Page:Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind - Benjamin Rush.djvu/17

 as conversation. The latter, however, is not necessary to constitute intellectual madness, for we sometimes meet with the most incongruous actions without incoherent speech, and we now and then meet with incoherent speech in mad people, in whom the disease does not destroy their habits of regular conduct. This is evinced by the correctness with which they sometimes perform certain mechanical and menial pieces of business. Madness is to delirium what walking in sleep is to dreaming. It is delirium, heightened and protracted by a more active and permanent stimulus upon the brain.

Let it not be supposed that intellectual derangement always affects the understanding exclusively in the manner that has been mentioned. Far from it. Two or more of the faculties are generally brought into sympathy with it, and there are cases in which all the faculties are sometimes deranged in succession and rotation; and now and then they are all affected at the same time. This occurs most frequently in the beginning of a paroxysm of