[149]. Bain, Emotions, chap. vi. p. 111.
[150]. The pathology of tender emotion does not offer sufficient interest to detain us. The altruistic tendency may be totally wanting in certain hypochondriac and demented patients, who, entrenched in an impenetrable egoism, have undergone a real “moral ossification.” Tenderness may become sentimentality towards persons, animals (zoophily), and things (nostalgia), etc. Morel (Études cliniques, vol. ii. sec. 4) quotes the case of a man of high intellectual capacity, in whom the most futile and ridiculous causes excited absurd accès de sensibilité. “The loss of domestic animals which he had reared threw him into a state of bewilderment and convulsions of tears, as if it had been the death of his best friends. I saw him one day almost delirious with grief at the death of one of the numerous frogs which he kept in his garden.” This morbid emotivity, coinciding with congenital or acquired weakness, and with convalescence or other adynamic states, throws into relief, by its exaggerated character, that state of relaxation which is, as we have seen, one of the principal marks of the tender emotion.
[151]. See Darwin (chap. xi.) and Mantegazza (chap. xiv.).
[152]. Consult James, Psychology, ii. 305, 329; Bain, Emotions, chap. x., xi.; J. Sully, Psychology, ii. 97 et seq.
[153]. For details on this point the reader should consult Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, p. 88 (where he will find a study of the Cæsars, the Hindoo Sultans, Ivan the Terrible, etc.), and Jacoby, Études sur la sélection et l’hérédité.
[154]. Dagonet, Traité des maladies mentales, pp. 360 et seq.
[155]. Among the very copious existing literature on suicide I must mention Morselli’s monograph, Il Suicidio, in which the various causes—cosmic, ethnic, social, biological, and psychological—are studied in great detail. His principal theoretical conclusions are—(1) Among all civilised nations suicide increases more rapidly than the geometrical ratio of the population and the general mortality; (2) suicides are in inverse proportion to homicides at any given time or in any given country. This last “law” has been strongly contested by Tarde and others.
[156]. For further details see my Hérédité psychologique, Part I., chap. viii.
[157]. M. Pierre Janet mentions the case of a woman in whom “the family feelings, the affective emotions, modesty, and the sensitiveness of the genital organs appeared and disappeared simultaneously.” He adds: “Which of these phenomena brings the others in its train? Is genital sensibility a centre round which other psychological syntheses are constructed? I draw no conclusion.”—État mental des Hystériques, i. pp. 217, 218.
[158]. This psychological thesis has been maintained, in all its rigour, by Delbœuf: “That girl and that young man, in being attracted to one another, obey the will, unknown to both, of a spermatozoid, an ovule. But it may be taken as certain that this will is not unknown either to the spermatozoid or the ovule; both know what they want, and seek it. To this end they give their orders to their respective brains through the medium of the heart, and the brain obeys without knowing why. Sometimes it imagines that it has been convinced by reason and explains its own choice to itself. At bottom it has been but an unconscious instrument in the hand of an imperceptible workman who knew both what he wanted and what he was doing.” (Revue philosophique, March 1891, p. 257.)