Of the Physiology of certain Disorders of Health. 131 



and anxiety of some kind ; and I have noticed that those persons 

 who are subject to fits of this disorder have that organ much 

 develojjed. I have indeed observed this to be the fact in cases 

 too numerous to doubt of the connexion between the two cir- 

 cumstances. The fear of death, the fear of hell, cf daemons, of 

 accidents, &c, are the result of this organ ; education, external 

 impression, and. the mutual influence of other faculties modify 

 the affection, and determine the oi)ject dreaded : l)ut the in- 

 trinsic character of the disease is the same ; fear and anxiety are 

 its characteristic marks. In hypochondriac-ism, the organ of 

 ideahty suggests the whimsical and delusive ideas, for fear, or the 

 organ of cautiousness, to act upon. But as persons thus or^ 

 ganized are not always hypochondriacal and melancholy, some 

 state of bodily ill-health must be necessary to the production 

 of the disease. I think the opinion of antiquity, the sanction 

 of ages, and facts well known to modern practitioners, warrant 

 the notion that disorders of the organs of digestion, and particu^ 

 Jarly hepatic irritation, exercise in general their morbid feelings. 

 If so, the disorder of the chylopoietic viscera must have a special 

 sympathy with the organs of ideality and cautiousness ; for, if 

 they merely excited the brain in general, the organs of the re- 

 flective powers would have a commensurate action, and the er- 

 roneous ideas would not prevail ; which is far from being the 

 case. The reflecting organs grow weaker, and at last the pa- 

 tient ceases to reason against feelings at first known by the reason- 

 ing powers to be fallacious. Sometimes, when the organ of indir- 

 viduality is weak from smallness and disease, the patient faneies 

 that external bodies have no real existence : when it is too largo 

 and diseased, he fancies he has heard every new thing before. 

 In other cases of defective individuality, I have known single con- 

 sciousness destroyed, analogous to double vision. These aiM 

 many other facts are curious, and lead me to regard individuality 

 its concerned in single consciousness, and other functions attri- 

 buted to the commissures of the brain alone. For it seems to 

 me that the commissures cannot be the cause why we conceive 

 one object to exist exte?'nally, and to excite vision and to act at 

 the same time ; and there seems to me a great analogy in the func- 

 tion of mind whereby we conceive unity of existence from double 

 impressions of the same organ, and that whereby we identify the 

 Jicnsations of different organs, and regard them as qualities of one 

 external body. — Little however, indeed, is known about these 

 things at present: but, little as it is, it must be studied and im- 

 proved on. Reasoning only on theories, and a blind respect for the 

 doctrine of the sciiools, have already caused metaj)hysics to ap- 

 pear al)surd, jjhilosophy in general vague, and medicine con- 

 |.radict(>rv or cutpirical, Wc nur>t follow Nature, and not those 



I 2 who 



