Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/94

84 diminished resistance of the will and the consequent overaction of the lower centers, permitted to become fixed or to express itself in a grossly exaggerated manner.

That voluntary power is invariably impaired in insanity is not perhaps evident to those who have not looked closely into the matter. Is it not true, it may be asked, that some insane persons exhibit extraordinary fixity of purpose and persist in some course of conduct—as, for example, the refusal of food with dogged obstinacy? That is so, but insane obstinacy is no more an indication of voluntary power than is the late rigidity of a paralyzed arm. That state of late rigidity in which the arm could not be stretched without being broken betokens that certain lower centers have been cut off from intercourse with higher ones and are undergoing degeneration; and so the unreasonable obstinacy of lunatics in insane conduct merely indicates that certain mental functions have escaped the regulation of volition, which is enfeebled, and are acting in an irregular and self-willed manner in consequence.

No doubt in all cases of insanity a certain amount of volitional power is retained, and this may in certain cases be effectual to some extent over the morbid mental manifestations. There may be contributory negligence on the part of a lunatic, just as there may be on the part of an invalid. Prof. Rüble, of Bonn, recommends the birch-rod and shower-baths in certain cases of chronic vomiting, and asserts that children often die of a bad bringing up, and adults because they can not, when ill, make up their minds to do what is right and omit what is hurtful; and Niemeyer quotes with approval the dictum of the wife of a Prussian general, a most determined woman but a tender mother, that whooping-cough is only curable by the rod. But no one in this country would now sanction such heroic treatment, or believe that anything but evil could come from such stringent appeals to a mere remnant of will in its corporeal relations; and so it would be dangerous in cases of insanity, in which will is obviously and seriously involved in its mental relations, to infer that what survives of it might, if put forth, have prevented a criminal act. In insanity, in which the mental movements are typically involuntary, but yet susceptible of some control, we must not expect of the patient what is beyond his strength—the habitual suppression of his morbid impulses. The criminal act of a lunatic is sometimes so alien to his healthy disposition, or so clearly motiveless, that we have no hesitation in concluding that his true will must have been in abeyance when he fell into it. At other times it follows upon mental struggles which he has himself described, and asked help in, previous to its commission, and is therefore clearly but the climax of a pathological process signifying the overthrow of the will. And at other times, again, it is associated with mental