great; this is the mental desire as presented from the psychological side. The series of apparently meaningless events, the so-called madness, have now a meaning; a significance appertains to the delusions, making the patient more human to us. Here is a person like ourselves, beset by universal human problems; no longer merely a cerebral machine thrown out of gear. Hitherto we thought that the insane patient revealed nothing to us by symptoms, save the senseless products of his disordered cerebral cells, but that was academic wisdom reeking of the study. When we penetrate into the human secrets of our patients, we recognise mental disease to be an unusual reaction to emotional problems which are in no wise foreign to ourselves, and the delusion discloses the psychological system upon which it is based.
The light which shines forth from this conception seems to us so enormously powerful because it forces us into the innermost depths of that tremendous disorder which is most common in our asylums, and hitherto least understood; by reason of the craziness of the symptoms it is the type that strikes the public as madness in excelsis.
The case which I have just sketched is a simple one. It is transparent. My second example is somewhat more complicated. It is the case of a man between 30 and 40 years of age; he is a foreign archaeologist of great learning and most unusual intelligence. He was a precocious boy of quite excellent character, great sensitiveness, and rare gifts. Physically he was small, always weakly, and a stammerer. He grew up and was educated abroad, and afterwards studied for several terms at B——. So far there had been no disorder of any kind. On the completion of his university career he became zealously absorbed in his archaeological work, which gradually engulfed him to such an extent that he was dead to the world and all its pleasures. He worked incessantly, and buried himself entirely in his books. He became quite unsociable; before, awkward and shy in society, he now fled from it altogether, and saw no one beyond a few friends. He thus led the life of a hermit devoted entirely to science. A few years later, on a holiday tour, he revisited
