The Man of Genius

physiologist is not afraid to reduce love to a play of stamens and pistils, and thought to a molecular movement.

furnish us with explanations of those strange religious insanities which become the nucleus of great historical events.

Good sense is the absence of every strong passion, and only men of strong passions can be great.

men of genius are lacking in tact, in moderation, in the sense of practical life, in the virtues which are alone recognized as real by the masses, and which alone are useful in social affairs.

The lunatic, again, among barbarous people is feared and adored by the masses who often confide to him supreme authority.

but has not nature caused to grow from similar germs, and on the same clod of earth, the nettle and the jasmine, the aconite and the rose? The botanist cannot be blamed for these coincidences;

But our nature, it is customary to say, revolts against a conception which tends to lower the most sublime manifestation of humanity to the level of the sorrowfully degenerate, to idiocy and insanity.

The true normal man is not the man of letters or of learning, but the man who works and eats—fruges consumere natus.

But, adds Joly, genius is often precocious;