I do about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the
autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I
read the following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any
good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and
still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Someone ought to
do it, but why should I?' is the ever reechoed phrase of
weak-kneed amiability. 'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?' is
the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing
to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie
whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between
these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the
ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a
superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce--as in
the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they
are bound to coalesce often enough--in the same individual, we
have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius
that gets into the <25> biographical dictionaries. Such men do
not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect.
Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse,
upon their companions or their age. It is they who get counted
when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to
defend their paradox.

[7] Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown,
seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of
the faculty of association by similarity.



To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as