Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/471

Rh fits, if authentic, might be said perhaps to illustrate the border-line between a normal and an abnormal condition of mind. A more distinctly pathological case is that of Beethoven, who could not be made to understand why his standing in his night attire at an open window should attract the irreverent notice of the street boys. For in this case we have a temporary incapacity to perceive exterior objects and their relations; and a deeper incapacity of a like nature clearly shows itself in poor Johnson's standing before the town clock vainly trying to make out the hour.

This same aloofness of mind from the external world betrays itself in many of the eccentric habits attributed to men and women of genius. Here, again, Johnson serves as a good instance. His inconvenient habit of suddenly breaking out with scraps of the Lord's Prayer in a fashionable assembly marks a distinctly dangerous drifting away of the inner life from the firm anchorage of external fact.

In the cases just considered we have to do with a kind of mental blindness to outer circumstances. A further advance along the line of intellectual degeneration is seen in the persistence of vivid ideas, commonly anticipations of evil of some kind, which have no basis in external reality. Johnson's dislike to particular alleys in his London walks, and Madame de Staël's bizarre idea that she would suffer from cold when buried, may be taken as examples of these painful delusions or idées fixes. A more serious stage of such delusions is seen in the case of Pascal, who is said to have been haunted by the fear of a gulf yawning just in front of him, which sometimes became so overmastering that he had to be fastened by a chain to keep him from leaping forward.

It is plain that in this last case we touch on the confines of sense-illusion. It is probable that hallucinations may occur as very rare experiences in the case of normal and healthy minds. Yet, though not confined to states of insanity, illusions of the senses are commonly, if not always, indicative of at least a temporary disturbance of the psycho-physical organism. And we have on record a considerable number of instances of eminent men who were subject to these deceptions. It is not only the religious recluse, with his ill-nourished body, and his persistent withdrawal from the corrective touch of outer things, who experiences them. Luther was their victim as well as Loyola. Auditory hallucinations—that is, the hearing of imaginary voices—appear to have occurred to Malebranche and Descartes, as they certainly did to Johnson. The instances of visual hallucinations are perhaps more numerous still. Pope, Johnson, Byron, Shelley, are said to have had their visions. Even so strong and well-balanced a mind as Goethe was not exempted. Nor has the active life of the soldier always proved a safeguard. The stories of the prognostic visions of Brutus and other generals of the old world are well known. Among