392 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nacity and untiring persistence such, patients go to work. Those 

 patients exhibit the same phenomena who may be termed invent- 

 ors and Utopians. They not seldom sacrifice their means and bring 

 themselves and their families to ruin by their unconquerable desire 

 of making inventions and discoveries. They are fully convinced, 

 in their folly, of the epoch-making importance of their improve- 

 ments, and all pains are lost to cause them to desist from their 

 ridiculous performances. In contrast with students, in whom the 

 turning point of their mental action lies in the understanding, in 

 artists moods and feelings are often the starting point of their 

 productions. Hence we find that in them this part of the mental 

 organ has not infrequently an enormous development. As with 

 the other psychical characters, so likewise here we find that the 

 high refinement of a single factor always, however, in just pro- 

 portion to the total action of the organ produces outward phe- 

 nomena having some similarity with those states which are due 

 to disturbed inward equilibrium, and which we often have occa- 

 sion to observe in the insane. 



No doubt, poets and artists, as well as scholars, often exhibit 

 an outward appearance of self-absorption and of indifference to 

 their surroundings. This is common to them with many of the 

 insane. But how disparate are the causes underlying these 

 phenomena ! With the weak-minded it is the want of power to 

 concentrate the attention which renders them uninterested and 

 indifferent to the outward world ; but with poets and scholars it 

 is, on the contrary, the high degree of that power which brings 

 about similar phenomena. As we know, the centrifugal condi- 

 tion which we term attention not only extends its power to the 

 organ of sense whose action is emphasized, but it must also be 

 able to order off all the rest of the impressions of sense. The 

 great thinker appears uninterested in surrounding things because 

 his whole attention is directed to the well-ordered sequence of his 

 logical thoughts, to which end, with fullest consciousness, the 

 outward impressions are ordered off. The weak-minded man is 

 present at a performance. The sounds of the words of the orator 

 ring in his ears, but the slightest outward or inward impression 

 suffices to make his attention wander. His thoughts ramble. 

 They are everywhere and nowhere. The mentally gifted man, 

 on the contrary, constantly has his mind on the matter in hand. 

 If he wishes to concentrate his thoughts upon an outward 

 object, nothing that takes place is able to escape him. Neither 

 the psychologist nor the psychiatrist ought to be content to 

 observe behavior superficially, but must trace out the motive 

 of it in order to draw any inference from it. The most ab- 

 surd conduct sometimes has reasons consistent with health, 

 while conduct which would not surprise a layman at all may 



