"How can you dispute that?" Hansen said, nodding in instant agreement. "All geniuses are a little mad. And by the same token, capable of a sudden, explosive violence when a situation gets out of hand and becomes unendurable to them." "I couldn't disagree more violently," Macklin said. Eaton sighed. "And I couldn't care less," he interposed. "Not right at the moment, anyway. I wish all three of you would shut up." "I'd like to thrash it out with Fred right now," Macklin said, staring steadily at Ellers. "It angers me when someone makes a statement like that--Plato, Aristotle or whomever. It doesn't matter what towering minds they were supposed to have. They lived long before modern science could give us just a little understanding, at least, of why human beings behave as they do." "All right," Eaton muttered resignedly. "Speak your piece and get it out of your system. Otherwise we'll have no peace...." He smiled thinly. "Sorry. No pun intended." "I'll try to keep it brief," Macklin said. "To me the one great, distinguishing quality of creative genius is sanity--a sanity that illuminates every aspect of human experience. I'll quote _you_ a passage from Emily Dickinson: 'Pardon me my sanity in an insane world.' "Well, that makes sense to me, that sums it up. I'll tell you why. A creative artist has superior insights into the nature of reality. Reason, completely rational behavior--common sense on a high level, if you want to put it in another way--is a _must_ with the creative mind, if it isn't to be crippled or completely destroyed. "A man of creative genius wages a terrific struggle for survival every waking moment and even in his sleep. He is torn by emotions a hundred times as tumultuous as those of the average person. He has all the emotional intensity of your so-called 'mad genius', granted. But it stops there. He's simply incapable of accepting the lunacies of society at its most neurotic, its most hare-brained. In fact, he's incapable of accepting or compromising with those lunacies at any point. His basic sanity is too great." "Just what are you trying to say, Jim?" Eaton asked. "Simply this. He has a fifty percent chance of winning that struggle because a man of creative genius has much more than the average person's inner strength. Don't kid yourself. He has, or he'd go down fast. Few people could survive the kind of battle he wages with himself every waking hour for ten minutes at a stretch. "Life itself, just the terrible kind of punishment that life inflicts--illnesses, misfortunes of every kind, tragic accidents, death--can hurt him much more than you or I can be hurt, simply because he has the emotional sensitivity which goes with genius.