Morbid Psychological Heredity. 121 



Since the direct cause of insanity is some morbid affection of 

 the nervous system, and as every part of the organism is trans- 

 missible, clearly the heredity of mental affections is the rule. It 

 makes little difference whether we regard thought as simply a 

 function of the nervous system, or the nervous system as a simple 

 condition of thought. Our experimental psychology, which deals 

 only with facts, remands to metaphysics all researches into first 

 causes. The metamorphoses of heredity are still more perplex- 

 ing. Nervous disorders are often transformed in their transmission. 

 Convulsions in the progenitors may change to hysteria or to 

 epilepsy in the descendants. A case is cited where hyperassthesia 

 in the father branched out in the grandchildren into the various 

 forms of monomania, mania, hypochondria, hysteria, epilepsy, 

 convulsions, spasms. Facts of this kind are very numerous. To 

 confine ourselves to psychological metamorphoses, nothing is more 

 frequent than to see simple insanity become suicidal mania, or 

 suicidal mania become simple insanity, alcoholism, or hypo- 

 chondria. ' A goldsmith, who had been cured of a first attack of 

 insanity, caused by the revolution of 1789, took poison ; later, his 

 eldest daughter was seized with an attack of mania, passing into 

 dementia. One of her brothers stabbed himself in the stomach 

 with a knife. A second brother gave himself up to drunkenness, 

 and ended his career by dying in the streets. A third, owing to 

 domestic annoyances, refused all food, and died of anaemia. 

 Another daughter, a woman of most capricious temper, married, 

 and had a son and daughter: the former died insane and epileptic; 

 the latter lost her mind during her lying in, became hypochondriac, 

 and wished to starve herself to death. Two children of this same 

 woman died of brain fever, and a third would never take the 

 breast.' 1 This is one of the most instructive cases we have. 



it is not a disease of the body, but a disease of the mind, a sin. It neither is, 

 nor can be hereditary, because the thinking ego, the soul, is not hereditary. 

 What is transmissible by way of generation is temperament and constitution, 

 and against these he must react whose parents were insane, if he would not 

 himself become lunatic. The man who, during his whole life, has before his 

 eyes and in his heart the image of God, need never fear that he will lose his 

 wits,' etc. 



1 Piorry, De ? H6redit6 dans les Maladies, p. 169. See also Maudsley, 

 Pathology of Mind, 244 256. 



