298 PSYCHOLOGY. 



hook it has been said that one can only hang a painted 

 chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain 

 can properly be hung. Wliatever things have intimate and 

 continuous connection luith my life are things of whose reality 

 I cannot doubt. Whatever things fail to establish this con- 

 nection are things which are practically no better for me 

 than if they existed not at all. 



In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensi- 

 bilities and reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, 

 rouses us, or wakens natural feeling. The consequence is 

 the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, 

 that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and 

 that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed 

 in india-rubber ; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws 

 blood, as it were. According to Griesinger, " I see, I hear !" 

 such patients say, ' but the objects do not reach me, it is as 

 if there were a wall between me and the outer world !" 



" In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sen- 

 sibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly. 

 But even were this change always present, it would not completely ex- 

 plain the psychic phenomenon . . . which reminds us more of the altera- 

 tion in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on 

 the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about. 

 In childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible 

 phenomena, we live unmediately with them and in them; an intimately 

 vital tie binds us and them together. But with the ripening of reflec- 

 tion this tie is loosened, the warmth of our interest cools, things look 

 differently to us, and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even 

 though we know it a great deal better. Joy and expansive emotions in 

 general draw it nearer to us again. Everything makes a more lively 

 Impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm recep- 

 tivity for sense impressions, joy makes us feel young again. In depress- 

 ing emotions it is the other w-ay. Outer things, whether living or in- 

 organic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite 

 objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more. Under these, 

 circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, 

 we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness 

 grows upon us. . . . Where there is no strong intelligpnee to control this 

 blase condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of 

 these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, 

 the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms 

 of insanity.* 



* Griesinger, Mental Diseases, §§ 50, 98. The neologism we so ofteu 



