From genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred. I will discuss later as to whether such things are possible as pure scientific or technical genius as well as artistic and philosophical genius. There is good reason for a greater exactness in the use of the word. But that may come, and however clearly we may yet be able to describe it woman will have to be excluded from it. I am glad that the course of my inquiry has been such as to make it impossible for me to be charged with having framed such a definition of genius as necessarily to exclude woman from it.
I may now sum up the conclusions of this chapter. Whilst woman has no consciousness of genius, except as manifested in one particular person, who imposes his personality on her, man has a deep capacity for realising it, a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood book on “Hero-Worship,” has described so fully and permanently. In “Hero-Worship,” moreover, the idea is definitely insisted on that genius is linked with manhood, that it represents an ideal masculinity in the highest form. Woman has no direct consciousness of it; she borrows a kind of imperfect consciousness from man. Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life.
CHAPTER V
TALENT AND MEMORY
The following observation bears on my henid theory:
I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from which later on I was going to make an extract. Something was in my mind in henid form. What I thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a typical example of the henid.
The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex perception may be the more easily does it reproduce itself. Clearness of the consciousness is the preliminary condition for remembering, and the memory of the mental stimulation is proportional to the intensity of the consciousness. “I shall not forget that”; “I shall remember that all my life”; “That will never escape my memory again.” Such phrases men use when things have made a deep impression on them, of moments in which they have gained wisdom or have become richer by an important experience. As the power of being reproduced is directly proportionate to the organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there can be no recollection of an absolute henid.
As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the sure, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If a common theory, especially popular with the philosophers of the coffee-house, be true, that productive men (because they are always covering new ground) have no memory, it is often because they are productive only from being on new ground.
The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of genius, which I propose to lay down dogmatically as a necessary inference from my theory, without attempting to prove it further, is not incompatible with their rapid loss of the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of Greek verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that was acquired for examination purposes only so much will be retained as was in harmony with the natural talent of the pupil. Thus a house-painter may have a better memory for colours than a great philosopher; the most narrow philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned by heart better than his teacher, who may none the less be a great poet.
The uselessness of the experimental school of psychology (notwithstanding their marvellous arsenal of instruments of experimental precision) is shown by their expectation of getting results as to memory from tests with letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. These experiments have so little bearing on the true memory of man, on the memory by which he recalls the experiences of his life, that one wonders if such psychologists have realised that such a thing as the mind exists. The customary experiments place the most different subjects under the same conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of these subjects, and treat them merely as good or bad registering apparatus. There is a parable in the fact that the two German words “bemerken” (take notice of) and “merken” (remember) come from the same root. Only what is harmonious with some inborn quality will be retained. When a man remembers a thing, it is because he was capable of taking some interest in the thing; when he forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The religious man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses and the mathematician equations.
This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter, and to another reason for the great memories of genius. The more significant a man is, the more different personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of perception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom perception and apprehension are identical in their field. Of course no such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has apprehended nothing that he has perceived.
In this way we may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist; no male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal; no man is absolutely without the quality, and no man possesses it completely. Apprehension or absorption, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with which they are absorbed. The extreme of genius also does not exist, because even the greatest genius is not wholly a genius at every moment of his life.
What is at once a deduction from the necessary connection between memory and genius, and a proof of the actuality of the connection, lies in the extraordinary memory for minute details shown by the man of genius. Because of the universality of his mind, everything has only one interpretation for him, an interpretation often unsuspected at the time; and so things cling obstinately in his memory and remain there inextinguishably, although he may have taken not the smallest trouble to take note of them. And so one may almost take as another mark of the genius that the phrase “this is no longer true” has no meaning for him. There is nothing that is no longer true for him, probably just because he has a clearer idea than other men of the changes that come with time.
The following appears to be one of the best means for the objective examination of the endowment of a man: If after a long separation from him we resume the new intercourse with the circumstances of the last, then we shall find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing, that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from where it was left off with the fullest recollection of the details. How much ordinary men forget of their lives any one can prove to his astonishment and horror. It may happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he has forgotten all about it. It is true that if one recalls all the circumstances to his mind, he begins to remember, and, finally, with sufficient help, may remember almost completely. Such experience has made me think that there may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no absolute forgetting ever occurs; that if the right method with the individual be chosen recollection may always be induced.
It follows also that from one’s own experience, from what one has thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest possible to another, that the other does not already know. Consideration of the amount that a man can take in from another would seem to serve as a sort of objective measure of
