6o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Xot only has the number of insane increased, but their impor- 

 tance in society has multiplied fourfold; for which reason we can not 

 fail to give them attention. The morally insane in polities and the 

 megalomaniac insane in the bank who inspired Ibsen are to be found 

 walking around in every country. The blood-criminal, transrauted 

 into the forger and the bankrupt, penetrates into our houses, and we 

 suffer from him every day; while the insane man at first was not 

 regarded, or was adored under the form of a saint or hated as a wizard, 

 possessed of the devil always, or seemed a phenomenon strange to 

 society, a species of extraplanetary meteor. If we add that the de- 

 generation provoked by the abuses of civilization has begotten a mul- 

 titude of forms akin to madness which afford a field for combinations 

 now tragic, now strangely comic — like the phobia by which one is 

 afraid to cross a room, or avoids a certain group of words, or refuses to 

 know how many doors and windows there are on the street, or can 

 not be at ease without saying sexual pacifying formulas; a class who 

 with their perverted tastes form a real new world apart; and they all 

 may inspire new dramatic settings forth. 



As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated 

 into all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the 

 sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane, 

 of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of 

 the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history, 

 to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last entered 

 into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share. And, 

 far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or 

 abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the 

 admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from 

 L'Uomo delinquente the Jacques of his Bete humaine to make an im- 

 mortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in 

 his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and Punish- 

 ment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a caricature 

 of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to the toilets 

 of women and the Parisian cocottes under the form of a psychology 

 of love. 



It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that 

 there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets 

 and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by 

 the observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to 

 events, but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic 

 potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their works. 

 Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age, saving a 

 part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister so as not 

 to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has not the 



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