THE DA WN OF MIND 173 



is what, on the theory of mental evolution, one 

 would already have expected. The highest part is 

 the latest added part, and the latest added part is 

 the least secured part. As the last arrival, it is 

 not yet at home; it has not had time to get last- 

 ingly embedded in the brain ; the competition of 

 older faculties is against it ; the hold of the will 

 upon it is slight and fitful ; its tenure as a tenant 

 is precarious and often threatened. Among the 

 older and more permanent residents, therefore, it 

 has little chance. Hence if anything goes wrong, 

 as the last added, the most complex, the least 

 automatic of all the functions, it is the first to 

 suffer. 



We are but too familiar with cases where men 

 of lofty intellect and women of most pure mind, 

 seized in the awful grasp of madness, are trans- 

 formed in a few brief months into beings worse 

 than brutes. How are we to account, on any 

 other principle than this, for that most shocking 

 of all catastrophes the sudden and total break-up, 

 the devolution^ of a saint? That the wise man 

 should become a chattering idiot is inexplicable 

 enough, but that the saintly soul should riot in 

 blasphemy and immorality so foul that not among 

 the lowest races is there anything to liken to it — 

 these are phenornena so staggering that if Evolu- 



