Intellectuality and Insanity. 87 Mr. Harrison observes: "It is well known that many of our eminent writers, especially those of an imaginative kind, were hypochondriacs. The unfortunate Cowper and Collins were of this class; and Chatterton and Haydon, it will be remembered, destroyed themselves under its influence. The Rev. Robert Hall had periods of actual insanity, and the elegant Charles Lamb probably escaped from his sister's fate only by the necessities of his position. Whitbread, Romilly, Londonderry, and Calcraft, put an end to their own existences; but the list is too great to particularize, and it is enough to know, that learning and genius are not removed from the worst of human calamities." How tenderly has Johnson spoken of the affliction of Collins, in his letters to Joseph Warton. "But how little can we venture to exult in any intellectual powers or literary attainments when we consider the condition of poor Collins. I knew him a few years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs." "The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance and depart, that it may blaze and expire." To the list of sufferers must be added Robert Southey, who, in early life, professed a democratic and half-deistical creed: his overtasked mental faculties gave way, and he sank into a condition which gradually became one of deeper unconsciousness, in which state he died, after four years' suffering. The poet Moore, for the last three years of his life, was afflicted with a softening of the brain, which reduced him to a state of mental incapacity, though without pain. The fate of Swift is well known; but even before the period at which his mind gave way, it is too probable that he inwardly laboured under a mental infirmity which, in itself, might be nearly allied to his genius. His own account of the source of his affliction is curious. In a letter to Lord Bolingbroke, Swift says: "I remember when I was a little boy, I felt a great fish at the end of my line, which I drew up almost on the ground, but it dropt in, and the disappointment vexes me to this very day, and, I believe it was the type of all my future disappointments." This little incident, (says Percival,) perhaps gave the first wrong bias to a mind predisposed to such impressions; and by operating with so occurs in Fuller's Profane State: "He was of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it."-Bell's Annotated Edition of Dryden's Poetical Works. * Medical Aspects of the Human Mind. much strength and permanency, it might possibly lay the foundation of the Dean's subsequent peevishness, passion, misanthropy, and final insanity. The quickness of his sensibility furnished a sting to the slightest disappointment; and pride festered those wounds which selfgovernment would instantly have healed. As children couple hobgoblins with darkness, every contradiction of his humour, every obstacle to his preferment, was, by him, associated with ideas of malignity and evil. By degrees, he acquired a contempt of human nature, and a hatred of mankind, which at last terminated in the total abolition of his rational faculties. Swift himself, in the last document which we possess of him, as a rational and reflecting being, thus awfully foretels the catastrophe which shortly afterwards took place: "I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under, both in body and mind. All I say is, that I am not in torture; but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is, and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few-few and miserable they must be. I am, for those few days, yours entirely, If I do not blunder, it is Saturday. J. SWIFT." Dr. Ferriar observes that what we call genius has often a degree of eccentricity connected with it, which he hints, may even have an alliance with insanity. "No doubt," says he, "the same causes, which, in a strong degree, produce madness, may, in a lower, increase the natural powers of the mind." Lord Byron has left a "trivial fond record" of a mind, rendered more subtle and more oppressed with thought and ambition, looking back even to its primitive simplicity, with a feeling little short of regret : I feel almost at times as I have felt In happy childhood; trees, and flowers, and brooks, Wordsworth thus expresses a feeling akin to the above: My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirr'd; For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay; And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what time takes away Than what he leaves behind. Personal attachment sometimes exists to a morbid degree in sensitive minds. Sheridan, in his play of The Rivals, apostrophises Love as the tormentor and fiend, "whose influence acting How the Egyptians Treated their Insane. 89 on men of dull souls makes idiots of them, but meeting subtler spirits, betrays their courses, and urges sensibility to madness." There are few persons who have not, at particular seasons, experienced the effect of certain accidental associations, which obtrude one impertinent idea, or set of ideas, on the mind, to the exclusion of every other. Locke has noticed this weakness, and he humorously describes it as, "a childishness of the under standing, wherein, during the fit, it plays with and dandles som insignificant puppet, without any end in view." Thus, at times, a proverb, a scrap of poetry, or some other trivial object, wil steal into the thoughts, and continue to possess them long after it ceases to be amusing. Persuasives to dismiss a guest that proves so troublesome, can hardly be necessary; and bodily exertion is generally the best remedy for this mental infirmity. HOW THE EGYPTIANS TREATED THEIR INSANE. How strange is it to find that the mild system now adopted in our asylums should have been that actually pursued in that "cradle of civilization,"-Egypt! The system of treatment seems to have been excellent. At both extremities of Egypt were temples dedicated to Saturn, to which melancholics resorted in great numbers in quest of relief. In these abodes, surrounded by shady groves and beautiful gardens, varieties of games and recreations were established for the amusement of the mind and the invigoration of the body, while the imagination was impressed with the finest productions of the sculptor and painter. This was nothing less than the treatment which Pinel laboured to restore when he struck off the chains from the lunatic, and by reverting to the system of a comparatively benighted age, destroyed that barbarous and cruel system which was disgracing the character and satirizing the vaunts of an advanced civilization. They were, indeed, wonderful people, those ancient Egyptians, with their tenets of a resurrection, a day of judgment, a future retribution and an incarnation of God; perhaps justice has scarcely been done them by those who owed so much to them. Thus Pythagoras, who was the first Greek philosopher who practised medicine, seems to have inherited most of his philosophy from them; and may well have introduced into Greece, with the doctrine of metempsychosis the plan after which the Egyptians treated insanity. At any rate the method of Asclepiades, who is looked upon as the real founder of a psychical mode of cure among the Greeks, was Egyptian. "Music, love, wine, employment, exercising the memory, and fixing the attention were his principal remedies." He recommended that bodily restraint should be avoided as much as possible and that none but the most dangerous should be confined by bonds. It was reserved, however, for more recent times to discover the ingenious plan of once for all disposing of lunatics by burning them alive, and to mingle with a barbarity scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous time the degraded foliy which discovered in some of them saints worthy of * * Feuchterleben's Medical Psychology. canonization. The cells, the whip, and the chains were of even yet more recent date ;* but now, happily, resting on the solid basis of the highest moral law, we apply every comfort which humanity can suggest, and every instrument which science can devise, to relieve the unhappy beings whom destiny has so fearfully afflicted.+ OPERATION OF MIND." THE GREAT BOOK." Mr. Samuel Warren says: "I do not know how to express it, but I have several times had a transient consciousness of mere ordinary incidents then occurring having somehow or other happened before, accompanied by a vanishing idea of being able to predict the sequence. I once mentioned this to a man of powerful intellect, and he said, 'So have I.' Again, it may be that there is more of truth than one suspects in the assertion which I met with in a work of M. de Quincey's, that forgetting-absolute forgetting is a thing not possible to the human mind. Some evidence of this may be derived from the fact of long-missed incidents and states of feeling suddenly being reproduced, and without any perceptible train of association. Were this to be so, the idea is very awful; and it has been suggested by a great thinker that merely perfect memory of every thing may constitute the great book which shall be opened in the last day, on which man has been distinctly told that the secrets of all hearts shall be made known; for all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." (Heb. iv. 13.) Sir Francis Beaufort, (in a letter published in the Autobiography of Sir John Barrow,) describes what happened to himself when he was preserved from being drowned; when "every incident of his former life seemed to glance across his recollection in a retrograde succession, not in mere outline, but the picture being filled with every minute and collateral feature," forming "a kind of panoramic picture of his entire existence, each act of it accompanied by a sense of right and wrong." All this must have happened in the brief space of a very few minutes. Other instances are related of individuals whose minds had been affected very much in the same way when they were suddenly placed in a situation which threatened immediate death, although they were not at all deprived of their sensibility and self-possession. The accounts, however, given after recovery from drowning differ very much. Some, whatever they may have felt at the time, remember nothing except their having been overcome by a sense of insuperable drowsiness. In one instance, a sailor who had been Scarcely half a century has elapsed since the Parliamentary Inquiry was instituted, which led to the reform of the treatment of lunatics in Bethlem Hospital. + Journal of Mental Science, July, 1860. Discipline of the Intellect. 91 snatched from the waves, after lying for some time insensible on the deck of the vessel, proclaimed on his recovery that he had been in Heaven, and complained bitterly of his being restored to life as a great hardship. We may conclude that drowning, terrible as it appears to be, is not, after all, either morally or physically, a painful death; and this is confirmed by the experience of one who had nearly lost his life in this manner. He says that the last thing which he remembers is looking at the pebbles and weeds at the bottom of the river, with little or no fear of what was about to happen, and no bodily suffering. (Sir B. Brodie.) We remember to have heard the Bishop of Oxford relate from the pulpit of St. James's Church, Piccadilly, an incident which illustrates this consciousness. An acquaintance of his Lordship, a man of remarkably clear head, was crossing a railway in the country, when an express train, at full speed, appeared closely approaching him. He had just time to throw himself down in the centre of the road between the two lines of rails; and as the vast train passed over him, the sentiment of impending danger to his very existence, brought vividly into his recollection every incident of his former life-in such an array as that which is suggested by the promised opening of "the great book, at the last great day." DISCIPLINE OF THE INTELLECT. Dr. Temple has thus ably illustrated the importance of the teaching of discipline in mature life which is needed for the intellect even more than for the conduct: There are many men who, though they pass from the teaching of the outer law to that of the inner in regard to their practical life, never emerge from the former in regard to their speculative. They do not think; they are contented to let others think for them, and to accept the results. How far the average of men are from having attained the power of free independent thought is shown by the staggering and stumbling of their intellects when a completely new subject of investigation tempts them to form a judgment of their own on a matter which they have not studied. In such cases a really educated intellect sees at once that no judgment is yet within its reach, and acquiesces in suspense. But the uneducated intellect hastens to account for the phenomenon; to discover new laws of nature, and new relations of truth; to decide, and predict, and perhaps to demand a remodeling of all previous knowledge. The discussions on table-turning, a few years ago, illustrated this want of intellects able to govern themselves. The whole analogy of physical science was not enough to induce that suspension of judgment which was effected in a week by the dictum of a known philosopher.-The Education of the World; Essays and Reviews. |