the last, finishing stroke; his reason reeled under the shock, and with an impulse as blind and furious as the rush of a whirlwind, he swept away the hindrance in his path.

§ 159. In cases like that of Mercer (§ 151), where a man destroys the seducer of his wife, or sister, or daughter, we often see the influence of the insane temperament, and the fact assists very much in determining the quality of the act. But, supposing it not to exist, and the mind to be sound and free from abnormal tendencies, are we bound to believe that notwithstanding the furious tumult of passion, the pure reason was deprived of none of its power or insight, and consequently, that we are to abate no jot nor tittle of the person's responsibility to the laws? Of late years, it has become a common belief, in practice, at least, that, under the moral shock supposed, the person necessarily loses all self-control, if not all proper perception of right and wrong, and is for the moment in a state of insanity. Unquestionably, this is going too far; for it needs no great knowledge of men to learn that, even under the severest provocations, they may remain calm and self-collected, fully capable of discerning their position, and of comprehending the relation between the offence committed and the punishment to be inflicted. But we also know, as a matter of no very infrequent experience, that insanity may be produced instantaneously by a profound moral shock. If a person may be deprived of his senses by a piece of good fortune, or the death of one near and dear to him, is it strange that the same result should follow an event calculated above all others to stir the soul to its inmost depths? What the mental condition actually is must be determined by the evidence in the case; and any doubt that may leave, we may be quite sure, will be given in favor of the accused.

§ 160. The mental disorders are, of course, as numerous and various as the mental constitutions of the insane themselves; and to consider any particular association of them as characteristic of the state of mind called mania, would be only to blend things together that have no uniform nor necessary relations to one another; and would convey no more really valuable information, than it would to marshal forth every symptom that has at any time been observed in the countless disorders of digestion as the symptpms of diseased stomach. The only use which the physician makes of the latter is to refer them, as they occur, to some particular derangement of that organ, and thus establish the ground for an appropriate and efficient treatment. There is no reason why the same process should not be pursued in mania; and it is because a different one has been followed, that the common notions of this disease are so loose and incorrect, as not only to be of little service in judicial discussions, but absolutely in the way of arriving at just and philosophical conclusions. To furnish any light on the subject, it would be our duty to analyze the various phenomena of mania, associate them by some natural relations, and refer them, as far as our knowledge will permit, to particular faculties. It is proposed, therefore, following this idea as closely as possible, to consider mania as affecting either the intellectual, or the affective faculties; meaning by the former, those which make us acquainted with the existence and qualities of external objects and the relations of cause and effect, and conduct us to the knowledge of general truths; and by the latter, those sentiments, propensities, and passions necessary to man as a social and accountable being. It is not intended to convey the idea that mania is invariably confined to one or the other of these two divisions of our faculties; for though they may sometimes be separately affected, the one presenting a chaos of tumult and disorder, while the other apparently retains its wonted soundness and vigor, yet more frequently they are both involved in the general derangement. But unless we study these disorders separately, and recognize their independent existence, — and this effect it is the tendency of the above classification to produce, — we never shall be able to refer them to their true source, nor discover their respective influence over the mental manifestations.

CHAPTER VI.

INTELLECTDAL MANIA.

§ 161. Intellectual Mania is characterized by certain hallucinations or delusions,1 in which the patient is impressed with the reality of facts or events that have never occurred, and acts more or less in accordance with such belief; or, having adopted some notion not altogether unfounded, carries it to an extravagant and absurd extent. It may be general, involving all or the most of the operations of the understanding; or partial, being confined to a particular idea, or train of ideas.

SECTION I.

GENERAL INTELLECTUAL MANIA.

§ 162. The general description of mania is equally applicable to the acute state of this and sometimes of other forms of the disease. It is not, generally, till after the excitement has somewhat subsided, that the distinctive features of each become very manifest. In this stage of general intellectual mania, many glimpses of natural soundness may be discovered amid the intellectual disorder.2 Questions on indifferent subjects

1 These terms, though they have long held a place in medical language, have always been used with remarkable diversity and vagueness of meaning. Without troubling the reader with an array of nosological definitions, it will be sufficient to say that, in this treatise, the latter is used as a general designation of all those notions which are indicative of derangement of the reflective, as the former is of the perceptive, powers.

* Pinel, Traite" sur 1' alienation mentale, 142, § 148.

may be appropriately answered; many of the patient's relations to surrounding circumstances may still be perceived; and no little acuteuess and ingenuity are often manifested in accommodating the real and true to the delusions under which he labors. The difficulty is to fix the attention on a particular point; the mind constantly running from one idea to another, or absorbed in the thoughts which happen, for the moment, to predominate over all others.

§ 1*33. In the present state of our knowledge of the mental constitution, it is not strange to find considerable diversity of opinion respecting the nature or cause of hallucinations of the senses; yet, in a medico-legal point of view, it is important that they should be correctly understood. Hoffbaucr1 says that they consist in a vicious relation between the imagination and the senses, in consequence of which the patient mistakes the creations of the one for objects really perceived by the others. Esquirol, not entirely satisfied with this explanation, divides them into two classes, termed by him, illusive sensations, and hallucinations.2 The first arise in the senses, as when a maniac mistakes a window for a door, passes through it, and is precipitated to the ground; or takes the clouds which he sees in the sky for contending armies; or believes his legs are made of glass; or his head turned round. In all these instances, the error refers to the real impression, which is ill-perceived; there is an error of sensation, a vicious relation between the sense which actually perceives and the intellect which judges falsely of the external object. In the second, on the contrary, the senses have no share; the imagination alone is exalted; the brain is exclusively the seat of the disturbance; the patient mistaking the creations of his imagination for objects actually present to his senses. He sees images and ap|iaritions amid the thickest darkness; hears sounds and voices in the most perfect silence; and smells odors in the absence of all odorous bodies. This distinction does not seem 1 Op. tit. nip. § 84. • Idem, § 82, note.

to be well supported. That the functions of the senses are sometimes greatly perverted there can be no question; but it needs more evidence than we yet have, to prove that such perversions bear much if any part in producing these illusions; more especially as Esquirol admits that, in what he terms hallucinations, an exalted imagination is sufficient of itself to produce a very similar effect. In old age, where, in consequence of the decay of the senses, wrong impressions are being constantly received, they nevertheless give rise to none of these delusions. When the hero of Cervantes did battle with the sheep and the windmills, it will not be contended that he was laboring under any special optical infirmity which conveyed false impressions of outward objects, because on most occasions the action of his senses was unequivocally sound. Ready as he was to mistake a company of peaceable she'pherds for the creations of his disordered intellect, he never imagined Saucho to be any other than his faithful squire, for the reason that his reflective faculties were not so far subverted as to be incapable of any healthy action. Besides, if erroneous sensation has any thing to do with producing these illusions, we must go the length of asserting that at such times all the senses are disordered, or deny that the errors of one may be corrected by the others. It is not so strange that vision should sometimes be so affected as to deceive a person with the idea that his legs are made of glass or butter, but it certainly is very strange that, on such occasions, the other senses should all return equally false impressions: the touch being unable to distinguish the feel of flesh and blood, and the hearing the sound produced by striking them, while they retain this power in regard to every other part of the body. These illusions appear to result from a morbid excitement of the perceptive faculties, whereby they are stimulated by outward impressions to involuntary and irresistible activity, while a co-existent impairment of the reflective faculties prevents them from being considered as illusions and not actual realities. The physician will not unfrequently hear