II.
The positive or negative feeling of personal strength is a normal and healthy emotion when it remains within the limits of adaptation; for it has an individual and even social utility.
For the individual, it is the instinct of conservation become reflective, and by the consciousness of his strength or weakness, it permits him to measure his pretensions by his degree of power.
Socially, it makes us in a certain measure dependent on others. Although strictly egoistic in its origin, self-feeling cannot develop unless it becomes ego-altruistic, or semi-social. According to Bain, self-esteem is a reflective sentiment which consists in judging ourselves as we judge others. This opinion has been criticised and scarcely seems tenable, in so far, at least, as it takes away from amour propre its instinctive and self-generated character and considers it as a return action. However, it is certain that the desire of approbation and the fear of blame are the external elements which count in the constitution and consolidation of the feeling of self-complacency; praise gives it extension, criticism impairs and mutilates it. This does not imply any great amount of reflection or culture. The child is extremely sensitive to the judgment of his equals. Primitive man is imprisoned in a network of custom, tradition, and prejudice which he cannot break without incurring excommunication; and those people are very rare who content themselves with their own approbation only.
But from a semi-social feeling, the love of ourselves can easily become an anti-social feeling. There is no emotion which passes so simply and definitely from the normal form to passion, and from passion to madness. At the bottom of the tendency of the ego to affirm itself there is a potentiality of limitless expansion and indefinite radiation. A man whose self-feeling is vigorous resembles those species of animals and vegetables which—prolific and of tenacious vitality—would, if left to themselves, cover the whole surface of the globe; his expansion is only kept in check by that of others.
Our path towards the pathology of the subject is already marked out. We have, first, the semi-morbid forms which have been called the monomania of power. Place a man in conditions where this tendency to unlimited expansion meets with no obstacle, and it will go to any extreme. This is the case with absolute power. No doubt this unique and, so to speak, superhuman position is not of itself sufficient. The madness of power (folie du pouvoir) is the resultant of two factors: first, the character, i.e., the violence of the egoistic appetites, which, continually satisfied, continually increase; while the will, the antagonistic, inhibitive force, keeps on diminishing; and next, external circumstances—the absence of all restraint, of any equal power which might overawe by threats. A religious sanction, or the fear of a political catastrophe, has restrained more than one, and limited that unbridled tendency which is only the ego’s feeling of its own power carried to the acute stage. It is needless to give examples from history, for they are known to every one.[[153]]
Self-feeling, under its positive form, has its ultimate incarnation in a well-known pathological manifestation—the delusion of greatness, or megalomania. Perhaps, indeed, in this case, the exaggeration produced by disease shows itself most clearly and without altering the original.
Megalomania is met with in general paralysis of the insane as a transitory phase; but especially in systematised chronic delusions (paranoia). We may pass over the period of incubation, which is often melancholic; thus, in a case of persecution-delusions, the patient is at first tormented by vague suspicions; he accuses no one in particular, he has as yet no accredited enemies; but one day he discovers them, and nothing will ever divert his thoughts from them again. Then, in some cases, the disease passing through another evolutionary stage, he arrives, by logical deduction, at the conclusion that it is his great merit, his high position, which are exciting jealousy. Thenceforth megalomania is fully developed; the subject thinks himself a millionaire, an unrecognised genius, a great inventor, a king, the pope, or even the Deity.
There is nothing more characteristic than such a description as the following, which has often been drawn up, and is yet another proof that emotion, its expressive and its physiological bases, are but parts of the same phenomenon. “He walks with head erect, with assurance; his speech is laconic and imperious, he seeks solitude, and is full of contempt for the society which surrounds him. His style of dress is in accordance with the tendency of his aberration. Like the maniac, he is restlessly active; but, in him, no movement is fortuitous or without a motive; his will is always active, his actions have a definite aim; if he shows violence, it is in order to ensure the execution of his commands, to show that he has strength sufficient to annihilate everything; it is not a destructive spirit which animates him, but the necessity for showing his power. The functions of the assimilative life have undergone no alteration; they take place, as a rule, with perfect regularity. It seems as if the expansive form of their feelings, their contentment with themselves, the extreme and unbroken satisfaction surrounding their life, imparted to the organic vital apparatus a surplus of activity, resulting, in a manner, in an excess of health.” Frequent cases of longevity among megalomaniacs have been noted. Finally, the following observation has its value, on account of the change—at once organic and psychic—there recorded:—"We have watched a patient who, after having suffered from melancholia for several years, suddenly became megalomaniac. His constitution had undergone great alterations, and his health was much weakened, so that he became a chronic melancholic; but so soon as his mental affection took on the character of megalomania he was not long in acquiring new vigour."[[154]]
We might add that the tendency of men is rather to pride, of women to vanity, which favours the views of those who maintain that madness is often only the exaggeration of the habitual character: it is sufficient to have shown that the feeling (though illusory) of personal strength in an extreme degree is only the normal state amplified, but not changed.