Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/148

Rh brought; namely, one short scene of Ophelia's madness, and three scenes of the madness of Lear.

The willfulness with which critics have refused to see the symptoms of insanity in Lear, until the reasoning power itself has become undeniably alienated, is founded upon that view of mental disease which has, until recently, been entertained even by physicians, and which is still maintained in courts of law, namely, that insanity is an affection of the intellectual, and not of the emotional part of man's nature. The author of these essays was among the first to raise the standard of revolt against this theory, in two articles on the "Law and Theory of Insanity," in the 24th and 25th numbers of the Medico-Chirurgical Review. The veteran Guislain had already fully recognized the immense influence of emotional suffering in the causation of insanity; but the wider and still more important principle, that morbid emotion is an essential part of mental disorder, still remained a novel doctrine. Any detailed exposition of the metaphysical and psychological arguments, by which I have endeavoured to maintain the validity of this doctrine, would here be out of place. It may suffice to state, that with the exception of those cases of insanity which arise from injuries, blood poisons, sympathetic irritations, and other sources of an unquestionably physical nature, From these and other reasons founded upon the symptomatology and treatment of insanity, upon the definite operation of the reasoning faculties, and their obvious inability to become motives for conduct without the intervention of emotional influence, and also from the wide chasm