578 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



selves plain or just give you a faint idea of what they are doing, but you or 

 any one else can imagine that they would be practises of sexual intercourse; of 

 the spirits having intercourse with each other. It seems to me right now that 

 this room is all filled with miles and miles of them all doing anything they can 

 think of. . . . Now I am sort of carrying the load, as you might say, and any one 

 who uses this (spirit) realm ought to be fair enough to keep out of my sight; I 

 don't want to see all this business. Another thing, these people are total 

 strangers to me, and if this business is going to keep me from engaging in re- 

 munerative employment there is going to be some remuneration, because I'm 

 not running a free lunch counter! 



We have reviewed the major exaggerations and distortions of per- 

 sonal traits which characterize the psychoses — individual differences due 

 to pathological conditions. But there has been mentioned a group of 

 disorders, the biogenetic, that arise upon constitutional incapacity for 

 mental adaptation to life, and in this aspect do the psychoses represent 

 pathological conditions due to individual differences. Here we see 

 individuals, who, though in early years presenting no such abnormalities 

 as would bring them into the group of feeble-minded, and adapting 

 themselves at least passably well to the situations of childhood, yet, 

 when they meet situations of a certain character in later life, are not able 

 to cope with them as normal individuals, but are precipitated into 

 psychosis. 



The fact that these situations are common ones in every-day experi- 

 ence has been held to refute the supposition that they could be the 

 precipitating factor in psychosis. Thus, if a girl, such as I have in 

 mind, develops a brief, dementia-prcecox-like episode on the death of an 

 old lover, this would not be an occasion for the psychosis, because 

 thousands of people live through the situation with no abnormal 

 reaction. But this fairly obvious reasoning that the shock could not 

 occasion the psychosis has to yield before the very obvious fact that it 

 does. The truth is rather that in these individuals certain particular 

 shocks would tend to be followed by psychotic reactions, and this girl 

 developed her psychosis because, as further observation indicated, the 

 death of that old lover meant to her something very different from what 

 the corresponding event means to the average person. 



Just what mental events will in any given individual be of the 

 character to precipitate a psychosis is a psychogenetic matter, and 

 varies as people's life-histories do. But that they have the property of 

 precipitating one at all, and what kind of psychosis they will precipi- 

 tate, depends on individual differences of constitution. 



The most definite conception has been reached in regard to those 

 mental constitutions on which dementia prcecox reactions develop. It 

 has been found by Adolf Meyer, August Hoch, and others who have 

 repeated their observations, that individuals who develop these psychoses 

 tend to be distinguished by a combination of traits which they sum 



