"... quando Amore spira, noto, ed a quel modo Che detta dentro, vo significando."
"When love inspires, I write, And put my thoughts as it dictates in me."
"I call inspiration," says Beethoven, "that mysterious state during which the whole world seems to form one vast harmony, and all the forces of Nature become instruments, when every sentiment and thought resounds within me, a shudder thrills through my frame, and every hair on my head stands on end."
These expressions show that when a genius attains to the fulness of his development and, consequently, to the widest possible deviation from the normal, he is more or less in that condition of unconsciousness which characterises psychic epilepsy and is represented by a series of unconscious psychic activities.
Having demonstrated the frequent existence of a spice of insanity in the genius and flashes of genius in the insane, and, further, that geniuses are subject to a special form of insanity, my father, who was no mere theorist, but an admirer of facts and eager to turn them to account, considered next the possibility of making practical use of these discoveries. This he had no difficulty in doing.
The prevalence of insanity in men of genius explained innumerable contradictions and mad traits in their lives and works, the true meaning of which had hitherto escaped biographers, who either ignored them altogether or covered reams of paper with vain attempts to represent them as inspirations or, at any rate, reasonable actions. It also explained the origin of some of the extraordinary errors committed by great men; for example, the absurdly contradictory actions of Cola di Rienzi, who, after making himself master of Rome when the city was in a state of chaos, restoring peace and order, reorganising the army and conceiving the vast idea of a united Italy, ended his patriotic mission with a series of extravagances worthy of a madhouse.
The fact that traits of genius are so often found in mentally unsound persons and _vice versa_, permits us to suppose that lunatics have not infrequently held the destinies of nations in their hands and furthered progress by revolutionary movements, of which by reason of their natural tendencies and marked originality they are so often the promoters.