WILL. 645 



" The only good that occurred to me from this whim was that of 

 gradually detaching me from love, and of awakening my reason which 

 had so long lain dormant. I no longer found it necessary to cause my- 

 self to be tied with cords to a chair, in order to prevent me from leaving 

 my house and returning to that of my lady. This had been one of the 

 expedients I devised to render myself wise by force. The cords were 

 concealed under a large mantle in which I was enveloped, and only one 

 hand remained at liberty. Of all those who came to see me, not one 

 suspected I was bound down in this manner. I remained in this situa- 

 tion for whole hours; Elias, who was my jailer, was alone intrusted with 

 the secret. He always liberated me, as he had been enjoined, whenever 

 the paroxysms of my rage subsided. Of all the whimsical methods 

 which I employed, however, the most curious was that of appearing 

 in masquerade at the theatre towards the end of the carnival. Habited 

 as Apollo, I ventured to present myself with a lyre, on which I played 

 as well as I was able and sang some bad verses of my own composing. 

 Such effrontery was diametrically opposite to my natural character. 

 The only excuse I can offer for such scenes was my inability to resist an 

 imperious passion. I felt that it was necessary to place an insuperable 

 barrier between its object and me; and I saw that the strongest of all 

 was the shame to which I should expose myself by renewing an attach- 

 ment which I had so publicly turned into ridicule." * 



Often the insistent idea is of a trivial sort, but it may 

 wear the patient's life out. His hands feel dirty, they must 

 be washed. He hnoivs they are not dirty ; yet to get rid of 

 the teasing- idea he washes them. The idea, however, returns 

 in a moment, and the unfortunate victim, who is not in the 

 least deluded intellectually, will end by spending the whole 

 day at the wash-stand. Or his clothes are not 'rightly' 

 put on ; and to banish the thought he takes them off and 

 puts them on again, till his toilet consumes two or three 

 hours of time. Most people have the potentiality of this 

 disease. To few has it not happened to conceive, after get- 

 ting into bed, that they may have forgotten to lock the 

 front door, or to turn out the entry gas. And few of us 

 have not on some occasion got up to repeat the perform- 

 ance, less because they believed in the reality of its omis- 

 sion than because only so could they banish the worrying 

 doubt and get to sleep, t 



* Autobiograpliy, Howells' edition (1877), pp. 193-6. 



f See a paper on Insistent and Fixed Ideas by Dr. Cowles in American 

 Journal of Psychology, i. 232 ; and another on the so-called Insanity of 

 Doubt by Dr. Knapp, ibid. ill. 1. The latter contains a partial bibliography 

 of the subject. 



