Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/586

568 conditions. In either case the intellectual and volitional centres appear unequal to the task of maintaining the balance which normally exists. As a matter of fact, there are certain mental attitudes found in some diseases which are so regularly present, so well marked and pronounced, that they may fairly be included as a part of the rational symptoms. So commonly is mental depression found along with biliary disturbance that the name melancholia was given to these conditions of mental gloom; and modern observation is but establishing the propriety of the term.

Allied in essence to melancholia is the panphobia, or "low spirits," common to women generally, but especially found in the habitués of our out-patients' rooms. It is the cry of the suffering brain for better nutrition, for a more liberal supply of arterial blood. There is much emotional mobility and the patient is easily moved to a flood of tears by the slightest exciting cause. Under different circumstances relief from the depression is sought in alcohol, and this is the most depraved, the most hopeless, and the deadliest of all forms of habitual intoxication, the more hopeless from its being based on physical conditions; or it stimulates the spinster and the widow to a pseudo-religious existence, where the religious fervor is the measure of the cravings of the ungratified physiological aspirations.

We do not consider, perhaps, because the subject is repugnant to us, how much our psychical attitude, even to religious, the highest of all thought, is based upon conditions of the body; that body which theologians of the old school denominate vile, which they would trample under foot, nay, even ignore, yet which is reigning supreme and dominating and directing them in their highest aspirations. What a terrible revelation this gives us of the psychological attitude of the monk, who thought to subdue his inborn passions by scourgings, fastings, sleeplessness, and religious exercises, when all the while he w r as the victim of their thwarted and riotous activity as they crowded his mental horizon with gloomy or sensual images and presented a future of everlasting damnation to his superstitious vision!

Another form of psychical disturbance is furnished by the perturbations termed hysterical attacks, and which usually occur under circumstances of repressed passion. There are an excitability and mobility about the person which tell how the emotional centres are quivering and vibrating under the tension to which they are subjected, and the emotional oscillations, from weeping to laughing, indicate that the emotions are no longer under the control of the volitional centres. This loss of equilibrium becomes more marked when any disturbance of the bodily health leaves the organism at the mercy of these emotional storms. Hysterical attacks are generally explosive discharges of the emotional centres, as epilepsy is of the motor or mania transitoria (demoniacal possession) is of the volitional centres. They all resemble the "blowing of the engine" when it