and the
candidates for them. But there are eccentricities of social
behavior, types of personality which though they cannot be
classed as either insane or criminal, yet definitely set an
individual apart.

These include what Trotter has called the "mentally unstable,"
as set over against "the great class of normal, sensible,
reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency
to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming
the backbone of the State." There are the large group of
slightly neurasthenic, made so, in part, by the high nervous
tension under which modern, especially modern urban, life is
lived. These include what are commonly called the hysterical
or over-emotional, or "temperamental" types. In a
civilization where most professions demand regularity,
restraint, punctuality, and directness, unstability and excess
emotionalism are necessarily at a discount. There are the
vagabond types who, like young Georges, Jean-qhristophe's
protege, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most
of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again
those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to
aesthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world
outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable.
If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their
peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social
and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year
at our great universities we see small groups of young men,
who, having spent three or four years on philosophy, literature,
and the liberal arts, and having no interest in academic
life, are put to it to find a profession in which they can find a
genuine interest or possible success.

Among these "eccentrics" a few have been reckoned geniuses
by their contemporaries or by posterity. In such cases
society hesitates to apply its usual formulae. One cannot
condemn out of hand a Shelley. He is not of the run of men.

Shelley was one of those spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of those
nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly, a dogmatic, inspired,
perfect, and incorrigible creature.... Being a finished child of
nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and
society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was
obtuse to the droll miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The cannonade
of hard inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what