BODILY CONDITION'S MENTAL STATES. 55 



must necessarily take food. There can be no doubt of that. Let us 

 draw a few parallels, and see how easily such cases are explained by 

 very ordinary and accepted facts. Every physician has had cases of 

 persons who asserted that they did not sleep at all for long seasons at 

 a time, while the fact was that such persons did actually sleep a good 

 deal, as proved by being seen asleep, and by the fact that they did not 

 suffer in health, as they must have done if sleep had been entirely ab- 

 sent. But these persons, while asserting that which was not true con- 

 cerning an important matter, did not intend to falsify. They simply 

 stated what they believed to be true. Their mental condition was such 

 that they did not feel the impression which sleep ordinarily makes on 

 the consciousness. They slept, but, having no impression of sleep, they 

 asserted that they did not sleep. They could not, with the only evi- 

 dence which they possessed, the absence of any mental impression of 

 having slept, assert otherwise. There are other persons who, under 

 certain states of mind, say that they eat almost nothing at all " not 

 enough to keep a bird alive " while, as a matter of fact, they do eat 

 very well, sometimes even heartily. We see them eat enough to main- 

 tain them well nourished, and yet they assert that they do not eat 

 enough for the bodily requirements. Again, the difficulty lies, not in 

 the fact of eating, nor in any desire to falsify, but in the fact that, in 

 their peculiar mental condition, their eating, though seen by others and 

 by themselves, makes no impression on their minds. They state, not 

 what is true, but what they feel to be true. To recur to the more 

 typical class : 



A lady, who was at once the daughter of one physician and the 

 sister of another, lost the use of one limb soon after a slight attack of 

 sore-throat. She got about on crutches for nearly a year, and when 

 summer came she went into the country, where she grew stout and was 

 in perfect bodily health, joyfully anticipating a speedy return to her 

 home in the city with restored powers. But suddenly the other limb 

 gave out, and she was brought helpless back. After I had examined 

 her I knew that she had all the power in her limbs which she had ever 

 had, but that did not make me think that she was intending to deceive 

 me when she asserted that she had no power to stand. Her statement 

 was contrary to the fact, but she had to express that which she felt to 

 be the fact. The parallel goes even further than this. 



This person did use her limbs more or less in certain ways, and 

 under certain circumstances. But that fact made no impression on her 

 consciousness, as against the stronger impression of entire want of 

 power in her limbs. And so it is in all of the cases of perverted and 

 abnormal mental timbre, when this condition has passed a certain boun- 

 dary. The words spoken and the things done are dominated by the 

 paramount influence on, and take their quality and coloring from, the 

 predominating mental state of the subjects of it. 



Nevertheless, while the mental timbre is an independent condition, 



