There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that its vagaries are but the symptoms of brain disease or brain deformity. The inhabitants of the borderlands are invested with a certain shadowy mystery which separates them from the rest of mankind, and which makes them appear to us as denizens of another psychical world than ours.
In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious turn, were considered holy. St. Simon Stylites was a very pronounced crank, and a very holy man also, because he chose to live the greater portion of his life perched on a pillar seventy feet high. St. Anthony was another holy crank who never, in all his life, washed his feet. Poor Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because she was “possessed of a false and lying devil.” She has been recently proposed for canonization by the same church that burned her, and thus, in a measure, had justice done her. I do not think, however, that this is any recompense for the terrible agony inflicted on this unfortunate victim of hystero-epilepsy.
Says Maudsley in “Responsibility in Mental Disease”: “Some of the prophets of the Old Testament presented symptoms which can hardly be interpreted as other than the effects of madness; certainly if they were not mad, they imitated very closely some of its most striking features.” Jeremiah takes a long journey to the river Euphrates and hides a linen girdle in a hole of a rock. He then returns home and in a few days makes the same journey, and finds the girdle rotten and good for nothing. Ezekiel digs a hole in the wall of his house, and through it removes his household goods, instead of through the door. Hosea marries a prostitute because he said he had been commanded by God so to do. Isaiah stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all the people.
Some of the greatest changes in the world’s history have been effected by dwellers in the borderlands. Mahomet was an epileptic, and his first vision was the result on an epileptic convulsion or seizure. The character of his visions was exactly like that of those visions which an epileptic sees and describes at the present time. Mahomet believed in his visions, and, what is more, got more than half the world to believe in them also. Gautama was a dweller in the borderlands, yet his followers now number five hundred millions.
The novel mode in which an insane man regards things may be an inspiration which reflection could never attain, and it sometimes happens that opinions which seem to the world to be the ravings of a madman, have turned out to be true. The insane man has the world against him, and though he may pose for a short time as a reformer, sooner or later lands in the asylum.
It sometimes happens that the crank will succeed in getting converts. A notable instance is Schweinfurth, or “the Christ,” as he calls himself. I am firmly convinced that this man believes in his delusions. One thing is certain, and that is, his disciples believe in him implicitly. This man is dangerous to society, inasmuch as he has caused the separation of several wives from their husbands; the wives abandoning their husbands to follow him to “Heaven,” as he calls his farm house.
The crank is, generally, a harmless individual, and is not anti-social unless his delusions take the form of homicidal impulse, pyromania, kleptomania, etc.
Homicidal impulse is the most dangerous to society of the many mental vagaries and derangements which afflict the dwellers in the borderlands. Its invasion is sudden and its impulse is, generally, overpowering. A man may be walking the streets presumably in perfect health, and yet have, all the while, a voice whispering in his ear “kill, kill.” His insane desire at length reaches its acme, and he throws aside every mental restraint and kills the first individual he may chance to meet. Again, he may desire to kill some particular individual, and will carefully and systematically arrange his plans for the successful enactment of the homicide. The murderers of Garfield and Harrison probably belong to this latter class, though in the case of Prendergast, the slayer of Mayor Harrison, this opinion may be erroneous. There is something about his photograph that leads me to believe that he is a moral imbecile, rather than an intellectual dyscrasiac.
A clerk in a solicitor’s office, at Alton, Hampshire, England, one afternoon took a walk outside the town, when he met some children. He persuaded one of these, a girl of nine, to go with him into a neighboring garden. A short while after, he was seen walking quietly home; he was seen to wash himself in the river and then go back to his office. The little girl did not return home, and, search having been instituted, her dismembered body was found strewn about the garden. The clerk was arrested, and in his diary was found this entry, recently made: “Killed a little girl; it was fine and hot.” This man was either a sadistic sexual pervert, or a victim of homicidal impulse. Maudsley gives this instance as an example of the latter, while Krafft-Ebing gives it as an example of the former. There is a great difference between these two mental derangements. The victim of homicidal impulse kills without any ulterior object, while the sadist kills in order to gratify his unnatural and perverted sexual appetite.
The victim of homicidal impulse is, to all outward appearances, perfectly sane otherwise. His impulse frequently leaves him for years and then returns with overpowering force.