RESPONSIBILITY IN MENTAL DISEASE. 8.3 



tlieir overactivity being expressed in delusions,, hallucinations, 

 wild and whirling words, and extravagant actions. 



When our attention is withdrawn as, for instance,, when we 

 have dropped into a reverie or are just falling asleep a sound that 

 might have made us turn our heads, if on the alert, will cause us 

 to start violently ; and when in insanity volition is impaired, sen- 

 sations that would have been almost unnoticed in health stir up 

 morbid feelings. Did time permit, I think I could establish that 

 affinitive sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and surface impressions, as 

 well as organic sensations, play a larger part than is generally 

 supposed in the induction of morbid impulses when the regulating 

 brain-centers are weakened. Many sane persons have experienced 

 horrid promptings when standing looking over a precipice or 

 gazing at a passing train, and among the insane the glitter of a 

 knife or the crackling of a fire will sometimes evoke suicidal or 

 homicidal impulses which but for it might have remained dormant. 



Will is the link between feeling and action, and when it is im- 

 paired it ceases to be available to prevent the transmutation of the 

 energy of feeling into the energy of motion. And here we have an 

 explanation of the utter inadequacy of the motives that constantly 

 lead to insane crimes. There is no check-action ; there is an ab- 

 breviation of that pause that gives time for foresight and reflec- 

 tion. " Must give us pause ! " says Hamlet when on the brink of 

 suicide time to summon up the forces of rational resistance. Man 

 is a hesitating animal. The whole system of Zoroaster hinges on 

 the fact that everything noxious and evil in creation is the work 

 of Ahriman, an independent power, whose wickedness depends on 

 the fact that he acts before he thinks ; whereas Ormuzd, the good 

 spirit, thinks before he acts. And madmen may in many instances 

 be distinguished from sane men in the same way. The impul- 

 sive madman acts before he thinks ; feeling is translated into 

 action with reflex precipitancy, with an abbreviation of that time 

 interval between stimulus and response which can now be sub- 

 jected to experimental measurement ; in the absence, therefore, of 

 all restraining considerations, and in a violent and disproportion- 

 ate manner. I have known an epileptic to kill his attendant, beat- 

 ing his head into jelly, because he had prevented him from taking 

 his daily walk. I have known another epileptic hang himself 

 because a smaller portion of bread and butter had been served out 

 to him than to his companions ; and, in the recent case at Weston- 

 super-Mare, the lad Hitchins shot his sister because of some tri- 

 fling slight which she had put upon him. In all such cases a mo- 

 mentary irritation, a natural feeling of chagrin, such as we all feel 

 when thwarted or disparaged, instead of being inhibited in its nas- 

 cent state when inhibition is most powerful, so that the reaction to 

 it may be reduced by deliberation to rational proportions, is, by the 



