"You will see it. The selfish care of your own soul which Gaunt has taught you is a lie; his narrow heaven is a lie: my God inspires other love, other aims. What is the old tale of Jesus?—that He put His man's hands on the vilest before He blessed them? So let Him come to me,—through loving hands. Do you want to preach the gospel, as some women do, to the Thugs? I think your field is here. You shall preach it to the heart that loves you."
She shook her head drearily. He looked at her a moment, and then turned away.
"You are right. There is a great gulf between you and me, Theodora. When you are ready to cross it, come to me."
And so left her.
CEREBRAL DYNAMICS.
The stranger in Paris, exploring its southern suburbs along the Fontainebleau road, comes upon an ancient pile, extended and renovated by modern hands, whose simple, unpretending architecture would scarcely claim a second look. Yet it was once the scene of an experiment of such momentous consequences that it will ever possess a peculiar interest both to the philanthropist and the philosopher. It was there, in that receptacle of the insane, while the storm of the great Revolution was raging around him, that a physician, learned, ardent, and bold, but scarcely known beyond the little circle of his friends and patients, conceived and executed the idea, then no less wonderful than that of propelling a ship by steam, of striking off the chains of the maniac and opening the door of his cell. Within a few days, says the record, fifty-three persons were restored to light and comparative liberty. In that experiment at the Bicêtre, whose triumphant success won the admiration even of those ferocious demagogues who had risen to power, was inaugurated the modern management of the insane, as strongly marked by kindness and confidence as the old was by severity and distrust. It was a noble work, whose benefits, reaching down to all future generations, are beyond the power of estimation; but its remote and indirect results are scarcely less important than those more immediate and visible. Here began the true study of mental disease. To the mind of Pinel, his experiment opened a track of inquiry leading to results which, like those of the famous discoveries in physical science, will never cease to be felt. A few collections of cases had been published, medical scholars, in the midst of their books, had composed elaborate treatises to show the various ways in which men might possibly become insane, but no profound, original observer of mental disease had yet appeared. Trained in that school of exact and laborious inquirers who at that period were changing the whole face of physical science, he was well prepared for the work which seemed to be reserved for him, of laying the foundations of this department of the healing art.
Without following him in the successive stages of his work, it is sufficient here to say, that the first step—that of showing that the insane are not necessarily under the dominion of brute instinct, incapable even of appreciating the arts of kindness and of using a restricted freedom—was soon succeeded by another of no less importance considered in its relations to humanity and psychology. Pinel, who began his investigations at the Bicêtre in the old belief that insanity implies disorder of the reasoning faculty, discovered, to his surprise, that many of his patients evinced no intellectual impairment whatever. They reasoned on all subjects clearly and forcibly; neither hallucination nor delusion perverted their judgments; and some even recognized and deplored the impulses and desires which they could not control. The fact was too common to be misunderstood, and having been confirmed by subsequent observers, it has taken its place among the well-settled truths of modern science. Not very cordially welcomed as yet into the current beliefs of the time, it is steadily making its way against the opposition of pride, prejudice, ignorance, and self-conceit.
The magnitude of this advance in psychological knowledge can be duly estimated only by considering how imperfect were the prevalent notions concerning mental disease. For the most part, our ancestors thought no man insane, whatever his conduct or conversation, who was not actually raving. If the person were quiet, taciturn, apathetic, he was supposed to be melancholy or hypochondriacal. If he were elated and restless, ready for all sorts of undertakings and projects, his condition was attributed to a great flow of spirits. If, while talking very sensibly on many subjects and doing many proper things, he manifested a propensity to wanton mischief, why, then he was possessed with a devil and consigned to chains and straw,—unless he had committed some senseless act of crime, in which case he received from the law the usual doom of felons.
One of the first fruits of the new method of study introduced by Pinel was a more philosophical notion of the nature of disease. The various diseases that afflict mankind had been regarded as so many different entities that could almost be handled, and many attempts to define and measure them exactly are on record. They came to be regarded somewhat as personal foes, to be combated and overcome by the superior prowess of the physician. It was not until such views were abandoned, and insanity, as well as every other disease, was considered as an abnormal action or condition, that true progress could be expected. One of the results of inquiry into the nature of insanity, starting from this point, has been a growing conviction that it implies defect and imperfection, as well as casual disorder. Attention is now directed less to occasional and exoteric incidents, and more to conditions which inhere in the original economy of the brain. We are sometimes required to look beyond the individual, and beyond the nervous system even, if we would discover the primordial movement which, having passed through one or two generations, finally culminates in actual disease. We say, in popular phrase, that the cause of insanity in this person was disappointed love, or reverse of fortune, and in that, a fever, or a translation of disease; the popular voice finds an echo in the records of the profession, and it all passes for very good philosophy. Now, the more we learn, the more reason have we to believe that the amount of truth in the common statistics respecting the causes of insanity bears but a very small proportion to the amount of error. That such things as those just mentioned are often deeply concerned in the production of insanity cannot be doubted, but their agency is small in comparison with those which exist in the original constitution of the patient, and are derived, in greater or less degree, from progenitors. We would not say that insanity has never occurred in a person whose brain was not vitiated by hereditary morbid tendencies, but we do say that the proportion of such cases is exceedingly small. All the seeming efficiency of the so-called "causes of insanity" requires that preparation which is produced by the deteriorating influences of progenitors, and without which they would be utterly powerless. Let us consider this matter a little more closely by the light which modern inquiry sheds upon it.
All the conditions of the bodily organs that determine the character of the function are not known, but all analogy shows that what in popular phrase is called quality is one of them. Exactly what this is nobody knows, nor is it necessary for our present purpose that we should know; but when we talk of the good or bad quality of an organ, we certainly do not talk without meaning. We have an intelligible idea of the difference between that constitution, of an organ which insures the highest measure of excellence in the function and that which admits of only the lowest. In the brain, as in other organs, size is to some extent a measure of power. The largest intellectual and moral endowments no one expects to see in connection with the smallest brain, and vice versâ, setting aside those instances of large size which are the effect of disease. The relative size of the different parts of the brain may have something to do with the character of the function, but this is a contested point. Education increases the mental efficiency, no doubt, but it is too late in the day to attribute everything to that. So that we are obliged to resort to that indescribable condition called quality, as the chief source and origin of the differences of mental power observed among men.