Books: Little Voltaire

IDIOT MAN—Charles Richet— Brentano’s ($2). Because he drinks, drugs, smokes, wears earrings, has venereal diseases, tattoos, castrates, circumcises, lets mosquitoes live, fears free trade and death, martyrs his great, razes his forests and does not talk Esperanto, and because all the while he knows better, therefore, fumes Prof. Richet, homo sapiens is homo stultus, most stupid of animals, God’s idiot. Most of which is the ranting of a dyspeptic physiologist. Whole herds of bison, seals, penguins and other contented animals are cited in contrast to homo stultus, but in the heat of the moment the author neglects to enlarge upon them specific attainments. He is a violent little Voltaire with faith in epithets and protoplasm, but not in philosophy. In 1913 he took a Nobel Prize for physiology, and to him wisdom is manifest in the perfect functioning of an animal organism unmolested by what others have been pleased to call the “higher” mental faculty. Farfetched, superficial, his book is but an amusing social irritant.