and curable and non-inheritable states on the one hand and of innate
and incurable and heritable mental disproportions on the other.

The less gifted portion of the educated public was greatly delighted
some years ago by a work by Dr. Nordau called _Degeneration_, in
which a great number of abnormal people were studied in a pseudo-
scientific manner and shown to be abnormal beyond any possibility of
dispute. Mostly the samples selected were men of exceptional artistic
and literary power. The book was pretentious and inconsistent--the late
Lord Tennyson was quoted, I remember, as a typically "sane" poet in
spite of the scope afforded by his melodramatic personal appearance and
his morbid passion for seclusion--but it did at least serve to show
that if we cannot call a man stupid we may almost invariably call him
mad with some show of reason. The public read the book for the sake of
its abuse, applied the intended conclusion to every success that
awakened its envy, and failed altogether to see how absolutely the
definition of madness was destroyed. But if madness is indeed simply
genius out of hand and genius only madness under adequate control; if
imagination is a snare only to the unreasonable and a disordered mind
only an excess of intellectual enterprise--and really none of these
things can be positively disproved--then just as reasonable as the idea
of suppressing the reproduction of madness, is the idea of breeding it!
Let us take all these dull, stagnant, respectable people, one might
say, who do nothing but conform to whatever rule is established about
them and obstruct whatever change is proposed to them, whose chief
quality is a sheer incapacity to imagine anything beyond their petty
experiences, and let us tell them plainly, "It is time a lunatic
married into your family." Let no one run away from this with the
statement that I propose such a thing should be done, but it is, at any
rate in the present state of our knowledge, as reasonable a proposal,