INERTIA AS RELATED TO CONSCIOUSNESS HI 



foreign to their normal life and experience. Well- 

 authenticated cases have been recorded of young 

 girls of the upper classes who, on becoming insane, 

 have given utterance not only to oaths but to 

 profane and obscene expressions (coprolalia) the 

 meaning of which they could not possibly com- 

 prehend and which they certainly had never once 

 heard uttered. On this feature in cases of nymph- 

 omania cf. Maudsley.* This conduct of young ladies 

 who have become insane is comparable with 

 that of old gentlemen, who, after a life of decorum 

 and moral rectitude in matters of sex, will suddenly 

 develop propensities to indecency and sexual im- 

 morality totally out of keeping with their past 

 training and behaviour. This form of senile de- 

 generacy is well known to those versed in psycho- 

 logical medicine : it is of purely non-environmental 

 origin, and therefore the expression of some latent 

 disposition related not to affectability but to 

 functional inertia. 



The scientific study of the insane abounds with 

 examples of psychic inertia. Under the category 

 of periodicity we have folie circulaire itself where, 

 in a definite rhythm, the patient is sane and insane 

 alternately ; this has little reference to the en- 

 vironment ; if it was through his environment that 

 he became insane, through what environment has 

 he now become sane again, for his environment 

 has not altered ? 



* Henry Maudsley, " Body and Mind," p. 83. (London : 

 Macmillan, 1870.) 



