Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/523

 510 H. MAUDSLEY : repel vibrations that are not concordant. An intense and uneasy sensation or emotion so engrosses the mind as to make it impossible to carry on a continuous train of thought or a definitely organised succession of nice purposive move- ments ; it attracts involuntarily the reinforcements of con- genial or consonant thoughts and repels, being insusceptible to, thoughts that are not consonant ; thus it reinforces and intensifies its special consciousness, and, failing utterly to come into relations of consciousness with uncongenial thoughts, makes reflection partial and prejudiced destroys judgment. Many positive insanities of thought and feeling begin in, and are the permanent outcomes of, such tem- porary disorders of reflection ; they are their pathological developments. The fundamental note of mental insanity, as of all errors of thought and feeling, is the want or loss of a just equili- brium between the individual and his surroundings ; the disorder marking a failure of adaptation in himself which is oftentimes a congenital fault that he owes to his forefathers. Strong passion is brief madness because the internal commo- tion of it, usurping consciousness, prevents full and free reflection and adaptation, and, putting the individual out of just ratio with persons and things, makes him irrational. Just as he loses his head in a panic and cannot make the proper motor reactions, so he loses his hold on the outer world when he is agitated and stupefied by some great temporary emotion, or possessed constitutionally by an exaggerated self-consciousness. In the latter case he is said to be very sensitive, and the quality is perhaps regarded as a fine merit of his nature ; but whether merit or misfortune, it is really a case of deficient power of adaptation, and there- fore fundamentally a defect of his nature a defect natural to him, occasional to a strong nature brought low by sick- ness. His mental structuralisations represent a consolidate past, built up from generation to generation, through which there has run a fault of defective adaptation. His right aim, if he would or could mend his nature, should be to learn to resolutely adapt himself to circumstances or to adapt cir- cumstances to himself, and so to attain to a just equili- brium in which self-consciousness might abate or well-nigh expire. As he who is in a state of perfect bodily health is for the most part unconscious that he has a body, and only becomes conscious of it when something goes wrong with its functions, so the ideal of a perfect state of mental health of the individual is that in which the person is unconscious for the most part that he is a self, and the ideal of the fullest