596 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



because they develop intellect and ruin character. " What is the 

 use," say they, " of teaching children to read and think if you do 

 not make them honest and truthful? How is it better for the com- 

 munity to educate liars and thieves merely that they may lie and 

 steal successfully in business and politics, where they can not be 

 caught, rather than to leave them in the slums, where the police 

 can get them? " The accusation is bitterly unjust in many ways, 

 but its force can be met by introducing a system of character build- 

 ing based on a careful study of the means of developing truth- 

 fulness, honesty, carefulness, persistence, bravery, courage under 

 defeat, and the other qualities that go to make up a true man. The 

 foundation of this system is to be found, I believe, in the principle 

 of character-building by motor activity. 



The ladder of cross-education will be slowly climbed by psycho- 

 logical investigators; if they find at the top a principle of such 

 value and wide application, surely the climb will have been worth 

 the time and trouble. 



THE MOKBID " SE^'SE OF mJURY," 



By W. F. BECKER, M. D. 



AS a fog about a ship removes it from exact relations to sur- 

 -^^^ roundings, so, from the standpoint of morbid psychology, we 

 may fancy the mind peering through a more or less misty envelope 

 to the true adjustment to things — the "glass " through which we see 

 " darkly." "Were all action and reaction of the mind to surround- 

 ings perfectly adapted, there could be such . a thing as absolute 

 sanity. So long, however, as evolution with continuous readapta- 

 tion and the processes of dissolution with attempted adaptations 

 continue, so long can there be but groping, imperfect relations to 

 surroundings, so long must there be defective or morbid mental 

 action, and sanity and insanity therefore but relative terms. Thus 

 many symptoms of the insane appear to be but varying degrees of 

 the morbid mental manifestations of health, and we may assume 

 a priori that they have a common genesis and can be identified 

 for study. If we take, for example, one of the commonest of 

 these — viz., the idea of persecution among the insane — we may 

 safely identify it with the " sense of injury " equally common 

 among the sane. 



By this " sense of injury " is meant that vague sense which 

 afflicts many of us at times of being the object of hostile feelings 

 on the part of others. No doubt we often are, for, in the stress 

 of necessary rivalry and conflict upon which progress depends,_jWe 



