SANITY AND INSANITY.*
DR. Guy's volume, which contains only about 250 pages, is one more attempt to classify the different forms of insanity, and to solve the problem of the proper legal treatment of the plea of madness in criminal cases. Dr. Guy holds, and no doubt truly, that insanity is a thing for recognition rather than definition ; but if our statute law is to contain no attempt at defining legal irresponsibility, we are thrown entirely into the bands of juries and experts or skilled witnesses. This, indeed, is what Dr. Guy's book seems to contemplate as desirable ; a view in which others may stoutly disagree with him, while fully admitting that judges and lawyers have, as a rule, shown the most alarm- ing dullness in dealing with these questions. On the other hand, the gentlemen whom the vulgar disrespectfully call "mad doctors " can be alarming, too, even when they are comic. We can see what is meant, when Dr. Conolly ranks Goldsmith among imbeciles (indeed, he did it in the best company, though it was lucky for him that he did it after the author of Retaliation was out of the way), especially when Dr. Mandsley, in a well-known work of his, gravely ad- mits that " in its less marked forms, the insane neurosis is by no means an unmixed evil." This deliverance is accompanied by a sort of scale of manifestations of this insane neurosis. We begin (p. 52 of Responsibility in Mental Disease) with the Prophets. "Jeremiah, under the influence of the prophetic spirit, procures a linen girdle and puts it round his loins," and so on. "Ezekiel takes a tile and portrays upon it the city of Jerusalem," and so on. "Isaiah walked naked and barefoot under the influence of the prophetic spirit." "If these symptoms are not madness, they imitate very closely some of its most striking features." Descending from these heights, we come to those who, though not quite "prophets," show a "pre- disposition to insanity in other ways." They "discover nnthought-of relations ;" they " initiate reforms ;" they " dis- cover originality in their remarks ;" they " display artistic talents, artistic feeling, and intense energy ;" lastly, they make " puns, such as a person not so peculiarly gifted might die before he could invent." Passing from these and similar mani- festations of "the insane neurosis in some of its milder forms," we are foredoomed, in nearly all these books, to such utter earthiness of construction and suggestion, such dissecting-room patronage of spiritual truth (politely watered down), that we come to wish the authors would take off their flesh and sit in their bones at once,—if we might so apply one of Sydney Smith's manifestations of "the insane neurosis."
The work of Dr. Guy now before us is largely a reproduction of lectures. It is cautiously written, and whatever value it may have consists mainly in its being a classified reiteration of fami- liar criticisms of insanity, from the purely physiological and " humanitarian " point of view. The author enumerates, as factors, elements, or constituents of the unsound mind, " Illu- sion, delusion, dreams, somnambulism, delirium, incoherent speech, convulsive movements, and then the emotions, pas- sions, and movements of the will." After this account of what makes the unsound mind, and wondering whether it is not a little stretch of language to call incoherent speech and convul- sive movements factors of it, we anxiously inquire for the signs of the mind which is "sound." "The mental characteristics by which we recognise and test the sound mind are few in number," says Dr. Guy. This is consoling. "If," Dr. Guy continues, "a man is neither the sport of illusions, nor the slave of dela-
• The Faders of the Unsound Mind, with Special Reference to the Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases, and the Amendment of the Law. By William A. Guy, N.B., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. London: De la Rae and Co. sions ; if his emotions and passions are under due restraint,. both in his domestic life and in his intercourse with the outer world ; if he manages his property and conducts his business with credit and success ; if, above all, he has undergone no marked deterioration of character, he will be esteemed a person of sound mind." The force of description can no further go. Another expert having laid it down that to feel that you are falling below your ideal and to spend much time in prayer are signs of incipient madness, we turn hastily to Dr. Guy's index, head, "Religion." But Dr. Guy has "only to observe that tho religions emotions are maintained in a state of excessive activity by the frequent recurrence of services and ceremonies which bring men and women together in large numbers, and submit them to the influences—often meretricious—of the. fine arts, which are in themselves most effective stimulants of emotion. Hence [sic] the firm hold which religion has on the minds of men." Cela est Clair comme is jour, but is it not too much like a vicious circle ?
"Religious mania may be expected to be of frequent occurrence, and would be universally recognised as the prevailing form of unsound- ness of mind, if it were not for the unwillingness of mankind to affix the seal of insanity to any dogmas which many men hold u common."
It is hardly possible to treat this seriously. But it is curious, that in dealing with conscience Dr. Guy has missed a point :— " It will be observed that I hare made no separate and distinct. allusion to conscientious disposition, though a knowledge of riglit and wrong figures so prominently in our Courts of Law as the test of criminal responsibility. My motive for the omission is that I do not see any sufficient reason for treating conscience otherwise than as one of the group of emotions which answer swiftly and certainly to the objects or thoughts fitted to call them into play ; or, if differing from them in any particular, in this,—that conscience is maintained in a highly sensitive state by the constant and sustained efforts of the teachers of religion."
The words which we have put in italics might, of course, be so whittled away in discussion as to convey scarcely any relevant meaning; but the author's omission to draw a certain necessary distinction is conclusive as to the part the clause is intended to play here. But there is yet another distinction applying to the latter clause. It is a fact that religious influences largely help to maintain "conscience," in one sense of the word, in a sensitive state ; but the religious teacher usually addresses him- self to wrongdoing as sin, i.e., as an affront to God, and an interruption to happy or even peaceful intercourse with hire. Without the support of religion, conscience (in every sense of the word) is in peril, and its dictates have no final justification; but, for all this, a keen sense of justice, which the word "con-
science" is often used to indicate, is by no means a speciality of the religious classes.
The question of the relation of religion to certain kinds of wrong-doing is as simple now as it was when Lucretius wrote, and as susceptible of misrepresentation. If the will of God is to govern our lives, there can be no greater calamity than to misapprehend that will. But what then? Let any one watch the church-going multitude, or even the crowd at a revival meeting, and examine the cases of religious mania, side by side with the countless thousands of cases where religion proves, as it may daily be seen to do, the last citadel of sanity for poor human nature, and he will wonder how writers on madness can go on taking such hasty and partial views. Cases of religious mania are frequent enough, but in about forty years of close knowledge of the strictly religious classes, including the severest types, we have only known three examples of such mania. In each case the sufferer fancied he or she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. In one instance, the insane person recovered. In another, a near relative of the insane person also had mania,'—a very secular species. In all three there was much self-esteem and vindictiveness in the general character, qualities which, turned-in upon themselves, so to speak, might naturally lead to mania. One man, full of gloomy egotism, hears of a certain sin, and fancies he has committed it ; while another, also a sullen egotist, but out of " serious " circles, fancies he is being robbed and will starve, though he is making his fortune.
It would not be true to say that books which discuss the
awful subject of madness all tell the same stories about the insane, so that the reader gets tired of them, and almost wonders whether people have not left off going mad, since there are no new cases to relate. But there is certainly great sameness in such works, and Dr. Guy seems to have felt this, for he calls attention to the fact that there are about twenty new cases in his volume. We are not going into these dreadful records, or to pretend to discuss in our short space any of the theories of legal or moral responsibility in the insane. Indeed, there is very little theory to be discussed ; and though, of course, all knowledge is good, we shall find, if we look closely, that we deceive ourselves, if we fancy we gain anything ultimately by the adoption of purely physiological expressions. When Dr. Guy treats " the unsound mind " as a thing to be " recognised " -rather than " defined " (in which, for the present, at all events, he is partly right), he also deprecates, and justly, the ridicule of " poets, satirists, and cynics," and thrusts aside the question of " perfect " mind as irrelevant. But we fear be considerably underrates the amount of difficulty which would arise in practice, if we were all handed over to experts and juries. The great specialists, both on the Continent and in England, have done muckgood service in these matters ; but they alarm us, too, and practically and immediately. We add these words, lest we should be thought to refer exclusively to the evident and usually avowed application or bearing of their theories of mind; and the consequences, if the net they spread were to take up (as it is ultimately bound to do) the whole of human life. Wonderful indeed, and honourable to the skill of the experts, are many of the recorded instances in which they have detected, by slight physical signs, the beginnings of insanity, and tendered pro- fessional advice which, if taken, would have saved much suffering. But this does not reassure us. We read with uneasiness in Dr. Guy's book of a married lady, now grown old in confinement, whose behaviour, as far as we are told of it, was no worse than that of Edith Donibey, or that of two unmarried ladies once known to us, and who were neither of them mad, though they narrowly escaped being treated as if they were. Dr. Guy quotes from Dr. John Reid the story of a lady who had a "palsy of the heart, or congela- lion of the affections,"—but in that there is no madness. Any man who will go and wilfully act against his conscience a few -times will soon experience a " palsy of the heart," or sensations looking that way ; instance of the kind may be found in psycho- logical novels, in biography, and in actual life ; and these are not less real, because the unhappy person has some superstitious theory about the cause. Then let us remember the cases of harmless, innocent, and even pleasant mad people, who would -probably be converted into miserable criminals or would- be criminals, if they were put under restraint. Any relation who had had an interest in getting Mr. Dick into a madhouse might have done it, but Miss Trotwood found his "common- sense invaluable." Mr. Mill remarked with disgust upon the triviality of the reasons for which, of late years, wills had been set aside on the ground of insanity ; though here it is probably not the experts who have been most at fault, if at all. In practice it may be taken for certain that men get put into mad- houses who are more safe to deal with than a good many others whom no expert or jury would dream of classifying as insane. He mast be fortunate or unobservant who has not come across men who answer to every one of Dr. Guy's tests of mental sound- ness, and yet whom it is very painful and sometimes dangerous to -know, men in whom the reasoning faculty, or the memory, plays tricks which have serious consequences ; or in whom there is a strange, mischievous inclination to conceal. Indeed, it is not at all out of the way to meet instances of failure of reasoning power, or " noticing "-power, exactly parallel to what may be seen in the insane, though the persons in whom the failure occurs are apparently in good health of mind and body. One more remark must be admitted within our limits, namely, that it is quite a mistake to assume that insane-looking eccentricities are ever so little special to the temperament of genius. When they occur in men of genius or their relatives, they receive more notice, but fair, free observation of life will find such cases sufficiently fre- quent among very common-place people. Nor are we helped (to draw a clear, practical dividing-line), when the expert comes up and digs out the fact that the great-uncle of the eccentric person 'bad an arm paralysed, or that the eccentric person himself has been pronounced the subject of suppressed gout. Who is there concerning whom something of the kind may not be raked up P After all, the great point is that we should be in no haste to receive for complete the first explanations which are offered. The whole subject is dreadful enough, and we all owe our -thanks to Dr. Guy, or any other specialist, who ploughs with sincere application any part of so wide a field. But while dreading to place the smallest obstacle (in the shape of what some might call persecuting criticism) in the • path of sincere
investigation, we are bound to keep a sharp eye upon all such treatment of the question as, while claiming to state the con- ditions of irresponsibility, really wipes out responsibility all round; a result which appears to us to follow from Dr. Guy's already-quoted definition of conscience, just as it does from Dr. Maudaley's charnel-house definition of " identity " or " indi- viduality " (p. 263, op. cit.), and from a hundred other deliver- ances to be found in books of this order.
Previous page
