetry while he was a maniac, but, having recovered, completely lost this ability "

He says in another place: “It has been noticed that famous poets, politicians and artists were partly melancholic and insane, partly misanthropes, like Bellerophon. Even today we see the same thing in Socrates, Empedocles, Plato and others, and most strongly in the poets. People with cold, abundant blood ( letters bile) are timid and limited, but people with hot blood are active, witty and talkative.”

Plato argues that “fury is not a disease at all, but, on the contrary, the greatest of the blessings given to us by the gods; under the influence of fury, the Delphic and Dodonian soothsayers provided thousands of services to the citizens of Greece, whereas in the ordinary state they brought little benefit or were completely useless. It happened many times that when the gods sent epidemics to the people, one of the mortals fell into sacred ecstasy and, under its influence, became a prophet, indicating a cure for these diseases. A special kind of fury aroused by the Muses awakens in the simple and immaculate soul of man the ability to express in beautiful poetic form the exploits of heroes, which contributes to the enlightenment of future generations.”

Democritus even directly said that he does not consider a person of sound mind to be a true poet. Excludit sanos, Helicone poetas.

As a result of such views on madness, the ancient peoples treated madmen with great respect, considering them to be inspired from above, which is confirmed, in addition to historical facts, by the fact that the words mania are in Greek, navi and mesugan are in Hebrew, and nigrata is in Sanskrit, mean both madness and prophecy.

Felix Plater claims that he knew many people who, while distinguished by remarkable talent in various arts, were at the same time crazy. Their insanity was expressed by an absurd passion for praise, as well as strange and indecent actions. By the way, Plater met at court an architect, sculptor and musician who enjoyed great fame and were undoubtedly crazy. Even more outstanding facts were collected by F. Gazoni in Italy, in "Hospital for the terminally mentally ill". His work was translated (into Italian) by Longoal in 1620. Of the writers closer to us, Pascal more than once said that the greatest genius borders on complete madness, and subsequently proved this by his own example. The same was confirmed by Hecart regarding his comrades, scientists and at the same time madmen, like himself. He published his observations in 1823 under the title "Stulticiana, or a short bibliography of the madmen in Valenciennes, compiled by a madman". Delpierre, a passionate bibliophile, dealt with the same subject in his interesting "Histoire litteraire des fous", 1860, Forgues - in an excellent essay placed in Revue de Paris, 1826, and by an unknown author in Sketches of Bedlam ( Sketchers in Bedlam, London, 1873).

Lately Lelya - in Demon de Socrate, 1856, and in Amulet de Pascal, 1846, Verga - in Lipemania del Tasso, 1850, and Lombroso in Pazzia di Cardano, 1856, proved that many brilliant people, for example Swift, Luther, Cardano, Brougham and others, suffered from insanity, hallucinations or were monomaniacs for a long time. Moreau, who dwells with special love on the least plausible facts, in his last work "Psychology morbid" and Schilling in their " "Psychiatrische Briefe", 1863, tried to prove with the help of careful, although not always strictly scientific research, that genius is, in any case, something like a nervous abnormality, often turning into real madness. Similar conclusions, approximately, were made by Hagen in his article “On the affinity between genius and madness” ( Ueber die Verwandschaft Genies und Irresein, Berlin, 1877) and partly also by Jurgen Meyer in his excellent monograph “Genius and Talent”. Both of these scientists, who tried to more accurately establish the physiology of genius, came, through the most careful analysis of the facts, to the same conclusions that were expressed more than a hundred years ago, more on the basis of everyday experience than strict observations, by the Italian Jesuit Bettinelli in his now completely forgotten , book " Dell' entusiasmo nelle belle arti", Milan, 1769

SIMILARITY OF GENIUS PEOPLE AND PHYSIOLOGICALLY INSANE PEOPLE

No matter how cruel and sad this kind of paradox may be, if we consider it from a scientific point of view, we will find that in some respects it is quite reasonable, although at first glance it seems absurd.

Many of the great thinkers are subject, like madmen, to convulsive muscle contractions and are distinguished by sharp, so-called choreic body movements. Thus, it is said about Lenau and Montesquieu that on the floor near the tables where they studied, one could notice indentations from the constant twitching of their legs. Buffon, immersed in his thoughts, once climbed the bell tower and descended from there by rope completely unconsciously, as if in a fit of somnambulism. Santeil, Crebillon, Lombardini had strange facial expressions, similar to grimaces. Napoleon suffered from constant twitching of his right shoulder and lips, and during fits of anger, also in his calves. “I was probably very angry,” he himself once admitted after a heated argument with Lowe, “because I felt my calves trembling, which had not happened to me for a long time.” Peter the Great was subject to twitching of the facial muscles, which horribly distorted his face.

“Carducci’s face,” says Mantegazza, “at times resembles a hurricane: lightning rains from his eyes, and the trembling of his muscles resembles an earthquake.”

Ampere could not speak otherwise than by walking and animatedly gesticulating. It is known that the normal composition of urine, and especially the urea content in it, changes markedly after manic attacks. The same thing is noticed after intense mental exercise. Already many years ago, Golding Bird made the observation that one English preacher, who spent the entire week in idleness and only preached sermons with great fervor on Sundays, precisely on that day the content of phosphate salts in the urine increased significantly, while on other days it was extremely insignificant. Subsequently, Smith confirmed with many observations the fact that with any mental stress the amount of urea in the urine increases, and in this respect the analogy between genius and madness seems undeniable.

From this abnormal abundance of urea, or rather from this new confirmation of the law of balance between force and matter, which governs the entire world of living beings, other more amazing analogies can be deduced: for example, gray hair and baldness, thinness of the body, as well as disorders muscular and sexual activity, characteristic of all madmen, are very often found in great thinkers. Caesar was afraid pale and thin Cassiev. D'Alembert and Fenelon Napoleon were as thin as skeletons in their youth. About Voltaire, Segur writes: “His thinness proves how hard he works; his emaciated and bent body serves only as a light, almost transparent shell, through which you seem to see the soul and genius of this man.”

Paleness has always been considered an accessory and even an adornment of great people. In addition, thinkers, along with crazy people, are characterized by: constant overflow of the brain with blood (hyperemia), intense heat in the head and cooling of the extremities, a tendency to acute diseases of the brain and poor sensitivity to hunger and cold.

It can be said about brilliant people, just like about crazy people, that they remain lonely, cold, and indifferent to the responsibilities of a family man and a member of society all their lives. Michelangelo constantly insisted that his art replaced his wife. Goethe, Heine, Byron, Cellini, Napoleon, Newton, although they did not say this, by their actions they proved something even worse.

Cases are not uncommon when, due to the same reasons that so often cause madness, that is, due to illness and head injuries, the most ordinary people turn into geniuses. Vico fell from a very high ladder as a child and crushed his right parietal bone. Gratri, at first a bad singer, became a famous artist after severely bruising his head with a log. Mabillon, completely weak-minded from a young age, achieved fame for his talents, which developed in him as a result of a head wound he received. Gall, who reported this fact, knew a Dane, a half-idiot, whose mental abilities became brilliant after he fell headfirst down the stairs at the age of 13. Several years ago, a cretin from Savoy, bitten by a mad dog, became a completely reasonable man in the last days of his life. Dr. Galle knew limited people whose mental abilities were unusually developed as a result of brain diseases (midollo).

“It may very well be that my illness (spinal cord disease) gave my latest works some kind of abnormal shade,” Heine says with amazing insight in one of his letters. It must be added, however, that the illness affected in this way not only his last works, and he himself was aware of this. A few months before his illness intensified, Heine wrote about himself (Correspondance inedite. Paris. 1877): “My mental excitement is more likely the result of illness than genius: in order to at least a little calm my suffering, I composed poetry. On these terrible nights, mad with pain, my poor head rushes from side to side and makes the bells of my worn out stupid cap ring with cruel gaiety.”

Bisha and von der Kolk noticed that people with crooked necks have a more alert mind than ordinary people. Conolly had one patient whose mental faculties were stimulated during operations on him, and several such patients who showed special talent in the first periods of consumption and gout. Everyone knows how witty and cunning humpbacks are; Rokitansky even tried to explain this by the fact that in them the bend of the aorta directs excess blood flow through the vessels leading to the head, which results in an expansion of the volume of the heart and an increase in blood pressure in the skull.

This dependence of genius on pathological changes can partly explain the curious feature of genius compared to talent in that it is something unconscious and manifests itself completely unexpectedly.

Jürgen Meyer says that a talented person acts strictly deliberately; he knows how and why he came to a certain theory, while this is completely unknown to a genius; all his creative activity is unconscious.

Haydn attributed the creation of his famous symphony “The Creation of the World” to a mysterious gift sent from above. “When my work was not moving forward well,” he said, “I, with a rosary in my hands, retired to the chapel, read the Virgin Mary - and inspiration returned to me again.”

The Italian poetess Milli, while creating, almost involuntarily, her wonderful poems, worries, screams, sings, runs back and forth and seems to be in an epileptic fit.

Those of genius who have observed themselves say that under the influence of inspiration they experience some inexpressibly pleasant feverish state, during which thoughts involuntarily arise in their minds and splash out of themselves, like sparks from a burning brand.

Dante expressed this beautifully in the following three lines:

…I mi son un che, quando

Amore spira, noto ed in quel modo

Che detta dentro vo significando.

“When I breathe love, I am attentive:

she just needs to suggest words to me, and I write.”

(Purgatory, XXIV, 52, trans. M. Lozinsky)

Napoleon said that the outcome of battles depended on one moment, on one thought that temporarily remained inactive; when a favorable moment arrives, it flares up like a spark, and the result is victory (Moreau).

Bauer says that Koo's best poems were dictated to him in a state close to insanity. In those moments when these wonderful verses flowed from his lips, he was unable to reason even about the simplest things.

Foscolo confesses his Epistolario, the best work of this great mind, that the writer’s creative ability is determined by a special kind of mental excitement (fever), which cannot be caused arbitrarily. “I write my letters,” he says, “not for the fatherland and not for the sake of glory, but for that inner pleasure that the exercise of our abilities gives us.”

Bettinelli calls poetic creativity a dream with open eyes, without loss of consciousness, and this is perhaps fair, since many poets dictated their poems in a state similar to sleep.

Goethe also says that a poet needs a certain cerebral stimulation and that he himself composed many of his songs while in a sort of fit of somnambulism.

Klopstock admits that when he wrote his poem, inspiration often came to him during sleep.

In a dream, Voltaire conceived one of the songs of the Henriade, Sardini - a theory of playing the harmonic, and Seckendorff - his charming song about Fantasia. Newton and Cardano solved mathematical problems in their sleep.

Muratori composed a pentameter in Latin in a dream many years after he stopped writing poetry. It is said that while he was sleeping, La Fontaine composed the fable “Two Doves,” and Condillac finished the lecture he began the day before.

"Kubla" Coleridge and " Fantasy" Golde were composed in a dream.

Mozart admitted that musical ideas appeared to him involuntarily, like dreams, and Hoffmann often told his friends: “I work, sitting at the piano with my eyes closed, and reproduce what someone from the outside tells me.”

Lagrange noticed an irregular pulse in his heart when he wrote, while Alfieri’s eyes grew dark at the same time.

Lamartine often said: “It is not I who think, but my thoughts that think for me.”

Alfieri, who called himself a barometer - to such an extent his creative abilities changed depending on the time of year - with the onset of September could not resist the one who possessed him involuntary impulse, so strong that he had to give in, and wrote six comedies. On one of his sonnets he wrote the following inscription in his own hand: "Random. I didn't want to write it". This predominance of the unconscious in the work of brilliant people was noticed in ancient times.

Socrates was the first to point out that poets create their works not as a result of effort or art, but thanks to some natural instinct. In the same way, soothsayers say beautiful things without realizing it at all.

“All works of genius,” says Voltaire in a letter to Diderot, “are created instinctively. The philosophers of the whole world together could not have written “The Armides of Cinema” or the fable “The Sea of ​​Beasts,” which La Fontaine dictated without even really knowing what would come of it. Corneille wrote his Horatii as instinctively as a bird builds its nest.”

Thus, the greatest ideas of thinkers, prepared, so to speak, by impressions already received and by the highly sensitive organization of the subject, are born suddenly and develop as unconsciously as the rash actions of madmen. This same unconsciousness explains the unshakable faith of people who are fanatically devoted to certain beliefs. But as soon as the moment of ecstasy, excitement has passed, the genius turns into an ordinary person or falls even lower, since the lack of uniformity (balance) is one of the signs of a genius nature. Disraeli expressed this perfectly when he said that the best English poets, Shakespeare and Dryden, can also find the worst poetry. They said about the painter Tintoretto that he was sometimes higher than Caracci, sometimes lower than Tintoretto.

Ovidio quite correctly explains the dissimilarity of Tasso's style by his own admission that when inspiration disappeared, he was confused in his writings, did not recognize them and was not able to appreciate their merits.

There can be no doubt that there is a complete similarity between a man who is mad during a seizure and a man of genius thinking about and creating his work.

Remember the Latin proverb “Aut insanit homo, aut versus fecit” (“Either a madman or a poet”).

This is how the doctor Revellier-Parat describes Tasso’s condition: “The pulse is weak and uneven, the skin is pale, cold, the head is hot, inflamed, the eyes are shiny, bloodshot, restless, running around. At the end of the period of creativity, the author himself often does not understand what he stated a minute ago.”

Marini, when he wrote Adone, I didn’t notice that I burned my leg badly. During his creative period, Tasso seemed completely insane. In addition, when thinking about something, many artificially cause a rush of blood to the brain, such as Schiller, who put his feet in ice; Pitt and Fox, preparing their speeches after immoderate consumption of porter; and Paisiello, who composed only under the cover of many blankets. Milton and Descartes threw their heads back on the sofa, Bossuet retired to the cold room and put warm poultices on his head; Cujas worked while lying face down on the mat. There was a saying about Leibniz that he thought only in a horizontal position - to such an extent he needed it for mental activity. Milton composed with his head thrown back on the pillow, and Thomas and Rossini - lying in bed; Rousseau pondered his works in the bright midday sun with his head open.

Obviously, they all instinctively used drugs that temporarily increase the flow of blood to the head to the detriment of the rest of the body. Here, by the way, it is worth mentioning that many gifted, and especially brilliant, people abused alcoholic beverages. Not to mention Alexander the Great, who, under the influence of intoxication, killed his best friend and died after draining the cup of Hercules ten times; Caesar himself was often carried home by soldiers on their shoulders. Socrates and Seneca were executed and did not suffer from delirium tremens. There is no reliable information about the death of Alcibiades. The Constable of Bourbon also suffered from heavy drinking; Avicenna, of whom it is said that he devoted the second half of his life to proving the complete uselessness of the scientific information he acquired in the first half; and many painters, for example Caracci, Steen, Barbatelli and a whole galaxy of poets - Murget, Gerard de Nerval, Musset, Kleist, Mailat and at their head Tasso, who wrote in one of his letters: “I do not deny that I am a madman ; but I like to think that my madness came from drinking and love, because I really drink a lot.”

There are many drunkards among the great musicians, for example Dussek, Handel and Gluck, who said that “he considers it quite fair to love gold, wine and fame, because the first gives him the means to have the second, which, inspiring, gives him glory.”

It has been noticed that almost always the great creations of thinkers receive their final form, or at least clear outlines, under the influence of some special sensation, which here plays, so to speak, the role of a drop of salt water in a well-constructed voltaic column. Facts prove that all great discoveries were made under the influence of sensory impressions, as Moleschott also confirms. Several frogs, from which it was supposed to prepare a healing decoction for Galvani's wife, served as the basis for the discovery of galvanism. The rhythmic swinging of a chandelier and the falling of an apple inspired Newton and Galileo to create great scientific systems. Alfieri composed and thought about his tragedies while listening to music. When Mozart saw an orange, he remembered a Neapolitan folk song that he had heard five years ago, and immediately wrote the famous cantata for the opera Don Juan. Looking at some porter, Leonardo conceived his Judas, and Thorvaldsen found a suitable pose for a sitting angel at the sight of his sitter’s antics. Inspiration first struck Salvator Rosa while he was admiring the view of Posilipo, and Gogarth found types for his caricatures in a tavern after a drunkard broke his nose there in a fight. Milton, Bacon, Leonardo and Warburton needed to hear the ringing of bells in order to get to work; Bourdalou, before dictating his immortal sermons, always played some aria on the violin. The reading of one of Spenser's odes aroused a penchant for poetry in Cowley, and Sakrobose's book made Gammad addicted to astronomy. While considering cancer, Watt came up with the idea of ​​constructing a machine that would be extremely useful in industry, and Gibbon decided to write the history of Greece after seeing the ruins of the Capitol.

But in the same way, certain sensations cause insanity or serve as its starting point, sometimes being the cause of the most terrible attacks of rabies. For example, Humboldt’s nurse confessed that the sight of her pet’s fresh, tender body aroused in her an uncontrollable desire to slaughter him. And how many people have been pushed to murder, arson or tearing up graves by the impression of an ax, a blazing fire and a corpse!

It should also be added that inspiration and ecstasy often turns into real hallucinations, because a person then sees objects that exist only in his imagination. Thus, Grossi said that one night, after he had worked for a long time to describe the appearance of the ghost of Prin, he saw this ghost in front of him and had to light a candle to get rid of it. Ball tells about Reynolds' son that he could make up to 300 portraits a year, since it was enough for him to look at someone for half an hour while he sketched a sketch, so that later this face would constantly appear in front of him as if alive. The painter Martini always saw in front of him the pictures he was painting, so one day, when someone stood between him and the place where the image appeared to him, he asked this person to step aside, because it was impossible for him to continue copying, while he existed only in in his imagination the original was closed.

If we now turn to solving the question - what exactly is the physiological difference between a genius and an ordinary person, then, based on autobiographies and observations, we will find that for the most part the whole difference between them lies in the refined and almost painful impressionability of the first. A savage or an idiot is little sensitive to physical suffering, their passions are few, and among the sensations they perceive only those that directly concern them in the sense of satisfying the needs of life. As mental abilities develop, impressionability grows and reaches its greatest strength in brilliant individuals, being the source of their suffering and glory. These chosen natures are more sensitive in quantitative and qualitative terms than mere mortals, and the impressions they perceive are distinguished by depth, remain long in memory and are combined in various ways. Little things, random circumstances, details, invisible to an ordinary person, sink deep into their soul and are processed in a thousand ways, which later manifests itself as creativity, although this is only a combination of previously received sensations.

Haller wrote about himself: “What is left for me except impressionability, this powerful feeling, which is a consequence of a temperament that vividly perceives the joys of love and the wonders of science? Even now I am moved to tears when I read the description of some generous act. My characteristic sensitivity, of course, gives my poems that passionate tone that other poets do not have.”

“Nature has not created a more sensitive soul than mine,” Diderot wrote about himself. Elsewhere he says: “Increase the number of sensitive people and you will increase the number of good and bad actions.” When Alfieri heard music for the first time, he was, in his words, “astounded to such an extent, as if the bright sun had blinded my sight and hearing; For several days after that I felt extraordinary sadness, not without pleasantness;

fantastic ideas crowded into my head, and I would have been able to write poetry if I had known then how it was done...” In conclusion, he says that nothing acts on the soul with such irresistible force as music. A similar opinion was expressed by Stern, Rousseau and J. Sand.

Corradi proves that all Leonardi's misfortunes and his philosophy itself were caused by excessive sensitivity and unrequited love, which he first experienced in his 18th year. And indeed, Leonardi's philosophy took on a more or less gloomy tone, depending on the state of his health, until finally a sad mood turned into a habit.

Urkvitsia fainted when he heard the smell of a rose.

Stern, after Shakespeare the most profound psychologist of poets, says in one letter: “Reading the biographies of our ancient heroes, I cry for them as if for living people... Inspiration and impressionability are the only tools of genius. The latter evokes in us those delightful sensations that give great strength to joy and cause tears of tenderness.”

It is known in what slavish subordination Alfieri and Foscolo were to women who were not always worthy of such adoration. The beauty and love of Fornarina served as a source of inspiration for Raphael not only in painting, but also in poetry. Several of his erotic poems have still not lost their charm.

And how early the passions of brilliant people manifest themselves! Dante and Alfieri were in love at the age of 9, Rousseau at 11, Carron and Byron at 8. The latter suffered from convulsions already at the age of 16 when he learned that the girl he loved was getting married. “Grief choked me,” he says, “although sexual desire was still unfamiliar to me, but I felt such passionate love that it is unlikely that I subsequently experienced a stronger feeling.” At one of Keane's performances, Byron had a seizure of convulsions.

Loroi saw scholars swoon with delight when reading the works of Homer.

The painter Francia died of admiration after seeing Raphael's painting.

Ampere felt the beauty of nature so vividly that he almost died of happiness when he found himself on the shores of Lake Geneva. Having found a solution to a problem, Newton was so shocked that he could not continue his studies. Gay-Lussac and Davy, after their discovery, began to dance around their office in their shoes. Archimedes, delighted with the solution to the problem, ran out into the street dressed as Adam, shouting: "Eureka!"("Found!"). In general, strong minds also have strong passions, which give special vivacity to all their ideas; if for some of them many passions fade, as if fading over time, this is only because little by little they are drowned out by the prevailing passion for fame or science.

But it is precisely this too strong impressionability of brilliant or only gifted people that in the vast majority of cases is the cause of their misfortunes, both real and imaginary.

“The precious and rare gift that is the privilege of great geniuses,” writes Mantegazza, “is accompanied, however, by a painful sensitivity to all, even the smallest external irritations: every breath of wind, the slightest increase in heat or cold turns for them into that dried rose petal, who did not let the unfortunate sybarite sleep.” La Fontaine may have meant himself when he wrote:

“Un souffle, une ombre, un rien leur donne la fievre.” A genius is irritated by everything, and what for ordinary people seems like just pinpricks, with his sensitivity already seems to him like a blow from a dagger.

Boileau and Chateaubriand could not be indifferent to hearing praise from anyone, even their shoemaker.

When Foscolo was one day talking to Mrs. S. (writes Mantegazza), whom he was strongly courting, and she laughed angrily at him, he became so furious that he shouted: “You want to kill me, so I’ll crush my skull right now at your feet.” " With these words, he threw himself head first into the corner of the fireplace. One of those standing nearby, however, managed to hold him by the shoulders and thereby save his life.

Morbid impressionability also gives rise to exorbitant vanity, which distinguishes not only people of genius, but also scientists in general, starting from ancient times; in this respect, both of them are very similar to monomaniacs suffering from delusions of grandeur.

“Man is the most vain of animals, and poets are the most vain of people,” wrote Heine, meaning, of course, himself. In another letter he says: “Don’t forget that I am a poet and therefore I think that everyone should give up everything they are doing and start reading poetry.”

Menke tells of Filelfo how he imagined that in the whole world, even among the ancients, no one knew Latin better than him. Abbot Cagnoli was so proud of his poem about the Battle of Aquileia that he became furious when any of the writers did not bow to him. “What, you don’t know Cagnoli?” - he asked.

The poet Lucius did not rise from his seat when Julius Caesar entered the meeting of poets, because he considered himself superior to him in the art of versification.

Ariosto, having received a laurel wreath from Charles V, ran like a madman through the streets. The famous surgeon Porta, present at the Lombard Institute during the reading of medical works, tried in every possible way to express his contempt and dissatisfaction with them, whatever their merit, while he listened calmly and attentively to works on mathematics or linguistics.

Schopenhauer became furious and refused to pay bills if his last name was written two paragraphs apart.

Barthes lost sleep from despair when, when printing his “Genie,” the diacritic mark was not placed over the e. Whiston, according to Arago, did not dare to publish a refutation Newtonian chronology out of fear that Newton would kill him.

Everyone who had the rare good fortune of living in the company of brilliant people was amazed at their ability to interpret every action of those around them in a bad way, to see persecution everywhere and in everything to find a reason for deep, endless melancholy. This ability is determined precisely by the stronger development of mental powers, thanks to which a gifted person is more able to find the truth and at the same time more easily comes up with false arguments to confirm the validity of his painful delusion. In part, the gloomy view of geniuses on their surroundings depends, however, on the fact that, being innovators in the mental sphere, they with unshakable firmness express beliefs that are dissimilar to the generally accepted opinion, and thus alienate the majority of ordinary sane people.

But still, the main reason for melancholy and dissatisfaction with the life of chosen natures is the law of balance of force, which also governs the nervous system, the law according to which, after excessive expenditure or development of a certain force, its excessive decline occurs - the law, as a result of which not a single mortal can show a certain strength without having to pay for it in other respects and very cruelly; finally, the law that determines the unequal degree of perfection of their own works.

Melancholy, despondency, shyness, selfishness - this is a cruel retribution for the highest mental talents, which they generously spend, just as abuse of sensual pleasures entails a disorder of the reproductive system, impotence and diseases of the spinal cord, and excess in food is accompanied by gastric catarrh.

After one of those ecstasies during which the poetess Milli discovered such enormous power of creativity that it would have been enough for the whole life of any minor Italian poet, she fell into a semi-numb state that lasted several days.

Goethe, the cold Goethe himself, admitted that his mood was sometimes too cheerful, sometimes too sad.

In general, I do not think that in the whole world there is at least one great person who, even in moments of complete bliss, would not consider himself unhappy and persecuted for no reason, or at least temporarily suffer from painful attacks of melancholy.

Sometimes sensitivity becomes distorted and becomes one-sided, focusing on one point. A few ideas of a certain nature and some especially favorite sensations gradually acquire the significance of the main stimulus acting on the brain of great people and even on their entire organism.

Heine, who himself admitted that he was incapable of understanding simple things, Heine, paralyzed, blind and already on the verge of death when he was advised to turn to God, interrupted the wheezing agony with the words: “Dieu me pardonnera – c’est son metier”, ending his life with this last irony, which has never been more aesthetically cynical in our time. It is said about Aretino that his last words were: “Guardatemi dai topi or che son unto.”

Malherbe, already dying, corrected his nurse’s grammatical errors and refused the parting words of his confessor because he spoke awkwardly.

Bogour (Baugours), a grammarian, dying, said: “Je vais ou je va mourir” - “Both are correct.”

Santenis lost his mind with joy, having found the epithet that he had been looking for in vain for a long time. Foscolo said about himself: “While in some things I am extremely understanding, regarding others my understanding is not only worse than that of any man, but worse than that of a woman or a child.”

It is known that Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Edison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton were almost completely unable to speak in public.

Poisson said that life is worth living only to do mathematics. D'Alembert and Ménage, who calmly endured the most painful operations, cried from the slight stings of criticism. Lucio de Lanceval laughed when his leg was cut off, but could not bear Geoffroy's harsh criticism.

Sixty-year-old Linnaeus, who had fallen into a paralytic and senseless state after an apoplexy, awoke from his drowsiness when he was brought to the herbarium, which he had previously especially loved.

When Lagny was lying in a deep faint and the most powerful means could not awaken consciousness in him, someone decided to ask him how much the square of the number 12 would be, and he immediately answered: 144.

Sebuya, an Arabic grammarian, died of grief because the Caliph Harun al-Rashid did not agree with his opinion regarding some grammatical rule.

It should also be noted that among brilliant or, rather, learned people, there are often those narrow specialists whom Wachdakoff calls monotypic subjects; All their lives they are engaged in one kind of conclusion, which first occupies their thoughts, and then covers them completely: thus, Beckmann studied kidney pathology throughout his entire life, Fresner studied the moon, Meyer studied ants, which is a huge similarity to monomaniacs.

Because of this exaggerated and concentrated sensitivity, both great men and madmen are extremely difficult to convince or dissuade of anything. And this is understandable: the source of true and false ideas lies deeper and more developed among them than among ordinary people, for whom opinions are only a conditional form, like clothing, changed according to the whim of fashion or as required by circumstances. It follows, on the one hand, that one should not trust anyone unconditionally, even great people, and on the other hand, that moral treatment brings little benefit to the insane.

The extreme and one-sided development of sensitivity, without a doubt, is the cause of those strange actions due to temporary anesthesia and analgesia, which are characteristic of great geniuses along with madmen. Thus, they say about Newton that one day he began to fill his pipe with the finger of his niece and that when he happened to leave the room to bring some thing, he often returned without taking it. They say about Tuscherel that once he even forgot his name.

Beethoven and Newton, having set to work, one on musical compositions, and the other on solving problems, became so insensitive to hunger that they scolded the servants when they brought them food, assuring them that they had already dined.

Gioia, in a fit of creativity, wrote an entire chapter on the desk board instead of paper.

Abbot Beccaria, busy with his experiments, during the service of mass, said, forgetting: “Ite, experientia facta est” (“Still experience is a fact”).

Diderot, when hiring cab drivers, forgot to let them go, and he had to pay them for the whole days that they stood in vain at his house; he often forgot months, days, hours, even those persons with whom he began to talk, and, as if in a fit of somnambulism, he pronounced entire monologues in front of them.

In a similar way, it is explained why great geniuses sometimes cannot grasp concepts that are accessible to the most mediocre minds, and at the same time express such bold ideas that seem absurd to most. The fact is that greater impressionability also corresponds to greater limitations of concrete thinking. The mind, under the influence of ecstasy, does not perceive positions that are too simple and easy, which do not correspond to its powerful energy. Thus, Monge, who did the most complex differential calculations, found it difficult to extract the square root, although any student could easily solve this problem.

Gauguin considers originality to be precisely the quality that sharply distinguishes genius from talent. In the same way, Jürgen Meyer says: “The fantasy of a talented person reproduces what has already been found, the fantasy of a genius reproduces something completely new. The first makes discoveries and confirms them, the second invents and creates. A talented person is a shooter who hits a target that seems difficult to achieve; genius hits a target that is not even visible to us. Originality is in the nature of genius.”

Bettinelli considers originality and grandiosity to be the main hallmarks of genius. “That is why,” he says, “poets were formerly called trovadori” (inventors).

A genius has the ability to guess what he does not fully know; for example, Goethe described Italy in detail without even seeing it. It is precisely because of such insight, rising above the general level, and because the genius, absorbed in higher considerations, differs from the crowd in his actions or even, like madmen (but in contrast to talented people), shows a tendency towards disorder - genius natures are met with contempt on the part of the majority, which, not noticing the intermediate points in their work, sees only the incompatibility of the conclusions they made with generally accepted opinions and the oddities in their behavior. Not so long ago, the public booed Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” and in our time Boito (his “Mephistopheles”) and Wagner have suffered the same fate. How many academicians treated poor Marzolo with a smile of compassion, who opened a completely new field of philology; Beaulieu, who discovered the fourth dimension and wrote anti-Euclidean geometry, was called a crazy geometer and compared to a miller who would think of grinding stones to obtain flour. Finally, everyone knows with what distrust Fulton, Columbus, Papen, and in our time Piatti, Prague and Schliemann were once greeted, who found Troy where it was not expected, and, having shown his discovery to learned academicians, forced them to stop mocking yourself.

By the way, people of genius have to experience the most severe persecution precisely from learned academicians, who, in the struggle against genius, driven by vanity, use their “learning”, as well as the charm of their authority, which is predominantly recognized for them by both the mediocre majority and the ruling classes. also mostly consisting of mediocrity.

There are countries where the level of education is very low and where, therefore, not only brilliant, but even talented people are treated with contempt. In Italy there are two university cities, from which the people who constituted the only glory of these cities were forced to leave by all kinds of persecution. But originality, although almost always aimless, is often also noticeable in the actions of insane people, especially in their writings, which only as a result sometimes receive a touch of genius, such as the attempt of Bernardi, who was in a Florence hospital for the insane in 1529, prove that monkeys have the ability of articulate speech (linguaggio). By the way, brilliant people are distinguished, just like crazy people, by their tendency towards disorder and complete ignorance of practical life, which seems so insignificant to them in comparison with their dreams.

Originality is determined by the tendency of brilliant and mentally ill people to come up with new words that are incomprehensible to others or to give known words a special meaning and meaning, which we find in Vicoya Carraro, Alfieri, Marzolo and Dante.

THE INFLUENCE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENA ON PEOPLE OF GENIUS AND THE INSANE

Based on a series of careful observations carried out continuously over three years in my clinic, I was fully convinced that the mental state of the insane changes under the influence of fluctuations in temperature and pressure. Thus, with an increase in temperature to 25°, 30° and 32°, especially if it occurs immediately, the number of manic attacks in crazy people increased from 29 to 50; in the same way, on those days when the barometer showed a significant increase in pressure, the number of seizures quickly increased from 34 to 46. A study of 23,602 cases of insanity proved to me that the development of insanity usually coincides with the rise in temperature in spring and summer and even goes parallel to it, but so that the spring heat, due to the contrast after the winter cold, has an even stronger effect than the summer heat, while the relatively even warmth of the August days has a less destructive effect. In the following colder months, a minimum of new diseases are noticed. The attached table shows this quite clearly:

A complete analogy with these phenomena is also noticeable in those people whom nature - it is difficult to say, beneficent or cruel - has more generously endowed with mental abilities. Few of these people did not express themselves that atmospheric phenomena had a tremendous impact on them. In their personal conversations and letters they constantly complain about the harmful effects on them of changes in temperature, with which they must sometimes endure a fierce struggle in order to destroy or mitigate the fatal influence of bad weather, weakening and delaying the bold flight of their imagination. “When I am healthy and the weather is clear, I feel like a decent person,” wrote Montaigne. “During strong winds, it seems to me that my brain is not right,” Diderot said. Giordani, according to Mantegazza, predicted thunderstorms two days in advance. Maine de Biran, a philosopher and spiritualist par excellence, writes in his diary: “I don’t understand why in bad weather my mind and will are completely different from those on clear, bright days.”

“I am like a barometer,” wrote Alfieri, “and the greater or lesser ease of work always corresponds to my atmospheric pressure: complete dullness attacks me during strong winds, my clarity of thought is infinitely weaker in the evening than in the morning, and in the middle of winter and summer My creative abilities are more alive than at other times of the year. This dependence on external influences, against which I have almost no power to fight, humbles me.”

From these examples the influence of barometer fluctuations on men of genius is already evident, and there is a great analogy in this respect between them and madmen; but the influence of temperature is even more noticeable, even sharper.

Napoleon, who said that “man is a product of physical and moral conditions,” could not stand the lightest wind and loved warmth so much that he ordered heating in his room even in July. The offices of Voltaire and Buffon were heated at all times of the year. Rousseau said that the sun's rays in the summer evoke creative activity in him, and he put his head under them at midday.

Byron said of himself that he was afraid of the cold, like a gazelle. Heine insisted that he was more capable of writing poetry in France than in Germany, with its harsh climate. “Thunder is thundering, snow is falling,” he writes in one of his letters, “I have little fire in the fireplace, and my letter is cold.”

Spallanzani, living on the Aeolian Islands, could study twice as much as in foggy Pavia. Leopardi in his "Epistolario" says: “My body cannot stand the cold, I wait and wish for the onset of the kingdom of Ormuzd.”

Giusti wrote in the spring: “Now inspiration will stop hiding... if spring helps me, as in everything else.”

Giordani could only compose in bright sunshine and warm weather.

Foscolo wrote in November: “I always stay near the burning fireplace, and my friends laugh at it; I try to give my members the warmth that my heart absorbs and processes within itself.” In December, he already wrote: “My natural flaw - fear of cold - forced me to stay close to the fire that burns my eyelids.”

Milton already admits in his Latin elegies that in winter his muse becomes barren. In general, he could only compose from the spring to autumn equinox. In one of his letters, he complains about the cold in 1798 and expresses fear that it might interfere with the free development of his imagination if the cold continues. Johnson, who tells about this, can be completely trusted, because he himself, devoid of imagination and gifted only with a calm, cold critical mind, never experienced the influence of seasons or weather on his ability to work and in Milton considered such characteristics to be the result of his strange character . Salvator Rosa, according to Lady Morgan, laughed in his youth at the exaggerated importance that the weather supposedly has on the work of brilliant people, but, as he grew old, he perked up and gained the ability to think only with the onset of spring; In the last years of his life, he could only paint in the summer.

Reading Schiller's letters to Goethe, you are amazed that this great, humane and brilliant poet attributed some extraordinary influence to the weather on his creative abilities. “In these sad days,” he wrote in November 1871, “under this leaden sky, I need all my energy to maintain my cheerfulness; I am completely incapable of taking on any serious work. I’m getting back to work, but the weather is so bad that it’s impossible to maintain clarity of thought.” In July 1818, he says on the contrary: “Thanks to the good weather, I feel better, lyrical inspiration, which is less subject to our will than any other, will not be slow to appear.” But in December of the same year he again complains that the need to graduate "Wallenstein" coincided with the most unfavorable time of the year, therefore, he says, “I must use every possible effort to maintain clarity of thought.” In May, Schiller wrote: "I hope to do a lot if the weather does not change for the worse." From all these examples one can already draw the conclusion with some justification that high temperature, which has a beneficial effect on vegetation, contributes, with few exceptions, to the productivity of genius, just as it causes stronger excitement in the insane.

If historians, who have spent so much time and paper in detailing the cruel battles or adventures of various kings and heroes, would instead examine with the same care the circumstances of the time when this or that great discovery was made or when a wonderful work of art was conceived, they They would almost certainly be convinced that the hottest months and days are the most fertile, not only for the whole of physical nature, but also for brilliant minds.

Despite all the seeming improbability, such an influence is confirmed by many undoubted facts.

Dante composed his first sonnet on June 15, 1282; in the spring of 1300 he wrote "Vita nuova", and on April 3 began to write his great poem.

Petrarch conceived "Africa" in March 1338. Michelangelo's enormous painting, which Cellini, the most competent judge in this field, called the most amazing of the works of a brilliant painter, was composed and completed within three months, from April to July 1506.

Milton conceived his poem in the spring.

Galileo discovered the rings of Saturn in April 1611.

Foscolo's best work was written in July and August.

Stern wrote the first of his sermons in April, and in May he composed his famous sermon on Errors of Conscience.

The newest poets: Lamartine, Musset, Hugo, Beranger, Carcano, Aleardi, Mascheroni, Zanella, Arcangeli, Carducci, Milli, Belli, used to indicate in almost all their short and lyrical poems exactly when each of them was written. Using these precious guidelines, we have compiled the following table:

Distributing Alfieri's works by month, we see that in August he wrote "Garzia", ​​in July - "Mary Stuart"; in May - “Conspiracy of the Madmen” (Congiura di’Pazzi), two books about tyranny and about the sovereign (Principe); in June - “Virginia”, “Lorentino”, “Alceste” and a panegyric of “Trajan”; in September - “Sofonizba”, “Agide”, “Mirru” and 6 comedies; in March - “Saula”; in April - “Antigone”, in February - “Merope”; in winter - both Brutes and a dialogue about Virtue. His first two tragedies were conceived in March and May.

From Giusti's autographs I could accurately determine the time of the initial creation of many of this poet's short poems, but when exactly they received their final finishing is difficult to say, to such an extent there are many amendments in them.

Giusti's poem "The Ball" (or "Modern Democracy" as it was first called) was written in November, "A Satire on False Liberals" in October; a small poem “To a Friend” - in June, “Ave Maria” - in March.

Voltaire wrote Tancred in August.

Byron graduated from the 4th song in September "Pelligrinaggio", in June – “Dante’s Prophecy”, and in the summer in Switzerland – “The Prisoner of Chillon”, “Darkness” and “The Dream”.

From Schiller's correspondence with Goethe it is clear that in the fall he drew up a plan for the tragedies "Don Carlos", "Wallenstein", "The Fiesco Conspiracy" and "William Tell". In September he wrote “Camp Wallenstein” and “Aesthetic Letters”. In winter, he conceived the tragedy “Louise Miller”, in June - “The Corinthian Bride”, “Ball and Bayadères”, “The Sorcerer” (Mago), “Diver”, “The Glove”, “Polycrates’ Ring”, “Cranes”; in June he began writing Joan of Arc.

Goethe sketched three lyric poems in the fall, and began writing “Werther” in April; in May - “Treasure Hunter”, “Stanzas”, “Minion” and another lyric poem; in June and July - “Cellini”, “Alexis”, “Ephrosina”, “Metamorphoses of Plants” and “Parnassus”; in winter - “Xenia”, “Herman and Dorothea”, “Divan” and “Illegitimate Daughter”. In the first days of March 1788, when, according to Goethe himself, a few days meant more than a whole month to him, he wrote, in addition to many lyrical plays, the ending to Faust.

Rossini composed almost the entire opera Semiramide in February, and in November wrote the last part of Stabat Mater.

Mozart composed the opera Mithridates in October.

Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony in February.

Donizetti in September composed the opera “Lucia” - perhaps the whole opera, and certainly the famous passage Tu che a Dio spiegasti l'ale. In the same way, in the fall he wrote the opera “Daughter of the Regiment”, in the spring - “Linda”, in the summer - “ Rita", in winter - “Don Pasquale” and “ Miserere".

Canova made a model of his first work (Orpheus and Eurydice) in October.

Michelangelo worked on his painting "Charity" from September to October 1498, he made a drawing of the library in December, and a wooden model of the tomb of Pope Julius in August.

Leonardo da Vinci conceived the idea of ​​an equestrian statue of Sforza and began writing his essay On Light and Shadow on April 23, 1490.

Columbus first thought about the existence of America in late May and early June 1474, when he decided to find a western route to India.

Galileo discovered spots on the Sun in April 1611, simultaneously with Scheiner or perhaps earlier than him; and a year earlier, in December, or rather September - since the observation was made three months earlier than its description appeared - he discovered the analogy between the phases of the Moon and Venus. In May 1609, Galileo invented the telescope, and in July 1610 he discovered those stars that later turned out to be the brightest points in the ring of Saturn. With his usual wit, he briefly expressed this last discovery in verse:

"Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi."

Kepler discovered the laws of motion of world bodies in May 1618.

In August 1546, Fabricius discovered the first periodically changing star.

In October and April (1666–1667), Cassini discovered spots indicating the rotation of Venus, and in October, December and March (1671, 1672, 1684) four moons of Saturn. Two more of them were discovered by Herschel in March 1789.

One of Saturn's moons was discovered by Huygens on March 25, 1655, and the other by Dove and Bond on the night of September 19, 1848.

Two moons of Uranus were discovered in 1778 by Herschel; he suspected that there was a third satellite, which was found in October 1847 by Struve and Lascelles, who also discovered the last satellite of Uranus, Ariel, on September 14 of this year.

Uranus was discovered by Herschel in March 1781. The same astronomer observed volcanoes on the Moon in April.

Bradley discovered the laws of aberration (the apparent motion of the fixed stars) in September 1728. It is remarkable that this discovery was prompted by his observation of the oscillations of the pennant (vane) with each turn of the barge on the Thames.

The curious discoveries of Encke and Vico (1735–1738) regarding Saturn were made in March and April.

Of the comets discovered by Gambard, he found three in July, two in March and May, and one each in January, April, June, August, October and December.

Gall discovered the moons of Mars in August.

The total number of 175 small planets discovered during 1877, and 247 comets discovered before 1864, is distributed by month:

Schiaparelli's discovery of shooting stars was made in August 1866.

From Malpighi's diary it is clear that in June he made his remarkable discovery regarding accessory buds, and in July - regarding crowded glands. It is curious that Malpighi has some months that are especially rich in new works, for example, in 1688 and 1690 - January, and in 1671 - June, during which 3 discoveries were made. The first thought about the construction of a barometer appeared to Torricelli in May 1644, as can be seen from his letter to Ritchie dated June 11; in March of the same year, he made an extremely important discovery for that time regarding the best method of preparing glasses for telescopes.

Pascal's first experiments on the equilibrium of liquids were carried out in September 1645.

In March 1752, Franklin made the first experiments with lightning rods, which, however, he finally completed only in September. Goethe says that his most original ideas regarding color theory came to him in May; his wonderful experiments on plants were carried out in June.

Alexander Volta invented his electric pole in the early winter of 1799–1800; the opinion that this invention was made in the spring is erroneous, since on March 20, 1805, Volta only reported it to the Royal Society in London. In the spring of 1775 he invented electrophore. In early November 1774, he also made a discovery regarding the separation of hydrogen during the fermentation of organic substances and in the fall of 1976 he invented his hydrogen-loading pistol, although biographers attribute this invention to the spring of 1976. The invention dates back to the same year eudiometer, most likely taken in the spring, around May. In April of the same 1777, Volta wrote a famous letter to Professor Barletta (kept at the Lombard Institute), where he made a prediction regarding electric telegraph. In the spring of 1788 he designed his electrometer-capacitor, a description of which was published in August.

Luigi Brugnatelli invented art electroforming in November 1806, as evidenced by a letter found by Volta's lawyer in the papers of his famous ancestor; this invention was attributed to Jacobi, Spencer, and De la Rive, although they only improved it in 1835 and 1840.

Nicholson discovered the oxidation of metals using a voltaic column in the summer of 1800.

Galvani's first works on the effect of atmospheric electricity on the nerves of cold-blooded animals were made by him, as he himself wrote, on April 26, 1776. In September 1786, he made the first experiments, observing the convulsive contractions of frogs without a constant electrical source, using only a metal conductor, from where the theory of galvanism originated. In November 1780, Galvani began experiments on contracting the muscles of frogs using electricity.

From Lagrange's manuscripts it is clear that his first idea of ​​​​variational calculation appeared on June 12, 1755 and that "Analytical mechanics" he conceived it on May 19, 1756. He found the solution to the problem of vibrating strings in November 1759.

Examining Spallanzani's manuscripts, which I was able to obtain in part in the original from the public library of Reggio, and using extracts from them made for me by Professor Tamburini, I came to the conclusion that Spallanzani's experiments on mold began on September 26, 1770. On May 8, 1780, he undertook, in his own words, "the study of animals that freeze in the cold", and in 1776, in April or May, he found embryos in females earlier than fertilization (parthenogenesis). Later, April 2, 1780 is the richest day of his life in terms of experiments or deductions regarding ovulation. “I am convinced,” Spallanzani wrote in his own hand that day, after making 43 experiments, “that the seed (sperma) acquires the ability to fertilize after a certain period of time after its release, that the mucus of the genital organs (succo vescicolare) can fertilize in the same way, like the seed, and that wine and vinegar interfere with fertilization.”

On May 7, 1780, he made the discovery that an infinitesimal amount of seed was sufficient for fertilization.

Judging by one letter from Spallanzani to Bonnet, one might think that in the spring of 1771 he had the idea to study the effect of heart contractions on blood circulation, and in May 1781, in his notebook, a plan was outlined for 161 new experiments on artificial insemination of frogs.

From Leibniz's manuscripts it is clear that on October 29, 1675, he first used the integral sign, instead of the Cavalieri notation accepted at that time.

From Humboldt's letter to Varnhagen it is clear that he began the preface to Cosmos in October.

In November 1796, Humboldt made his first observations of the electric eel, and in March 1793, experiments on the irritability of organic tissue.

In July 1801, Gay-Lussac discovered fluoride compounds in the bones of fish and at the same time completed the analysis of alum.

In September 1876, Jackson used sulfuric ether to render patients unconscious during surgical operations.

In October 1840, Armstrong invented the first hydroelectric machine.

Mateucci made the first experiments on galvanoscopy of frogs in July 1830, on electric stingrays in the spring of 1836, on the electrical excitability of muscles in July 1837, on the decomposition of acids in May 1835; in May 1837 he investigated the role of electricity in meteorological phenomena, and in June 1833 - the influence of heat on electricity and magnetism.

If the reader had the patience to look through this long list of various discoveries, then he could be convinced that many great people had, as it were, their own special chronology, that is, their favorite months and seasons in which they predominantly showed a tendency to make the greatest number of observations or discoveries and create the best works of art. Thus, in Spallanzani this tendency manifested itself in the spring, in Giusti and Arcangeli - in March, in Lamartine - in August, in Carcano, Byron and Alfieri - in September, in Malpighi and Schiller - in June and July, in Hugo - in May, in Beranger - in January, Belli - in November, Milli - in April, Volta - in late November and early December, Galvani - in April, Gambard - in July, Peters - in August, Luther - in March and April, for Watson - in September.

In general, the most diverse works of brilliant people - literary, poetic, musical, sculptural, as well as scientific discoveries, the time of creation of which we managed to find out with accuracy, can be summed up under a kind of chronology, compiling from them a kind of calendar of the spiritual world, as can be seen from the following table.

From this table we see that for artistic creativity the most favorable month is May, followed by September and April, while the least productive months were February, October and December. The same is partly noticeable in relation to astronomical discoveries, only for the latter, April and July have predominant importance. Discoveries in the exact sciences, like the largest number of aesthetic works, and consequently the total number of all works, also predominate in May, April and September, that is, during not particularly hot months, when barometric fluctuations are more frequent compared to the hottest months. hot and cold months.

Grouping these numbers by season - which will give us the opportunity to use some other data regarding works made in an unknown month - we see that the maximum of artistic and literary works occurs:

for spring, namely – 387

Then comes summer - 346

And autumn – 335

Then at least it happens in winter - 280

Likewise, from the great discoveries in physics, chemistry and mathematics:

the largest number was made in the spring, namely 21

Somewhat less in autumn – 15

Significantly less in summer – 9

And finally, the smallest number in winter is 5

The astronomical discoveries, which we have separated from the previous ones on the ground that the time at which they were made is known with greater accuracy (which is especially important for our purpose), are likewise unevenly distributed among the seasons:

135 were made in the fall

In spring – 131

But in winter it is much less - 83

And again a little more in the summer - 120

Taking the total number of 1867 great works, we find that a much larger part of them occurs in spring (539) and autumn (485), while in summer the number drops to 475 and in winter to 368.

The predominance of moderately warm months here is quite obvious and is expressed not only quantitatively, but even qualitatively, although in this sense it is still impossible to make a completely accurate conclusion due to the paucity of data. There is no doubt, however, that it was in the spring months that America was discovered and galvanism, the barometer, the telescope and the lightning rod were invented; in the spring, Michelangelo conceived his famous painting, Dante began to write the Divine Comedy, Leonardo began his essay on light, Goethe began his Faust, Kepler discovered the laws of motion of celestial bodies, and Milton conceived his poem.

I will also add that in those few cases where the creations of great men can be followed almost day by day, their activity in winter constantly turns out to be intensified on warmer days and weakened on cold ones. Thus, looking through Spallanzani's diaries (kept in the Reggio library) and mainly those that he kept in 1777, 1778, 1780, 1781, when he began research on mold, digestion and fertilization, I counted:

50 days on which observations were made in March:

143 – in May

Using Malpighi’s interesting diary, which he kept for 34 years, recording his observations daily, and distributing his discoveries by month, we will find the following sequence in the number of days rich in discoveries:

There were 71 days in July

in June – 66

in May – 42

in October – 40

in January – 36

in September – 34

in April – 33

in March – 31

in August – 28

in November – 20

in December – 13

In general, out of 436 observations, barely 81, i.e., less than a fifth, occur in the cold months.

From Galvani's manuscripts examined by Gherardi, it appears that April played a predominant role in his work. Thus, in March (1781) and January (1774) he wrote only one essay each on cataracts and eye hygiene, while in April he wrote four, namely:

In April 1772 - two essays on the ossicles of the tympanic cavity;

in April 1776 - about the organ of hearing;

in April 1777 - about muscular movements and the structure of the ear.

I foresee what a mass of refutations my generalizations will cause, they will point out to me the paucity of data and their insufficient reliability, I will be reproached for trying to introduce statistics into the narrow field and place next to it high manifestations of mental creativity, apparently least amenable to the logic of numbers and not allowing for comparison. between themselves. In particular, my attempt will not be liked by the followers of that school, which thinks to limit statistics to the mere use of large numbers, often preferring their quantity to quality, and a priori does not allow the use of them for any conclusions, forgetting that numbers, in essence, , the same facts, amenable to synthesis, like all other facts, and that these figures, having no meaning in themselves, would not be of the slightest interest if thinkers did not use them for their generalizations or conclusions.

Regarding the paucity of data, I note that despite the insufficiency of the 1867 facts I cited, they are still more convincing than simple hypotheses or confessions of individual authors, confessions to which, however, these facts do not in the least contradict and therefore can serve, if not as indisputable, then at least for approximate conclusions. In addition, they can give rise to a number of new, more eloquent psychometeorological observations, although the works of genius are not so numerous that they can easily fill large tables.

On the other hand, I fully agree that the chronological coincidence of many phenomena is determined by random circumstances that apparently have nothing to do with our mental state. For example, it is most convenient for naturalists to carry out their experiments and observations in the warm months. Therefore, the abundance of discoveries made in spring and autumn is largely a consequence of the greater uniformity in the distribution of days and nights, the greater clarity of the weather and the absence of both sweltering heat and intense cold.

In the same way, one cannot help but be convinced that all these circumstances do not unconditionally influence creative activity. This can be seen, for example, from the fact that although anatomists never have a shortage of corpses and it is especially convenient to work on them in the winter cold, nevertheless discoveries in this area are made mainly in the warm season. On the contrary, long, clear winter nights (during which the influence of refraction is least affected) and warm summer nights should be especially favorable for astronomical observations, and yet their maximum occurs in spring and autumn.

Finally, who does not know that, thanks to statistical research, the significance of random circumstances turns out to be negligible even in such phenomena as death, suicide and birth? The correctness observed in them can only be explained by the influence of one common cause, which lies in nothing other than meteorological factors.

Next, I allowed myself to combine works of art and natural scientific discoveries into one group on the basis that for both, that moment of mental excitement and heightened sensitivity is equally necessary, which brings together the most distant or heterogeneous facts and gives them life, in general, that fertilizing moment, rightly called creative, when the naturalist and the poet stand much closer to each other than it might seem at first glance. And indeed, what a bold, rich imagination, what creative imagination is manifested in the experiments of Spallanzani, in the first works of Herschel or in the two great discoveries of Schiaparelli and Le Verrier, made first on the basis of hypotheses and subsequently with the help of calculations and new observations that turned into axioms! Littrov, speaking about the discovery of Vesta, notes that it was made not as a result of chance alone or solely as a result of a brilliant mind, but thanks to a genius favored by chance. The star discovered by Piazzi was seen by Zach much earlier than him, but he did not pay attention to it, either because he was less brilliant than Piazzi, or because at that moment he did not have such insight as he did. To discover sunspots did not require, according to Secchi, anything except time, patience and luck, but to create a correct theory of this phenomenon, a true genius was needed. “How many physicists, crossing the river, observed the oscillation of the pennant on the barge, but only Bradley was able to derive the laws of aberration from this!” - says Arago. And how many people, I will add, have seen the typical figures of porters, and yet no one created Judas except Leonardo, just as no one who saw oranges painted cavatina, with the exception of Mozart.

A more serious objection may be considered that almost all the works of great minds, and especially modern discoveries in physics, are not the result of instantaneous inspiration, but rather the consequence of a series of continuous and slow researches on the part of scientists who lived in former times, so that the latest inventor is in essence, only a compiler, to whose works chronology is not applicable, since the numbers we have given determine rather the time of completion of this or that work than the moment when it was conceived. But this kind of objection does not apply exclusively to our task: almost all other manifestations of human activity, even the least arbitrary, can be brought under the same category. Fertilization, for example, even depends on good nutrition of the body and heredity; death and madness itself only seem to be determined by immediate or accidental causes, but, in essence, they are completely dependent, on the one hand, on atmospheric phenomena, and on the other, on organic conditions; in many cases it can be said that death and madness are prepared in advance and the time of their onset is precisely indicated at the moment of the individual’s birth.

THE INFLUENCE OF METEOROLOGICAL PHENOMENA ON THE BIRTH OF GENIUS PEOPLE

Having become convinced of the enormous influence of meteorological phenomena on the creative activity of brilliant people, we can easily understand that climate and soil structure must also have a very significant impact on their birth.

There is no doubt that the emergence of brilliant people is greatly influenced by race (for example, in the Latin and Greek races there are more great people than in others), political movements, freedom of thought and speech, the wealth of the country, and finally, the proximity of cultural centers - but undoubtedly also that temperature and climate are no less important in this regard.

To be convinced of this, it is enough to look and compare reports on recruitment in Italy in recent years. From these reports it is clear that the regions which, obviously due to their excellent climate, although independently of the influence of nationality, produce the largest number of tall soldiers and the smallest percentage of unhealthy ones, belong precisely to those in which there have always been many talented people, such as, for example , Tuscany, Liguria and Romagna.

On the contrary, in those provinces where the percentage of tall young men fit for military service is smaller - Sardinia, Basilicata and the Aosta Valley - the number of geniuses decreases noticeably. The only exceptions are Calabria and Valtellina, where talented people are not uncommon, despite the low stature of the majority of the population, but this is noticeable only in areas open to the south or lying on a hill, as a result of which neither cretinism nor malaria develops there, so this fact is not at all does not contradict the position we have expressed.

It has long been noticed by both common people and scientists that in mountainous countries with a warm climate there are especially many brilliant people. A popular Tuscan proverb says: “Highlanders have thick legs, but good brains.” Vegetzio wrote: “Climate affects not only physical but also mental health; Minerva chose the city of Athens as her residence for its blessed air, as a result of which wise men would be born there.” Cicero also mentions more than once that in Athens, thanks to the warm climate, smart people will be born, and in Thebes, where the climate is harsh, stupid people will be born. Petrarch, in his Epistolario, which is a kind of autobiography of this poet, constantly points out that the best of his works were written, or at least conceived, in the midst of his favorite lovely hills of Val Chiusa. According to Vasari, Michelangelo told him: “If I managed to create something really good, then I owe it to the wonderful air of your native Arezzo.” Muratori wrote to an Italian: “ Air We have an amazing one, and I am sure that it is thanks to him that there are so many wonderfully talented people in our country.” Macaulay says that Scotland, one of the poorest countries in Europe, ranks first in it in the number of scientists and writers; it belongs to: Beda, Mikhail Scott, Napier - the inventor of logarithms, then Buchanan, Walter Scott, Byron, Johnston and partly Newton.

Without a doubt, it is precisely in this influence of atmospheric phenomena that we should look for an explanation for the fact that in the mountains of Tuscany, mainly in the provinces of Pistoia, Buti and Valdontani, among shepherds and peasants, there are so many poets and especially improvisers, including even women, like , for example, the shepherdess Giuliani talks about in his essay "About the language spoken in Tuscany", or the extraordinary Frediani family, where the grandfather, father, and sons are all poets. One of the members of this family is still alive and writes poetry no worse than the great Tuscan poets of former times. Meanwhile, peasants of the same nationality living on the plains are not, as far as I know, distinguished by such talents.

In all low-lying countries, as, for example, in Belgium and Holland, as well as in areas surrounded by too high mountains, where, as a result, local diseases develop - goiter and cretinism, as, for example, in Switzerland and Savoy - people of genius are extremely rare, but There are even fewer of them in damp and swampy countries. The few geniuses of which Switzerland is proud - Bonnet, Rousseau, Tronchin, Tissot, de Candolle and Bourla-Maki - were born of French or Italian emigrants, that is, under conditions where race could outweigh the influence of local unfavorable conditions .

Urbino, Pesaro, Forli, Como, Parma have produced more famous men of genius than Pisa, Padua and Pavia - the oldest of the university cities of Italy, where, however, there was neither Raphael, nor Bramante, nor Rossini, nor Morgagni, nor Spallanzani, nor Muratorno, neither Fallopia nor Volta are natives of the first five cities.

Moving then from general to more specific examples, we will be convinced that Florence, where the climate is very mild and the soil extremely hilly, provided Italy with the most brilliant galaxy of great people. Dante, Giotto, Machiavelli, Lully, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, Guicciardini, Cellini, Beato Angelico, Andrea del Sarto, Nicolini, Capponi, Vespucci, Viviani, Boccaccio, Alberti and Donati - these are the main names that this city has the right to be proud of.

On the contrary, Pisa, which is scientifically located as a university city in no less favorable conditions than Florence, produced in comparison even a significantly smaller number of outstanding generals and politicians, which was the reason for its fall, despite the help of strong allies. Of the great people of Pisa, only Nicola of Pisa, Giunta and Galileo belong to Pisa, whose parents, however, were Florentines. Meanwhile, Pisa differs from Florence only in its low-lying location.

Finally, what a wealth of men of genius is the mountainous province of Arezzo, where Michelangelo, Petrarch, Guido Reni, Redi, Vasari and the three Aretini were born. Further, how many talented individuals came from Asti (Alfieri, Oggero, S. Brunone, Belli, Natta, Gualtieri, Cotta, Solari, Alione, Giorgio and Ventura) and Turin, located on the hills (Roland, Calusa, Gioberti, Balbo, Beretta, Marochetti, Lagrange, Bozhino and Cavour).

In the mountainous parts of Lombardy and in the lake districts of Bergamo, Brescia and Como, the number of great men is likewise much greater than in the lowlands. In the first we meet the names: Tasso, Mascheroni, Donizetti, Tartaglia, Ugoni, Volta, Parini, Appiani, Mai, Plinia, Cagnola, etc., while in lowland Lombardy one can barely count six such names - Alciato, Beccaria, Oriani, Cavalieri , Azelli and Boccacini. Hilly Verona produced Maffei, Pavel Veronese, Catula, Fracastoro, Bianchini, Sammicheli, Tiraboschi, Lornna, Pindemonte; the rich and most learned Padua, only here and there representing a few sunlit hills, gave Italy only Titus Livy, Cesarotti, Peter d'Abano and a few others.

If the lowland region of Reggio can boast of such famous natives as Spallanzani, Ariosto, Correggio, Secchi, Nobile, Vallisneri, Bogiardo, then it is partly due to these sunlit hills found in it: the last three of this galaxy were born in the hilly Scandiano; Genoa and Naples, located in particularly favorable conditions (warm climate, proximity to the sea and mountainous location), can be placed on a par with Florence, if not in the number of their brilliant natives, then in their importance: Columbus, Doria, Vico, Caracciolo, Pergolese were born here , Genovese, Cirilo, Filangeri, etc.

Further, it is interesting to trace the influence that a moderately warm climate has, especially if it is also accompanied by national qualities, on the development of musical talents. Looking through Clement's essay "Famous Musicians" ( Clement. Les Musiciens celebres, 1868), I found that out of 110 great composers, 36, that is, more than a third, belong to Italy and that 19, or more than half of these latter, are natives of Sicily (Scarlata, Pacini, Bellini) and Naples with its surroundings. This phenomenon is obviously due to the influence of the Greek race and the warm climate. The Neapolitans include: Jomelli, Stradella, Piccini, Leo, Duni, Sacchini, Carafa, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Zingarelli, Mercadante, Traeta, Durante, Ricci and Petrella. Of the remaining 17 musicians, only a few can consider Upper Italy their homeland: Donizetti, Verdi, Allegri, Frescobaldi, two Monteverdi, Salieri, Marcelo and Paganini. The last three are natives of coastal areas; all the rest come from central Italy: Palestrina and Clementi were born in Rome, Spontini, Lully, Pergolesi were born in Perugio and Florence.

The enormous importance of climate and soil is felt not only in relation to outstanding artists in all kinds of art, but even in relation to the least famous of them. I was convinced of this by drawing up, with the assistance of the venerable Professor Cunje, a map of Italy indicating the distribution of painters, sculptors and musicians in it over the last two centuries, and with amazing correctness the predominant number of artists was expressed in the hot mountainous provinces of central Italy, such as Florence and Bologna, and the coastal – Venice, Naples, Genoa.

So, for example, in Bologna there are 262 painters, 95 musicians

In Florence - 252 and 70

In Venice - 138 and 124

In Milan - 127 and 95

In Rome - 100 and 127

In Genoa – 100 and 30

In Naples - 95 and 216

The indirect influence of the surrounding nature on the birth of brilliant people is somewhat analogous to its influence on the development of insanity.

The well-known fact that in mountainous countries the inhabitants are more susceptible to madness than in lowland ones is fully confirmed by psychiatric statistics. Moreover, recent observations prove that epidemic madness is much more common in the mountains than in the valleys. Remember the mental epidemics that have arisen in recent years and before our eyes in Monte Amiata (Lazaretti), in Buska and Montenegro. It should also not be forgotten that the hills of Judea were the cradle of many prophets and that in the mountains of Scotland there appeared people gifted with clairvoyance (Seconda Vista); both of them belong to the ranks of brilliant madmen and half-crazed soothsayers.

THE INFLUENCE OF RACE AND HERITAGE ON GENIUS AND INSANE

The similarity between the influence of atmospheric phenomena on men of genius and on the insane will be even more noticeable if we consider it together with the influence of race. The Jews provide us with an excellent example in this regard.

In his monographs "Uomo bianco e l'uomo di colore" and "Pensiero e Meteore" I have already pointed out the fact that, as a result of the cruel persecution experienced by the Jews in the Middle Ages (the result of which was the extermination of weak individuals, i.e., a kind of selection), as well as due to the temperate climate, European Jews reached such a degree of mental development that, perhaps, even ahead of the Aryan tribe, while in Africa and the East they remained at the same low level of culture as the rest of the Semites. Moreover, statistics show that general education is even more common among Jews than among other nations, that they occupy a prominent position not only in trade, but also in many other activities, such as music, journalism, literature, especially satirical and humorous, and in some branches of medicine. Thus, in music, Jews belong to such geniuses as Meyerbeer, Halevi, Guzikov, Mendelssohn and Offenbach; in humorous literature: Heine, Safir, Camerini, Revere, Calisse, Jacobson, Jung, Weil, Fortis and Gozlan; in belles lettres: Auerbach, Kompert and Aguilar; in linguistics: Ascoli, Munch, Fiorentino, Luzzato, etc.; in medicine: Valentin, Hermann, Heidenhain, Schiff, Kasper, Hirschfeld, Stilling, Gluger, Laurens, Traube, Frenkel, Kuhn, Konheim and Hirsch; in philosophy: Spinoza, Sommerhausen and Mendelssohn, in sociology: Lassalle and Marx. Even in mathematics, for which Semites are generally incapable, one can point out among the Jews such outstanding specialists as Goldschmitt, Beer and Marcus.

It should also be noted that almost all brilliant people of Jewish origin showed a great inclination to create new systems, to change the social structure of society; in political science they were revolutionaries, in theology - the founders of new creeds, so that the Jews, in essence, owe, if not their origin, then at least their development, on the one hand, nihilism and socialism, and on the other, Christianity and the monotheism of Moses , just as they were the first to introduce bills of exchange in trade, positivism in philosophy, and positivism in literature neo-humorism(neo-humorismo). And at the same time, it is among Jews that there are four and even five times more insane people than among their fellow citizens belonging to other nationalities.

The famous scientist Servi calculated that in Italy in 1869 there was one madman for every 391 Jews, that is, almost four times more than among Catholics. The same was confirmed in 1869 by Verga, according to whose calculations the percentage of crazy people among Jews turned out to be even greater. So,

among Catholics there is 1 crazy person per 1775 people

Among Protestants there is 1 crazy person in 1725

Among Jews there is 1 crazy person in 384

Tigges, who studied more than 3,100 insane persons, says in his statistics of insanity in Westphalia that it spreads among its population in the following proportion:

From 1 to 8 per 7000 inhabitants among Jews

1 to 11 per 14,000 among Catholics

From 1 to 13 per 14,000 among Lutherans.

Finally, for 1871, Mayr found the number of insane people:

in Prussia 8.7 per 40,000 Christians and 14.1 per 10,000 Jews.

In Bavaria, the figures are 9.8 and 25.2, respectively.

In all of Germany 8.6 and 16.1.

As you can see, this is an amazingly large proportion, especially if you take into account that although there are many old people among the Jews, who are most often susceptible to insanity from old age, there are extremely few alcoholics.

This fatal privilege of the Jewish race, however, went unnoticed by the anti-Semites who constitute the plague of modern Germany. If they had paid attention to this fact, they would, of course, not have become so indignant at the successes being made by the unfortunate Jewish race, and would have realized how dearly the Jews have to pay for their mental superiority even in our time, not to mention the disasters experienced by them in the past. However, it is unlikely that the Jews were more unhappy than now, when they are persecuted precisely for what constitutes their glory.

The importance of race in the development of genius, as well as insanity, is evident from the fact that both are almost completely independent of education, while heredity has an enormous influence on them.

“Through education you can make bears dance,” says Helvetius, “but you cannot produce a man of genius.”

There is no doubt that insanity is only in rare cases a consequence of bad upbringing, while the influence of heredity in this case is so great that it reaches 88 per 100, according to Tiggess’s calculations, and up to 85 per 100, according to Golgi’s calculations. As for genius, Galton and Ribot (De l’Heredite, 1878) consider it most often the result of hereditary abilities, especially in the art of music. Thus, among musicians, the sons of Palestrina, Benda, Dussek, Hiller, Mozart, Eichhorn were distinguished by their remarkable talents; The Bach family produced 8 generations of musicians, 57 of whom were famous.

Among the painters we find hereditary talents in Van de Velde, Van Eyck, Murillo, Veronese, Bellini, Caracci, Correggio, Mieris, Bassano, Tintoretto, as well as in the Cagliari family, consisting of uncle, father and son, and especially in Titian's family, which produced a number of painters, as can be seen from the genealogical table attached here, which I borrowed from an inexhaustible source of information on this topic - from Ribot's book “De l'Heredite”.

Among the poets, one can point to Aeschylus, whose two sons and nephews were also poets; Swift - Dryden's nephew; Lucan - nephew of Seneca, Tasso - son of Bernard; Ariosto, whose brother and nephew were poets; Aristophanes with two sons, who also wrote comedies; Corneille, Racine, Sophocles, Coleridge, whose sons and nephews had poetic talent.

Of the naturalists, members of the families of Darwin, Euler, Decandolle, Hooke, Herschel, Jussier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire became famous. The sons of Aristotle himself (whose father was a scientist and physician), Nicomachus and Callisthenes, as well as his nephews, are known for their learning.

The son of the astronomer Cassini was also a famous astronomer, his nephew at the age of 22 had already become a member of the Academy of Sciences, his great-nephew was the director of the Observatory, and his great-grandnephew had become famous as a naturalist and philologist. Then here is Bernoulli's genealogical table:

All of them made a name for themselves in one or another branch of the natural sciences. As early as 1829, one of the Bernoullis was known as a chemist, and in 1863 another member of the same family, Christopher Bernoulli, who held the position of professor of natural sciences at the University of Basel, died.

Galton, who often confuses talent with genius (a defect from which I could not always get rid of), says in his excellent study that the chances of relatives of famous people who have become or are about to become outstanding are 151/2: to 100 for fathers; 131/2: 100 – for brothers; 24: 100 – for sons. Or, if we give these, as well as other, relationships a more convenient form, we will get the following results: in the first degree of kinship: the father’s chances are 1: 6; the chances of each brother are 1: 7; each son – 1:4. In the second degree: the chances of each grandfather – 1:25; each uncle – 1:40; each grandchild - 1: 29. To the third power: the chances of each member are approximately 1: 200, with the exception of cousins, for whom - 1: 100.

This means that out of six cases, in one the father of a famous person is probably also a famous person; in one case out of seven, the brother of a famous person is also distinguished by outstanding abilities; in one case out of four, the son inherits the properties of his father that are outstanding above the general level, etc.

However, these figures, in turn, change greatly, depending on whether we apply them to brilliant artists, diplomats, warriors, etc. Nevertheless, even these enormous figures cannot give us new evidence in favor of a complete analogy between the influence of heredity on the development of genius and insanity, because the latter manifests itself, unfortunately, with much greater force and intensity than the former (as 48 to 80). Further, although the law derived by Galton is quite true regarding judges and statesmen, artists and poets do not at all fit under it, for whom the influence of heredity is reflected with extreme force on brothers, sons, and especially nephews, while in grandfathers and uncles it is less noticeable. In general, this influence is felt in the transmission of insanity twice as strongly and intensely as in the transmission of genius abilities and, moreover, to almost the same extent for both sexes, while in geniuses hereditary traits are passed on to male descendants in a proportion of 70 to 30 compared to female descendants. Further, most brilliant people do not pass on their qualities to their descendants, either because they remain childless or due to degeneration, just as we see in aristocratic families.

Finally, with a few exceptions, such as the names of Darwin, Bernoulli, Cassini, Saint-Hilaire and Herschel, what an insignificant part of their gifts and talents were usually passed on by brilliant people to their descendants, considering that these talents were also exaggerated thanks to the charm of the name of a glorious ancestor. What does it mean, for example, Titianello in comparison with Titian, some Nicomachus - with Aristotle, Horace Ariosto - with his uncle, the great poet, or the modest professor Christopher Bernoulli next to his famous ancestor Jacob Bernoulli!

Insanity, on the contrary, is most often inherited in its entirety... Moreover, it even seems to intensify with each new generation. Cases of hereditary insanity in all sons and nephews - often in the same form as in their father or uncle - are encountered at every step. So, for example, all the descendants of one noble Hamburger, ranked among the great military geniuses, went crazy when they reached the age of 40; finally, only one member of this unfortunate family remained alive, who was in public service, and the Senate forbade him to marry. At 40, he also went crazy. Ribot says that 11 members of the same family were admitted to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in succession.

Then, here is another story of the family of a watchmaker who went crazy as a result of the horrors of the revolution of 1789 and then recovered: he himself was poisoned, his daughter went crazy and completely went crazy, one brother stuck a knife in his stomach, another started drinking and died from white blood. fever, the third stopped eating and died of exhaustion; his healthy sister had one son who was insane and epileptic, another did not take breastfeeds, two little ones died from inflammation of the brain, and the daughter, who also suffered from insanity, refused to eat.

Finally, the most indisputable evidence in favor of our theory is provided by the attached family tree of the Berti family, which produced an incomparably larger number of madmen than the family of the famous Titian produced brilliant painters. ( Cm. family tree on pp. 124, 125.)

From this curious genealogical table it is clear that in four generations, out of 80 descendants of one crazy melancholic, 10 people went crazy and almost all suffered from the same form of mental disorder - melancholy, and 19 people - from nervous diseases, therefore 36%. In addition, we notice that the disease developed more and more in subsequent generations, capturing the most active age and manifesting itself with particular force in the male line, where insanity appeared already in the first generation, while in the female line - only in the 3rd and in proportion barely 1 in 4. In the 1st and 4th tribes there are many crazy and nervous people in all families; in the 2nd tribe, on the contrary, healthy members predominate, which are also found in the 3rd, and then a terrible disease covers everyone a greater number of victims experiencing some form of mental suffering. It is unlikely that brilliant people will have a family that is as fertile and has experienced the fatal, progressively increasing influence of heredity to the same extent!

But there are cases when this influence manifests itself with even greater force, which is especially noticeable in relation to alcoholics (crazed by drunkenness). So, for example, from one ancestor of the drunkard Max Uke, over the course of 75 years, 200 thieves and murderers, 280 unfortunate people who suffered from blindness, idiocy, consumption, 90 prostitutes and 300 children died prematurely, so that this entire family cost the state, counting losses and expenses, more than a million dollars.

And this is far from an isolated fact. On the contrary, even more striking examples can be found in modern medical research.

Targe, in his book “On the Heredity of Alcoholism,” cites several similar cases. Thus, he says that the four Dufay brothers were subject to an unfortunate passion for wine, apparently due to the influence of heredity; the eldest of them threw himself into the water and drowned, the second hanged himself, the third cut his throat, and the fourth threw himself down from the third floor.

We borrow many more facts of the same kind from Targe:

a certain R. had the following offspring from a healthy wife:

A certain P.S., who died of softening of the brain as a result of drunkenness, and his wife, who died of abdominal dropsy, also, perhaps, caused by drunkenness, had children:

These examples prove that atavism is easily possible in alcoholism - a leap back through one generation, so that the children of drunkards remain healthy, but the disease affects the grandchildren.

Here's one last example.

The drunkard L. Bert., who died of apoplexy, had only one son, also a drunkard, who had children:

Morel reports about one drunkard who had seven children, that one of them went crazy at the age of 22, the other was an idiot, two died in childhood, the 5th was an eccentric and misanthrope, the 6th was hysterical, the 7th was good worker, but suffered from a nerve disorder. Of the 16 children of another drunkard, 15 died in childhood, and the last survivor was an epileptic.

Sometimes in people who are apparently of sound mind, insanity manifests itself in individual monstrous, insane actions.

Thus, one judge, a German, killed his wife, who had been ill for a long time, with a revolver shot and later assured that he did so out of love for her, wanting to save her from the suffering caused by illness. He was convinced that he had done nothing wrong and tried to kill his mother in the same way when she fell ill. Experts hesitated for a long time whether to consider this man mentally ill, and came to the conclusion that he was insanity based on the fact that his grandfather and father were drunkards.

Not only binge drinking, but the use of alcoholic beverages in general leads to terrible consequences... Flemming and Demo proved that it is not only drunkards who pass on to their children a tendency towards insanity and crime, but that even completely sober men, who were under the influence of wine fumes at the time of copulation, gave rise to children - epileptics, paralytics, madmen, idiots and mainly microcephalics or feeble-minded people who very easily lost their minds.

Thus, one extra glass of wine can cause the greatest disasters for many generations!

What analogy is possible here in comparison with the rare and almost always incomplete transmission of genius abilities even to the closest offspring?

True, the fatal similarity between madness and genius in this case is less noticeable, but it is the law of heredity that reveals the close connection between them in the fact that many crazy people have relatives with genius abilities and that the vast majority of gifted people have children and relatives who are epileptics and idiots , maniacs and vice versa, as the reader can verify by looking again at the family tree of Bertie’s family.

But even more instructive in this regard are the biographies of great people. Frederick the Great's father and Johnson's mother were crazy, Peter the Great's son was a drunkard and a maniac; Richelieu's sister imagined that her back was made of glass, and Hegel's sister imagined that she had turned into a mail bag; Nicolini's sister considered herself condemned to eternal torment for her brother's heretical beliefs and tried several times to wound him. Sister Lamba killed her mother in a fit of rage; Charles V's mother suffered from melancholy and insanity, Zimmermann's brother was insane; Beethoven's father was a drunkard; Byron's mother is crazy, his father is a shameless libertine, his grandfather is a famous navigator; therefore, Ribot had every right to say about Byron that “the eccentricity of his character can be fully justified by heredity, since he came from ancestors who possessed all the vices that can disrupt the harmonious development of character and take away all the qualities necessary for family happiness.” Schopenhauer's uncle and grandfather were crazy, but his father was an eccentric and subsequently committed suicide. Kerner's sister suffered from melancholy, and the children were insane and prone to somnambulism. In the same way, the following suffered from mental disorders: Carlini, Mercadante, Donizetti, Volta; Manzoni had crazy sons, Villemin had a father and brothers, Comte had a sister, Perticari and Puccinotti had brothers. D’Azeglio’s grandfather and brother were distinguished by such oddities that the whole of Turin was talking about them.

Now let's see how these facts are confirmed by numbers.

Prussian statistics of 1877 counted 10,676 insane people as 6,369, in whose madness the influence of heredity was clearly expressed, namely of them:

89.0% of parents are crazy;

12.4% – binge drinkers;

1.0% – criminals;

18.0% – alcoholics;

1.7% – suicides;

6.3% – very talented.

___________________________

86.0% of grandfathers and uncles are insane;

6.7% – binge drinkers;

0.1% – criminals;

3.1% – alcoholics;

2.7% – suicides;

1.3% – very talented.

___________________________

76.1% of sisters and brothers are insane;

13.1% – binge drinkers;

0.1% – criminals;

3.3% – alcoholics;

2.3% – suicides;

3.6% – very talented.

From this it is clear that the influence of heredity in insanity is much more common among brilliant people than among suicides or criminals, and that it is only two to three times stronger among drunkards. Of the 22 cases of hereditary insanity, Aubanel and Tore found two cases in which the children of geniuses suffered from this disease.

GENIUS PEOPLE WHO SUFFERED WITH INSANITY: HARRINGTON, BOLYAY, CODAZZI, AMPERE, KONT, SCHUMANN, TASSO, CARDANO, SWIFT, NEWTON, ROUSSEAU, LENAU, SZECHENI, SCHOPENGAUER

The examples given here of the analogy of madness with genius, if they cannot serve as proof of their complete similarity with each other, at least convince us that the first does not exclude the presence of the second in the same subject, and explain to us why this is possible.

In fact, not to mention the many geniuses who suffered from hallucinations for more or less long periods of time, like Andral, Cellini, Goethe, Hobbes, Grassi, or who lost their minds at the end of their glorious lives, like Vico and others, a considerable number of geniuses people were at the same time monomaniacs or were under the influence of hallucinations all their lives. Here are some examples of such coincidence.

Motanus, who always longed for solitude and was distinguished by oddities, ended up believing that he had turned into a grain of barley, as a result of which he did not want to go outside for fear that the birds would peck him.

Lully’s friend constantly spoke about him in his defense: “Don’t pay attention to him, he has common sense, he is completely a genius.”

Harrington imagined thoughts flying out of his mouth in the form of bees and birds, and hid in the gazebo with a broom in his hand to disperse them.

Haller, considering himself persecuted by people and cursed by God for his depravity, as well as for his heretical writings, experienced such terrible fear that he could only get rid of it with large portions of opium and conversation with priests.

Ampere burned his treatise on “The Future of Chemistry” on the grounds that it was written under the inspiration of Satan.

Mendelssohn suffered from melancholy. Lattre went crazy in his old age.

Already in our time, people have gone crazy: Farini, Brougham, Southey, Gounod, Govone, Gutzkow, Monge, Fourcroix, Loyd, Cooper, Rocchia, Ricci, Fenicia, Engel, Pergolesi, Nerval, Batyushkov, Murger, B. Collins, Techner, Hölderlin, van der West, Gallo, Spedalieri, Bellingeri, Salieri, physiologist Müller, Lenz, Barbara, Fuseli, Petermann, painter Whit Hamilton, Poe, Uhliche, and also, perhaps, Musset and Bodelin.

The famous painter von Leyden imagined himself poisoned and spent the last years of his life without getting out of bed.

Carl Dolce, a religious lipemaniac (lipemania is a dark insanity), finally vows to take only sacred subjects for his paintings and devotes his brush to the Madonna, but then to depict her he paints a portrait of his bride, Balduini. On his wedding day he disappeared and after a long search he was found prostrate before the altar of Our Lady.

Tommaso Loyd, the author of the most charming poems, represents in his character a strange combination of anger, pride, genius and mental disorder. When his poems weren’t entirely successful, he put them in a glass of water “to cleanse them,” as he put it. Everything that he happened to find in his pockets or that came into his hands - no matter whether it was paper, coal, stone, tobacco - he used to mix it with food and assured that coal cleanses him, stone mineralizes him, etc.

Hobbes, the materialist Hobbes, could not stay in a dark room without immediately seeing ghosts.

The poet Hölderlin, who suffered from insanity almost all his life, committed suicide in a fit of melancholy in 1835.

Mozart was convinced that the Italians were going to poison him. Moliere often suffered from attacks of severe melancholy. Rossini - whose cousin, an idiot who passionately loves music, is still alive - became a real lipmaniac in 1848, due to grief over the unprofitable purchase of the palace. He imagined that poverty now awaited him, that he would even have to beg for alms, and that his mental faculties had left him; in this state, he not only lost the ability to write musical works, but could not even hear conversations about music. However, the successful treatment of the venerable Doctor Sansone of Ancona gradually returned the brilliant musician to his art and friends.

Reading historical works made such an impression on Clark that he imagined himself an eyewitness and even a protagonist of long-past historical events. Black and Banneker imagined the fantastic images they reproduced on canvas to actually exist, and saw them in front of them.

The famous professor P. was also often subject to similar illusions and imagined himself either as Confucius or Tamerlane.

Schumann, the harbinger of that direction in musical art, which is known as “the music of the future,” being born into a wealthy family, could freely practice his favorite art and in his wife, Clara Wiecek, he found a gentle, quite worthy life partner. Despite this, already at the age of 24 he became a victim of lipemania, and at the age of 46 he almost completely lost his mind: he was either haunted by talking tables with omniscience, or he heard sounds that haunted him, which first formed into chords, and then and into entire musical phrases. Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated various melodies to him from their graves. In 1854, Schumann threw himself into the river, but was rescued. He died in Bonn. An autopsy revealed the formation of osteophytes—thickenings of the meninges—and brain atrophy.

The great thinker Auguste Comte, the founder of positive philosophy, was treated by Esquirol for ten years for a mental disorder and then, upon recovery, without any reason, drove away his wife, who saved his life with her care and affection. Before his death, he declared himself an apostle and clergyman of a materialistic religion, although earlier he himself had preached the destruction of all clergy. In Comte's writings, next to amazingly profound propositions, there are purely insane thoughts, such as, for example, that the time will come when the fertilization of a woman will take place without the mediation of a man.

Although Mantegazza claims that mathematicians are not susceptible to such psychoses, this opinion is also false. To be convinced of this, it is enough to remember, in addition to Newton, about whom I will speak in more detail, Archimedes, then Pascal, who suffered from hallucinations, and the specialist in pure mathematics and at the same time the eccentric Codazzi. An alcoholic, stingy to the point of being stingy, indifferent to everyone around him, he refused to help even his parents when they were almost dying of hunger. At the same time, he was so vain that, while still young, he allocated a certain sum for the construction of a tombstone for himself and did not allow his opinions to be challenged even about the cut of the dress. Finally, Codazzi's madness resulted in him coming up with a way to compose musical melodies through calculation.

All mathematicians bow to the genius of the geometer Bolyay, who was distinguished, however, by his crazy actions. For example, he challenged 13 young people in public service to a duel, and in the intervals between fights he amused himself by playing the violin, which was the only movable property in his house. When he was granted a pension, he ordered invitation cards to be printed in white letters on a black background for his funeral and made a coffin for himself (I observed similar oddities in two other mathematicians who recently died). Seven years later, he again printed a second invitation to his funeral, probably considering the first one to be invalid, and in his spiritual will he obliged his heirs to plant an apple tree on his grave, in memory of Eve, Paris and Newton. And such things were done by the great mathematician who corrected Euclid’s geometry!

Cardano, about whom his contemporaries said that he was the smartest of people and at the same time stupid as a child, Cardano, the first of the brave men who decided to criticize Galen, exclude fire from among the elements and call sorcerers and Catholic saints crazy - this great man was I myself have been mentally ill all my life. By the way, I will add that his son, cousin and father also suffered from insanity.

This is how he describes himself: “A stutterer, frail, with a weak memory, without any knowledge, I have suffered from hypno-fantastic hallucinations since childhood.” He imagined either a rooster speaking to him in a human voice, or Tartarus itself, filled with bones, and whatever appeared in his imagination, he could see in front of him as something that really existed, real. From the age of 19 to 26, Cardano was under the patronage of a special spirit, like the one that once provided services to his father, and this spirit not only gave him advice, but even revealed the future. However, even after 26 years, supernatural forces did not leave him without assistance: so, one day, when he prescribed the wrong medicine, the prescription, contrary to all the laws of gravity, jumped on the table and thereby warned him of the mistake.

Like a hypochondriac, Cardano imagined himself suffering from every disease he had ever heard or read about: palpitations, sittophobia, abdominal swelling, urinary incontinence, gout, hernia, etc.; but all these illnesses passed without any treatment or only as a result of prayers to the Blessed Virgin. Sometimes it seemed to him that the meat he ate was soaked in sulfur or melted wax, at other times he saw lights in front of him, some kind of ghosts - and all this was accompanied by terrible earthquakes, although those around him did not notice anything like that.

Further, Cardano imagined that he was being pursued and spied on by all governments, that a whole host of enemies had taken up arms against him, whom he did not even know by name and had never seen and who, as he himself says, in order to disgrace and drive him to despair, Even his dearly beloved son was condemned to death. Finally, it seemed to him that the professors of the university in Pavia poisoned him, inviting him to their place especially for this purpose, so that if he remained safe and sound, it was only thanks to the help of St. Martin and the Virgin Mary. And such things were expressed by the writer who was the bold predecessor of Dupuy and Renan in theology!

Cardano himself admitted that he had all the vices: he was prone to drunkenness, gambling, lying, debauchery and envy. He also says that four times during the full moon he noticed signs of complete insanity in himself.

His impressionability was perverted to such an extent that he felt good only under the influence of some kind of physical pain, so much so that he even inflicted it on himself artificially, biting his lips or hands until they bled. “If nothing hurt me,” he writes, “I tried to induce pain for the sake of the pleasant sensation that the cessation of pain gave me, and also because, when I did not experience physical suffering, my moral torment became so strong that all pain seemed insignificant to me in comparison with them.” These words fully explain why many crazy people, with some kind of pleasure, inflict physical suffering on themselves in the most terrible ways.

Finally, Cardano believed so blindly in prophetic dreams that he even published the absurd essay “On Dreams.” He was guided by dreams in the most important cases of his life, for example, when giving medical advice, when concluding his marriage, and among other things, under the influence of dreams, he wrote essays, such as “On the Variety of Things” and “On Fevers.”

Having been impotent until the age of 34, in a dream he again gained the ability to have sex, and in the dream his future life partner was indicated to him, though not a particularly good one, the daughter of some robber, whom, according to him, he had never seen before. This insane belief in dreams so possessed Cardano that he was guided by them even in his medical practice, which he himself proudly admitted.

We could cite many more facts from the life of this brilliant madman, sometimes funny and absurd, sometimes terrible and outrageous, but we will limit ourselves to one that combines all these qualities of him - a dream concerning a precious stone (gemma).

In May 1560, when Cardano was already in his 62nd year, his son was publicly recognized as a poisoner. This misfortune deeply shocked the poor old man, who already did not have peace of mind. He sincerely loved his son like a father, proof of which is, by the way, a charming poem "For the Death of a Son", where true grief is expressed in such a highly artistic form, and at the same time, as a proud man, he hoped to see in his son the same talents that he himself possessed. In addition, in this condemnation, which further strengthened his extravagant ideas of a lipemaniac, the unfortunate man considered his imaginary enemies, who had conspired against him, to blame. “Overwhelmed by such grief,” he writes on this occasion, “I sought in vain for relief in studies, in play and in physical suffering, biting my hands or striking myself in the legs” (we know that he had previously resorted to a similar remedy for your peace of mind). “I had not slept for the third night, and finally, about two hours before dawn, feeling that I should either die or go crazy, I began to pray to God to deliver me from this life. Then, completely unexpectedly, I fell asleep and suddenly felt that someone was approaching me, hidden from me by the surrounding darkness, and saying: “Why are you grieving for your son?.. Take the stone hanging on your neck into your mouth, and “As long as you touch him with your lips, you will not remember your son.” When I woke up, I did not believe that there could be any connection between the emerald and oblivion, but, not knowing any other way to alleviate unbearable suffering, and remembering the sacred saying “Credidit, et reputatum ei est ad justitiam” I took the emerald into my mouth. And what? Contrary to my expectations, all memory of my son suddenly disappeared from my memory, so that I fell asleep again. Then, for a year and a half, I took my precious stone out of my mouth only while eating and lecturing, but then the previous suffering returned to me.” This strange treatment was based on a play on words (untranslatable in Russian), since gioia - joy and gemma - precious stone come from the same root. To tell the truth, Cardano in this case did not even need the revelation made to him during sleep, because even earlier, based on an etymology that he had misunderstood, he attributed to precious stones a beneficial effect on people.

At the end of his long-suffering life, Cardano, like Rousseau and Haller, wrote his autobiography and predicted the day of his desired death. On the appointed day, he actually died, or perhaps killed himself, to prove the infallibility of his prediction.

Let us now get acquainted with the life of Tasso. For those who are unfamiliar with the Verga brochure "Tasso's Lipemania", we present an excerpt from his letter, where he says about himself: “I am constantly in such a melancholy mood that everyone considers me crazy, and I myself share this opinion, since, not being able to restrain my anxious thoughts, I often and I talk to myself for a long time. I am tormented by various obsessions, sometimes human, sometimes devilish. The first are the cries of people, especially women, and the laughter of animals, the second are the sounds of songs, etc. When I pick up a book and want to study, voices are heard in my ears, and I can hear them pronouncing the name of Paolo Fulvia.” .

In his essay “Messaggero” (“messenger, or Messiah”), which later became the subject of hallucinations for Tasso, he confessed several times that he had lost his mind due to abuse of wine and love. Therefore, it seems to me that he portrayed himself in "Tirsi dell'Aminta" and in that lovely octave that another lipemaniac, Rousseau, loved to repeat:

Tormented by fear, doubt and anger,

I must live as a lonely wanderer,

Always scared with crazy anxiety

Ghosts of dark and menacing visions,

Created by myself in the hour of illness.

The sun will shine on me in vain,

In him I will see not a brother, not a friend,

But only an obstacle to my torment...

In vain efforts to get away from myself,

I will forever remain with myself.

Under the influence of hallucinations or in a fit of rage, Tasso once grabbed a knife, rushed with it at a servant who entered the office of the Tuscan Duke, and was imprisoned for this. Reporting this fact, the envoy who was then in Tuscany says that the unfortunate poet was imprisoned rather to cure than to punish for such an extravagant act.

After this, Tasso constantly moved from place to place, finding peace nowhere: he was haunted everywhere by melancholy, unreasonable remorse, fear of being poisoned and fear of the torments of hell awaiting him for the heretical opinions he expressed, of which he accused himself in three letters , addressed "too meek" to the inquisitor.

“I am constantly tormented by heavy, sad thoughts,” Tasso complained to the doctor Cavallaro, “as well as various fantastic images and ghosts; In addition, I still suffer from weakness of memory, so I ask you that something be added to the pills that you prescribe for me to strengthen it.” “I have fits of rage,” he wrote to Gonzago, “and I am surprised that no one has yet written down what things I sometimes say to myself, arbitrarily endowing myself with imaginary honors, favors and courtesies from ordinary people, emperors and kings."

This strange letter serves as proof that Tasso interspersed dark, painful thoughts with funny and cheerful ones. Unfortunately, the former appeared much more often, as he beautifully expressed it in the following sonnet:

I'm tired of fighting the crowd of shadows

Sad and gloomy or lightly beautiful,

Is it my imagination of pathetic children,

Or are they really dangerous enemies for me?

Will I find the strength to defeat them alone?

Helpless, weak hermit, -

I don’t know, but fear rules over me,

Isn't he my magician?

In the last lines there is noticeable doubt about the reality of the hallucinations caused by delirium, which serves as proof of how stubbornly this powerful mind, accustomed to logical thinking, fought against painful, absurd ideas. But - alas! – such doubts appeared too rarely. After some time, Tasso wrote to Cattaneo: “Now I rather need an exorcism than a medicine, because my illness supernatural origin. I’ll say a few words about the brownie: this scoundrel often steals money from me, creates complete chaos in my books, opens drawers and carries away keys, so there is no way to protect myself from him. I suffer constantly, especially at night, and I know that my suffering is due to insanity (frenesia)" In another letter he says: “When I am awake, it seems to me that bright lights are flashing in the air in front of me, and my eyes are sometimes so inflamed that I am afraid of losing my sight; at other times I hear a terrible roar, whistling, rattling, ringing of bells and such an unpleasant noise, as if from the striking of several wall clocks. And in a dream I see that a horse rushes at me and knocks me to the ground, or that I am covered all over with unclean animals. After this, all my limbs ache, my head becomes heavy, but suddenly, in the midst of such suffering and horror, the image of the Holy Virgin, young and beautiful, appears in front of me, holding in her arms her son, crowned with rainbow radiance.” After leaving the hospital, he told the same Cattaneo that the “brownie” was distributing letters containing information about him, Tasso. “I consider this,” he said, “one of those miracles that often happened to me in the hospital: without a doubt, this is the work of some magician, for which I have a lot of evidence, and especially the fact that one day “At three o’clock, before my eyes, my bread disappeared somewhere.” When Tasso fell ill with a fever, the Virgin Mary cured him with her appearance, and in gratitude to her for this he wrote a sonnet that resembled "Messaggero". The spirit appeared to the unfortunate poet in such a tangible form that he spoke to him and almost touched him with his hands. This spirit evoked in him ideas that, according to him, had not previously occurred to him.

Swift, the father of irony and humor, already in his youth predicted that madness awaited him; Walking one day in the garden with Jung, he saw an elm tree, almost devoid of leaves at its top, and said: “I will begin to die in the same way from the head.” Proud to the extreme in high society, Swift willingly visited the dirtiest taverns and spent time there in the company of gamblers. As a priest, he wrote books of anti-religious content, so it was said about him that before he could be given the rank of bishop, he should be baptized again. Weak-minded, deaf, powerless, ungrateful regarding friends - this is how he described himself. The inconsistency in him was amazing: he fell into terrible despair over the death of his dearly beloved Stella and at the same time composed comic letters “About Servants.” A few months after this, he lost his memory, and all he had left was his old, harsh, razor-sharp tongue. Then he fell into misanthropy and spent a whole year alone, not seeing anyone, not talking to anyone, and not reading anything; he walked around his room for ten hours a day, always ate while standing, refused meat, and became furious when anyone entered his room. However, after the appearance of boils, he began to seem to be getting better and often spoke about himself: "I'm crazy", but this bright interval did not last long, and poor Swift again fell into a senseless state, although glimpses of irony, which remained in him even after the loss of reason, still flared up from time to time; Thus, when an illumination was organized in his honor in 1745, he interrupted his long silence with the words: “It would be better if these madmen did not drive others crazy.”

In 1745, Swift died with a complete breakdown of mental faculties. He left behind a will written long before, in which he allocated 11,000 pounds sterling in favor of the mentally ill. The epitaph he composed for himself at the same time serves as an expression of the terrible moral suffering that constantly tormented him: “Here lies Swift, whose heart no longer breaks with proud contempt.”

Newton, who conquered all of humanity with his mind, as his contemporaries rightly wrote about him, in his old age also suffered from a real mental disorder, although not as strong as the above-mentioned brilliant people. It was then that he probably wrote “Chronology”, “Apocalypse” and “Letter to Bentley”, works that are vague, confusing and completely different from what he wrote in his younger years.

In 1693, after the second fire in his house and after excessively intense studies, Newton, in the presence of the archbishop, began to express such strange, absurd judgments that his friends found it necessary to take him away and surround him with the most careful care. At this time, Newton, who had previously been so timid that even in a carriage he could only ride by holding the door handles, started a duel with Villars, who certainly wanted to fight in the Cevennes. A little later, he wrote the following two letters, the confused and confused style of which fully proves that the famous scientist had not yet recovered from the mania of persecution that had seized him, which actually developed again in him several years later. Thus, in a letter to Locke, he says: “Assuming that you wanted to confuse (embrill) me with the help of women and other temptations, and noticing that you were feeling ill, I began to expect (desire) your death. I ask you to apologize for this, as well as for the fact that I recognized both your essay “On Ideas” and those that you will subsequently publish as immoral. I considered you a follower of Hobbes. Please forgive me for thinking and saying that you wanted to sell me a place and confuse me. Your ill-fated Newton." He speaks somewhat more clearly about himself in a letter to Pepi: “With the approach of winter, all my habits became confused, then the illness brought this confusion to the point that for two weeks I did not sleep a single hour, and during the last five days not even a single second.” (what mathematical precision). I remember writing to you, but I don’t know what exactly; if you send me a letter, I will explain it to you.” Newton was at that time in such a state that when he was asked for clarification about some place in his works, he answered: “Contact De Moivre - he understands this more than I do.”

Anyone who, having never been in a mental hospital, would like to get a true idea of ​​the mental anguish experienced by a lipemaniac, should only read the works of Rousseau, especially the last of them, i.e. "Confession", "Dialogues" And "Dreams of a Passerby"(Reveries).

“I have burning passions,” writes Rousseau in his "Confession", - and under their influence I forget about all relationships, even about love: I see in front of me only the object of my desires, but this lasts only one minute, after which I again fall into apathy, into exhaustion. Some picture seduces me more than the money with which I could buy it! I see a thing... I like it; I also have the means to purchase it, but no, this does not satisfy me. Besides, when I like something, I prefer take it yourself, and not ask to be given it to me.” This is the difference between a kleptomaniac and an ordinary thief, that the first steals out of instinct, out of need, the second out of calculation, for the sake of acquisition; The first is attracted by every thing he likes, while the second is attracted only by valuable things.

“Being a slave to my feelings,” he continues, “I could never resist them; The most insignificant pleasure in the present tempts me more than all the joys of heaven.”

And indeed, for the sake of the pleasure of attending the brotherly feast (of Father Ponthière), Rousseau became an apostate, and as a result of his cowardice, without compassion, he abandoned his epileptic friend on the road.

However, it is not only his passions that are distinguished by morbid ardor - his mental abilities themselves were in an abnormal state from childhood to old age, evidence of which we also find in the “Confession”, such as, for example:

“My imagination runs wilder the worse my health is. My head is so structured that I do not know how to find charm in really existing good things, but only in imaginary ones. In order for me to describe spring beautifully, I need it to be winter.”

From this it becomes clear why Swift, also a madman, wrote the most cheerful of his letters during Stella's death throes and why both he and Rousseau portrayed everything absurd with such skill.

“Real suffering has little influence on me,” continues Rousseau, “I am much more tormented by those that I invent for myself: the expected misfortune for me is more terrible than what I have already experienced.”

Is this why some take their own lives out of fear of death?

As soon as Rousseau read some medical book, he immediately imagined that he had all the diseases described in it, and he was amazed at how he remained alive, suffering from such ailments. By the way, he imagined that he had a polyp of the heart. According to his own explanation, such oddities appeared in him due to exaggerated, abnormal sensitivity, which did not have the correct outcome.

“There are times,” he says, “when I am so little like myself that I can be considered a completely different person. In a calm state I am extremely timid, ideas arise in my head slowly, heavily, vaguely, only with a certain excitement; I’m shy and don’t know how to put two words together; under the influence of passion, on the contrary, I suddenly become eloquent. The most absurd, crazy, childish plans fascinate, captivate me and seem easy to implement. So, for example, when I was 18 years old, I went with a friend to travel, taking with me a bronze fountain, and was sure that by showing it to the peasants, we would not only feed ourselves, but even get rich.”

The unfortunate Rousseau tried almost all professions, from the highest to the lowest, and did not stop at any of them: he was a renegade for money, and a watchmaker, and a magician, and a music teacher, and a painter, and an engraver, and a footman, and finally something like a secretary at the embassy.

In the same way, in literature and in science, he took on all branches, working now in medicine, now in music theory, now in botany, theology and pedagogy. Abuse of mental work (especially harmful for a thinker, whose ideas developed slowly and with difficulty), as well as ever-increasing pride, little by little turned the hypochondriac into a melancholic and, finally, a real maniac. “Excitement and anger shook me to such an extent,” he says, “that I suffered from rabies for ten years and only now have I calmed down.” Calmed down! Despite the fact that a chronic mental disorder did not allow him, even for a short time, to find the boundary between real suffering and imaginary ones.

For the sake of rest, he left the big world, where he always felt awkward, and retired to a secluded area, to a village; but even there city life did not give him peace: painful vanity and echoes of secular noise darkened the beauty of nature for him. In vain Rousseau tried to escape into the forests - madness followed him there and overtook him everywhere.

Thus, Rousseau was, as it were, the personification of the image that Tasso created in his octave:

...and trying to hide from myself,

I will always stay with myself.

He probably alluded to this poem when he assured Corancez that he considered Tasso his prophet. Then the unfortunate author of “Emile” began to imagine that Prussia, England, France, kings, women, the clergy, in general the entire human race, offended by some passages of his writings, declared a fierce war on him, the consequences of which explained the mental suffering he experienced.

End of introductory fragment.

Cesare Lombroso (Italian: Cesare Lombroso)(November 6, 1835, Verona, Italy - October 19, 1909, Turin, Italy) - Italian prison psychiatrist, founder of the anthropological trend in criminology and criminal law, the main idea of ​​which was the idea of ​​a born criminal.

In 1863, the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso published his book “Genius and Insanity. Introduction to a course in a psychiatric clinic given at the University of Pavia.” Milan, 1863 (Russian translation by K. Tetyushinova, 1892), in which he draws a parallel between great people and madmen.

I. Introduction to Historical Review

Caesar Lombroso

Referring to the opinion of ancient Greek scientists - Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, as well as the conclusions of some modern psychiatrists, Lombroso states: “As a result of such views on madness, the ancient peoples treated the insane with great respect, considering them inspired from above, which is confirmed, in addition to historical facts, also because the words mania are in Greek, navi and mesugan are in Hebrew, and anigrata in Sanskrit mean both madness and prophecy.”

An analysis of the lives and works of some of the great modern writers also testifies in favor of the hypothesis that insanity contributes to genius. "In recent times, Lelu - in Démon de Socrate, 1856, and BAmulet de Pascal, 1846, Verga - in Lipemania del Tasso, 1850, and Lombroso in Pazzia di Cardano, 1856, have proven that many men of genius, for example Swift, Luther, Cardano, Brougham and others suffered from insanity, hallucinations or were monomaniacs for a long time."

II. Similarities between genius people and crazy people in physiological terms

“A talented person acts strictly deliberately; he knows how and why he came to a certain theory, while this is completely unknown to a genius: all creative activity is unconscious.” Due to this circumstance, deviations of a physiological nature - head bruises, the tendency of the nervous system to states of acute excitement and feeling create the prerequisites for the creation of brilliant works.

Lombroso gives numerous examples:

“Goethe says that a poet needs a certain cerebral stimulation and that he himself composed many of his songs while in a kind of fit of somnambulism. Klopstock admits that when he wrote his poem, inspiration often came to him during sleep.”

Lombroso's conclusion: "Thus, the greatest ideas of thinkers, prepared, so to speak, by impressions already received and by the highly sensitive organization of the subject, are born suddenly and develop as unconsciously as the rash actions of madmen."

III. The influence of atmospheric phenomena on people of genius and on the insane

For three years, Lombrazo has been studying the influence of atmosphere on genius and insanity. “The study of 23,602 cases of insanity proved to me that the development of insanity usually coincides with the rise in temperature in spring and summer and even goes parallel to it, but in such a way that the spring heat, due to the contrast after the winter cold, acts even more strongly than the summer, while the comparatively even warmth of the August days has a less destructive effect. In the following colder months, a minimum of new diseases is noticed."

Studying the statements of geniuses, Lombroso comes to the conclusion that there is a high positive connection between weather conditions and creative upswings.

“I am like a barometer,” Alfieri wrote, “and the greater or lesser ease of work always corresponds to my atmospheric pressure - complete dullness (stupidita) attacks me during strong winds, my clarity of thought is infinitely weaker in the evening than in the morning, and in "In the middle of winter and summer, my creative abilities are more alive than in other seasons. Such dependence on external influences, against which I am almost powerless to fight, humbles me."

Having examined a large number of empirical facts, Lombroso makes one of the most interesting statements: “If only the historians who have written so much paper and spent so much time in detailing the cruel battles or adventurous enterprises carried out by kings and heroes, if only these historians had examined with the same care the memorable epoch when this or that great discovery was made or when a remarkable work of art was conceived, they would almost certainly be convinced that the hottest months and days turn out to be the most fertile not only for the whole of physical nature, but also for brilliant minds." “I will also add that in those few cases where the creations of great people can be traced almost day after day, their activity in winter constantly turns out to be intensified on warmer days and weakened on cold ones.”

IV. The influence of meteorological phenomena on the birth of brilliant people

Another statistical parallel:

“It has long been noticed by both common people and scientists that in mountainous countries with a warm climate there are especially many brilliant people. A popular Tuscan proverb says: “Highlanders have thick legs, but tender brains.”

“The well-known fact that in mountainous countries the inhabitants are more susceptible to madness than in lowland ones is confirmed by quite psychiatric statistics. In addition, the latest observations prove that epidemic madness is much more common in the mountains than in the valleys.”

V. The Influence of Race and Heredity on Genius and Insanity

Lombroso took the Jews as a striking example of the influence of nationality on genius and insanity.

“It should also be noted that almost all brilliant people of Jewish origin showed a great inclination to create new systems, to change the social structure of society; in political science they were revolutionaries, in theology - founders of new creeds, so that the Jews, in essence, owe, if not their origin, then at least their development, on the one hand, nihilism and socialism, and on the other, Christianity and mosaicism, just as in trade they were the first to introduce bills of exchange, in philosophy - positivism, and in literature - neo-humorism (neo-humorism). umorismo). And at the same time, it is among Jews that there are four and even five times more crazy people than among their fellow citizens belonging to other nationalities."

The influence of heredity on genius and insanity also does not go unnoticed by statistics. “There is no doubt that insanity is only in rare cases a consequence of bad upbringing, while the influence of heredity in this case is so great that it reaches 88 per 100 according to Tigges’ calculations and up to 85 per 100 according to Golgi’s calculations. As for genius, Galton and Ribot (De l'Hérédité, 1878) considers it most often to be the result of hereditary abilities, especially in the art of music, which produces such a huge percentage of the insane. Thus, among musicians, the sons of Palestrina, Benda, Dussek, Hiller, Mozart, Eichhorn were distinguished by their remarkable talents; The Bach family produced 8 generations of musicians, of which 57 were famous."

What is the extent of the connection between talent and insanity in one family? Here Lombroso again refers to numerous historical examples.

"But even more instructive in this regard are the biographies of great people. Frederick the Great's father and Johnson's mother were crazy, Peter the Great's son was a drunkard and a maniac; Richelieu's sister imagined that her back was made of glass, and Hegel's sister imagined that she had turned into a mail bag; sister Nicolini considered herself condemned to eternal torment for her brother's heretical beliefs and tried several times to wound him. Sister Lamba killed her mother in a fit of rage; Charles V's mother suffered from melancholy and insanity; Zimmermann's brother was insane; Beethoven's father was a drunkard; Byron’s mother is crazy, his father is a shameless libertine, his grandfather is a famous navigator; therefore Ribot had every right to say about Byron that “the eccentricity of his character can be fully justified by heredity, since he came from ancestors who possessed all the vices that can disrupt the harmonious development character and take away all the qualities necessary for family happiness." Schopenhauer's uncle and grandfather were crazy, but his father was an eccentric and subsequently became a suicide. Kerner's sister suffered from melancholy, and the children were insane and prone to somnambulism. In the same way, the following suffered from mental disorders: Carlini, Mercadante, Donizetti, Volta; Manzoni had crazy sons, Villemin had a father and brothers, Comte had a sister, Perticari and Puccinotti had brothers. D'Azelio's grandfather and brother were distinguished by such oddities that the whole of Turin was talking about them.

VI. Brilliant people who suffered from insanity

Garrington, Bolian, Codazzi, Ampere, Kent, Schumann, Tasso, Cardano, Swift, Newton, Rousseau, Lenau, Sheheni, Schopenhauer are vivid examples of the connection between genius and insanity, according to Lombroso.

“Schumann, the harbinger of that direction in musical art, which is known as the “music of the future,” was born into a wealthy family, could freely practice his favorite art, and in his wife, Clara Wieck, found a gentle, quite worthy lifelong friend. Despite this , already at the age of 24 he became a victim of lipemania, and at the age of 46 he almost lost his mind: he was either haunted by talking tables possessing omniscience, or he saw sounds that haunted him, which first formed into chords, and then into whole musical phrases. Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated various melodies to him from their graves. In 1854, Schumann threw himself into the river, but was rescued and died in Bonn. An autopsy revealed the formation of osteophytes - thickening of the meninges and brain atrophy."

“Swift, the father of irony and humor, already in his youth predicted that madness awaited him; while walking one day in the garden with Jung, he saw an elm tree, almost devoid of leaves at its top, and said: “I will begin to die in the same way from the head.” Extremely proud of his superiors, Swift willingly visited the dirtiest taverns and spent time there in the company of gamblers.As a priest, he wrote books of anti-religious content, so that they said about him that before giving him the rank of bishop, he should be baptized again. Weak-minded, deaf, powerless, ungrateful regarding his friends - this is how he described himself. The inconsistency in him was amazing: he fell into terrible despair over the death of his dearly beloved Stella and at the same time composed comic letters “About Servants.” After a few months after this, he lost his memory, and all he had left was his former harsh, razor-sharp tongue.Then he fell into misanthropy and spent a whole year alone, not seeing anyone, not talking to anyone, and not reading anything; he walked around his room for ten hours a day, always ate while standing, refused meat, and became furious when anyone entered his room. However, after the appearance of boils (vereda), he began to seem to be getting better and often said about himself: “I’m crazy,” but this bright period did not last long, and poor Swift again fell into a senseless state, although glimpses of irony remained in him even after losing their minds, they still flared up from time to time; Thus, when an illumination was organized in his honor in 1745, he interrupted his long silence with the words: “Let these madmen at least not drive others crazy.”

In 1745, Swift died with a complete breakdown of mental faculties. He left behind a will written long before, in which he refused 11,000 pounds sterling in favor of the mentally ill. The epitaph he composed for himself at the same time serves as an expression of the terrible moral suffering that constantly tormented him: “Here lies Swift, whose heart no longer breaks with proud contempt.”

VII. Examples of geniuses, poets, comedians and other crazy people

Summarizing the work of poets and humorists in psychiatric clinics, Lombroso makes several interesting conclusions. “Thanks to their more vivid imagination and rapid association of ideas, madmen often accomplish with great ease what the most gifted healthy, normal people find difficult, as is proved by the characterization of Lazaretti we cited earlier, written without any effort by a madman, while many Allenists labored in vain at it. including the famous Doctor Michetti, who, of course, had greater insight and - what is even more important - an incomparably large amount of data to make a correct diagnosis. Another characteristic feature of such writers - and this is noticeable even in the works of criminals - is a passion for talking about themselves or their loved ones and compose their autobiographies, while giving full rein to selfishness and vanity.It should be noted, however, that ordinary madmen display in their writings less artificiality in expression and less consistency than criminals, but they have more creative power and originality compared to these the last ones. Further, the writers of the insane asylum are extremely prone to use consonances, often completely meaningless, and invent new words or give a special meaning to existing words and exaggerate the meaning of the most insignificant details; Thus, Farina devotes almost half a page to describing the bar of soap he bought.

Many mentally ill people, although not as often as mattoids (touched, damaged), have a noticeable desire to supplement their poetic inventions with drawings, as if neither poetry nor painting alone are strong enough to express their ideas. The style is affected by a lack of correctness and finishing; but the periods are distinguished by such strength and completeness that in this respect they are not inferior to the works of exemplary writers.

Such mastery of presentation and the ability to versify, manifested in people who before the disease did not even have a concept of prosody, will not seem especially amazing to us if we recall Byron’s definition of poetry: in his opinion, based on his own experience, “poetry is the expression of passion.” , which manifests itself more powerfully, the stronger the excitement that caused it." From this it becomes clear why the crazy develop such a strong imagination, often even turning into complete unbridledness. The richness of imagination and passionate excitement have always been powerful factors in creative activity."

Autobiography of a Madman (to Chapter VII)

Lombroso gives an example from his psychiatric practice, extremely interesting even from the point of view of forensic psychiatry, “since in this case, in addition to the undoubted literary talent temporarily caused by madness, we also have proof that insane people can feign madness under the influence of some passion , especially out of fear of punishment."

“One poor shoemaker, named Farina, whose father, uncle and cousin were crazy and cretins, still a young man, had long suffered from insanity and hallucinations, but in appearance seemed cheerful and calm. Suddenly the fantasy came to him to kill a woman who had not done anything to him. nothing bad, the mother of the girl whom, under the influence of the erotic delirium characteristic of the insane, he considered his mistress, although, in essence, he only saw her briefly.Imagining that this woman was inciting invisible enemies against him, whose voices did not give him peace, Farina stabbed her to death with a knife, and he fled to Milan. No one would have even suspected him of committing such a crime if he, having returned to Pavia, had not come to the police bureau himself and confessed to the murder, presenting for greater persuasiveness the sheath of that knife , which dealt the fatal blow, but then, when he was sent to prison, he repented of this act and pretended to suffer from a complete loss of reason, although he no longer had this form of insanity at that time. When I was invited as an expert to resolve the issue of the mental state of a criminal, I hesitated for a long time what conclusion to come to about him and how to make sure that, although he was insane, he was at the same time pretending to be insane. Finally he was admitted to my clinic, where I could observe him carefully and where he wrote his detailed biography for me; Only then did it become clear to me that in front of me was a real monomaniac.

This biography*, in my opinion, is a most precious document in the field of pathological anatomy of thought, as obvious proof of the possibility not only of the appearance of hallucinations while all other mental functions are normal, but also of an uncontrollable impulse to commit an offense with the consciousness of responsibility for it, as I have already pointed out Professor Herzen in his wonderful essay “On Free Will”.

The autobiography is given in full in the appendix to the main text of the book.

Literary works of madmen (to Chapter VII)

Of particular interest is the Diary of the Pesaro Lunatic Asylum, as it is the first of its kind in Italy to be kept exclusively by the mentally ill (since 1872). Therefore, it can serve as an inexhaustible source of, so to speak, phrenopathic literature. It is dominated by autobiographies and biographies, sometimes written in extremely flowery language. Here, for example, is how one young man suffering from suicidal mania and moral insanity (mania morale) depicts his state of mind, which does not, however, prevent him from being a talented painter:

Contravolonta

Anti-will is a terrible thing, and I can speak about it from experience, which is too bitter, because it took away from me all the charm from the world around me and turned my calm, pleasant past life into a heavy and painful burden. This is what we are essentially talking about: to really live in this world, it is not enough for a person to just eat and sleep, he also needs to manage his abilities, he needs to have a goal in life and find pleasure in his activities. But dragging out a miserable existence with difficulty, not taking any part in the joys of life, is not worth it - it is a thousand times better to die or lose all self-awareness. This is exactly the same story that happened to me. Accustomed to a quiet and calm life, I suddenly saw myself drawn into a whirlpool of cruel suffering; My poor brain, shocked by such absurdity, refused to work as before, I could no longer freely talk about my affairs, and it was from this that anti-will was born, or the constraint of a person’s natural freedom, the inability to work and act, as if some material force binds individuality . I now do not have sufficient power over myself to give my actions the direction I desire, as a result of which fear, melancholy, and aversion to life arise. At first I felt some kind of vague anxiety, a painful heaviness, then this force grew, became more powerful, more persistent, so that it finally destroyed all contentment in me and forced me to spend time in the most painful boredom. At night I could not sleep, usually falling asleep for an hour or two, and the days became a painful pastime for me, since I absolutely don’t know what to do with myself, where to lay my head, what direction to give my thoughts - and everything mercy against will. I hear talk about family happiness, peace of mind, satisfaction of pride, mutual affection between people, but I myself cannot experience anything like that; I measure the hours slowly, and my whole concern is to be as bored as possible. Therefore, I would ask that a strong reaction be produced in my brain and that I be allowed to see my family. A beneficial shock could have brought me enormous benefit: cruel emotional excitement ruined me, another emotion, only of a different kind, could have saved me. I haven’t seen my family for so many years, and Mr. Director understands how unpleasant it is. If I did any inconsistencies, it depended on the evil fate (fatalita), in the power of which I am, and not on my character, which was always considered excellent, which should also be taken into account.

VIII. Crazy artists and artists

"Du Can and I were able to comprehensively investigate the question that occupied us with the manifestation of artistic inclinations in the insane with the help of rich material collected in the insane hospitals located in Pesaro and Pavia, as well as thanks to the recent phreniatric exhibition in Reggio * and the assistance of many specialists who helped us not only with advice, but also with the delivery of many interesting documents and facsimiles. Based on the data collected in this way, we found artistic inclinations in 107 crazy people, including 46 people who were engaged in painting, 10 - sculpture, 11 - carving, 8 - music, 5 - architecture and 27 - poetry."

Lombroso collects any mention of peculiarities of creativity of patients.

“Of the eight painters who were in Perugia, whose characteristics Adriani sent me, four retained their talent completely under the influence of acute or intermittent madness; in two, the talent weakened significantly, so that upon recovery they destroyed the paintings painted during illness; in one, it completely disappeared, and finally, the last one - the lipemaniac - lost the correctness of drawing and color. One painter, Verga writes to me, used red paint in such excess that all the figures he painted seemed to depict drunken people. Alcoholics, on the contrary, always abuse yellow paint, which Frigerio noticed and in one patient who suffered from moral insanity.There is also a known case where an alcoholic painter lost all ability to distinguish colors and became so perfect in using only white paint for his paintings, which he painted in the intervals between periods of heavy drinking, that he became the first in all of France artist of winter and northern landscapes. Cretins, idiots, weak-minded people either draw figures of children, or constantly reproduce the same drawing, like Grundy, for example, although they sometimes display remarkable abilities in coloring and composing arabesques: I myself happened to see cretins twice who beautifully drew ciphers. Often, even people in a normal state, who did not feel any inclination towards art, after an illness suddenly begin to draw and work most diligently precisely at the moment of its greatest development.”

Lombroso examines in detail features of patient drawings, highlighting the main ones.

1) The choice of subject is determined for many by the nature of the mental disorder: the lipemaniac constantly drew a man with a skull in his hand; a woman who suffered from megalomania would certainly place an image of the deity on her embroidery; Monomaniacs for the most part use some kind of emblem to designate the imaginary disasters that torment them. I have a libel composed by an official from Voger, who imagined that he was being pursued by the prefect through the winds; Therefore, he depicted in the drawing, on one side, a crowd of enemies chasing him, and on the other, judges protecting him. One woman, suffering from persecution mania and partly from erotic insanity, painted an image of the Virgin Mary, and in the caption under it she hinted that it was her own image.

2) Mental disorder often causes in patients, as we have already seen in relation to geniuses and even relatively brilliant madmen, extraordinary originality in invention, which is sharply expressed even in the works of half-insane people. The reason for this is clear: their unrestrained imagination creates such bizarre images that a healthy mind would recoil, recognizing them as illogical and absurd. So, for example, in Pesaro there was a lady who came up with a special way of embroidering, or rather laying out: she pulled threads out of fabric and then glued them onto paper with saliva.

3) But in the end, even originality itself turns into something strange, bizarre and seemingly logical for all or almost all crazy people only when we know the point of their insanity and when we imagine to what extent their imagination is unbridled. Simon noticed that in persecution mania, as well as in paralytic megalomania, the imagination is the more vivid and the power of creative, eccentric fantasy is more active, the less normal the state of mental abilities. One mentally ill painter, for example, claimed that he saw the bowels of the earth, and in them - many crystal houses, illuminated by electricity and filled with a wonderful aroma and charming images. Next, he described the city of Emma that seemed to him, whose inhabitants had two mouths and two noses - one for ordinary use, and the other for more aesthetic use; their brain is silver, their hair is golden, their arms are three or four, and they have only one leg and a small wheel is attached under it.

4) One of the characteristic features of the artistic creativity of madmen is the almost constant use of written signs together with drawings, and in these latter there is an abundance of symbols and hieroglyphs. Such mixed works are extremely similar to the paintings of the Japanese, Indians, and ancient wall paintings of the Egyptians and are determined by the madmen for the same reasons as among the ancient peoples, i.e. the need to supplement the meaning of a word or picture, which alone is not strong enough to express a given idea with the desired clarity and completeness. This explanation is quite applicable to the fact that Monty told me, when a mute man, who suffered from insanity for 15 years, added to the plan of some building that he had drawn absolutely correctly, adding a lot of incomprehensible rhyming inscriptions, epigraphs, inscribed inside the plan and around it, obviously, for the purpose of serving as comments that the poor man could not give orally.

5) Some, although few, mentally ill people have, as Toselli notes, a strange tendency to draw arabesques and ornaments of almost geometrically regular shape, but at the same time extremely graceful; however, only monomaniacs exhibit this kind of peculiarity, while in the insane and maniacs chaotic disorder predominates, although sometimes it is also not devoid of grace, as is proven by the picture Monty told me and drawn by a madman, with the image of some building composed of a thousand tiny curls, beautifully mixed up with each other in all sorts of ways.

6) Further, for many, especially erotomaniacs, paralytics and the insane, drawings and poetic works are characterized by complete obscenity; Thus, one mentally ill carpenter carved male genitals on the corners of his furniture and on the tops of trees, which, however, again resembles the sculpture of savages and ancient peoples, in which genitals are found everywhere. Another, a captain from Genoa, constantly painted indecent scenes. Sometimes such artists try to disguise the cynicism of their drawings and explain it with the imaginary demands of art itself, such as, for example, a patient who imagined that he was depicting a picture of the Last Judgment, or a priest who painted naked figures and then shaded them so artistically that the genital organs, breasts and etc. stood out quite clearly, and to accusations of obscenity he objected that only people who were hostile to his drawings found it. This same subject often depicted a group of three persons - a woman in the arms of two men, one of whom was wearing the hat of a priest (Raja).

7) A common feature of most of the works of madmen is their uselessness, unnecessaryness for the workers themselves, which is fully confirmed by Heckart’s saying: “Working to create things that are useless for anything is an activity characteristic only of madmen.” Thus, one woman, suffering from persecution mania, worked for whole years, charmingly painting fragile eggs and lemons, but, apparently, without any purpose, because she always carefully hid her works, so that even to me, whom she considered her best friend, , managed to see them only after her death. The work of that patient who sewed only one boot for himself, as we talked about earlier, was of the same kind. One might think that crazy people, like brilliant artists, also adhere to the theory of art for art's sake, only in a perverted sense.

8) Sometimes crazy people create extremely useful things, but they are completely unsuitable for them personally, and, moreover, not in the specialty in which they were previously engaged. For example, one crazy quartermaster official came up with and made a model of a bed for raging patients, so practical that, in my opinion, this bed should have been put into use; two other officials worked together to make very pretty, carved match holders from ox bones, although they could not derive any benefit from this work, because they refused to sell their works. However, I happened to see many exceptions to this rule: for example, a melancholic man, suffering from mania for murder and suicide, made himself a knife and fork from the bones left over from dinner, which was very useful for him, since, on the orders of the director, he They did not provide metal knives and forks. A megalomaniac, a cafe attendant who was treated at the Colleño hospital, prepared excellent sweet vodka there, although the materials supplied to him by lovers of this drink were of the most varied quality. A fifty-year-old woman, suffering from fits of rabies, sewed a huge nightcap in the form of a helmet and could not sleep except by pulling it over her face to the very neck; a maniacal criminal made himself a key from splinters. I am not talking here about those who arranged for themselves real cuirasses made of iron or stones, since in this case the work was caused by the need to protect themselves from imaginary pursuers, and therefore the work was fully rewarded by the results obtained.

9) In the artistic work of madmen, of course, all sorts of absurdities prevail, both regarding color and the figures themselves, but this is especially noticeable in some maniacs due to an uneven, exaggerated association of ideas, which does not give room for intermediate shades in the embodiment of the image conceived by the artist. In the case of madmen, there are breaks in the association of ideas, as can be seen, for example, from the fact that one of them, wanting to depict the marriage at Cana, excellently painted all the apostles, and instead of the figure of Christ - a huge bouquet of flowers.

10) In some people, especially monomaniacs, we see, on the contrary, there is already too great an abundance of petty details, so that out of a desire to more accurately express the idea of ​​the drawing, they make it completely incomprehensible. In one landscape, for example, placed in Turin between paintings that were not accepted for the exhibition, in a field visible in the distance, all the blades of grass were clearly separated from one another, or in a huge painting the shading was made as thin as in a small pencil drawing.

11) Some of the crazy people show an amazing talent in imitation, in the ability to capture the appearance of an object, for example, they accurately copy the facade of a hospital, the heads of animals; but such, although very careful, drawings are usually devoid of grace and resemble the infant state of art.

Features of the musical art of patients

“In the art of music, the preponderance also appears to be on the side of megalomaniacs and paralytics, for the same reason as in painting, namely, due to the strongest mental excitement. Thus, with one of the paralytics, real musical paroxysms occurred throughout the duration of the illness , during which he imitated all kinds of instruments and, when playing quiet parts (piano), showed indescribable enthusiasm. Another paralytic, imagining herself to be a French empress, performed marches for her army with her lips and snapping her fingers and sang in time with these sounds.

Another paralytic patient, who considered himself an admiral general, also often sang some monotonous melodies. The original poet and painter megalomaniac M., who wrote sometimes charming and sometimes absurd poems, which we cited earlier, also wrote, or rather scribbled, some musical pieces according to a new system he himself invented, which, however, was not understandable to anyone.

Maniacs always prefer fast tempos on high notes, especially when in a cheerful mood, and love to repeat choruses (Raji). However, in general, all patients, even if only for a short time, find themselves in mental homes, show a great tendency to sing, scream, and to express their feelings in any way through sounds, and a certain meter and rhythm are always noticeable. The reason for this phenomenon, just like the abundance of mad poets, will be quite clear to us when we recall the opinion of Spencer and Ardigo, who prove that the law of rhythm is the most common form of manifestation of energy inherent in everything in nature, starting from stars, crystals and ending with animal organisms. Instinctively obeying this law of nature, a person strives to express it in all ways and with greater intensity, the weaker his reason is. That is why primitive peoples always love music with passion. Spencer heard from one missionary that to teach the savages he sang psalms to them, and the next day almost all of them already knew them by heart."

IX. Mattoid graphomaniacs, or psychopaths

Lombroso calls mattoids-graphomaniacs a variety that constitutes an intermediate link, a transitional stage between brilliant madmen, healthy people and the truly insane.

Literary works of the Mattoids (to Chapter IX)

Although they are most interested in politics, theology and poetry, they also study mathematics, physics, even histology and clinical medicine. Lombroso gives several examples.

Here in front of me is an essay in two large volumes entitled “New Pathology on Ancient Origins,” where, with the help of absurd and confusing quotes, the author tries to reduce all diseases to an ellipse. Even letters should have an elliptical shape, in his opinion, like all objects in general.

“Smells and tastes,” says the inventor of “New Pathology,” “also need to be placed on an elliptical scale, since they have an abstract focus - a pleasant or unpleasant sensation caused by them. Who does not know the elliptical properties of heat? The most perfect creatures, like man and angels, form an ellipse. Man consists of soul and body, elliptically connected to each other. All tissues consist of four substances, which, depending on whether the arterial or lymphatic origin predominates in them, penetrate into various tissues to a greater or lesser extent. Bones also of lymphatic origin, as is noticed when they are cooked, and consist of lymphatic, arterial, calcareous or gastric (ventrale) and fibrous or venous membranes,” etc.

Finally, there are many more works by Mattoid publicists proposing various extreme measures regarding state improvement. Among them there are especially many economists who come up with various projects to improve Italy’s finances. By the way, on this issue I came across a brochure with the following title: “On universal usury as the cause of the disruption of economic balance in our time - reasoning most respectfully proposed by one voter for the benefit of His Excellency, Chairman of the Council and Minister of Finance, Mr. Mark Minghetti, in order to prove the necessity, possibility, convenience and fairness of a patriotic loan of four billion for only one percent of a hundred, as the only means to counteract the usury of banks and achieve a strong balance in the balance sheet, and through this the abolition of the forced exchange rate without increasing or changing taxes."

This is the full title of the brochure. This means is based on a voluntary subscription or rather a forced loan through wealthy Jews. Something very similar is also proposed in the brochure entitled: “How to deliver a billion to the Ministry of Finance and Trade, and after that other billions.”

Graphomaniac criminals (to Chapter IX)

Lombroso describes examples of a special type of crazy or semi-crazy, “people extremely irritable and so vain, thirsting for fame that they are ready to achieve it by any means, but most often by attempting to kill crowned or important persons.”

Someone M.A. pretended to be a professor at Oxford University, who defeated 300 candidates and received a salary of 20 thousand rubles, although he did not speak English at all and knew Latin poorly; but he invented a way of teaching with which even someone who did not know English could teach it. Living in London, M.A. met a princess and imagined that she was in love with him, although she soon even refused him the house. He then published a voluminous volume of memoirs, in which he accused the princess of stealing his briefcase; then he wrote accusatory articles against the minister and submitted memos either to parliament or to the House of Lords. One of these latter even promised the author to interpellate his note, but at that very time M.A. suddenly moved to Paris, where he was taken under the protection of the emperor's chaplain.

After the fall of the empire M.A. turned to the Bishop of Limoges; however, he immediately realized who he was dealing with and sent the petitioner to a hospital for the insane.

X. "Prophets" and revolutionaries. Savonarola. Lazaretti

Lombroso tries to explain how great successes in the field of politics and religion of peoples were caused or at least planned thanks to madmen or half-madmen.

“The reason for this phenomenon is obvious: only in them, in these fanatics, next to originality, which is an integral part of both brilliant people and madmen, but even more so of brilliant madmen, exaltation and passion reach such strength that they can cause altruism, forcing a person to sacrifice his interests and even his very life for the propaganda of ideas to the crowd, which is always hostile to any novelty and is sometimes capable of bloody reprisals against innovators.

It goes without saying that they do not create anything new, but only give impetus to a movement prepared by time and circumstances; obsessed with a positive passion for any novelty, for everything original, they are almost always inspired by a newly discovered discovery, innovation, and on it they already build their conclusions about the future. Thus, Schopenhauer, who lived in an era when pessimism, with an admixture of mysticism and enthusiasm, began to come into fashion, according to Ribot, only combined the ideas of his time into a coherent philosophical system.

In the same way, Luther merely summarized the views of his predecessors and contemporaries, as evidenced by Savonarola’s sermons.”

“But the most important reason is that many of the insane often showed intelligence and will that significantly exceeded the general level of development of these qualities among the mass of other fellow citizens, absorbed in concerns about satisfying their material needs. It is further known that under the influence of passion, the strength and tension of the mind increase noticeably, and in some forms of insanity, which is nothing more than a morbid exaltation, they can be said to increase tenfold. The deep faith of these people in the reality of their hallucinations, the powerful, captivating eloquence with which they expressed their convictions, the contrast between their pitiful, unknown past and the greatness of their present situation, they naturally attached enormous importance to such madmen in the eyes of the crowd and elevated them above the general level of sane, but ordinary, ordinary people. Examples of such charm are Lazaretti, Briand, Loyola, Malinas, Joan of Arc , Anabaptists, etc. During the epidemic of prophecy that took place in the Cevennes and then recently appeared in Stockholm, completely uneducated individuals, maids, children, under the influence of the passion that gripped them, delivered sermons that were often distinguished by liveliness and eloquence.”

XI. Special characteristics of brilliant people who at the same time suffered from insanity

Speaking about the high connection between genius and insanity, Lombroso believes that there are many geniuses who are not mentally ill. Lombroso identifies 15 signs that distinguish healthy geniuses from those suffering from insanity.

Let's take the first two as an example:

1) First of all, it should be noted that these damaged geniuses have almost no character at all, that integral, real character, never changing at the whim of the wind, which is the lot of only a few chosen geniuses, like Cavour, Dante, Spinoza and Columbus. So, for example, Tasso constantly scolded high-ranking officials, and all his life he groveled before them and lived at court. Cardano himself accused himself of lies, slander and passion for the game. Rousseau, who flaunted his lofty feelings, showed complete ingratitude to the woman who showered him with blessings, abandoned his children to the mercy of fate, often slandered others and himself, and became an apostate three times, renouncing first Catholicism, then Protestantism, and finally - that the worst thing is from the religion of philosophers.

2) A healthy, brilliant person is aware of his strength, knows his worth, and therefore does not humiliate himself to complete equality with everyone; but on the other hand, he does not have even a shadow of that painful vanity, that monstrous pride that consumes mentally abnormal geniuses and makes them capable of all sorts of absurdities.

Anomalies of the skull in great people (to Chapter XI)

Lombroso summarizes various kinds of statistical data that testify in favor of the hypothesis of abnormal development of the brain or its parts in geniuses.

“In France, Le Bon, who examined 26 skulls of brilliant Frenchmen, such as Boileau, Descartes, Jourdan and others, found in the most famous of them a capacity of 1732 cm3, while among the ancient inhabitants of Paris it was only 1559: at present "while only 12 per hundred Parisians have a capacity above 1700 cm3. Among geniuses, 73 per hundred have a capacity greater than this average figure."

XII. Exceptional Features of Genius People

Lombroso asks the question: is there a connection between genius and insanity?

“If genius was always accompanied by insanity, then how can we explain to ourselves that Galileo, Kepler, Columbus, Voltaire, Napoleon, Michelangelo, Cavour, people undoubtedly brilliant and, moreover, subjected to the most severe trials during their lives, never showed signs of insanity?

In addition, genius usually manifests itself much earlier than madness, which for the most part reaches its maximum development only after the age of 35, while genius is discovered in childhood, and in youth it already appears in full force: Alexander the Great was at the height of his fame in 20 years old, Charlemagne - at 30 years old, Charles XII - at 18, D "Alembert and Bonaparte - at 26 (Ribault)".

And yet, “we are convinced that psychopaths have something in common not only with geniuses, but, unfortunately, also with the dark world of crime; we see, in addition, that real madmen are sometimes distinguished by such an outstanding mind and often such extraordinary energy that involuntarily forces them to equate them, at least for a while, with genius personalities, and among the common people it first evokes amazement and then reverence for them.”

“Having established such a close relationship between men of genius and madmen, nature seemed to want to point out to us our duty to treat with indulgence the greatest of human disasters - madness and at the same time give us a warning so that we are not too carried away by the brilliant ghosts of geniuses, many of whom “not only do they not rise to the transcendental spheres, but, like sparkling meteors, having once burst into flames, they fall very low and drown in a mass of delusions.”

Lombroso's ideas in Russia

Lombroso's works and views were controversially perceived in scientific circles. This did not stop the scientist, who continued until the end of his life to collect interesting facts from the biographies of celebrities, mentally ill people, and criminals. “We will respond to the caustic ridicule and petty quibbles of our opponents, following the example of that original who moved in their presence to convince people who denied the movement, only by collecting new facts and new evidence in favor of our theory. What could be more convincing facts and who will deny them? Perhaps only the ignorant, but their triumph will soon come to an end."

The ideas about Lombroso's genius and madness gained wide popularity in Russia. They are represented by numerous both lifetime and posthumous Russian editions of his scientific works. In 1897, Lombroso, who participated in the congress of Russian doctors, received an enthusiastic reception in Russia. In his memoirs dedicated to the Russian episode of his biography, Lombroso reflected a sharply negative vision of the social structure of Russia, typical of contemporary Italian leftists, which he severely condemned for police brutality (“suppression of thought, conscience and personal character”) and authoritarian methods of exercising power.

In Soviet Russia, the term “Lombrosianism” was widely used to designate the anthropological school of criminal law - one of the directions in the bourgeois theory of law (according to the criteria of the class approach).

Genius and madness Cesare Lombroso

(No ratings yet)

Title: Genius and Madness

About the book “Genius and Madness” by Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso is an outstanding Italian psychiatrist, criminologist and researcher. He became best known for his theory on the biological predisposition of an individual to criminal acts. In his acclaimed book, Genius and Madness, the author draws a clever parallel between people of genius and the mentally ill. This work is considered to be the cornerstone for understanding the mysterious essence of genius and those religious views that at different times and eras were the cause of numerous social cataclysms. In his work, the author invites us to analyze the process of the emergence of ideas that were of great importance for the formation of social thought of the twentieth century. The work will be interesting to read not only for specialists in the field of psychiatry, but also for everyone who wants to receive quality food for thought.

In his book Genius and Insanity, Cesare Lombroso seeks to find the relationship between genius and insanity. Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Mozart, Van Gogh - the author subjects these and many other great cultural and scientific figures to merciless psychiatric dissection. He searches for patterns and that line invisible to the naked eye that separates a genius from a madman. In his research, he resorts to the biographies of his subjects, studies various facts from their lives, as well as their behavior, habits and way of thinking. Based on the information received, conclusions are drawn and patterns are found, among which both physical and mental patterns are found. For example, a person with pronounced deviations from the norm, whether for the better or for the worse, could be influenced by a variety of factors: family ties, heredity, place of birth and many others.

Cesare Lombroso, in his work “Genius and Madness,” makes a kind of diagnosis of the most famous representatives of the human race and raises interesting questions that fall within the competence of philosophers and psychologists. For example, what exactly is genius? A gift from heaven, a serious illness or an eternal curse for its bearer?

Hitherto unknown biographical facts, amazing personal dramas, successes and failures of the greats of this world appear before us on the pages of the book “Genius and Madness.” Reading it will be useful and exciting for anyone who wants to learn more about the life, creative path and personal qualities of the most outstanding people of all times and peoples.

On our website about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read online the book “Genius and Madness” by Cesare Lombroso in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “Genius and Madness” by Cesare Lombroso

Those people of genius who have observed themselves say that, under the influence of inspiration, they experience some kind of inexpressibly pleasant feverish state, during which thoughts involuntarily appear in their minds and splash out on their own. But as soon as the moment of ecstasy, excitement has passed, the genius turns into an ordinary person or falls even lower, since the lack of uniformity is one of the signs of a genius nature.

The main cause of melancholy and dissatisfaction with the life of selected natures is the law of dynamism and balance, which also governs the nervous system, the law according to which, following an excessive expenditure or development of strength, there is an excessive decline of the same strength - a law as a result of which not one of the miserable mortals can show a certain amount of force without having to pay for it in other respects, and very cruelly.

The pulse is weak and uneven, the skin is pale, cold, the head is hot, inflamed, the eyes are shiny, bloodshot, restless, darting around. At the end of the creative period, the author himself often does not understand what he stated a minute ago.

And they [the insane] for the most part remain lonely all their lives, uncommunicative, indifferent or insensitive to what worries the human race, as if they were surrounded by some special atmosphere that belonged to them alone.

The indirect influence of the surrounding nature on the birth of brilliant people is somewhat analogous to its influence on the development of insanity.

Melancholy, despondency, shyness, selfishness - this is a cruel retribution for the highest mental talents.

Great geniuses sometimes cannot grasp concepts that are accessible to the most ordinary minds.

Download the book “Genius and Madness” for free by Cesare Lombroso

No matter how cruel and sad this kind of paradox may be, if we consider it from a scientific point of view, we will find that in some respects it is quite reasonable, although at first glance it seems absurd.

Many of the great thinkers are subject, like madmen, to convulsive muscle contractions and are distinguished by sharp, so-called “trochaic” body movements. Thus, it is said about Lenau and Montesquieu that on the floor near the tables where they studied, one could notice indentations from the constant twitching of their legs. Buffon, immersed in his thoughts, once climbed the bell tower and descended from there by rope completely unconsciously, as if in a fit of somnambulism. Santeil, Crebillon, Lombardini had strange facial expressions, similar to grimaces. Napoleon suffered from constant twitching of his right shoulder and lips, and during fits of anger, also in his calves. “I was probably very angry,” he himself once admitted after a heated argument with Lowe, “because I felt my calves trembling, which had not happened to me for a long time.” Peter the Great was subject to twitching of the facial muscles, which horribly distorted his face.

“Carducci’s face,” says Mantegazza, “at times resembles a hurricane: lightning rains from his eyes, and the trembling of his muscles resembles an earthquake.”

Ampere could not speak otherwise than by walking and moving all his limbs. It is known that the normal composition of urine, and especially the urea content in it, changes markedly after manic attacks. The same thing is noticed after intense mental exercise. Already many years ago, Golding Bird made the observation that one English preacher, who spent the entire week in idleness and only preached sermons with great fervor on Sundays, precisely on that day the content of phosphate salts in the urine increased significantly, while on other days it was extremely insignificant. Subsequently, Smith confirmed with many observations the fact that with any mental stress the amount of urea in the urine increases, and in this respect the analogy between genius and madness seems undeniable.

From this abnormal abundance of urea, or rather from this new confirmation of the law of balance between force and matter, which governs the entire world of living beings, other, more amazing analogies can be deduced: for example, gray hair and baldness, thinness of the body, and also poor muscular and sexual activity, characteristic of all madmen, is very often found in great thinkers. Caesar was afraid of the pale and thin Cassiev. D'Alembert, Fenelon, Napoleon were thin as skeletons in their youth. About Voltaire, Segur writes: “Thinness proves how hard he works; his emaciated and bent body serves only as a light, almost transparent shell, through which you seem to see the soul and genius of this man.”

Paleness has always been considered an accessory and even an adornment of great people. In addition, thinkers, along with crazy people, are characterized by: constant overflow of the brain with blood (hyperemia), intense heat in the head and cooling of the extremities, a tendency to acute diseases of the brain and poor sensitivity to hunger and cold.

It can be said about brilliant people, just like about crazy people, that they remain lonely, cold, and indifferent to the responsibilities of a family man and a member of society all their lives. Michelangelo constantly insisted that his art replaced his wife. Goethe, Heine, Byron, Cellini, Napoleon, Newton, although they did not say this, by their actions they proved something even worse.

There are frequent cases when, due to the same reasons that so often cause madness, i.e. Due to illnesses and head injuries, the most ordinary people turn into geniuses. As a child, Vico fell from a tall staircase and crushed his right parietal bone. Gratri, at first a bad singer, became a famous artist after severely bruising his head with a log. Mabille-on, completely weak-minded from a young age, achieved fame for his talents, which developed in him as a result of a wound to his head. Gall, who reported this fact, knew one half-idiot Dane whose mental abilities became brilliant after he, at the age of 13, fell head first down the stairs 3). Several years ago, a cretin from Savoy, bitten by a mad dog, became a completely reasonable man in the last days of his life. Dr. Galle knew limited people whose mental abilities were unusually developed as a result of brain diseases (mi-dollo).

“It may very well be that my illness (spinal cord disease) gave my latest works some kind of abnormal shade,” Heine says with amazing insight in one of his letters. It must be added, however, that the illness affected in this way not only his last works, and he himself was aware of this. A few months before the intensification of his illness, Heine wrote about himself (Correspondace inedite. Paris, 1877): “My mental excitement is more likely the result of illness than genius - in order to at least a little calm my suffering, I wrote poetry. On these terrible nights, maddened from pain, my poor head rushes from side to side and makes the bells of my worn out stupid cap ring with cruel gaiety.”

Bisha and von der Kolk noticed that people with crooked necks have a more alert mind than ordinary people. Conolly had one patient whose mental faculties were stimulated during operations on him, and several such patients who showed special talent in the first periods of consumption and gout. Everyone knows how witty and cunning humpbacks are; Rokitansky even tried to explain this by the fact that their aorta, giving vessels going to the head, bends, resulting in an expansion of the volume of the heart and an increase in blood pressure in the skull.

This dependence of genius on pathological changes can partly explain the curious feature of genius compared to talent, in that it is something unconscious and manifests itself completely unexpectedly.

Jürgen Meyer says that a talented person acts strictly deliberately; he knows how and why he came to a certain theory, while this is completely unknown to a genius: all creative activity is unconscious.

Haydn attributed the creation of his famous oratorio “The Creation” to a mysterious gift sent from above. “When my work was not moving forward well,” he said, “I, with a rosary in my hands, retired to the chapel, read the Virgin Mary - and inspiration returned to me again.”

The Italian poetess Milli, while creating, almost involuntarily, her wonderful poems, worries, screams, sings, runs back and forth and seems to be in an epileptic fit.

Those people of genius who have observed themselves say that under the influence of inspiration they experience some inexpressibly pleasant feverish state, during which thoughts involuntarily arise in their minds and splash out of their own accord, like sparks from a burning brand.

Dante expressed this beautifully in the following three lines:

...I mi son un che, guando

Amore spira, noto ed in quel modo

Che detta dento vo significando.

(Inspired by love, I say what it tells me.)

Napoleon said that the outcome of battles depended on one moment, on one thought that temporarily remained inactive; when a favorable moment arrives, it flares up like a spark, and the result is victory (Moreau).

Bauer says that Koo's best poems were dictated to him in a state close to insanity. In those moments when these wonderful verses flowed from his lips, he was unable to reason even about the simplest things.

Foscolo admits in his Epistolario, the best work of this great mind, that the creative ability of a writer is determined by a special kind of mental excitement (fever), which cannot be caused at will.

“I write my letters,” he says, “not for the fatherland and not for the sake of glory, but for that inner pleasure that the exercise of our abilities gives us.”

Bettinelli calls poetic creativity a dream with open eyes, without loss of consciousness, and this is perhaps fair, since many poets dictated their poems in a state similar to sleep.

Goethe also says that a poet requires a certain cerebral stimulation and that he himself composed many of his songs while in a sort of fit of somnambulism.

Klopstock admits that when he wrote his poem, inspiration often came to him during sleep.

In a dream, Voltaire conceived one of the songs of the Henriade, Sardini - a theory of playing the harmonic, and Seckendorff - his charming song about Fantasia. Newton and Cardano solved mathematical problems in their sleep.

Muratori composed a pentameter in Latin in a dream many years after he stopped writing poetry. They say that while he was sleeping, La Fontaine composed the fable “Two Doves,” and Condillac finished the lecture he began the day before.

Coleridge's "Kubla" and Golde's "Fantasia" were composed in a dream.

Mozart admitted that musical ideas appeared to him involuntarily, like dreams, and Hoffmann often told his friends: “I work, sitting at the piano with my eyes closed, and reproduce what someone from the outside tells me.”

Lagrange noticed an irregular pulse in his heart when he wrote, while Alfieri’s eyes grew dark at the same time.

Lamartine often said: “It is not I who think, but my thoughts that think for me.”

Alfieri, who called himself a barometer - to such an extent his creative abilities changed depending on the time of year - with the onset of September could not resist the involuntary impulse that took possession of him, so strong that he had to give in and wrote six comedies. On one of his sonnets, he wrote the following inscription in his own hand: “Accidental. I didn’t want to write it.” This predominance of the unconscious in the work of brilliant people was noticed in ancient times.

Socrates was the first to point out that poets create their works not as a result of effort or art, but thanks to some natural instinct. In the same way, soothsayers say beautiful things without realizing it at all.

“All works of genius,” says Voltaire in a letter to Diderot, “are created instinctively. The philosophers of the whole world together could not write Cinema’s Armide or the fable “The Sea of ​​Beasts,” which La Fontaine dictated, without even knowing well what would come of it. Corneille wrote tragedy "Horace" as instinctively as a bird builds a nest."

Thus, the greatest ideas of thinkers, prepared, so to speak, by impressions already received and by the highly sensitive organization of the subject, are born suddenly and develop as unconsciously as the rash actions of madmen. This same unconsciousness explains the unshakability of convictions in people who have internalized fanatically known convictions. But as soon as the moment of ecstasy, excitement has passed, the genius turns into an ordinary person or falls even lower, since the lack of uniformity (balance) is one of the signs of a genius nature. Disraeli expressed this perfectly when he said that the best English poets, Shakespeare and Dryden, can also find the worst poetry. They said about the painter Tintoretto that he was sometimes higher than Carracci, sometimes lower than Tintoretto.

Ovidio quite correctly explains the dissimilarity of Tasso's style by his own admission that when inspiration disappeared, he was confused in his writings, did not recognize them and was not able to appreciate their merits.

There can be no doubt that there is a complete similarity between a man who is mad during a seizure and a man of genius thinking about and creating his work.

Remember the Latin proverb: “Aut insanit homo, aut versus fecit” (“Either a madman or a poet”).

This is how the doctor Revellier-Parat describes Tasso’s condition:

“The pulse is weak and uneven, the skin is pale, cold, the head is hot, inflamed, the eyes are shiny, bloodshot, restless, running around. At the end of the creative period, the author himself often does not understand what he stated a minute ago.”

Marini, when writing Adone, did not notice that he had severely burned his leg. During his creative period, Tasso seemed completely insane. In addition, when thinking about something, many artificially cause a rush of blood to the brain, such as Schiller, who put his feet on ice, Pitt and Fox, who prepared their speeches after drinking immoderate porter, and Paisiello, who composed only under the cover of many blankets. Milton and Descartes threw their heads back on the sofa, Bossuet retired to the cold room and put warm poultices on his head; Cujas worked while lying face down on the mat. There was a saying about Leibniz that he thought only in a horizontal position - to such an extent he needed it for mental activity. Milton composed with his head thrown back on the pillow, and Thomas and Rossini - lying in bed; Rousseau pondered his works in the bright midday sun with his head open.

Obviously, they all instinctively used drugs that temporarily increase the flow of blood to the head to the detriment of the rest of the body. Here, by the way, it is worth mentioning that many of the gifted and especially brilliant people abused alcoholic beverages. Not to mention Alexander the Great, who, under the influence of intoxication, killed his best friend and died after draining the cup of Hercules ten times, Caesar himself was often carried home by soldiers on their shoulders. Socrates, Seneca, Alcibiades, Cato, and especially Septimius Severus and Mahmud II were so intemperate that they all died from drunkenness due to delirium tremens. The Constable of Bourbon, Avicenna, who is said to have devoted the second half of his life to proving the futility of the scientific information he acquired in the first half, and many painters, for example Carracci, Steen, Barbatelli, and a whole galaxy of poets - Murger, Gerard de Nerval, Musset, Kleist, Mailat and at their head Tasso, who wrote in one of his letters: “I do not deny that I am mad; but I like to think that my madness came from drunkenness and love because I really drink a lot."

There are many drunkards among the great musicians, for example Dussek, Handel and Gluck, who said that “he considers it quite fair to love gold, wine and fame, because the first gives him the means to have the second, which, inspiring, gives him glory.” However, besides wine, he also loved vodka and finally got drunk on it.

It has been noticed that almost all the great creations of thinkers receive their final form, or at least become clear, under the influence of some special sensation, which here plays, so to speak, the role of a drop of salt water in a well-arranged voltaic column. Facts prove that all great discoveries were made under the influence of the senses, as Moleschott confirms. Several frogs, from which it was supposed to prepare a healing decoction for Galvani's wife, served as the basis for the discovery of galvanism. The isochronic (simultaneous) swinging of a chandelier and the falling of an apple prompted Newton and Galileo to create great systems. Alfieri composed and thought about his tragedies while listening to music. When Mozart saw an orange, he remembered a Neapolitan folk song that he had heard five years ago, and immediately wrote the famous cantata for the opera Don Giovanni. Looking at some porter, Leonardo conceived his Judas, and Thorvaldsen found a suitable pose for a sitting angel at the sight of his sitter’s antics. Inspiration first struck Salvatore Rosa while he was admiring the view of Posilino, and Hogarth found types for his caricatures in a tavern after a drunkard broke his nose there in a fight. Milton, Bacon, Leonardo and Warburton needed to hear the ringing of bells in order to get to work; Bourdalou, before dictating his immortal sermons, always played some aria on the violin. The reading of one of Spenser's odes aroused a penchant for poetry in Cowley, and Sakrobose's book made Gammad addicted to astronomy. While considering cancer, Watt came up with the idea of ​​constructing a machine that would be extremely useful in industry, and Gibbon decided to write the history of Greece after he saw the ruins of the Capitol 4).

But in the same way, certain sensations cause insanity or serve as its starting point, sometimes being the cause of the most terrible attacks of rabies. For example, Humboldt’s nurse confessed that the sight of her pet’s fresh, tender body aroused in her an uncontrollable desire to slaughter him. And how many people have been involved in murder, arson or tearing up graves at the sight of an ax, a blazing fire and a corpse!

It should also be added that inspiration and ecstasy always turn into real hallucinations, because a person then sees objects that exist only in his imagination. Thus, Grossi said that one night, after he had worked for a long time to describe the appearance of the ghost of Prin, he saw this ghost in front of him and had to light a candle to get rid of it. Ball tells about Reynolds' son (successore) that he could make up to 300 portraits a year, since it was enough for him to look at someone for half an hour while he sketched a sketch, so that later this face would constantly be in front of him, as if alive . The painter Martini always saw in front of him the pictures that he painted, so one day, when someone stood between him and the place where the image appeared to him, he asked this person to step aside, because it was impossible for him to continue copying, while he existed only in in his imagination the original was closed. Luther heard arguments from Satan that he could not have come up with himself before.

If we now turn to solving the question - what exactly is the physiological difference between a genius and an ordinary person, then, on the basis of autobiographies and observations, we will find that for the most part the whole difference between them lies in the refined and almost painful impressionability of the first. A savage or an idiot is insensitive to physical suffering, their passions are few, and among the sensations they perceive only those that directly concern them in the sense of satisfying the needs of life. As mental abilities develop, impressionability grows and reaches its greatest strength in brilliant individuals, being the source of their suffering and glory. These chosen natures are more sensitive in quantitative and qualitative terms than mere mortals, and the impressions they perceive are distinguished by their depth, remain in memory for a long time and are combined in various ways. Little things, random circumstances, details, invisible to an ordinary person, sink deep into their soul and are processed in a thousand ways to reproduce what is usually called creativity, although these are only binary and quaternary combinations of sensations.

Haller wrote about himself: “What is left for me except impressionability, this powerful feeling, which is a consequence of a temperament that vividly perceives the joys of love and the wonders of science? Even now I am moved to tears when I read a description of some generous deed. Characteristic of me sensitivity, of course, gives my poems that passionate tone that other poets do not have."

“Nature has not created a more sensitive soul than mine,” Diderot wrote about himself. Elsewhere he says: "Increase the number of sensitive people and you will increase the number of good and bad actions." When Alfieri heard music for the first time, he was, in his words, “astounded to such an extent, as if the bright sun had blinded my sight and hearing; for several days after that I felt an extraordinary sadness, not devoid of pleasantness; fantastic ideas crowded into my head, and I would have been able to write poetry if I had known then how it was done...” In conclusion, he says that nothing acts on the soul as irresistibly powerful as music. A similar opinion was expressed by Stern, Rousseau and J. Sand.

Corradi proves that all of Leopardi's misfortunes and his very philosophy were caused by excessive sensitivity and unsatisfied love, which he first experienced in his 18th year. And indeed, Leopardi's philosophy took on a more or less gloomy tone, depending on the state of his health, until finally a sad mood became a habit among him.

Urkvitsia fainted when he heard the smell of a rose.

Stern, after Shakespeare the most profound of poet-psychologists, says in one letter: “Reading the biographies of our ancient heroes, I cry for them as if for living people... Inspiration and impressionability are the only tools of genius. The latter evokes in us those delightful sensations that give great strength to joy and cause tears of tenderness."

It is known in what slavish subordination Alfieri and Foscolo were to women who were not always worthy of such adoration. The beauty and love of Fornarina served as a source of inspiration for Raphael not only in painting, but also in poetry. Several of his erotic poems have still not lost their charm.

And how early the passions of brilliant people manifest themselves! Dante and Alfieri were in love at the age of 9, Rousseau - 11, Carron and Byron - 8. The latter had convulsions already at the age of 16, when he learned that the girl he loved was getting married. “Grief choked me,” he says, “although sexual desire was still unfamiliar to me, but I felt such passionate love that it is unlikely that I subsequently experienced a stronger feeling.” At one of Kitz's performances, Byron had a seizure of convulsions.

Lorby has seen scholars swoon with delight when reading Homer's works.

The painter Francia died of admiration after seeing Raphael's painting.

Ampere felt the beauty of nature so vividly that he almost died of happiness when he found himself on the shores of Lake Geneva. Having found a solution to some problem, Newton was so shocked that he could not continue his studies. Gay-Lussac and Davy, after their discovery, began to dance around their office in their shoes. Archimedes, delighted with the solution to the problem, ran out into the street dressed as Adam, shouting: “Eureka!” (“Found!”) In general, strong minds also have strong passions, which give special vivacity to all their ideas; if for some of them many passions fade, as if fading over time, this is only because little by little they are drowned out by the prevailing passion for fame or science.

But it is precisely this too strong impressionability of brilliant or only gifted people that in the vast majority of cases is the cause of their misfortunes, both real and imaginary.

“A precious and rare gift, which is the privilege of great geniuses,” writes Mantegazza, “is accompanied, however, by a painful sensitivity to all, even the smallest, external irritations: every breath of wind, the slightest increase in heat or cold turns for them into that dried rose petal , which did not allow the unfortunate sybarite to sleep." La Fontaine may have meant himself when he wrote:

"Un souffle, une rien leur donne la fievre."

[The slightest breath of wind, the slightest cloud, every trifle makes them feverish.]

A genius is irritated by everything, and what for ordinary people seems like just pinpricks, with his sensitivity already seems to him like a blow from a dagger.

Boileau and Chateaubriand could not be indifferent to hearing praise from anyone, even their shoemaker.

When Foscolo was talking one day with Mrs. S., writes Mantegazza, whom he was strongly courting, and she laughed at him angrily, he became so furious that he shouted: “You want to kill me, so I’ll crush my skull right now at your feet.” . With these words, he threw himself headfirst into the corner of the fireplace with all his might. One of those standing nearby, however, managed to hold him by the shoulders and thereby save his life.

Morbid impressionability also gives rise to exorbitant vanity, which distinguishes not only people of genius, but also scientists in general, starting from ancient times; in this respect, both of them are very similar to monomaniacs suffering from prideful insanity.

“Man is the most vain of animals, and poets are the most vain of people,” wrote Heine, meaning, of course, himself. In another letter he says: “Don’t forget that I am a poet and therefore I think that everyone should give up everything they are doing and start reading poetry.”

Menke tells about Filelfo how he imagined that in the whole world, even among the ancients, no one knew the Latin language better than him. Abbot Cagnoli was so proud of his poem about the Battle of Aquileia that he became furious when any of the writers did not bow to him. “What, you don’t know Cagnoli?” - he asked.

The poet Lucius did not rise from his seat when Julius Caesar entered the meeting of poets, because he considered himself superior to him in the art of versification.

Ariosto, having received a laurel wreath from Charles V, ran like a madman through the streets. The famous surgeon Porta, present at the Lombard Institute during the reading of medical works, tried in every possible way to express his contempt and dissatisfaction with them, whatever their merit, while he listened to works on mathematics or linguistics calmly and attentively.

Schopenhauer became furious and refused to pay bills if his last name was written two paragraphs apart.

Barthes lost sleep in despair when, during the printing of his Genie, the sign was not placed over E. Whiston, according to Arago, did not dare to publish a refutation of Newton's chronology for fear that Newton would not. killed him.

Everyone who had the rare good fortune of living in the company of brilliant people was amazed at their ability to interpret every action of those around them in a bad way, to see persecution everywhere and in everything to find a reason for deep, endless melancholy. This ability is determined precisely by the stronger development of mental powers, thanks to which a gifted person is more able to find the truth and at the same time more easily comes up with false arguments to confirm the validity of his painful delusion. In part, the gloomy view of geniuses on their surroundings depends, however, on the fact that, being innovators in the mental sphere, they with unshakable firmness express beliefs that are not similar to the generally accepted opinion, and thus alienate most ordinary people.

But still, the main reason for melancholy and dissatisfaction with the life of chosen natures is the law of dynamism and balance, which also governs the nervous system, the law according to which, following excessive expenditure or development of strength, there is an excessive decline of the same strength - a law due to which Not a single miserable mortal can show a certain strength without paying for it in other respects, and, finally, the law that determines the unequal degree of perfection of their own works is very cruel.

Melancholy, despondency, shyness, selfishness - this is a cruel retribution for the highest mental talents that they waste, just as abuse of sensual pleasures entails a disorder of the reproductive system, impotence and diseases of the spinal cord, and excess in food is accompanied by gastric catarrh.

After one of those ecstasies during which the poetess Milli discovers such enormous power of creativity that it would have been enough for a lifetime for minor Italian poets, she fell into a semi-paralytic state that lasted several days. At the end of his sermons, Mohammed fell into a state of complete stupor and once himself told Abu Bakr that the interpretation of three chapters of the Koran had driven him to stupor.

Goethe, the cold Goethe himself, admitted that his mood was sometimes too cheerful, sometimes too sad.

In general, I do not think that in the whole world there is at least one great person who, even in moments of complete bliss, would not consider himself, without any reason, unhappy and persecuted, or would not, at least temporarily, suffer from painful attacks of melancholy.

Sometimes sensitivity becomes distorted and becomes one-sided, focusing on one point. Several ideas of a certain order and some especially favorite sensations little by little acquire the significance of the main (specific) stimulus acting on the brain of great people and even on their entire body.

Heine, who himself admitted that he was incapable of understanding simple things, Heine, paralyzed, blind and already at his last breath when he was advised to turn to God, interrupted the wheezing of agony with the words: “Dieu me pardonnera - c”est son metier,” ending with this last the irony of his life, which has never been more aesthetically cynical in our time. It is said about Aretino that his last words were: “Guardatemi dai topi or che son unto unto.”

Malherbe, already dying, corrected his nurse’s grammatical errors and refused the parting words of his confessor because he spoke awkwardly.

Bogour (Baugours), a grammarian, dying, said: “Je vais ou je va mourir” - “both are correct.”

Santenis went crazy with joy, having found the epithet that he had been looking for in vain for a long time. Foscolo said about himself: “While in some things I am extremely understanding, regarding others my understanding is not only worse than that of any man, but worse than that of a woman or a child.”

It is known that Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, Newton were almost completely unable to speak in public.

Poisson said that life is worth living only to do mathematics. D'Alembert and Menage, who calmly endured the most painful operations, cried from the light stings of criticism. Lucio de Lanceval laughed when his leg was cut off, but could not bear Geoffroy's harsh criticism.

Sixty-year-old Linnaeus, who had fallen into a paralytic and senseless state after an apoplexy, awoke from his drowsiness when he was brought to the herbarium, which he had previously especially loved.

When Lagny was lying in a deep faint and the most powerful means could not awaken consciousness in him, someone decided to ask him how much 12 squared would be, and he immediately answered: 144.

Sebuya, an Arabic grammarian, died of grief because the Caliph Harun al-Rashid did not agree with his opinion regarding some grammatical rule.

It should also be noted that among brilliant or rather learned people there are often those narrow specialists whom Wachdakoff calls monotypic subjects; They spend their whole lives engaged in one kind of conclusion, which first occupies their brain and then covers it completely: thus, Beckmann spent his entire life studying kidney pathology, Fresner - the moon, Meyer - ants, which represents a huge similarity with monomaniacs.

Because of this exaggerated and concentrated sensitivity, it is extremely difficult to convince or dissuade either great people or madmen of anything. And this is understandable: the source of true and false ideas lies deeper and more developed among them than among ordinary people, for whom opinions constitute only a conventional form, a kind of clothing changed at the whim of fashion or as required by circumstances. From this it follows, on the one hand, that one should not trust anyone unconditionally, even great people, and on the other hand, that moral treatment brings little benefit to the insane.

The extreme and one-sided development of sensitivity, without a doubt, is the cause of those strange actions, as a result of temporary anesthesia * and analgesia 2), which are characteristic of great geniuses along with madmen. Thus, they say about Newton that one day he began to fill his pipe with the finger of his niece and that when he happened to leave the room to bring some thing, he always returned without taking it. They say about Tuscherel that once he even forgot his name.

Beethoven and Newton, having set to work, one on musical compositions, and the other on solving problems, became so insensitive to hunger that they scolded the servants when they brought them food, assuring them that they had already dined.

Gioia, in a fit of creativity, wrote an entire chapter on the desk board instead of paper.

Abbot Beccaria, busy with his experiments, during the service of mass, said, forgetting: “Ite, experientia facta est” (“And yet experience is a fact”).

Diderot, when hiring cab drivers, forgot to let them go, and he had to pay them for the whole days that they stood in vain at his house; he often forgot months, days, hours, even those persons with whom he began to talk, and, as if in a fit of somnambulism, pronounced entire monologues in front of them.

In a similar way, it is explained why great geniuses sometimes cannot grasp concepts that are accessible to the most ordinary minds, and at the same time express such bold ideas that seem absurd to most. The fact is that greater impressionability also corresponds to greater limited thinking (concetto). The mind, under the influence of ecstasy, does not perceive positions that are too simple and easy, which do not correspond to its powerful energy. Thus, Monge, who did the most complex differential calculations, found it difficult to extract the square root, although any student could easily solve this problem.

Hagen considers originality to be precisely the quality that sharply distinguishes genius from talent. In the same way, Jürgen Meyer says: “The fantasy of a talented person reproduces what has already been found, the fantasy of a genius is completely new. The first makes discoveries and confirms them, the second invents and creates. A talented person is a shooter who hits a target that seems difficult to achieve; a genius hits to a goal that is not even visible to us. Originality is in the nature of genius."

Bettinelli considers originality and grandiosity to be the main hallmarks of genius. “That is why,” he says, “poets were formerly called trovadori” (inventors).

A genius has the ability to guess what is not fully known to him: for example, Goethe described Italy in detail without having yet seen it. It is precisely because of such insight, rising above the general level, and due to the fact that genius, absorbed in higher considerations, differs from the crowd in super-actions or even, like crazy people (but in contrast to talented people), shows a tendency towards disorder - genius natures are met with contempt from the side of the majority, which, not noticing the intermediate points in their work, sees only the contradiction of the conclusions they made with the generally accepted ones and the oddities in their behavior. Not so long ago, the public booed Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Beethoven's Fidelio, and in our time Boito (Mephistopheles) and Wagner have suffered the same fate. How many academicians treated poor Marzolo with a smile of compassion, who opened a completely new field of philology; Bolyai, who discovered the fourth dimension and wrote anti-Euclidean geometry, was called a crazy geometer and compared to a miller who would think of grinding stones to obtain flour. Finally, everyone knows with what distrust Fulton, Columbus, Papin, and in our time Piatti, Prague and Schliemann were once met, who found Ilion where they did not suspect it, and, showing his discovery to learned academicians, silenced their ridicule of yourself.

By the way, people of genius have to experience the most severe persecution precisely from learned academicians, who, in the struggle against genius, determined by vanity, use their “learning”, as well as the charm of their authority, which is predominantly recognized for them by both ordinary people and the ruling classes. , also mostly consisting of dozens of people.

There are countries where the level of education is very low and where, therefore, not only brilliant, but even talented people are treated with contempt. In Italy there are two university cities, from which the people who constituted the only glory of these cities were forced to leave by all kinds of persecution. But originality, although almost always aimless, is often noticed in the actions of insane people, especially in their writings, which only as a result sometimes receive a shade of genius, such as the attempt of Bernard, who was in the Florentine insane asylum in 1529, to prove that monkeys have the ability of articulate speech (linguaggio). By the way, brilliant people are distinguished, along with crazy people, by their tendency towards disorder and complete ignorance of practical life, which seems so insignificant to them in comparison with their dreams.

Originality is determined by the tendency of brilliant and mentally ill people to invent new words that are incomprehensible to others or to give known words a special meaning and meaning, which we find in Vico, Carraro, Alfieri, Marzolo and Dante.

1) The late Metropolitan of Moscow Macarius, distinguished by a remarkably bright mind, was such a sickly and stupid child that he was completely unable to study. But in the seminary, one of his comrades, during a game, pierced his head with a stone, and after that Macarius’ abilities became brilliant, and his health completely improved.

2) Goethe created his theory of the development of the skull based on the general type of dorsal vertebrae during a walk, when, pushing his foot on a sheep’s skull lying on the road, he saw that it was divided into three parts.

3) Loss of tactile sensitivity.

4) Loss of pain sensitivity.

Lombroso Cesare

Genius and madness

Cesare Lombroso

Genius and madness

Parallel between great men and madmen

I. Introduction to Historical Review.

II. The similarity between genius people and crazy people in physiological terms.

III. The influence of atmospheric phenomena on people of genius and on the insane.

IV. The influence of meteorological phenomena on the birth of brilliant people.

V. The influence of race and heredity on genius and insanity.

VI. Brilliant people who suffered from insanity: Garrington, Bolian, Codazzi, Ampere, Kent, Schumann, Tasso, Cardano, Swift, Newton, Rousseau, Lenau, Szcheni, Schopenhauer.

VII. Examples of geniuses, poets, comedians and other crazy people.

VIII. Crazy artists and artists.

IX. Mattoid graphomaniacs, or psychopaths.

X. "Prophets" and revolutionaries. Savonarola. Lazaretti.

XI. Special characteristics of brilliant people who at the same time suffered from insanity.

XII. Exceptional characteristics of brilliant people.

Conclusion

When, many years ago, being, as it were, under the influence of ecstasy (raptus), during which the relationship between genius and insanity appeared to me as if in a mirror, I wrote the first chapters of this book in 12 days*. I confess that even I myself was not clear to what serious practical conclusions the theory I created could lead to. I did not expect that it would provide the key to understanding the mysterious essence of genius and to explain those strange religious manias that were sometimes the core of great historical events, that it would help establish a new point of view for assessing the artistic creativity of geniuses by comparing their works in the field of art and literature with the same works of madmen and, finally, that it will provide enormous services to forensic medicine.

[Genius and madness. Introduction to a psychiatric clinic course given at the University of Pavia. Milan, 1863.]

Little by little, I was convinced of such an important practical significance of the new theory by both the documentary works of Adriani, Paoli, Frigerio, Maxime Ducamp, Rive and Verga regarding the development of artistic talents among the insane, as well as the high-profile trials of recent times - Mangione, Passanante, Lazaretti, Guiteau, who proved to everyone that the mania for writing is not just a kind of psychiatric curiosity, but directly a special form of mental illness and that the subjects obsessed with it, apparently completely normal, are all the more dangerous members of society because it is difficult to immediately notice a mental disorder in them, and Meanwhile, they are capable of extreme fanaticism and, like religious maniacs, can even cause historical upheavals in the lives of peoples. That is why it seemed to me extremely useful to re-examine the previous topic on the basis of the latest data and on a broader scale. I will not hide that I even consider him brave, in view of the bitterness with which the rhetoricians of science and politics, with the ease of newspaper writers and in the interests of one or another party, try to ridicule people who prove, contrary to the nonsense of metaphysicians, but with scientific data in their hands complete insanity, due to mental illness, of some of the so-called “criminals” and mental disorder of many persons hitherto considered, according to generally accepted opinion, to be completely sane.

To the caustic ridicule and petty quibbles of our opponents, we, following the example of the original who moved in their presence to convince people who denied the movement, will only respond by collecting new facts and new evidence in favor of our theory. What could be more convincing than facts and who would deny them? Perhaps only the ignorant, but their triumph will soon come to an end.

I. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL REVIEW

Our duty is extremely sad - with the help of inexorable analysis, to destroy and destroy, one after another, those bright, rosy illusions with which man deceives and exalts himself in his arrogant insignificance; it is all the more sad that in return for these pleasant delusions, these idols, which have served as objects of adoration for so long, we can offer him nothing but a cold smile of compassion. But the servant of truth must inevitably submit to its laws. Thus, due to fatal necessity, he comes to the conviction that love is, in essence, nothing more than the mutual attraction of stamens and pistils... and thoughts are the simple movement of molecules. Even genius - this is the only sovereign power that belongs to a person, before which one can bend the knee without blushing - even many psychiatrists have put it on the same level with the tendency to crime, even in it they see only one of the teratological (ugly) forms of the human mind, one of the varieties of madness. And note that such profanation, such blasphemy is not only allowed by doctors, and not exclusively in our skeptical times.

Even Aristotle, this great ancestor and teacher of all philosophers, noted that under the influence of a rush of blood to the head, “many individuals become poets, prophets or soothsayers and that Mark of Syracuse wrote quite good poetry while he was a maniac, but, having recovered, completely lost this ability ".

He says in another place: “It has been noticed that famous poets, politicians and artists were partly melancholic and insane, partly misanthropes, like Bellerophon. Even today we see the same thing in Socrates, Empedocles, Plato and others, and most powerfully in poets. People with cold, abundant blood (lit. bile) are timid and limited, and people with hot blood are active, witty and talkative."

Plato argues that “delirium is not a disease at all, but, on the contrary, the greatest of the blessings given to us by the gods; under the influence of delirium, the Delphic and Dodonian soothsayers provided thousands of services to the citizens of Greece, whereas in their ordinary state they brought little benefit or were completely useless It happened many times that when the gods sent epidemics to the people, one of the mortals fell into a sacred delirium and, under its influence, became a prophet, indicated a cure for these diseases. A special kind of delirium, excited by the muses, evokes in the simple and immaculate soul of a person the ability to express in beautiful poetic form the exploits of heroes, which contributes to the education of future generations."

Democritus even directly said that he does not consider a person of sound mind to be a true poet. Excludit sanos, Helicone poetas.