What Makes a Genius Part 3,What Makes a Genius Part 3

According to a study made at Stanford University many geniuses haven't had particularly remarkable IQ's.The careers and works of many geniuses were carefully researched to estimate what IQ would most reasonably account for the recorded facts.While there were no low scores in their estimates,there were only a few extraordinary scores.Leibnitz,Goethe and Grotius all topped 190.But some of the greatest geniuses,it appeared,had only averagely good intelligences:Cervantes scored an estimated 110;Copernicus only 130;Rembrandt 135;Bach,Darwin and Lincoln 140.Leonardo himself was rated at only 150. Following "brains" as an explanation of genius comes heredity.It is true that bright parents tend to have bright children,and some kinds of special abilities follow family lines.Mozart and Mendelssohn came of musical backgrounds.The Bach family was practically a living orchestra.Huxley and Darwin both had scientifically gifted ancestors.But many,if not most,geniuses,have come from undistinguished stock.Shakespeare's parents were small-town burghers.Stendhal's were provincial nobodies.Leonardo was the bastard son of a Florentine lawyer and a peasant girl. "Why are not germs of genius transmitted in a race?" Trelawney once wrote to Shelley,to which the poet replied,"It would be a more intolerable wrong of nature than any which man has devised.The sons of foolish parents would have no hope." Yet another theory of genius is that great creativity is a more or less benign form of insanity.The "mad genius" of the movies is a popular stereotype.But are geniuses mad? Melville,Van Gogh,Dostoyevski and Nietzsche were all undeniably victims of severe emotional afflictions,yet in most instances,even these remarkable individuals were much more humane than the average man.Such cases can be counter-balanced,however,by such as Socrates,whose life was a model of saneness and hundreds of other geniuses.At best,it might be said that geniuses are "possessed" by their creative urges and that they manifest a strong and sometimes unusual and fascinating personality as a result.This is a far cry from madness...it may be supreme health. What,then,shall we take to be the origin of genius? It may help if we focus on two key characteristics.The first is the terrific concentration of genius.Geniuses,without exception,are absorbed,drowned almost,in their work.Edison and others pooh-poohed the inspiration theory of genius and emphasized the perspiration theory.But what enables a genius to carry a project in his mind for years without tiring of it? What enables him to focus his whole personality on it? Certainly this betokens a deep inner psychological unity,an ability to marshall all of one's conscious and unconscious energies for a single purpose.How this is done,and why certain people can do it so superlatively well,remains a mystery into which we all penetrate on those occasions when we feel that everything inside of us is in place,that we are "clicking," and when we lose ourselves in our

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