for development, are cast off by the stream of progress, and are on their way to destruction, for re-issue by nature under better form. By such examples of dehumanisation men are taught how best to promote the progress of humanisation through the ages.

The foregoing considerations help us to understand how it is that we sometimes witness such a precocity of seeming vice in the insane infant or child. Innate in its human constitution lurks the potentiality of a certain development, the latent power of an actual evolution which no monkey ever has; for in it is contained, as by involution, or implicitly comprehended, the influence of all mankind that has gone before. When such a being is insane, there is not an individual creature only, but there is human nature, in perverse action, in retrograde metamorphosis; we have actualised in morbid display certain potentialities of humanity; accordingly exhibitions of degenerate human action are presented, which so far as regards the individual infant seem to mark prematurity of vice. Humanity is contained in the individual; and in these strange morbid displays there is an example of humanity undergoing resolution. Whatever act of vice, of folly, of crime, of madness one man has perpetrated, there is in every man the potentiality of perpetrating; if it were not so, why repeat the decalogue? In the sense of anything in nature being self-determined and self-sufficing, there is no individuality as in one word are summed up the foregoing ages of human cultivation, so in one mortal are summed up the foregoing ages of human existence. Both in his knowledge and in his nature each one is the inheritor of the acquisitions of the pastthe heir of all the ages. Take the word which represents the subtile and, as it were, petrified thought of a high mental culture, and trace back with analytical industry its genesis,-resolve it into its elementary production,-what a long succession of human experiences is unfolded! What a gradual process of growth, rising in speciality and complexity up to that organic evolution which the word now marks, is displayed! Take, in like manner, the individual being, and trace back in imagination through the long records of ages the antecedent steps of his genesis, or observe intelligently the resolution of his essential human nature as it

is exhibited in the degenerate acts of the insane child-in this experiment thus obtruded on the attention by nature-and there will then be no cause for surprise at phenomena which the young creature could never have individually acquired, and which, so far as its conscious life is concerned, appear strangely precocious and inexplicable. There is the rapid undoing of what has been slowly done through the ages; the disruption and degenerate manifestation of faculties which have been tediously acquired; the resolution of what has been the gain of a long process of evolution; the formless ruin of carefully fashioned form. We are sad witnesses of the operation of a pathological law of dehumanisation in producing dehumanised varieties of the human kind.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF INSANITY.

MUCH discussion, into which I shall not enter here, has taken place at different times concerning the proper method of classifying the varieties of mental derangement, and as many as forty or fifty different systems of classification have been propounded: a sufficient proof that no one has yet been found to be satisfactory. Some writers desire to have an exact pathological basis for each of the varieties which they recognise, and throw scorn on anything short of that, before they have done more than cross the pathological threshold, and while they still know nothing of what is going on in the intimate and inaccessible workings of nerve element. Doubtless, their day will come a long time hence; in the meantime we may pass them by as persons whose eager aspirations have outrun practical needs, and whose enthusiasm oftentimes forestalls observation. The commonly received classification is the least ambitious, since it is founded upon the recognition of the obvious differences of the mental features-that is to say, is entirely symptomatological; it is simply a convenient scheme for grouping together into some sort of provisional order phenomena which resemble one another, without regard to their real nature, their origin, and their essential relations, concerning all which it gives no information. We group together under the name of Melancholia a number of cases in which the symptoms are those of great depression, and under the name of Mania other cases in which the symptoms are those of exaltation and excitement, notwithstanding that what seems to be the same cause may produce the depressed form in one person and the excited form

in another, and that the disease may go through both forms in the same person before it has run its natural course. Clearly such a classification of symptoms must be looked upon as provisional; but for the present it is convenient, and in truth necessary. Were there no methodical classification of symptoms, an author would be compelled on each occasion, when describing a variety of mental derangement, to set forth the symptoms in detail instead of denoting them by the general name of the class, and there would be no end of his labour. This necessity of calling up by a general term the conception of a certain coexistence and sequence of symptoms is a reason why the old classification holds its ground against classifications that are alleged to be more scientific: it is good so far as it goes, but it by no means goes to the root of the matter; whereas the classifications which pretend to go to the root of the matter go beyond what knowledge warrants, and are radically faulty.

Some persons exhibit eccentricities of thought, feeling, and conduct, which, not reaching the degree of positive insanity, nevertheless make them objects of remark in the world, and cause difficulty sometimes when the question of legal or moral responsibility is concerned. They are so unlike other people in their feelings and thoughts, and do such odd things, that they are thought to have a strain of madness in them; they have what may be called the insane temperament,-in other words, a defective or unstable condition of nerve element, which is characterised by the disposition to sudden, singular, and impulsive caprices of thought, feeling, and conduct. This condition, in the causation of which hereditary taint is commonly detectable, may be described as the Neurosis spasmodica or Neurosis insana.

The Insane Temperament or Neurosis insano.

It is characterised by singularities or eccentricities of thought, feeling, and action. It cannot truly be said of any one so constituted that he is mad, but he is certainly strange, or "queer," or, as it is said, "not quite right." What he does he must often do in a different way from all the rest of the world. If he thinks about anything, he is apt to think about it under strange and novel

relations, which would not have occurred to an ordinary person; his feeling of an event is unlike that which other people have of it; he has perhaps the strangest twists and cranks of thought, and is given to punning on words; and now and then he does whimsical and apparently quite purposeless acts. There is in the constitution an innate tendency to act independently as an element in the social system, and there is a personal gratification in the indulgence of such disposition, which to lookers-on seems to mark great self-feeling and vanity; he, however, is so exclusively engrossed in the affection of self that he gratifies his eccentric impulses without being conscious of the way in which his conduct affects other persons. Such an one, therefore, is looked upon by those who perform their duties in the social system with equable regularity, thinking and feeling always just as other people think and feel, as odd, queer, strange, crochety, not quite right.

This peculiarity of temperament, which is the sign and perhaps the sanitary outlet of a predisposition to insanity, borders very closely upon genius in some instances; it is the condition of the talent or wit which is allied to madness, being only divided from it by thin partitions. The novel mode of looking at things may be an actual advance upon the accepted system of thought, and occasion a flash of true insight; the individual may be in a minority of one, not because he sees less than, or not so well as, all the world, but because he happens to see deeper, and to have the intuition of some new truth. He may differ from all the world, not because he is wrong and all the world is right, but because he is right and all the world is wrong. Of necessity every new truth is at first in a minority of one; it is a deviation from or a rebellion against the existing system of belief; accordingly, the existing system, ever thinking itself a finality, strives with all the weight of its established organisation to crush it out. By the nature of things that must happen, whether the novelty be a truth or an error. It is only by the work of rebels in the social system that progress is achieved, and precisely because individuality is a reproach, and sneered at as an eccentricity, is it well for the world, as Mr. J. S. Mill pointed out, that individuality or eccentricity should