ON ACQUIRED PSYCHICAL HABITS. 319 



which we before dwelt on with delight, now excite no feelings hut 

 those of pain, or at best of insouciance. 



Now, there are many persons in whom these opposite Emotional 

 states are induced by Meteorological conditions; the one by a dry, 

 clear, bright atmosphere; the other by that close, damp, "muggy" 

 state of the air, which seems to lay a " wet blanket " upon all their 

 enjoyment, both bodily and mental. And precisely the same depressing 

 influence is often experienced from deficient action of the liver, causing 

 an accumulation of the materials of bile in the blood ; and it is just as 

 apparent to the Physician that the elimination of these by appropriate 

 remedies, so as to restore the Blood to its normal purity, thereby re- 

 moves the Moral depression, as it is that the introduction of a minute 

 quantity of Hashish into the Blood produces a Moral exaltation. 



In these days of eager competition, again, it is extremely common 

 for a psychical state to be induced by the overtasking of the Brain, 

 which every intelligent medical practitioner recognizes as essentially 

 physical in its origin, but which yet manifests itself chiefly in moral, 

 and not unfrequently, also, in intellectual perversion. The excess of 

 activity is followed, as its natural result, by a state of depression ; in 

 which the subject of it looks at every thing, past, present, and future, 

 in a gloomy light, as through a darkened glass. His whole life has 

 been evil ; he has brought ruin on his affairs ; his dearest friends are 

 in league to injure him. At first this moral perversion extends itself 

 only to a misinterpretation of actual occurrences, which only differs in 

 degree from that which we observe in persons of a morose temper. 

 But, with the advance of the disorder, the mind dwells on its own 

 morbid imaginings, till they come to take the place of actual facts ; 

 and in this way hallucinations are generated i. e., creations of the 

 imagination, which are accepted as real occurrences. Now, here there 

 is no primary intellectual perversion ; the reasoning powers are not 

 disturbed; the patient can discuss with perfect sanity any question 

 that does not touch his morbid feelings; but the representations shaped 

 by his own mind, under the influence of these feelings, being received 

 as truths to the exclusion of his common-sense, all his actions are based 

 on those erroneous data. This condition is merely an intensification 

 of that just described ; and the Physician can no more doubt that it 

 depends upon an unhealthy condition of the bodily frame, than that 

 the delirium of fever and the fantasia of Hashish are dependent upon 

 the presence of a poison in the blood. 



The Psychologist who neglects such phenomena as these, merely 

 because the inferences drawn from them by the Physiologist have a 

 dangerous flavor of " materialism," seems to me just as blameworthy 

 as the Physiologist who ignores the facts of consciousness, when they 

 do not happen to fit in with his own conclusions. The true Psycholo- 

 gist is he who lays the foundations of his science broad and deep in 



