Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/321

Rh evidence to warrant an interference. Mr. Forster saw the hermit last year, and found him singularly acute, without the least trace of mental aberration. He said to that gentleman: "You may think it strange my living like this. So do I sometimes, but it is not done without a reason." Nor could Forster's friend, Dickens, recognize the signs of madness in his behavior.

On the other hand, there is the family history pointing to hereditary predisposition to insanity, only wanting some exciting cause to develop it; also the change of character at ten, with an alleged physical cause; the action, as a moral cause, of an injuriously indulgent rearing; the constant waywardness, obstinate willfulness, in a word, wrongheadedness; the acts which frequently alarmed his family; the necessity at length of legal restraint; the freaks regarding dress; his extraordinary conduct on the death of his mother; the persistent delusion respecting the queen, involving much loss of property; the entire neglect of his dwelling and person; his groundless suspicion of and antipathy toward his brother; the delusion that poison was put into his food; his fits of mental depression; and his violent passion on the slightest contradiction. These characteristics—in many respects so familiar to us in asylum-life, and so easily conceivable in others if certain cases of insanity we have known had been allowed to develop—prove that the hermit's condition passed the limits of eccentricity, that his emotions were perverted by disease. But, while his case was primarily one of moral insanity—a madness of action rather than language, a state of degraded feeling rather than of intellectual incapacity—his suspicions at times took the form of a definite delusion. It should be carefully borne in mind that his isolated life, and neglect of his residence and dress, did not arise from the preoccupation of his thoughts by any absorbing pursuit. He had none. It arose from his diseased mental condition, and the solution of the problem of his life can be obtained only  by tracing back his history to the unfavorable circumstances of his childhood, acting upon a brain in all probability predisposed to disease.

Should such a man be interfered with? Interference could not be made on account of the neglect of his property, or of his mode of life. But, conceding his insanity, would it have been desirable to place him under care? He was harmless to others, and also to himself, except in a very general sense; but might he not have been benefited and really more comfortable under medical treatment and control? And answering, as I think this case did, the definition of the law, that there must be "demonstrative proof of the incapacity of the individual to be trusted with himself and his own concerns," it certainly would have saved a great deal of trouble, had he been under the protection of the lord chancellor. I submit that such control would have been better for the neighborhood, for his family, and for the hermit himself.