Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/408

392 and untiring persistence such, patients go to work. Those patients exhibit the same phenomena who may be termed inventors and Utopians. They not seldom sacrifice their means and bring themselves and their families to ruin by their unconquerable desire of making inventions and discoveries. They are fully convinced, in their folly, of the epoch-making importance of their improvements, and all pains are lost to cause them to desist from their ridiculous performances. In contrast with students, in whom the turning point of their mental action lies in the understanding, in artists moods and feelings are often the starting point of their productions. Hence we find that in them this part of the mental organ has not infrequently an enormous development. As with the other psychical characters, so likewise here we find that the high refinement of a single factor—always, however, in just proportion to the total action of the organ—produces outward phenomena having some similarity with those states which are due to disturbed inward equilibrium, and which we often have occasion to observe in the insane.

No doubt, poets and artists, as well as scholars, often exhibit an outward appearance of self-absorption and of indifference to their surroundings. This is common to them with many of the insane. But how disparate are the causes underlying these phenomena! With the weak-minded it is the want of power to concentrate the attention which renders them uninterested and indifferent to the outward world; but with poets and scholars it is, on the contrary, the high degree of that power which brings about similar phenomena. As we know, the centrifugal condition which we term attention not only extends its power to the organ of sense whose action is emphasized, but it must also be able to order off all the rest of the impressions of sense. The great thinker appears uninterested in surrounding things because his whole attention is directed to the well-ordered sequence of his logical thoughts, to which end, with fullest consciousness, the outward impressions are ordered off. The weak-minded man is present at a performance. The sounds of the words of the orator ring in his ears, but the slightest outward or inward impression suffices to make his attention wander. His thoughts ramble. They are everywhere and nowhere. The mentally gifted man, on the contrary, constantly has his mind on the matter in hand. If he wishes to concentrate his thoughts upon an outward object, nothing that takes place is able to escape him. Neither the psychologist nor the psychiatrist ought to be content to observe behavior superficially, but must trace out the motive of it in order to draw any inference from it. The most absurd conduct sometimes has reasons consistent with health, while conduct which would not surprise a layman at all may