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This book is concerned entirely with the personality of genius, the laws governing its biological origin and the psychology of its inner instinctive structure.
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The Psychology of Men of Genius BY
ERNST KRETSCHMER Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology in the University of Marburg
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
R. B. CATTELL B.Sc.' Ph.D.^ University of London
LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER
NEW YORK:
HARCOURT BRACE 1931
CO. LTD.
AND COMPANY
PRINTKD IN G1EAT BRITAIN BY THE EDINBURGH PRKSS, EDINBURGH
CONTENTS Translator’s Foreword . . . Preface . . . . . Introduction ......
PAG« vii
xi xiii
Part One LAWS CHAP.
I. The Inner Voice
....
II. Instinct and Intellect
.
.
3
.24
III. The Chief Forms underlying Personality Differences . . . . -47 IV. The Breeding of Talent . 56
V. Genius and Race
.
.
.
.69
Part Two
PATTERNS VI. Spiritual Periodicity. VII. Sex and Puberty. VIII. The Scientist
The Artist of Life 107 The Curves of Life . 123
.....
IX. Heroes and Leaders .... X. Inspired Characters and Mankind’s Ven eration .....
XI. The Prophet
..... V
136 148
166 175
vi
CONTENTS
Part Three
PORTRAIT COLLECTION Preliminary Remarks
Portraits
.
.
.
193
...... 197
Sources of the Portrait Collection
Index
.
.
......
.
253
255
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD Since ancient times, many illuminating observations and many pretentious books have been written about genius, but the real, scientific study of this biological problem began with the modem psychological researches of Dr Lombroso and Sir Francis Galton. These pioneers started out on two distinct trails which have been followed up—one fitfully, the other systematically —right to the present day. Lombroso pointed to the connection of genius and mental disease, and his paradoxical observations were snatched up and ravelled into a tangle of popular literary discussion and psychoanalytic conjectures. Galton, in his classic Hereditary Genius, established the high degree of inheritance of talent among men of genius. His conclusions have been confirmed and expanded by McKeen CattelTs studies of eminent men, and Castle’s study of eminent women. They have been developed in many ways by Havelock Ellis. And finally, the attack which Galton began, and which has been characterised by strict empiricism, precise statistical methods and (wherever pos sible) psychological measurement, has armed itself with the technique of intelligence testing and gone on to new and permanent conquests in the Genetic Studies of Genius emanating from Professor Terman’s laboratory. Kretschmer is not blind to these achievements, but he himself is back on the neglected trail of Lombroso—neglected, that is to say, except for a few isolated psychoanalytic vii
viii
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
incursions by Freud and Adler. The English-American approach has made progress because of the scientific rigour of its methods, but it has done so at the expense of dividing the subject piecemeal, concentrating on one part, and neglecting other aspects, particularly the emotional side. Kretschmer calls once more for the comprehensive view, and himself illuminates the rich complexity of the conative bases of genius. In a region where so much has been built on the shifting sands of speculation, he erects a structure which will be permanent because he has discovered a rock beneath—one of the few established principles in psychiatry. That basis